21 November 2019
Dr. Neri Oxman is an Architect and professor at the MIT media lab, leading the Meditated Matter Research Group. Her approach toward design deals with alternative manufacturing using nature’s way of growth, as opposed to assembly line production. Her work combines research, learning and application from the fields of art, science, engineering and design in developing materials that are derived from nature.
“The input for one domain becomes the output for another”
The Media Lab is a place where you have to think about things 50 (..) or a hundred years out. If you’re making something that’s applicable to the world today, here, you’re too late!
Rachel Smith, Research Assistant, from Abstract: Bio Architecture
The Meditated Matter functions on collaboration between Biologists, Material Scientists, Product Designers, Computer Scientists, Graphic Designers, Neuroscientists, Architects and Engineers, ‘thinking up crazy ideas, and then working on making them a possibility’. I connected this with Olafur Eliasson’s practice, based on such interdisciplinary collaboration, as the basic and most essential means of interdisciplinary innovation.
Silk Pavillion project
Allowing silkworms to weave surfaces along a Robotically spun fibre silk dome – co-habiting and co-fabricating at the same time
- Unexpected and surprising revelations
- Every project – a creation of a new technology
- Focus is designing designing new materials for, with and by nature – fruit skins, crustacean shells, milk proteins etc.
Approach:
- “Rather than problem solve, problem seek”
- Nature inspired design – Design inspired nature
- “Technology catches up with imagination, so therefore imagination has responsibility”
- Naturing (as a means of creation)
- Future oriented inquiry – tangible payoff – in 20 years..
Reflection:
Dr. Neri’s Bio Architecture and Material Ecology are inspiring to me, not only in their respect for nature, but also as a new approach towards creating objects. Anything we produce today, has impacts on the larger context of the environment, and creating objects that ‘decay’ and go back to nature, seems like a responsible step as a designer. I am also inspired by her practice in the field of education, that directs her talents and energy toward inspiring the youth toward sensitive, futuristic and critical design thinking. This might not be possible in a private practice to such an extent. I’d like to use the Bio-engineering approach toward my exploration of crystal growth (or plant/fungal growth?) in my Investigate project, and the overall concept of working with and for nature, into my practice as a whole.
design factory 