CWL

scinerds:

Filament Mind

Ever thought of what human curiosity might look like in a form expressed other than words or drawings? Designers Brian W Brush and Yong Ju Lee did just that when they began creating what they now call ‘Filament Mind’, where your curious searches and questions are linked with the library that ends up displaying these searches in varying colors. Education and design just had another baby, and this is it. I can Imagine this being used across more libraries, I think a lot of people might enjoy this (kids especially) and see it as an addition to the wonderful world of libraries and the awe they already come with when we open those books up.

Designers Brian W Brush and Yong Ju Lee of E/B Office New York created an extensive fibre-optic installation for the Teton County Library grand opening in Wyoming that visualises library searches in flashes of coloured light. Dubbed Filament Mind, the installation, which opened at the end of January, uses over eight kilometres of fibre-optic cables and 44 LED illuminators to collect, categorise, and render searches from libraries all across the state of Wyoming into glowing bursts of colour.

Visualisations begin when a person uses specific words while searching online library catalogues. Subjects including social sciences, arts, languages, history, and philosophy have been categorized by the Dewey Decimal System into 904 text labels, so that when a person uses any one of those labels in their search, it’s filtered through the categories and the corresponding fibre optic cable lights up. If a person clicks on one of the results of their search, another cable will light up. There’s also a donor mode in which the entire display flashes with all the different colours of light, as a way to thank the private donors that made the project possible.

—

Filament Mind may live at the Teton County Library, but it lights up the searches from all the libraries in the state as a reminder of the continuous search for knowledge taking place at different libraries.

(via Fibre-optic Installation Lights Up Library Queries)

I really wish this kind of design was implemented into libraries. Or if it seems too intrusive of others nearby at least a rethinking of how libraries look and the interaction involved. Changes like these (even if the example above may or may not be temporary) could wake a whole different and perhaps broader crowd and bring them into libraries for some good old fashion learning or autodidacticism.

Dutch Architect Plans World’s First 3D-Printed Building

Side Note: As previously mentioned, this sort of venture and combination between design, architecture and technology with the usage of 3D printing would be exactly what’s needed to help people in less favorable conditions of living. If we can, through trials and errors, learn the best methods of 3D-printing on larger scales we could, in theory, start creating buildings on the fly and at low costs.

Of course we’d have to give the technology just a tad more time and investment to develop in such a way that we have 3D printers large enough to assemble the right pieces at a steady pace. With time, It could also be a good excuse to abandon our old methods of construction and style that we implement to our buildings and houses and use a new design, something more modern and thoughtful of the environment and ever changing conditions we live in today. Just a thought.

A Dutch architect is planning to construct a Möbius strip-shaped house using the world’s largest 3D printer.

Landscape House, designed by Janjaap Ruijssenaars of Amsterdam firm Universal Architecture, will contain around 1,100 square metres of floorspace throughout the twisted structure. The 3D printer — which can “print” objects as large as six metres by nine metres using a mix of grinded-down rocks or sand, held together with a liquid binding agent — has been designed by Italian roboticist Enrico Dini.

Dini has been printing huge objects with his printer for a couple of years, but this will be the first building that he’s produced that’s actually designed to be occupied just like any other. For a house that will be a solid whole, without any visible seams, a Möbius strip makes perfect sense as a design shape.

“While doing a competition [in Ireland] for housing in a beautiful landscape we wondered if you could make a building that celebrates landscape,” Ruijssenaars explained to Wired.co.uk over email. “We didn’t win the competition, but moved on with the design to further explore it. The essence of landscape, we thought, was that is is continuous. The earth is round, valleys transform into hills, oceans into land but it is one thing. So we looked for a building form without beginning or end.”

They worked with artist and mathematician Rinus Roelofs on the design, but they soon realised that “when making physical small models we always had to make a cut and paste in the material — with lead or paper you have to start or finish somewhere”. They used a small 3D printer to make a model out of potato flour, though, which was one continuous structure without beginning or end, just like they wanted. Roelofs had worked with Dini before to produce 3D printed art, and the three of them then started working on how to print the Landscape House. RIght now that means constructing giant sections and connecting them together, but theoretically the printer can be adapted to move along the entire structure and print one continuous building.

Ruijssenaars claims that the Landscape House will be as sturdy and durable as a house built with regular methods and materials: “The whole structure is calculated with the knowledge coming from engineers from large companies like Arup. In this design traditional techniques and new 3D printing techniques are combined — the façades for example are made with glass and thin steel construction. It is the combination of façade and floor/ceiling that gives this structure its sturdiness.”

We’re increasingly seeing 3D printing find its feet as a way of producing useful objects, and not just on the scale of small items like medical implants. That said, most of the time we’re still seeing 3D printers putting out children’s toys or action figures rather than, say, guns, which are still being tweaked by their designers. The Landscape House should cost between €4-5 million (£3.3-£4.2 million), according to Ruijssenaars, and should be take around 18 months to build. It’ll be finished sometime in 2014.

Ruijssenaars said: “It is interesting to explore the possibility of printing houses for the poor. This week we were approached by a company from South Africa that constructs buildings for the poor. In architecture it is interesting because you can skip the trouble of making a mould of wood that you fill with concrete and later have to remove.”

Reportedly a Brazilion national park is also interested in buying a copy of the Landscape House for use as a visitors centre, and we could see the same technology being used to build bases and tools for astronauts on the moon in the future.

For more on 3D printing/ or Here

scinerds:

DNA ‘LEGOs’ Build a Mini Space Shuttle

A tiny space shuttle made out of DNA “LEGO bricks” shows how scientists could someday build new technologies on the smallest scales.

Image: DNA ‘bricks’ can self-assemble into complex 3D shapes such as a miniature space shuttle. Credit:Kurt V. Gothelf | Yonggang Ke et al

Single DNA strands became “LEGO bricks” that could assemble together by themselves into 102 individual 3D shapes. Harvard researchers manipulated the DNA coding of the bricks so that they could form solid shapes such as the tiny shuttle, honeycomb structures, and even “written” features on a solid base such as numbers and letters of the English alphabet.

“Once we know how to compile the correct code of complex shapes and add it to the synthetic DNA strands, everything else is simple and natural,” said Yonggang Ke, a chemist at Harvard University. “Those DNA strands are like smart LEGO bricks that know exactly where to go by themselves.”

nyanning:

Design for Corner Lithography/

“The structure pictured below is a “microscopic pyramid,” New Scientist explains, “a cage for a living cell, constructed to better observe cells in their natural 3D environment, as opposed to the usual flat plane of a Petri dish.”

It was constructed “by depositing nitrides over silicon pits. When most of the material is peeled away, a small amount of material remains in the corners to create a pyramid.”

This is called corner lithography, a technique used for creating the “cell trapping device” seen above.

The Giza-like, seemingly alien geometry of the pyramidal cage compared to the wild and barely containable spheroid burr of the cell itself is remarkable. The literally monstrous vitality of the cell caught inside the imposed order of the pyramid offers us an image of two fundamentally opposed methods of material organization in conflict with one another, a collision of orders as if the Gothic met the Doric or the Baroque met the Romanesque. 

Interestingly, though, at least according to New Scientist, “Because the pyramids have holes in the sides and are close together, the cells can interact for the most part as they naturally do.” In other words, these apparently oppositional modes—the fuzzy and the straight—incredibly, even miraculously, don’t interfere with one another at all.

Functionally speaking, it’s as if, from the cell’s perspective, the pyramid isn’t even there.”

(via BLDGBLOG)

artistcompilation:

Hanamichi style