Organic design: towards new artefacts
- Publish On 11 July 2021
- Marie-Ange Brayer
- 7 minutes
Confronted with environmental challenges, designers are exploring new materials that could replace plastics. Options include biodegradable, renewable, biobased, and self-growing materials. Discover three prototypes.
Digital technologies have brought about a radical paradigm shift, blurring the lines between real and virtual, organic and artificial, tangible and intangible. As early as the 1990s, the networking of the world was compared to the processes of biological development, but as global awareness of environmental issues has become a reality, the exploration of the self-organizing abilities of the living is now integral to pursuing energy efficiency, designing new hybrid materials, and reducing our carbon footprint. Artists and designers were the first to embrace this environmentally-friendly approach, designing items thanks to living organisms and seeking alternatives to plastic for instance.
Marie-Ange Brayer, curator, and head of the Design and Industrial Prospective Department at Mnam-Cci, Centre Pompidou, gives us an overview of the possible forms of collaboration between technology and natural intelligence through three projects demonstrating a new relationship with living things. A special preview of her article will appear in the 5th edition of our book magazine, Stream, which is slated for publication this fall.
Designing intelligent materials
Neri Oxman, a designer, and engineer, and head of a research laboratory at MIT, has been interested in biodesign and IT since the very beginnings of the digital revolution. With the Aguahoja project, presented in 2019 in the “Designing the Living” at Centre Pompidou, which I curated along with Olivier Zeitoun, she exhibited biocomposite items that were digitally fabricated while also inspired by the properties of nature. Neri Oxman elaborates hybrid materials that are midway between the living and the artificial, designed based on molecular components that can be found in trees, insects, or bones, but digitally controlled. Her research focuses on new materials that could react to environmental stimuli, in an interaction between the physical, lighting, and thermal environment.
Urban planning inspired by primitive moss
Image cover: The Mediated Matter Group and Neri Oxman, The Aguahoja Artifacts Display
This catalogue of experimental materials (made from organic materials and printed by a robot) covers four years of research and reveals the diversity of aesthetics and properties generated according to geometries, bio-composite distribution and manufacturing parameters.
