Neri Oxman says that since the industrial revolution design has been dominated by the needs of manufacturing. Her design ideas want to find the middle ground between machines and organisms, to exist in a place where organic growth means as much as industrial assembly. Her TED Talk Design at the intersection of technology and biology is a great showcase of her work as Head of Mediated Matter at the MIT Media Lab .
Oxman says that computational design, additive manufacturing, materials engineering and synthetic biology all intersect to give today’s designers incredible tools. Having high resolution fabrication tools allow us to build things that fit the shape of our body and also meet our body’s physiological needs.
Neri uses chitin as a basis of many of her designs. She says it’s the second most abundant biopolymer on the planet and 100,000,000 tons are produced every year by shrimps, crabs, scorpions and butterflies. Modifying the properties of chitin can give us several different properties out of one single component. Chitin powder was taken from seafood waste and turned into chitisin paste. Using different chemical concentrations gave several different printing bases, from dark and stiff to light and soft. A large robotic extruder was built with several nozzles to print different aspects of one single material as a large twelve foot organism. The structure is air dried and finds its own organic shape. Single pieces can exist in states from beam to mesh to windows. After end of life the parts can be put back in water to help feed marine life or placed in the ground to act as fertilizer.
This is a great high concept discussion that gives us inspiration not just about the possibilities of the future but also using the materials we have in better ways. Oxman has built new forms of life and objects that are ‘computationally grown, additively manufactured and biologically augmented.’ She demonstrates photosynthetic wearables and presents her ideas for clothing that will help in space exploration. The most striking demonstration for me is the dome with a framework spun by a robotic arm and finished by silkworms.