Read about Buckminster Fuller – architect, inventor, innovator, designer, futurist.

Evolution at work Bacteria make major evolutionary shift in the lab.

User Designer has been very quiet because I was on holidays and attending the Advanced Visual Interfaces 2008 conference, where I presented Perceptual Usability: Predicting changes in visual interfaces & designs due to visual acuity differences. Yet again AVI was an enjoyable conference with lots of friendly faces. Unfortunately its only on every two years.

While in Italy I headed to Pompeii and unexpectedly stumbled upon a 2000 year old bistable optical illusion mosaic in The House of the Faun. Wow. I hadn’t realised the Romans and Greeks used optical illusions in their art. Below is a photo of the mosaic:

Scientists have created an entire synthetic genome. Another important step towards making biological nanobot “machines”, which would be extremely useful as smart malleable materials.

Very very blog relevant and interesting Call For Papers: Imagining Domestic Interiors. This is one CFP I’ll definitely be working towards! Robots are set to play an increasing role in our everyday lives, particularly in our domestic interiors. Already, they have found their way into vacuum cleaners, sweepers, mops, and other automated service machines for the home. Looking beyond these largely predictable developments, advances in self-configurable and adaptive robots promise some radically new possibilities. Our furniture, for example, may be host to interconnected assemblies of robotic modules that can re-configure themselves to suit different purposes, events, or even moods. An adaptive home interior might also physically age with its occupants, conforming to their changing needs and operating to support their states of development and health. (rest…)

What Kind of Genius Are You? Slow burn or short fast bright bright bright.

This post is dedicated to Molly “Isn’t it only natural”.

What would happen if your toothbrush could mate with another toothbrush?

Would you end up with an even better toothbrush – the best of both toothbrushes? How about if your toothbrush mates with 5, 10 or 15 different toothbrushes, with each new toothbrush in turn mating with another new toothbrush?

If you could decide which toothbrushes get to breed would you eventually end up with a toothbrush that’s perfect for you? Its form and function, its colour, feel and shape all bred into the toothbrush children generation by generation. The toothbrushes you dislike don’t breed so don’t pass on their “Form & Function DNA” to the next generation.

How would you tell a toothbrush to mate? Maybe to start the mating process you exchange design DNA by physically rubbing your toothbrush against another toothbrush. After that your smart malleable material toothbrush turns into a lump, which then self-forms into lots of little baby toothbrushes. To decide which mini-toothbrushes breed you crush the ones you don’t like, and rub the ones you do like off each other. Then repeat again and again, till eventually you have a baby toothbrush that you stretch into full size and begin using as your day-to-day toothbrush.

The method I’ve described for breeding toothbrushes is a Genetic Algorithm (GA) search. GAs are very powerful for exploring a large search space. In this case our search space is the potential designs for toothbrushes. Seeing each design generation could be a great way of helping people explore and imagine design possibilities.

Dryad, from Stanford Virtual Worlds Group, is a related example of software for exploring the design space around 3D trees. You can cross breed different kinds of 3D trees. Dryad is freely available for Windows and Macs, go play.

It’s easy enough to speculate about reshaping toothbrushes by cross breeding them, but what about more complex artifacts. Such as doors that slide or TV remote controls. How would you control the cross breeding of what a button does? Functionality is more abstract than form. For example if you cross breed two door handles where one door handle works by turning and the other by pulling…you could end up with a nightmare child door handle that works by turning, then pulling, then turning again.

How can the person doing the cross breeding place limits on what forms and functionality are explored? Maybe by only cross breeding one specific part of an artifact at a time, e.g. only cross breed the handles on the toothbrushes.

For artifact cross breeding to be possible objects and artifacts will need some kind of DNA. At the most abstract level the DNA would encode form, functionality and the relationship between both. Or putting it another way: malleable objects and artifacts need to be self-describing.

Smart Lego (New Scientist article), from CMU’s Computational Design Lab, is an example of a physical / virtual artifact that is able to self-describe. Also for many years various computer languages have been capable of different amounts of self-describing, which in computer science is called Reflection.

Of course now I’m wondering what would happen if you cross breed a door handle with a toothbrush?

In the Wired article “Where’s My Personalized Medicine?” you can read more about existing methods that enable personalisation of drugs. In the longer term it should be feasible to create drugs that are optimally adapted based on individual differences in genetic makeup (Pharmacogenetics).

Most of the research and projects I’ve mentioned so far have tended to enable the user to have more freedom by giving them more control. The user is in charge of personalising and adapting.

In personalised medicines we find an example where it probably isn’t feasible or acceptable to let the user design and adapt the (non-recreational) drugs. Are there certain objects that should be adaptive to the user without letting the user explicitly adapt them? Are there certain things that should be fixed in form and function? If so what are the characteristics of adaptive (that which adapts to the user) but not adaptable (that which the user can alter) objects?

On a separate but related point: I wonder what home medicine cabinets will be like in the future? Will they have a spit here slot which when used causes the cabinet to quickly sequence your genome and then pop out some individualised pills? Or could it be far more subtle where when you use the restroom the toilet paper gets automatically infused with personalised medicines? Wipe your way to a healthy lifestyle!