Tuesday, October 11, 2011

A World Of Finite Resources

As part of the electives course, we had a day of Seminars and Lectures on the topic of Manufacture And Sustainability. Though this is probably not the elective I am planning on choosing, a few interesting topics came up nonetheless. The topic of how we go on living after we have used up our fossil fuels has always interested me, more often in the genre of 70's post apocalyptic sci fi, so it was insightful to look at this issue from a designers point of view.

Yaniv Peer from Exploration Architecture gave a lecture on Biomimicry, which I would particularily inspiring, both for the reason that it seems a positive direction to take the issues of dependency on finite resources, and an innovative take on problem solving and design.

Definitions:
 
"biomimetics to describe the transfer of ideas from biology to technology."

"a science concerned with the application of data about the functioning of biological systems to the solution of engineering problems" Webster Dictionary 1960


Biomimicry: new science that studies nature's models and then imitates or takes inspiration from these designs and processes to solve human problems". Janine Benyus 1997.
 
The following Video is a TED talk on the topic,




The particular quote "Taking the design genius from nature and learning from it." made me recall Bruno Munari's writings on the replication of nature in art and design. As I cannot locate my book on the topic, I found a quote that probably illustrates this much more effectively;


"When the artist observes nature... it is as if nature communicated, through the sensitivity of the artist at that moment, one of its secrets. (Bruno Munari)"

"In Societies dominated by modern conditions of production, life is presented as immense accumulation of a spectacle of images." Guy Debord

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