Yingyang Zhou-LookingOutwards-10

For this week looking outwards, I would like to looking into Neri Oxman who is well-known in computation design filed especially in architecture, an excellent designer in MIT Media Lab.

Her work embodies environmental design and digital morphogenesis, with shapes and properties that are determined by their context. She coined the phrase “material ecology” to define her work, placing materials in context. Stylistic trademarks include brightly colored and textured surfaces with structure at many scales, and composite materials whose hardness, color, and shape vary over an object. The results are often designed to be worn or touched, and inspired by nature and biology.

Designer and architect Neri Oxman, working with the Mediated Matter group, has unveiled “Mushtari”: a 3D-printed wearable that can convert sunlight into usable products. Joining the “Wanderer” collection, Mushtari was designed as a relationship between the most primitive and most sophisticated life forms. The wearable contains 58 meters of internal fluid channels and functions as a microbial factory, using synthetic biology to convert sunlight into items for the wearer.

Using a symbiotic relationship between a photosynthetic microbe (e.g. microalgae or cyanobacteria) and compatible microbes (e.g. baker’s yeast or E.coli), Mushtari mimics phenomenon found in nature. The wearer triggers the photosynthetic microbe to produce sucrose (table sugar) using sunlight, which is then converted by the compatible microbes into the desired products, including pigments, drugs, food, fuel or scents.

The 3D printing of Mushtari was accomplished with the collaboration of the Mediated Matter Group and Stratasys, makers of the Object Connex3. The Objet Connex3, a color, multi-material 3D printer typically would dispense gel-like support material which could not be cleared. To create the hollow channels necessary for Mushtari, a liquid support which could be dispensed into channels during printing and subsequently cleared was developed.

What I admire about her project is that she is integrating biometric technologies into what could be developed and the project I chose is close related to undergoing project.