GENOMICON

This is cool

It’s the sort of project I lie awake at night dreaming about. Probably need (a hell of a lot of) these to get all the plastic out of the sea… although the bits of plastic are tiny etc. Make tiny plastiphile-bots I guess.

Not that these aren’t tiny… 10cm cubed… which is also cool… although it does look a bit like a flight-case.

What will the aliens think when they turn up? I’ll tell you what they’ll think: “Earthlings, LOL” they’ll go. “They’re tiny… and they fly around in little flight-cases”.

I was imagining something more like this

Which is the spaceship from QUARK – which is a 1970s TV program about a space-janitor. I thought it was brilliant when it first came out, but now I’m not so sure.

Unless I’m very much mistook, they’ve pinched the control-panel thing from The Tardis eg:

The weird thing about The Tardis control panel is that it basically stayed the same for about 30 years

and then… the 21st Century arrived, and it actually got older looking

All of which are from here

Is that how time-machines work? Not impossible I suppose, but not what I imagined at all.

Anyway, back to the Swiss Cleaner-bot… not entirely sure I understand how it gets the individual bits of stuff… I mean they’re going pretty fast some of them… like 10km/s fast. Rather than have a flight-case, you’d be better off having a massive lump of blu-tack with a block of carbon-fibre or something in the middle.

I love this sort of thing.

I’m starting a fablab btw. Got the premises oked today.

So we saw that Zeitgeist 3 the other day, because people keep going on about it… and to be fair, I was a bit suspicious about the whole thing because there’s a fairly major overlap between Zeitgeist 1 and the things that conspiracy cranks keep going on about… but I had an evening with nothing-doing, so I watched it.

Fair enough. Currency. It’s a problem. It takes a long time to sink in, just how much of a problem it is – years… but eventually, it does kindof sink in and you realise that the whole thing is one giant scam. It’s a ponzi scheme where banks rob money from the future in the shape of inflation. It’s not a tax, it’s fraud, pure and simple, and precipitating from that are meta-frauds.

So anyway, Z3 is pretty good at pointing out the problems – which are becoming untenable. On the solutions though, they do what geeks always do when they want to “fix” the way society is run…

… THEY DESIGN A FUTURE CITY!

This does not work.

Z3 goes on about someone or other not understanding Systems-Design. Z3 does not understand systems-design. They’ve designed a city that is essentially a single-cell. Cities aren’t single cells… and those that have been designed from the top down as single cells have failed (and yes, it has been tried). This idea that you can solve systems-problems by combining 1930s fascist architecture with 1970s Sci-Fi totally fails to recognise that a city is not a single cell, but a collection of cells – which at the smallest coherent level, are (not buildings, but) individual people.

Z3 have not designed an ecosystem, they’ve designed a terrarium. It won’t work, and outside (increasingly unlikely to happen) experiments in Dubai or China, it’s not going to happen.

Here are two videos that I’ve embedded before… but they’re worth looking at again

and photos of an art-expo from the Eden Project… which is not connected to this in any way whatsoever. Looks cool though. Looks like Silent Running or Logan’s Run or something.

This is Logan’s Run

It’s got Jenny Agutter in it, which instantly makes it brilliant.

Because if there’s one thing that geeks truly love, it’s designs for moon-bases.

Absolutely Brilliant.

It’s from Holland… it says

“Wie op de maan woont is niet gebonden aan kamers of zelfs maar wanden. Een enkele gesloten bol voor ruimtes waar privacy gewenst is, volstaat. Verder kunnen de bewoners in een volledig vrije ruimte leven.

Dat is althans de visie van Royal Haskoning Architecten voor een villa op de maan. Deze ontwikkelde het bureau voor het februarinummer van het populair-wetenschappelijke maandblad Quest.”

Which in English means

“Check out this totally brilliant moon-base. It’s got proper 1970s spherical chairs that when lined up with the bedroom door, make a happy/bonkers face. It’s got a gym, A BAR and a bath where you can look up and see the stars.

Mind you… the bath seems to be see-through and sunk into the floor, so people sitting in the living room will have your bare arse looming above them, and we’re not sure about the weeds hanging from the ceiling – looks like Spanish Moss… a bit horror-show. Still… a really nice touch is having a special bedroom in the basement away from the rest of the family, where your stroppy teenage offspring can sit in the dark and listen to goth music all day and all night, and communicate with their friends in a language that consists entirely of abbreviations and acronyms”

The Moon. Brilliant. We were promised the moon back in the 70s. That’s why we made those spherical chairs.

You can get them with teeth now as well.

Although personally I think I’d go for one of the hanging ones with a gold bean-bag in it

So you could spin round and round until you can’t tell which way is up any more, and simulate the experience of actually BEING in space. In the 1970s.

Otherwise known as the blogosphere – that parallel universe where someone only has to draw a picture of something for it to become real, re-published across the net as a world-saving fait accompli.

Ooh. Beads. Shiney.

I don’t know why I find this so annoying. Really I should like it – it’s people being creative etc, throwing wonderful ideas into the soup. It’s an explosion of creativity and democratised publishing, it generally starts with designers (and design blogs) who are pretty inspirational…

… but somewhere in the process I can’t help but feel it turns into snake oil. The purpose of it goes from creativity to clamorous, panting attention seeking – tricking people into thinking they can actually buy this stuff somewhere. They always take pains to skirt around the fact that what they’re presenting is actually just a drawing of something.

The greeny blogs are the worst – they’ve created this whole diorama of world-saving consumerism, and none of it’s fucking real. To pick a random example (and I won’t provide a link because I’m sure they’re nice people, and I have no particular desire to piss on anyone’s chips). There are currently 10 articles on the front page – and they look wonderful. They are:

1) a drawing of a solar powered market – that doesn’t actually exist
2) a drawing of a bamboo prefab house – that doesn’t actually exist
3) a drawing of a university data centre – that doesn’t actually exist
4) some people aiming to build a solar powered bike – doesn’t actually exist
5) researchers aiming to power cars with cottonseed oil – doesn’t actually exist
6) an energy efficient computer power supply. It exists!
7) a drawing of a green office block – that doesn’t actually exist
8 ) a lovely looking design for a green vehicle – that doesn’t actually exist
9) a test flight by a 747 using 50/50 biofuel / jet fuel. It exists!
10) an energy efficient house in Australia, who’s roof has been extended, and looks a bit like an eyelid, though I personally would have called it an “eve” not dissimilar to what any other house in the entire country has. This exists too, but like, so what?

Maybe they’re not supposed to exist – maybe it’s purely about design and I’m completely wrong, and I’m a cunt and I should shut the fuck up… but the pattern here is spread across the web. It’s kindof like a liberals version of Fox News ending their headlines with a question mark. There simply isn’t enough news to report so they make stuff up – or in this case, report upon the “aspirational” flagship projects of designers and architects, treating them as though they’ve actually made it all the way to actually, actual, real, reality.

C’mon. It’s living in a bubble. We need shit that’s real. Drawing pictures of wishful thinking doesn’t cut it.

So on that note… here are a load of kinetic chargers, some of which are real, some of which aren’t… and lets face it, it’s not always easy to tell the difference… and really, I’m not complaining about these because they look quite cool as well, and I am quite conflicted about the whole thing.

Maybe it acts as a sort of – market research – designs that create a buzz are merged into tomorrow’s DNA. Who knows. Something about it doesn’t feel right though.

–

Still. Whatever:

(from)

Laundry balls. You put them in your clothes drier and the constant motion charges the battery inside. They look cool. These would be worth having no matter what they did. The Linking site is about “form over function” as well, so no complaints there etc – other than that they publish things that other sites then assume to be reality.

Bullet shaped charger thing – you wear a bunch of them bandolera style. This one is from the site I was bitching about before, and to be fair it has apparently made it to prototype stage.

This one from Gizmag is actually real – a bit of a stretch at nine inches though.

This one’s pretty neat – for dancing apparently. I wonder if they could make one for sitting around the house in your underpants. I mean theoretically it would be more efficient to just dangle a couple of electrodes into a fermented brew of beer (which is already fermented) and pizza, and cut out the middleman. Still, I like it.

A designer security tag that replenishes your energy at the same time as you drain someone else’s with your never ending talking. This one is cool as well, and does (or doesn’t) come in a variety of fashion colours.

Here’s another one, a little less glam… any more real?

from… let me see, let me see… ah ” M2E will announce the development of an external charger later this month” – not quite real at the time of writing (last year) then… The originating site seems to have no mention of this gadget – but maybe that’s not their thing. They seem quite preoccupied with military stuff.

Eric Von Hippel having done a fair amount of research has found that around 80% of innovation is user driven – ie: people playing with actual physical things. He also says that about 3/4 of non-user-innovated products that make it to production, fail.

I hate to think of the number of products that never actually get made at all, but instead are just vapor-ware in the attention economy.

So obviously the other thing that I find really irritating about Minority Report is the way that everyone else seems to love the Waving Arms About Interface (Waai) that they use at the police station.

I don’t want to wave my arms about. If you don’t have to stand, sit, if you don’t have to sit, go and have a nice lie down. My trackpad allows corner to corner movement of the mouse with the most minuscule of muscular movements of a single finger. It’s almost thought control. That’s what I want.

So anyway, here are some videos from the future… the first from the same people that brought you, IE6, Vista, The Blue Screen of Death and that fucking talking paperclip thing… a web 2.0 version of a spotless Gattica-like utopia. Nobody has fingerprints.

<a href="http://video.msn.com/?mkt=en-GB&#038;playlist=videoByUuids:uuids:a517b260-bb6b-48b9-87ac-8e2743a28ec5&#038;showPlaylist=true&#038;from=shared" target="_new" title="Future Vision Montage">Video: Future Vision Montage</a>

(from where there are more of them, once this one’s finished etc)

Everything’s a smart-surface. The whole world is one massive curvy-cornered flash interface.

The there’s this, which is tres charmant etc – and they do at least have the honesty to insert a blue-wall-of-death, albeit in the shape of a badly rendered building.

from

Which has a bloke designing a European Olde-Towne using a rather impressive Waai that someone commented looks a bit like Google’s Sketchup… pretty impressive if it can do that.

All of this was at least partly inspired by this 1993 predictive video from Sun Microsystems which also uses Waai s quite a lot.

Which as Joel Johnson points out, is a far more accurate prediction predictor than any sort of actual reality predictor.

1993 was a long time ago. I didn’t see my first email until 1994. Everyone was using Mosaic browsers… and unless I’m very much mistaken, Auckland University where I worked, used to download and locally cache the entire Internet. Something like that anyway.

(from)

And if Japanese Girls ruled the world, maybe it would be a far better place, and people other than Japanese Girls would drive these things… but alas, the Otaku of the Motoring World would literally rather die than be seen dead in one (in fact they’d rather die than be buried in one), so once again a rather impressive technology (compressed air… costs less than a quid to go 200k and can be refilled in minutes) is pissed up the wall by designers designing for other designers rather than the people who might actually buy the things, if they looked a bit more macho.

Which links in no way whatever to this rather impressive bit of neo-paleofuturism…

…”In the future, vertical coastal farms could use seawater to grow crops”. Yea, they could, but they fucking won’t… because in case you hadn’t noticed, the institutions that might conceivably fund such gravity-defying sky-castles are all going bust from… well, funding gravity-defying sky-castles. Still, this doesn’t stop the concept being passed from blog to blog like some sort of ephemeral fait-accompli.

Still, I don’t know if it’s art, but I like it… mainly because it does look a hell of a lot like The Venus Project guy’s amazing designs where the future is permanently stuck in the 70s. Or something.

A really interesting branch in this genre of design… of things that are made to be as futuristic as possible, but which will never be made and who’s only real value is that in a decade or two’s time, they will become collector’s items in their own right… and people will say “how quaint, how hip and groovy, we were so naive then, we were so young”

There have been a couple of real crackers show up recently:

and

This of course is nothing new (and how could it be?) The true master of this art is one Jacque Fresco who’s Venus Project is an err… “A bold new direction for humanity that entails no less than the total redesign of our culture.”, which is cool… and who’s architecture is spot on – it gets that whole 60s futurism thing down to a t.

And who’s ideas do actually have some traction in various qtrs…

Still, that’s not what the future looks like. It looks like one side of this line… and no prizes for guessing which

Personally, I think we need radical land-reform – probably planet-wide. Enough space to feed yourself should be a basic human right.

A nice list of digital ink devices (that never were) from Dvice… which is one of my favourite sites for… well, products that never were (or will be). Speculative design and all that. Pushing the envelope all the time.

A symptom of the approaching sci-fi singularity, that the predicted future can become quaint and old-fashioned in such a short period of time… almost zero in fact – in fact there’s a whole genre of design devoted to making things that look like failed sci-fi predictions – Sci-fi movies based on steam-punk Victoriana, are outstripping by far “proper” predictive ones. When was the last one? Minority Report? I can think of at least 5 steampunk sci-fi movies that have been made in the same period.

This is happening partly because steam-punk Victoriana is an incredibly rich seam visually… but mainly because the future has become impossible to predict without being rendered embarrassing within a very short period of time.

Things have become incredibly volatile.