The Spirit of Dutch Design

Here are some highlights from the always delighting Dutch Design Week for this year.

Many projects revolved around 'green' design thinking, and in general you could see a development towards introducing natural elements into our living spaces.



Philips Design took this philosophy to the next level in their new future probe 'The Microbial Home'. This home would minimize energy usage through biological processes. In their vision, methane gas can be gathered from human and vegetable waste, and biogas can be produced from other organic substances. Food should be kept alive and fresh inside the home by having it grow around structures attached to furniture. Bioluminescent bacteria provide moodlight, and waste is converted into edible mushrooms through special fungi that can digest plastics. Philips' proposal makes the living room look a bit like a science lab, but I think it's a good start towards true green living, on the physical plane.



The highlight of this design probe on an aesthetic level may well be the Urban beehive. It is basically a honey vending machine that incorporates the actual living bees. The bees enter the hive at one side of the device, and out comes the honey on the other side. Behind a transparent shell are several softly illuminated disks that the bees can use to build their hive, while being watched in admiration by their human customers.



Jeanine Kierkels, a master student Industrial Design at the university of Eindhoven, has taken the soothing aesthetics of natural growth and implemented this in a very specific human context: giving birth. She envisions an animation of a tree branch on the wall of the room where somebody would be giving birth. This animation is coupled to the occurance and length in time of each contraction, which makes the process interactive and personalized. In the end, the tree branch beautifully visualizes the event as a story to take home.



Another student created this lovely and intriguing accessoire. Embedded into it is a system that senses its wearer's physiological arousal. This value is then translated into the movement of scales on the sleeve, more or less like enhanced goosebumps. By externalizing our underlying physiology this way, then, people are invited to connect to each other on a deeper and more intimate level.




Floris Wubben directly translates the aesthetics of natural form into his designs by blending state-of-the-art technology with natural elements. This gives his products a very alive character.



We see a playful wink towards unification with nature in the work 'Digital Portraits.' One item is a shirt that incorporates the head of a wolf into the three-dimensional structure of its fabric.





Some interesting new ideas have also sparked up at the Design Academy. Within the theme of finding new ways to mass-manufacture objects, one student had an intriguing idea to blend human craftsmanship with the crude approach of the machine. He envisioned the human craftsman as being directly guided by a machine, for example through tools that are attached to robotic arms. This would enormously speed up manual work, while retaining a unique human touch. This may be a pioneering project into a future of cyborg production processes.



The supreme highlight of the Dutch design week is an art installation that is genius in its technical simplicity, and stunning in effect. It completely transcends the paradigm of our existence and our technology as material, it has the potential to bring about a peak experience that brings us beyond a perspectival existence of having one point of view, and approaches a unification with the cosmos (yes!). It is called Plane Scape, and is installed in the 5MM (five minutes museum). Watch the video here or go experience the installation yourself. And stay more than five minutes to let it work its way into your system and open your doors of perception.

robots and the creative class

The robots are coming, we can't ignore it any longer. The global robot population has tenfolded the last 6 years to a number of around 9 million. They are becoming more human, we are teaching them to play tricks on us, babies have been shown to make no distinction between them and humans, and we are still using them as weapons in countries like Pakistan, where several people have been killed lately through drone attacks. The time is coming where they are massively entering our own homes as helpers such as vacuum cleaners, grass mowers and pool cleaners. Then, I foresee them to also occupy roles in our social world, and this is where humanoid robots will be excellent training tools as friends that do not form opinions and can guide us with our internal emotional, intellectual, and spiritual processes.

How fast the development of robots will go is an almost unpredictable notion in today's complex world, but an almost universally held projection is that robots will be able to beat the world's best soccer team by 2050. The experts differ widely, for example with Ray Kurzweil thinking that around 2029 machines will explode in intelligence -although he seems to not take into account an embodied notion of intelligence- while iRobot's founder Colin Angle is far more reserved, stating that in 10 years we can't really make all that much progress, and that there are a large number of unforeseen complexities to be dealt with that will make things much slower than we predict.

I tend to be more in line with Colin Angle's view. Things will go slow, but I do think that the embodied, communicative, and spatial intelligence required for the 2050 robot soccer champs goal is realistic. Another milestone we should take into account is that of social intelligence. And with that I simply mean the ability of a robot to push the buttons ingrained inside of us through our herd instinct. The milestone would be reached when a robot can sustain a conversation with somebody in 'fun' mode, that occurs often for example when two people who just met go on a date. This, I think, can also be reached by 2050, if innovation develops in the accelerating pace as it is doing now.

Something that is often not taken into account in these business-like projections though is the psychical development of man. Most people do not think in terms of innovation and creativity. A job is a job for them, and innovation a way to make money. When they come home, they go into their comfort zone with sensory pleasures, distractions, and social rituals. But slowly, we people are expanding our own comfort zone to include our creativity. Creation becomes an inherent part of our sense of self and our existence in the world as we shift our mindsets to a passive, consumerist one to an active, existentalistic, and embodied one. Richard Florida talks about the upsurge of a creative class. And it is this creative class that I think will majorly increase innovation.

Not only do companies more and more 'crowdsource' this creative class for cheap input in the form of ideas and concepts, but also more and more people will start their own project just to keep them busy, and share it with the world in an open-source format. For this, you already need an entrepreneurial and independent spirit, that is beyond the comforts of your family and friends.

Take this guy in the movies below, who hacks Roombas for the sake of it. By simply combining the robo-vacuum cleaner with Nintendo input devices, he creates a middle ground between a fully automized vacuum cleaner, and a cumbersome process that requires you to bend, pull, push, and drag. By dividing the embodiment in two systems he removes the hassle and keeps you engaged in the process. All you need now are some visual and sound augmentations to make it seem as if the Roomba is, say, a turtle collecting seashells that are scattered over the beach, which is really your own house.





Sure, the creative class mainly wants to have freedom of exploration and fun. But this too I think is changing. Maybe in the future it will be willing to take on highly specialized and complex development projects, if given freedom and a little bit of money. I think we are underestimating the upcoming of creative thinking as a natural state of being, and how it will affect the world.

generative product design; computers that create ideas

It's one of the big new ideas: creative computers. The first reaction is often one that stems from the oh so pervasive idea that humans and computers are fundamentally different, a reaction of resistance that occurs so often when the abilities of computers expand into new realms, the reaction "that's impossible".

Sure, computers are programmed by people. Sure, even when you program a computer to do something random or chaotically, still this was programmed into it. At some point though the causal line between programmer and programmed becomes very hard to be found, and it's only a matter of perception before you see a computer as an autonomous thing with thoughts, feelings, empathy, and creativity.

On these pictures you see what happens when you use generative algorithms to automate the exploration of a design space. As a designer I must say that I think this can be inspiring in the early stages of a creation process, though in the end a design will still have to be internalized by people if we want to prevent things from becoming a postmodern cybermess where we treat the physical as a product of the mental, but instead suffuse the things we make with socio-cultural and psychological depth. I don't think computers can do that at this stage, because they simply too much lack a body and a way to base their behavior more on their direct embodiment instead of on abstract codings. But as always, development comes from both sides of a spectrum, and I think things could really get interesting this way if we can do world-simulations in which our products participate with simulated bodies that operate according to an embodied cognition approach. In other words, things get interesting when we can simulate an entire design process, including virtual user involvement. How shallow it may seem as an idea, still I think it might drastically speed up design processes.