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Jakarta Transit Network

Incremental Infrastructures_ Mumbai group final

Mumbai Final Presentation (30mb file)

Futurist visions of the…you guessed it…future

Visions

Plastic Garbage Island

 

vbs tv has done a 12-part webcast series documenting the floating plastic debris field located within the Pacific Gyre, between California and Japan said to be the area of Texas and up to 90 feet deep.

Roxy Paine Maelstrom

The Times reviews artist Roxy Paine’s installation “Maelstrom”, which opens on the Metropolitan Museum’s roof next week (through Oct 25).

“It looks as if a tornado had ripped through Central Park and deposited its gleanings here. Except the thicket is made of shiny metal rods and pipe: some 10,000 pieces weighing more than seven tons and ranging from three-eighths of an inch to 10 inches in diameter, with larger trunk sections made of rolled plate. It’s as though all that wood had been transformed by a Midas with a stainless-steel touch…..the evocation of a complicated relationship between man and nature. Contrary to the fantasies of many sentimental environmentalists, nature, in Mr. Paine’s universe, is not always beneficent. He has created broken trees in stainless steel that appear to have been hit by lightning, and one sculpture whose moving parts are activated by ambient radiation. Nature, as viewed through the lens of Mr. Paine’s art, can be downright hostile.”

article and slideshow

More Scenario Aspirations

Some incredibly seamless and sublime composite animated scenarios from our friends at Tronic Studio. Worth checking out or their simple, compact, but totally sophisticated narrative structure. More at tronicstudio.com

export layers from rhino to render

Following up on the maya render tutoriol, this script should help to export all of your layers as seperate .obj files.

Just turn on the layers you want to export, and make sure the objects you are exporting are not locked – if you are working with nurbs, you may prefer to mesh them before running the script, but it is not necessary.  Also, it should be pretty easy to tweak it to any other file format that rhino can export.

exportLayerstoMaya

Crisis Shrinkage

The Times reports on a movement in Flint, Michigan famously profiled as a depressed community in Michael Moore’s Roger and Me that focuses on accelerating the decay of the city and the reduction of its size as a means to stimulate and reinvigorate the rest. Given the architectural tendency to add as the primary means of infrastructural intervention, it’s interesting to see an example where removal may be exactly what the doctor ordered.

Stranger Than Fiction Opening by MK12

Go here for the clip.

World Wise Commercial

I love this commercial as a template for project scenarios. Talk about suggestive and slippery. 

Underground view of Madrid

Water Rights- Control within an essential resource

 

 This is an article by the economist that  touches part of the discussion we have been having through out our thesis;  the idea that the control of water should rest either  with in the government, community, or personal discrepancy. It gives a couple of example of successful governmental intervention models and how they are benefiting a more conscious use of this resource and uses Australia as an example. In Australia water right are traded among the farmers since they are restricted to a maximum use, but it also gives them the possibility to sell their “right to use”  to neighboring farmers.  

   Article

Article_1

The WaterBoard

This interactive visualization informs through user  defined models that reflect water dynamics based on basic real world principles. 

Pre_Final BKK – Transactional Topography

  

 

prefinal-bkk

Through transactional topographies water is transformed from crisis to leisure, by reintegrating it into society as a leisure culture it becomes a de-stratifying agent.  Through localizing the collection, treatment, and distribution water and removing it from the global network we by-pass government barriers between people and water giving free access to the communities.

Fractal Boundaries | Los Angeles Pre-Final

The project explores the opportunity in developing an infrastructural system that is analogous to the growth logic of the city. In so doing, the infrastructure system augments the unique micro urban characteristics of the city as it currently exists. This is done through the implementation of several micro municipal infrastructural devices that allow for an immediate affect on the city. These devices, which in their quantitative and qualitative deployment offer diverse and unique social protocols that currently do not exist. 

Autonomous Incrementalism: Explorations of Local & Informal Resource Infrastructure

Pre-final presentation for the Mumbai team. PDF here
Our thesis posits a reflexive assembly system developed as an incrementally built structural framework and integrated component system. The normative framework enhances the structural integrity of informal settlements and allows for self-guided spatial transformation, both horizontally and vertically, of the local environment while also harnessing the extreme appropriation characteristics found within such urban contexts. The embedded components augment the capacity of informal settlements to collect their own resources in a massively distributed fashion and utilizing the fundamental cooperative strategies already employed, share them communally for the benefit of all involved. Operating globally as a continually reconfigurable framework constituted by these simple yet intelligent parts, the systems local growths and alterations over time result in new global organizations that, through their spatial form, begin to expose the social organization and individual agenda which is traditionally invisible in more formal architecture. The overall form of the framework is always in flux and never predetermined, however, it is guided at all times by purpose and necessity, and the flexibility of human cognition.

LONDON PREFINAL

NYC_preFinal

an early example of the scaffold deployed on site in an interior circulation scenario, vs. a vacant space bridging scenario.  There is a notion to give back vacant space to the public, and adding redundant circulation to increase accessibility to these newly civic spaces.

NYC_pFinal

Pre Final

pre-final

Pizio Electric Sidewalk LED

Originally published in Metropolis as part of the Next Generation competition – two proposals for motion and weight sensitive urban surfaces for play (in the sidewalk) and night jogging (in the shoe). More at  Inbatitots.com

Brightwalk

BrightWalk trainers let after-dark joggers put their expended energy to good use, lighting the way and alerting cars to their presence. Every time a sole strikes the ground, piezoelectric transducers convert the shock into electricity, which in turn stimulates electroluminescent polymers—low-heat-generating light sources—embedded in the shoe’s toe and heel. With a customizable upper, the sneaker allows sporty nocturnal types to exercise in safety and style. “This shoe introduces the concept of ‘empowered fashion,’” Villarreal says.

PowerLeap

Imagine a nightclub where dancers generate the venue’s electricity just from the impact of their steps. With Redmond’s innovative flooring system, this vision of a human-powered energy source may be close to a reality. The floor tiles, cast in durable concrete and recycled glass, are fitted with piezoelectric brass-reinforced ceramic plates covered in nickel electrodes. With the impact of each footstep, a metal pointer inside the tile compresses the ceramic plate, generating an electric impulse. The resulting voltage activates four LED lights, visible through the glass surface, allowing energy-generating participants to see the power of their steps. Envisioned as a flooring system for high-traffic areas such as sidewalks, public-transport platforms, and gymnasiums, PowerLeap proposes to give pedestrians an active role in offsetting their energy consumption. “I am calling on all humans,” Redmond says, “to become responsible and sustainable self-generators for the 
communal grid.”

Flexible OLED Display

Via inhabitat 

“Charting the future of cell phone technology, Kyocera recently unveiled a kinetic energy-powered phone that is capable of folding up like a wallet. Designed by industrial designer Susan McKinney, the EOS phone consists of a soft, semi-rigid polymer skin surrounding a flexible low-energy OLED display. Shape memory allows the phone’s keys to pop up when in use and blend in with the surface during downtime.”

Very useful flexible display technology for several of the projects

Shoe Map and Pirate Maps

Some interesting mappings online:

Zappos.com, the discount conline shoe retailer runs a real time map showing where their orders are shipping to and what is being shipped.

 

And the International Maritime Bureau has a real time map of incidents of piracy and armed robbery incidents on the high seas around the world.

Los Angeles | Edible Estates- Fritz Haeg

Here is a link to Fritz Haeg’s project called Edible Estates, where he explores the opportunity of taking over “wasteland” conditions of the suburban yard and turning them into a vehicle for producing food. This type of planting scheme is meant to utilize the water and resources put into them by generating necessary output, where currently the suburban lawn and yard do not.

http://www.fritzhaeg.com/garden/initiatives/edibleestates/main.html

NYC Resistor

NYC Resistor is a fantastic community/collective of hackers based in downtown Brooklyn who are doing interesting work on computation, robotics, rapid prototyping…lots of fun things. Profiled recently on public radio. See below, swiped from their site.