neri oxman 3d printing ft
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https://www.ft.com/content/143dcdee-afd0-11e8-8d14-6f049d06439c
The work of MIT professor Neri Oxman straddles art and science, from a 3D-printed performance mask for the singer Björk, to wearable skins full of living bacteria to help humans survive on inhospitable planets, to a synthetic apiary that allows bees to produce honey year-round. Her projects often present solutions for problems that do not exist yet, a research-based approach shot through with both speculation and uncanny beauty. As head of MIT’s Mediated Matter group, Oxman has access to some of the world’s most sophisticated technologies. But she also uses tools already available in nature: her 2013 “Silk Pavilion” was a collaboration between a robotic arm and 6,500 silkworms. She is being awarded the Design Innovation Medal at this year’s London Design Festival, a “tribute to designers who are making, or have made, a significant difference to our lives through their innovation, originality and imagination”. Here she talks about the difference between a career and a calling — and how bees in space might save our species. How did you begin thinking about the intersection of biology and design? I landed at the Architectural Association the year DNA synthesis was made feasible for a price of about $1 per base pair of DNA. Around that time, designing and constructing buildings through digital means was prevalent. But everything else was old-style: material applications, assembly methods and manufacturing traditions. I remember wondering how it was that we can engineer yeast for commercial production of antimalarial drugs, but can’t even vary the density of concrete as a function of load. As a designer in an age when artificial life can be created in vitro, mastering the curve was not going to be good enough. This imbalance between innovations achieved in fields such as synthetic biology and the primitive state of digital fabrication in product and architectural design shaped my ambition. Experiments in 3D printing porous structures © Tony Luong You went to medical school. Why did you change track, and how did medicine inform your work? I changed track the day my grandmother died, when I realised (halfway through my third organic chemistry seminar at the Hebrew University) that there was a profound difference between a job, a career and a calling. Medical school offered me a career. Architecture was a calling. I took the entry exam (where I was asked to design a pod for a single individual on Mars) and never looked back. But med school is with me everywhere I go: in the end, every body is a building and every building is a body. What is material ecology? And what’s the advantage of man-made things that behave like organic materials? The designed world is still behind the natural world in terms of material and behavioural sophistication. Bricks, as units of construction, are not as sophisticated as cells, the units of life, and synthetic fibres have yet to fire electrical signals into the textiles they make up. But what if we can change that by creating new technologies that can vary the physical properties of matter at a resolution and sophistication that approaches that of the natural world? If bricks were smart, buildings would weigh less, generate less carbon and function more like a body than a building, accommodating for multiple functions rather than just one. A 3D-printed prototype of Vespers II, inspired by ancient death masks © Tony Luong A printed sample of chitosan, a plastic substitute © Tony Luong Does that preclude mass production? No. Why “or” when you can “and”? The magic lies in the ability to fuse mass production with mass customisation, assembly with growth, and traditional construction with digital fabrication. If we combine 3D printing with biological systems, we open up previously impossible opportunities. Imagine photosynthetic building façades that convert carbon into biofuel, wearable microbiomes that nourish our skin through selective filtration, and 3D-printed matter that repairs damaged tissue. Or consider a solar-harnessing, glass-printed façade that can act both as structure and as environmental skin. With almost 450 billion sq ft of windows installed per annum (as of 2015), imagine the implications these technologies would have on urban-scale energy budgets. In the biological age, designers are empowered to dream up new, dynamic possibilities, where products and structures can grow, heal and adapt. But it requires a change in the way we see nature. As we master “unnatural” processes at a speed that dwarfs evolution, we can mother nature — through design. Inside the MIT Media Lab © Tony Luong What are you working on now? Among other projects, we are designing a queen-rearing mechanism for bees in space, for the Blue Origin [Jeff Bezos’s space-flight company] mission. We hope to compare the viability of a queen larva that has experienced microgravity to one that has stayed grounded terrestrially. Bee pollination in space could help save our species — it could even help us survive on Mars. We are also starting to explore the implications of glass 3D printing. The technology was developed in our lab with the goal of ultimately printing full-scale architectural façades that harness the power of the sun. We have also recently completed a structure made almost entirely of biocompatible materials including shrimp shells and cornstarch. The structure is composed of environmentally responsive biocomposites made of the most abundant materials on our planet (cellulose, chitosan and pectin). In life, these materials modulate their properties in response to light, heat and humidity; in death, they can be made to dissociate in water to fuel new life, eliminating the use of plastic along the way. On the urban scale, we are exploring the use of a swarm of robots that work together to build a structure larger than themselves. Soon to appear: fibrebots
https://www.ft.com/content/143dcdee-afd0-11e8-8d14-6f049d06439c
The work of MIT professor Neri Oxman straddles art and science, from a 3D-printed performance mask for the singer Björk, to wearable skins full of living bacteria to help humans survive on inhospitable planets, to a synthetic apiary that allows bees to produce honey year-round. Her projects often present solutions for problems that do not exist yet, a research-based approach shot through with both speculation and uncanny beauty. As head of MIT’s Mediated Matter group, Oxman has access to some of the world’s most sophisticated technologies. But she also uses tools already available in nature: her 2013 “Silk Pavilion” was a collaboration between a robotic arm and 6,500 silkworms. She is being awarded the Design Innovation Medal at this year’s London Design Festival, a “tribute to designers who are making, or have made, a significant difference to our lives through their innovation, originality and imagination”. Here she talks about the difference between a career and a calling — and how bees in space might save our species. How did you begin thinking about the intersection of biology and design? I landed at the Architectural Association the year DNA synthesis was made feasible for a price of about $1 per base pair of DNA. Around that time, designing and constructing buildings through digital means was prevalent. But everything else was old-style: material applications, assembly methods and manufacturing traditions. I remember wondering how it was that we can engineer yeast for commercial production of antimalarial drugs, but can’t even vary the density of concrete as a function of load. As a designer in an age when artificial life can be created in vitro, mastering the curve was not going to be good enough. This imbalance between innovations achieved in fields such as synthetic biology and the primitive state of digital fabrication in product and architectural design shaped my ambition. Experiments in 3D printing porous structures © Tony Luong You went to medical school. Why did you change track, and how did medicine inform your work? I changed track the day my grandmother died, when I realised (halfway through my third organic chemistry seminar at the Hebrew University) that there was a profound difference between a job, a career and a calling. Medical school offered me a career. Architecture was a calling. I took the entry exam (where I was asked to design a pod for a single individual on Mars) and never looked back. But med school is with me everywhere I go: in the end, every body is a building and every building is a body. What is material ecology? And what’s the advantage of man-made things that behave like organic materials? The designed world is still behind the natural world in terms of material and behavioural sophistication. Bricks, as units of construction, are not as sophisticated as cells, the units of life, and synthetic fibres have yet to fire electrical signals into the textiles they make up. But what if we can change that by creating new technologies that can vary the physical properties of matter at a resolution and sophistication that approaches that of the natural world? If bricks were smart, buildings would weigh less, generate less carbon and function more like a body than a building, accommodating for multiple functions rather than just one. A 3D-printed prototype of Vespers II, inspired by ancient death masks © Tony Luong A printed sample of chitosan, a plastic substitute © Tony Luong Does that preclude mass production? No. Why “or” when you can “and”? The magic lies in the ability to fuse mass production with mass customisation, assembly with growth, and traditional construction with digital fabrication. If we combine 3D printing with biological systems, we open up previously impossible opportunities. Imagine photosynthetic building façades that convert carbon into biofuel, wearable microbiomes that nourish our skin through selective filtration, and 3D-printed matter that repairs damaged tissue. Or consider a solar-harnessing, glass-printed façade that can act both as structure and as environmental skin. With almost 450 billion sq ft of windows installed per annum (as of 2015), imagine the implications these technologies would have on urban-scale energy budgets. In the biological age, designers are empowered to dream up new, dynamic possibilities, where products and structures can grow, heal and adapt. But it requires a change in the way we see nature. As we master “unnatural” processes at a speed that dwarfs evolution, we can mother nature — through design. Inside the MIT Media Lab © Tony Luong What are you working on now? Among other projects, we are designing a queen-rearing mechanism for bees in space, for the Blue Origin [Jeff Bezos’s space-flight company] mission. We hope to compare the viability of a queen larva that has experienced microgravity to one that has stayed grounded terrestrially. Bee pollination in space could help save our species — it could even help us survive on Mars. We are also starting to explore the implications of glass 3D printing. The technology was developed in our lab with the goal of ultimately printing full-scale architectural façades that harness the power of the sun. We have also recently completed a structure made almost entirely of biocompatible materials including shrimp shells and cornstarch. The structure is composed of environmentally responsive biocomposites made of the most abundant materials on our planet (cellulose, chitosan and pectin). In life, these materials modulate their properties in response to light, heat and humidity; in death, they can be made to dissociate in water to fuel new life, eliminating the use of plastic along the way. On the urban scale, we are exploring the use of a swarm of robots that work together to build a structure larger than themselves. Soon to appear: fibrebots
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