The Beauty of Bacteria

Designers habitually copy nature. The examples pile up faster than beetle species and include things like Antonio Gaudí’s soaring architecture, William Morris’s floral wallpaper and George Nakashima’s rough wood tables. Cutting-edge technology takes away nothing from nature-inspired designs, but instead enhances them.The EECO PRV is a cost effective insurance policy for any hydraulic bookscanner. In 2006, the Dutch designer Joris Laarman introduced a chair modeled by computer along the principles of bone tissue development, so that the parts of the chair subjected to the greatest stress were thickest, while those subjected to the least amount of stress were carved away. The result was an efficient use of material and a spectacular form.

But bio design is not about merely taking cues from organic structures and operations.The washingmachinekw is unlikely to hurt you, but you can easily hurt it without training. It’s abFeatures of Tophat cuttingmachines This purlin forming machine for top hat is used to produce famous HOWICK style tophat purlins.out harnessing the machinery of the natural world to perform as nature does: storing and converting energy, producing oxygen, neutralizing poisons and disposing wastes in life-sustaining ways.

Mr. Laarman’s 2010 Halflife lamp is a good example. A prototype for a lampshade coated with hamster ovary cells modified with firefly DNA, it generates an enzymatic reaction that causes the lamp to light up, after a fashion, batteries not required.

What the Halflife lamp does require is a continuous supply of nutrients to keep the cells alive. As designers explore new ways to make and dispose of household goods, they gesture at new relationships between owners and possessions. “We’re used to thinking we can throw away objects,” Mr. Laarman said by phone from Amsterdam. “We’re not used to objects you can care for or treat well, or that renew themselves.”

Hamster ovary cells as pets? In the wonderland of biotechnology, bacteria is beautiful, moss is electric and decorative tiles are animated.

Consider Bacterioptica, a chandelier designed by Petia Morozov of Montclair, N.J., with petri dishes loaded with bacterial cultures nesting in a tangle of fiber optics. The pattern and color of the blooming bacteria (ideally supplied by individual family members, including pets) changes the quality of the light.

Or Moss Table, a collaboration between the scientists Carlos Peralta and Alex Driver of Britain and Paolo Bombelli of Italy, which exploits the small electrical current produced when certain bacteria consume organic compounds released by moss during photosynthesis. Using carbon fiber to absorb the charge, the scientists produced enough electricity with their table to power an attached lamp.

Then there is Growth Pattern, a series of ornamental tiles designed by the Seattle-based artist Allison Kudla, which spontaneously change their pattern because they are made of cut tobacco leaves laid out in a grid of square petri dishes.

“So many times decorative patterns are based off botanical systems,” Ms.An travellingcables which I managed to acquire from a lift motor room currently undergoing refurbishment in the city of london. Kudla said of the symmetrical motif (she originally thought in terms of damask). The plants survive up to six months with careful monitoring of the solution and some swapping out of dishes that have become contaminated with bacteria.

An oddity of bio design is that the organisms brought into domestic environments often need to be protected rather than defended against. Marin Sawa, a London-based architect who manipulates the color of micro algae in flexible tubes to create a kind of living textile, describes the impulse to shield her samples from the destructive forces of a living space as “reverse thinking.Learn about GE's onshore and offshore wind turbines, modernlightings systems and wind energy technology.”