Together with the The Power of 8 team, we designed a new kind of pollinating creature called the Beamer Bee, or the Beamer Signum Apis Melifera. This concept aims to encourage debate around the mysterious disappearance of honey bees, alongside the emerging biohacking culture that allows the creation of new organisms with greater ease. Importantly, through design, this project aims to consider the implications of living with such new organisms.
'The Power of 8' final exhibition went up on 22nd September, was open for 3 weeks during which 6544 visitors came by. We designed scenarios for Acres Green, a sustainable permaculture ecosystem, where people balance the requirment to live closer to nature, with their human impulses to simultaneously subvert and control it. To find out more, drop us a line.
We collaborated with STBY on an exciting project around Patient Dignity for the Department of Health, UK, commissioned by the Design Council. Based on our research and design work, the Design Council and Department of Health are now set to launch a student design competition and a national design challenge inviting designers to join forces with manufacturers, service providers and specialist contractors to help eliminate mixed sex accommodation and increase patient privacy and dignity in hospitals.
The Power of 8 project was invited to take part in the London 2012 Open Weekend events, at the Watermans Gallery. We invited the local people of Brentford to imagine their future worlds over a map situated in the gallery. Together with the participants we transformed the table into a landscape of fantasy and possibility: from walking houses to snow stimulators, solar powered airships, public free boxes, trees that could talk to one another and even new kinds of organisms. More images here.
Bruce Sterling wrote an article in the Make Magazine titled 'Designer Futurescape', a title and topic that refers to my talk ‘Design Futurescaping’ at LIFT09 in Geneva earlier this year.
It is exciting to find this in the MAKE magazine, which emphasises the point we, at Superflux are trying to make. Not only designing futurescapes, but ‘making’ them tangible, and creating ways of distributing and testing them today.
We had the opportunity to work with team of designers at Nokia Design, London, to design, develop and test prototypes demonstrating new kinds of gestural interactions. We also developed a set of guiding principles for designers across all Nokia platforms to develop gestural interactions in the future.
We worked with Unwired Ventures on a research project looking at ways in which children imagine their futures of work. Together with ten 12 year olds we co-created our ‘Futurescapes of Work’, using methods of role-playing: the sorts of jobs we may want to do, places we would like to work in, the technologies we imagine using and the people we would be working with. The results of this work were captured in a film, a series of workshops and a report for the multiple stakeholders involved.
For a project at Microsoft Research Cambridge, we designed and made a series of bespoke RFID-embedded jewellery. These jewellery pieces enabled people to create and physically wear personal, 'broadcastable' digital content, such as photos, videos and words.
Our project with the team at Microsoft Research, Cambridge titled 'Rethinking Machine Intelligence' is now documented in a book, highlighting our design and research processes. There are limited copies available, if you are interested get in touch.
We designed a series of concept prototypes of power-generating objects made of sugar, containing the microbes ‘Rhodoferax ferrireducens’, at their core. By doing so, we wanted to expose the slow and gradual breakdown of organic material using a microbial system and, in doing so, reveal the relationship between the processes of artificial digestion, the autonomous production of electricity and our own practices of power consumption. (research fuelled by the Ecobot, developed by the Bristol Robotics Laboratory)
Client: Microsoft Research Cambridge, Shown at: MoMA, New York, SIGGRAPH, LA, Design Engaged08, LIFT09.
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