Neri Oxman: Design at the Intersection of Technology and Biology
Curators: Gerard Loiseau, ESQ and Aviva Lev-Ari, PhD, RN
UPDATED on 2/9/2018
Sylvia Heisel – “3D printing clothes at scale isn’t possible yet but we are moving closer very quickly”
WATCH Prof. Neri Oxman of MIT, Media Lab on TED
Neri Oxman Tells Davos Conference that 3D Printing is Key to Saving the World
“At the close of the Digital Age,” she writes, “design remains constrained by the canon of manufacturing and mass production – she goes on. Assembly lines still dictate a world made of parts, limiting the imagination of designers and builders who are indoctrinated to think and make in terms of discrete elements with distinct functions. Even the assumption that parts are made from single materials goes unchallenged. The legacies of Joseph Marie Jacquard and Henry Ford persist: homogeneous materials are formed into predefined shapes at the service of predetermined functions.”
Through her work, Professor Oxman has been exploring how the Digital Age is enabling engineering and production at Mother Nature’s quantum scale, ushering in the Fourth Industrial Revolution: the Biological Age. She has done this through several projects which pushed the boundaries of manufacturing through multiple material 3D printing (in particular, through a collaboration with Stratasys).
Oxman’s AL-QAMAR piece.
The idea of growing objects is clear in the work of several designers experimenting with 3D printing such as studios Nervous Systems, Growth Objects, and Emerging Objects. For Oxman “top-down form generation (additively manufactured) combined with bottom-up growth of biological systems (biologically synthesized) opens previously impossible opportunities: photosynthetic building façades that convert carbon into biofuel; wearable micro-biomes that nourish our skin through selective filtration; 3D printed matter that repairs damaged tissue.”
Although this may seem like a foreign and mysterious concept it is a lot simpler than it sounds. The products of tomorrow are going to be built in a way that makes us blend in with nature and live symbiotically with the World Organism, instead of parasitically. The only issue remaining is to push the 7+ billion people that inhabit the Earth to make that shift. I’d suggest the 62 people that own half the world’s wealth should probably focus on that.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Davide Sher
Davide was born in Milan, Italy and moved to New York at age 14, which is where he received his education, all the way to a BA. He moved back to Italy at 26 and began working as an editor for a trade magazine in the videogame industry. As the market shifted toward new business models Davide started working for YouTech, the first iPad native technology magazine in Italy, where he discovered the world of additive manufacturing and became extremely fascinated by its incredible potential. Davide has since started to work as a freelance journalist and collaborate with many of Italy’s main generalist publications such as Corriere della Sera, Panorama, Focus Italy and Wired Italy: many of his articles have revolved around the different applications of 3D printing.
SOURCE
Towards a material ecology
Lecture by Prof. Neri Oxman at World Economic Forum, 2016, Davos, Switzerland
Written by
Neri Oxman, Associate Professor of Media Arts and Sciences, MIT Media Lab
Published
Sunday 17 January 2016
SOURCE
http://www.weforum.org/agenda/2016/01/towards-a-material-ecology
Material Ecology’s intimate relationship between design and biology proposes a shift from consuming nature as a geological resource to editing it as a biological one. And this journey from mining to growing is accelerating. Top-down form generation (additively manufactured) combined with bottom-up growth of biological systems (biologically synthesized) opens previously impossible opportunities: photosynthetic building façades that convert carbon into biofuel; wearable micro-biomes that nourish our skin through selective filtration; 3D printed matter that repairs damaged tissue. In the Biological Age, designers and builders are empowered to dream up new, dynamic design possibilities, where products and structures will be able to grow, heal, and adapt.
But striding nature’s way is far from natural. It requires a change in the way we see “Mother Nature,” from a boundless nourishing entity to one that begs nourishment by design. As we master ‘unnatural’ processes at a speed and sophistication that dwarfs evolution, Material Ecology propels us into the age where we mother nature by design.
Ideas in this essay have been published recently in The Economist’s “The Year in 2016.” See also Mothering Nature: The Shape of Things to Come, MINDS ON THE FUTURE, published Monday, November 02, 2015; and the Material Ecology Special Issue of CAD (Elsevier, Vol. 60, March 2015, pp. 1-2). For related projects, see Oxman’s TED Talk here: Design at the Intersection of Technology and Biology. Related websites include: materialecology.com andmatter.media.mit.edu.
IMAGE SOURCE
http://www.materialecology.com/projects/details/anthozoa
About the IMAGE
Anthozoa: Cape & Skirt
3-D Printed Dress in collaboration with Iris Van Herpen
By Neri Oxman
2012, 3D Print
Museum of Fine Arts, Boston
A 3-D printed dress was debuted in the Paris Fashion Week Spring 2013 as part of collaboration with fashion designer Iris Van Herpen for her show “Voltage”. The 3D printed skirt and cape were produced using Stratasys’ unique Objet Connex multi-material 3D printing technology, which allows a variety of material properties to be printed in a single build. This allowed both hard and soft materials to be incorporated within the design, crucial to the movement and texture of the piece.
In collaboration with Prof. W. Craig Carter and Keren Oxman
Production: Stratasys
3D printed with Stratasys multi-material 3D printing technology
Photography: Eloy Ricardez Luna
SOURCE
http://www.weforum.org/agenda/2016/01/towards-a-material-ecology
Other related articles published in this Open Access Online Scientific Journal include the following:
http://pharmaceuticalintelligence.com/medical-3d-printing/
Neri Oxman and her Mediated Matter group @MIT Media Lab have developed a technique for 3D-printing Molten Glass
Reporter: Aviva Lev-Ari, PhD, RN
VIEW VIDEO
Fluidigm Microfluidic Technology: Contributions to Life Science Industry – the Biomark™ HD and C1™systems.
Reporter: Aviva Lev-Ari, PhD, RN
Technology
https://www.fluidigm.com/about/technology
Products
https://www.fluidigm.com/products
This is very insightful. There is no doubt that there is the bias you refer to. 42 years ago, when I was postdocing in biochemistry/enzymology before completing my residency in pathology, I knew that there were very influential mambers of the faculty, who also had large programs, and attracted exceptional students. My mentor, it was said (although he was a great writer), could draft a project on toilet paper and call the NIH. It can’t be true, but it was a time in our history preceding a great explosion. It is bizarre for me to read now about eNOS and iNOS, and about CaMKII-á, â, ã, ä – isoenzymes. They were overlooked during the search for the genome, so intermediary metabolism took a back seat. But the work on protein conformation, and on the mechanism of action of enzymes and ligand and coenzyme was just out there, and became more important with the research on signaling pathways. The work on the mechanism of pyridine nucleotide isoenzymes preceded the work by Burton Sobel on the MB isoenzyme in heart. The Vietnam War cut into the funding, and it has actually declined linearly since.
A few years later, I was an Associate Professor at a new Medical School and I submitted a proposal that was reviewed by the Chairman of Pharmacology, who was a former Director of NSF. He thought it was good enough. I was a pathologist and it went to a Biochemistry Review Committee. It was approved, but not funded. The verdict was that I would not be able to carry out the studies needed, and they would have approached it differently. A thousand young investigators are out there now with similar letters. I was told that the Department Chairmen have to build up their faculty. It’s harder now than then. So I filed for and received 3 patents based on my work at the suggestion of my brother-in-law. When I took it to Boehringer-Mannheim, they were actually clueless.