Monthly Archives: September 2012

As the automotive industry continues to look towards other design disciplines for inspiration and ideas, French design school Creapole is increasingly well positioned to cater for their needs. While relatively small, Creapole's range of courses which as well as Transport Design includes Product Design, Fashion, Art Design, Visual Communication,Movie and Video Game Animation, and Interior Architecture gives its students experience in a broad range of creative media.

The foundations of Creapole's success lie in its hands-on approach not only to teaching, but also to the tools used by its students. While the Parisian school recognizes the importance of digital technology, it encourages its students to adopt an unusually tactile approach to design; for example, scale models are crafted more by hand than they are milled, thereby engendering a deeper emotional rapport with the volume.

Undergraduates are taught to use state-of-the-art mechanics and design software to polish their design proposals, but the emphasis remains true to Creapole's fundamental philosophy: creating strong, socially relevantconcepts that will be of practical use to their target audience.

Adrien Dauptain Pagani ChiasognaTransport Design

Inspired by the Argentinean stag beetle Chiasognathus Granti', the Chiasogna is an aggressive, mid-engined electric-hybrid proposal for the next evolutionary step in Pagani's DNA. Darwin's discovery inspired the carbon bodyshell, which hinges upwards from the nose to create an unusual entry point for passengers.

Laeticia LopezOkoboArt Design

By observing the shoes of Japanese Geishas, we can see how their design embodies the principles of a culture renowned for its precision and attention to detail. The construction methods of the traditional wooden Zri', Geta' and Okobo' shoes allows the join between its materials to stay hidden, and are why Geishas seem to float' across the floor when they walk. The design of these shoes is light and simple and does not require any additional pieces to hold itself together, such as nails or screws - only a silk lace. What if we could transfer this approach to something else?

Bendjellal Madani 2015'Visual Communication

Madani's project 2015 is a digital Polaroid camera for lovers of retro-futurism. Inspired by the Delorean sports car from the film Back to the Future', this Polaroid camera is both digital and instamatic, allowing you to retouch and publish your photos digitally as well as print them instantaneously using Polaroid film.

Vianney de MontgolfierAdidas NeutrinoProduct Design

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Creapole: creating the next generation of creative designers

In the north of Germany, fifty activists of international organization Greenpeace held a demonstration to protest the arrival of fuel rods with plutonium and uranium for the nuclear power plant in Grohnde. According to environmentalists, their use raises the risk of accidents. Is there a safe place left in the world for the disposal of nuclear waste?

Last Sunday, fifty Greenpeace activists on 12 inflatable boats conducted a 20-minute protest action on the Weser River near the town of Nordenham. Their action was held against the transportation of plutonium fuel rods for a German NPP from Sellafield (UK) to Germany. One of the demonstrators, according to Spiegel-online, even managed to climb onto the nose of the cargo ship. Bernd Ebeling from Contratom (the man who initiated the action) told German online publication nwzonline: "This is a symbolic action. We can not delay the transportation of nuclear materials."

Environmentalists are concerned because the rods may be defective. The Sellafield nuclear complex experienced serious technical problems during the recent years. After the disaster at Japan's Fukushima, the UK government decided to shut down the complex, German agency dpa said.

Ordinary Germans could witness the transportation of dangerous goods in the late 1980s, when the Atlantic Osprey with eight rods of nuclear waste docked at a German port. This week, however, there were two vessels with nuclear waste. After the cargo was unloaded at the port, special transport delivered the hazardous cargo to the point of destination.

The Russian law prohibits the import of radioactive waste on the territory of the country. However, it does not mean that the problem does not affect Russia at all. In 1981, a Soviet nuclear submarine K-27 with two reactors was sunk in the Kara Sea. The Minister of Environment of Norway asked journalists to not exaggerate the dangers and risks associated with the sinking of large amounts of nuclear waste during the Soviet period. However, the subject periodically reappears in the news.

Russian media quoted the Director for Nuclear and Radiation Safety of Russian federal nuclear agency Rosatom, Oleg Kryukov, who said that the corporation planned to export radioactive waste from the Kamchatka region for their subsequent disposal. "In 2014-2015, we will be launching the project to remove radioactive waste from Kamchatka. The waste with all necessary security measures will be removed for further decontamination and final burial," the official said.

A question arises - where to? Chinese Taoists, and not only them, believed that human beings are only a part of the Universe. Today, there is no sense in disposing nuclear waste, taking it, for example, to "underdeveloped countries." They have their own intelligentsia - the people, who are familiar with the problem of nuclear waste disposal. But most importantly, they have no protests (a consequence of the absence of civil society) and no appropriate locations for such practices, that is, for disposing nuclear waste.

Modern scientists have not yet developed a safe way to destroy spent nuclear fuel - they transport radioactive waste to repositories instead. Apparently, this is an issue for the next generation to solve, not ours.

Is there a way out of this vicious circle? An expert on global catastrophes of the Russian transhumanist movement, an employee of the Center for Civilizations Research of the Institute for African Studies, Alexei Turchin, the author of "War and Another 25 Doomsday Scenarios" offers the following:

"The analysis of global risks shows that they can (if they can) be reduced only with the attraction of very serious (if not all available to mankind) resources. Secondly, they can be reduced owing to concerted actions taken by all states. The role of each state in this joint effort to a large extent is determined by what kind of resources (from the intellectual to natural) a particular state has at its disposal (and control), because they can serve as a tool for both solving and creating global problems. It is also easy to see that the catastrophic phenomena of global scale in a number of scenarios may turn out to be a consequence of some blunders made by single states. Thus, considering the question of global risks, we inevitably come to the subject of responsibility."

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Is there a place for nuclear waste on Earth?

It's not very often that a tagline trying to sell an opera CD reads, "you've heard the performance, now taste the song". But that's exactly what a collaboration between design collective After Agri and mezzo-soprano Louise Ashcroft is asking the public to do.

After Agri -- made up of concept artists Michiko Nitta and Michael Burton -- positions itself as exploring the "cultural revolution that will replace agriculture". It has, in the past, lobbied humans to consider the possibility of a new symbiotic relationship with algae (algaculture) where it essentially lives within our organs, making us semi-photosynthetic and self-fuelling. Now it is demonstrating a novel example of how that relationship could one day complement or, alternatively, subvert human culture as well.

Algae Opera, which debuted at London 2012 Design Festival, envisions the year 2060 -- otherwise known as the Algae Age. The green stuff is now the world's main source of food, and biotechnology opera singers are in high demand for their ability to convert breath into bitter or sweet-tasting algae according to their tone and pitch. And that's just what Ashcroft does in her opera. Wearing a biotechnology suit that transforms her into a 21st century version of the Fifth Element's blue opera singer, Ashcroft's breath is supposedly fed through transparent tubes that snake over her face and head, then across to a portable lab where CO2-hungry algae is stored in containers. An assistant (read: actor) in a white lab coat feeds the tubes into the various algae samples, which the audience can then taste afterwards.

In the future, opera singers' huge lung capacity will provide an endless source of food for the algae and, thus, for society. Song compositions will be written with this in mind, to ensure it tastes pleasant and provides people with a varied palate of flavours. The algae is becoming enriched by the song and humans, in turn, are being enriched by culture in a far more literal way than ever before.

Sounds easy (kind of), right? Not so much, according to Ashcroft. The whole experience and "non-reflexive breath cycle", as she calls it, completely challenges the founding premise of traditional operatics.

"This type of breath cycle is considered inefficient and undesirable due to the issues surrounding sustainability and aesthetic," she writes in her blog. "However, in the Algae Opera, a breath cycle based on a point of collapse is considered efficient and ultimately desirable, for it produces more algae.

"For me, the Algae Opera project has been about finding new things and re-examining old things. One of the biggest vocal challenges I have faced is considering how the opera voice, traditionally built for the size of the opera house and therefore requiring a sustained line, is re-built to the food needs of the world's population as defined by the algae mask. Due to this re-design, the musical structure and performance practice of today's operatic tradition shift and enter a future state."

The performer, then, has its position shifted, placing the end product (algae, not music) as the most important element. Opera is not a religious experience anymore; it's merely a "breath ceremony". In the Algae Age, we won't have to have men in white coats standing by to assist either -- the CO2 passing through the suit will generate algae as it flows, then be harvested once there's enough captured.

We're used to experiencing culture in a multi-sensory way, with visuals now as important as sound when it comes to performances. But the Algae Opera asks spectators and performers to take into account all the senses in the context of one piece of music.

"Our relationship to pitch, tone and vocal colour changes," writes Ashcroft. "Tone and colour in the algae framework is no longer linked just to text and texture, but also to flavour. What this means for me as a trained singer, is that I have to re-think technique, the purpose of the voice and explore a new vocal aesthetic to ensure that an algae sound creates food to feed you and me."

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Algae Opera imagines a world where song produces Earth's food supply