No, there are no real insects that exchange their legs, but an interesting suggestion is made in this iconic little comic by illustrator Schwantz. Of course it's just a joke, but it very much suits today's 'Zeitgeist', and it's interesting to think about the interchangeability of body parts isn't it.
Body architect Lucy McRae is taking her extraordinary transhumanist aesthetic from low-tech to high-tech as she is currently collaborating with Harvard scientist Sheref Mansy to create a pill that acts as a perfume. This pill would contain cells that are engineered to be recognized by the human body as fat cells, and absorbed in a similar way. As these cells are broken down then, they could release certain molecules that come out through the skin and act as a perfume.
Lucy has come up with an interesting teaser to wet our appetites, which you can see below.
I'm not so sure that the appetite for these pills will be big though, from a commercial perspective. Of course there are the early adopters who like to show off or provoke the people around them by showing them something new and radical. These are the important people through which a new technology can start evolving, as Kevin Kelly also explains in his book 'What Technology Wants.' But for the larger public, there would probably be more to these pills than just acting like a perfume. One major selling point where a pill may take over from spray-on perfume is that the scent may last for several days, but even then I think the threshold may be too high to start ingesting things.
What is happening here seems to be the same as happened to other major technological breakthroughs like the automobile, movies, and radio. They started off as literal replacements of the previous technology, but in a new embodiment. The first cars were designed like horse carriages, and the first movies were made in the same way as written stories and theater plays. It was only later that the larger inherent potential of the new medium revealed itself, and people started to align themselves with what almost seems like the intention of the technology. The technology then ends up not just a more efficient replacement of the former technology, but bringing about an entire shift of behavior and mindset in its users.
This will probably be the same for these new intimate technologies that enter the human body. The mindshift this will bring about is that the body is just another object that we can manipulate. It is not us, our identification with it that started in early age was too limited a conception, it was an illusion keeping us blinded from the larger whole. Now, this technology opens us up towards this mindset, as we can continually alter our own body to the needs of the situation, or simply to play around with it. The swallowable perfume pill will probably not remain just a perfume, but integrate more functionalities inherent to the capabilities of the pill-form. Maybe it will turn out to become an 'experience-pill', where different pills are created to generate different sensory and mental experiences. Next to fragrance molecules, it might also contain skin and hair colorants, or neurotransmitters to generate a certain subjective experience. Who knows what will happen. But that the next major technological shift is coming is certain.
This shoe is an early exploration by Michael Wihart into combining biotechnology with everyday products. He has turned the heel into something truly functional by implementing special cells inside of it, called protocells. When the sole gets damaged over time, these cells will flow towards the damaged parts, and solidify in place in order to repair the sole.
So the shoe is actually turning into a biological, almost alive entity. The developer has emphasized this through the quite radical contraption that was clearly meant to provoke rather than sell itself. It also reminds us of the work of fashion designers Hussein Chalayan and Kei Kagami, who often make their wearable creations into not just a surface around the skin, but a mechanical extension of the human body. These may not be the most comfortable to wear, but they do help shift our perspectives in making us ready for a very dynamic and alive world. Because in the future, our products will not get replaced any longer; they will grow along with us.
Complexity is the new minimalism, and more is the new less. Many mature minds today have gotten reasonably used to the complexity and interconnectedness of the world, and we no longer need our technological creations to exude simplicity and purity so that we can let our mind have some breathing space. We are more and more skilled at having our senses flooded while mentally staying at a comfortable level. Now we are ready to bring an intelligent complexity into the physical environment we live in.
More and more, products, graphics, and architecture is created that is fueled by the urge for created complexity. Often, these things borrow heavily from nature, which shows through in the outer form. Those things can impress us because they are new, and they look natural while being man-made. But once you're over that shock it tends to seem very natural that we would build things that way. The machine age we created after the second industrial revolution allowed humanity to quickly set up healthy, thriving, functional societies, but they tore us away from nature. In the sixties and seventies we massively returned to nature, and now we are integrating the world of nature and the world of the machine. We are now getting used to that new way of building, and we need lots of exploration.
One of the pioneers in this area who are making this into a career is Marc Fornes, and it is his work that triggered me to write a bit about complexity. He uses scripts to generate architectural forms, and has been displaying these constructions in the form of small spaces that people can walk through. It is interesting that Marc Fornes is creating his own design language through his work, and is not simply mimicking nature or strictly using natural principles. Instead, he seems to be mixing natural elements and human preferences, for example in his material use and form language.
Now it's time for designers to follow people like Marc Fornes, and bring in complexity in forms where we can, and even more so when we can intelligently merge form with function this way. But also visual complexity alone can greatly elevate people's experiences of products in that it takes them out of their minds, and into the world again.
It's good to see entrepreneurs popping up who are taking 3d printing to the next level, and searching for business opportunities for new products manufactured by this technique. One of these entrepreneurs is Siavash Mahdavi. He is especially looking into optimization of form through intelligent weight reduction and force redirection, and has come up so far with prototypes of orthopedic implants that bone can grow into, optimized shoe soles that vary in support and cushioning, an engine block with 22% weight reduction, and a structure that he intends to use for docking shuttles at a space station.
This is a beautiful little animation that has the potential to give you a few meditative minutes getting out of your mind and just resting in your senses. It was made by Seiichi Hishikawa, a Japanese filmmaker, with the intention to visualize sound.
Nokia has been working on bendable displays for a while, and have now managed to go from concept to working demonstrator for this technology. The 'Nokia Kinetic' concept is a flexible rectangular device with a bendable touch screen. They kept interaction simple by using only twisting and horizontal bending motions as input, besides touching and sliding. Especially bending the device in order to zoom in and out seems a very natural mapping from action to function, as you either press away or bring closer the center of the screen.
Another device that Nokia has presented with this concept is a beautiful borderless flexible display. This display is embedded in a soft and transparent skin-like material that can detect a finger pressing into it and then stretching the skin in various directions. This may greatly enrich and simplify browsing interactions.
The Nokia Kinetic gives us a good glimpse of where our technological devices are headed. Softer, more expressive, and no more being confining us only to rapid sequential movements for input, technology is about to engage more of our bodily skill. Instead of the miniaturization of devices, there might be more potential in fitting our technology better to our bodies, and making it soft and adaptable.
This blog reports and reflects on intellectual and technological developments that can give rise to a liberated feeling of oneness with the whole of being, and an awakening of creative intelligence that empowers people to feel and act as inextricably linked with their lifeworld.
Special attention in this blog is paid to embodied intelligence, complex emergent behavior, applied behavioral economics, technology for physical behavior modification, and the merging of digital and physical experiences.
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The author
Ralph Zoontjens is a product designer from Tilburg, the Netherlands. He has graduated with a Master's Degree from the Industrial Design program at the Eindhoven University of Technology with an interactive jacket that gives feedback for yoga practitioners. He has worked for the Philips Design Probes group and currently does product design for Motio Development in Eindhoven, the Netherlands. In his spare time he pursues his many interests, does yoga and distance-running, and tries to immerse himself into creative processes as much as possible.
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