Syd Mead, Blade Runner Designer, Reflects on the Future

Syd Mead designed the look of Blade Runner, Tron, and other movies. In this video brief, he discusses the accelerated pace at which technology is changing, bringing many sci-fi concepts, including androids, into an ever-nearing reality. But while technology appears to dominate the subject of The Future, what truly drives it is human intellect and the creativity that strives to re-arrange our material world. Now, more than ever, and at ever-increasing rates, we can re-arrange the world in which we live.

2019: A Future Imagined from Flat-12 on Vimeo.

Neoplasmatic Future Home Visions

Part architecture, part biology, part engineering, Neoplasmatic Design is an emerging interdisciplinary movement that yields hybrid technologies, new materiality and a whole new potential of living, "biologized" forms. The "House of the Future," a project by Kuangyi Tao, conceives of homes made with alloy tubes and a "skin" comprised of photosynthetic algae. As an electro-responsive material, the algae would be able to adapt to daylight, thereby increasing energy efficiency in the building. The "skin"  would also convert carbon dioxide into energy-providing sugar while releasing oxygen as a by-product, thereby purifying air. Any overgrowth of algae could be composted as biofuel, feeding energy back into the home or its surrounding city. Quite a few energy benefits, just from an algae skin!

In a coming neo-biological era, buildings could mutate to make better use of their environment, cars could be similarly adaptable, and any number of hybridized biological material could be developed to apply biology's adaptability.

 

See related:

  1. Living Environments: TED—Rachel Armstrong discusses the creation of synthetic living materials and how their application in Venice could keep the city from sinking. 
  2. What is Biomimicry?

Disabilities yield Creative Discovery in Two Artists

Two tales of disabled artists who push through their disabilities and, in the process, discover new self-expression and public recognition.

Marwencol is a 1/6th scale town set in World War II, as created by Mark Hogancamp. After suffering brain damage as the result of an assault, Mark finds that he has lost his memory as well as his ability to draw. He creates new memories and exercises his fragile motor skills by bring life to the characters of Marwencol and photographing them with vivid realism.

 

| Artists Wanted | In Focus : Pete Eckert from Artists Wanted on Vimeo.

Pete Eckert was trained in sculpture and industrial design, but when a genetic condition led him to be permanently blind, he uncovered photography as a way to convey audio-driven visual representations.