Neri Oxman is the head of the Mediated Matter group in MIT’s Media Lab. She’s a designer and architect by background and her group has developed of a whole string of interesting research projects that explore the relationships between humans, designed objects and the environment in surprising ways.
As she says in the video below:
We live in a very special time in history, a rare time, a time when the confluence of four fields is giving designers access to tools we’ve never had access to before. These fields are computational design, allowing us to design complex forms with simple code; additive manufacturing, letting us produce parts by adding material rather than carving it out; materials engineering, which lets us design the behavior of materials in high resolution; and synthetic biology, enabling us to design new biological functionality by editing DNA. And at the intersection of these four fields, my team and I create.
I said in my previous post that one of the things we should be doing in D&T from KS3 onwards is introducing children to the novel ideas that are at the forefront of design and technology activity – and teaching them how to interrogate these ideas critically.
Neri’s Mediated Matter group is a rich source of intriguing ideas you can draw on.
HildaRuth and Torben for D&T 