Interactive Matter — Tinkering with electronics & ambient interaction Metabolic Materials as a Measure of Architectural Quality | By Rachel Armstrong Between the 1830’s to 1840’s, the modern public health movement was started in Britain when Edwin Chadwick, advocate for the Poor Law, brought his vision of public health through sanitarianism into being through public works. This ultimately resulted in the construction of modern day water and sewage systems that set standards of urban infrastructure throughout the developed world. Today we are facing a similar urban crisis of environment due to the consequences of living in industrial pollution for the last 150 years. Global warming is a symptom of technological progress coupled with environmental belligerence and is facilitated by the industrial practices of capitalism. Architecture is a technology of environments. The architectural Green movement proposes designs for a nostalgic, rather pantheistic, rural existence that is perceived to be more ‘healthy’ by bringing biology itself into the urban environment in the form of green walls, roofs and even farms.
Company: Time Magazine Names the XOS 2 Exoskeleton "Most Awesomest" Invention of 2010 Last updated: 10/27/2011* Raytheon’s second-generation exoskeleton (XOS 2), essentially a wearable robotics suit, has been named one of the Best Inventions of 2010 by Time Magazine . The suit was unveiled for the first time in September during an event at the company’s Salt Lake City research facility. XOS 2 is lighter, stronger and faster than its predecessor, yet it uses 50 percent less power, and its new design makes it more resistant to the environment. The wearable robotics suit is being designed to help with the many logistics challenges faced by the military both in and out of theater. Repetitive heavy lifting can lead to injuries, orthopedic injuries in particular. * The content on this page is classified as historical content.
freemote.nl Creating 'Living' Buildings The University of Greenwich's School of Architecture & Construction is poised to use ethical synthetic biology to create 'living' materials that could be used to clad buildings and help combat the effects of climate change. Researchers from the University of Greenwich are collaborating with others at the University of Southern Denmark, University of Glasgow and University College London (UCL) to develop materials that could eventually produce water in desert environments or harvest sunlight to produce biofuels. In collaboration with an architectural practice and a building materials' manufacturer, the idea is to use protocells -- bubbles of oil in an aqueous fluid sensitive to light or different chemicals -- to fix carbon from the atmosphere or to create a coral-like skin, which could protect buildings. ''We want to use ethical synthetic biology to create large-scale, real world applications for buildings,'' he says.
Main Page - Firmata 'Living' buildings could inhale city carbon emissions A graphical representation of London's "living" skyline as envisaged by award-winning architect Richard Hyams. Over the next 40 years, "living" buildings could absorb carbon emitted from the city Synthetic biology enables scientists to create life-like matter in the labKnown as "protocells," these chemicals could be applied to buildings in the form of paintOther chemicals will let buildings regulate their own temperature and produce own power London (CNN) -- What if buildings had lungs that could absorb carbon emissions from the city and convert them into something useful? What if they had skin that could control their temperature without the need for radiators or air-conditioning? What if buildings could come "alive?" Science fiction? "Not as such," claims Dr Rachel Armstrong, senior TED fellow and co-director of Avatar, a research group exploring the potential of advanced technologies in architecture. A drawing of protocells reacting with carbon to produce artificial limestone shells.
Connecting To The World with Danger Shield - ZachHoeken.com If you have an Arduino and a Danger Shield, and you are reading this page, you already have enough to start posting sensor readings to a webpage and sharing them with the world. You can also access those readings yourself, on the web, wherever you go. How? With the help of Pachube! Start by taking a look at the Pachube sites: Pachube.comPachube.communityPachube.apps What does all this mean? As I write this, Pachube (pronounced "patchbay") is still in beta (that means they are still getting the kinks out before they open it to the public). Check out Pachube's Quickstart Page In the top half of the page, you see three points, that explain how to request a beta login code that will let you send information to Pachube (Inputs) and request information from other Pachube users (Outputs). Scan the rest of the page. The folks who run Pachube are big Arduino fans, and they have posted excellent tutorials that walk you step-by-step through the process of setting up an Arduino to work with Pachube.
KERB 19 / Paradigms of Nature: Postnatural Futures “So no, I don’t accept that the future is over-sold : it’s productised an as a result it’s over constrained by our current ways of thinking and immediate practices …” - Rachel Armstrong, letter to ARUP Have you ever wondered how a single cell can finally transform in a complex organism? And how the survival of this organism depends on the key relations set with its species and the environment. The same questions could be applied when talking about our cities. If we see humankind as the top of evolution, the obvious consequence is to see nature as a resource to achieve all of our goals. But what if we perceive humankind and its manifestations as part of nature? The traditional one-way dependency on technology and machines is presented here as a reciprocal, way to understand the new paradigm of landscape, architecture, and design. So, how can we now synthesise technologies with living systems? Dr. The philosophy behind this kind of projects is reinforced with Daan Roosegaarde words:
SENSEable Shoes Created by Huaishu Peng and Yen-Chia Hsu at the Computational Design Lab at Carnegie Mellon comes the SENSEable shoes project. The shoes can identity and transmit information for 10 different gait patterns (standing, sitting, turning left, turning right, walking left, walking right, walking forward, walking backward, going upstairs, and downstairs). Suggested applications for the shoes include being used in gaming platforms (think Wii Fitness) or detecting abnormal gaits in health care patient monitoring. Project Description: "The goal of this project is to build a foot-computer interface: a newly hand-free and eye-free interactive technology designed for the growing pervasive computing environments. Created with: Twelve Force-Sensing Resistors(FSR) two Arduino UNO microcontroller boards with ATmega168 microprocessors two Xbee wireless transmission devices Similar Projects: FootIO GaitShoe Additional Details: Based on the MIT licence (code here) Image credits: Huaishu Peng and Yen-Chia Hsu
The Future is Now – A Letter to Arup by Rachel Armstrong This post is also available in: Chinese (Traditional) Response to The Under-imagined Future of Transport by Susan Claris I don’t agree that the importance of forward-thinking long term planning is over sold! What I do think is over-sold – is the productisation of very specific solutions to challenges that are not well characterised and we don’t yet know how to face. The current economic & political system only deals with short term-ism (returns and period in office) so investment in research and development that deals with decade or more kinds of solutions does not exist to properly support the strategic development of implementable solutions. In fact, the future is very poorly invested in and governments are currently slashing funding for basic science which underpins technological and economic developments. As for the issue of under-imagining, I don’t think that there is a crisis in this capacity at all! Real budgets are needed for open research & development. Dr.