Food

don´t miss food

The first day has started with a short overview about Presence Design! After we have searched for any problems of "food" in a group of 4 persons. We have made a story of a woman who has to buy food for her family at a market. For the planning the points “time, place, action and relation" must not forget! The first problem was "no money" and the second was "buy by phone"! My group and I have seen that food is a very important part of our life. After dinner we have competed our profile and have posted our first articles.

Food. Something most of us take for granted. But should we? Why or when do we trust the food we eat? Some look at labels, others talk to friends about whats good or not, some don't think at all.

Food. Something most of us take for granted. But should we? Why or when do we trust the food we eat? Some look at labels, others talk to friends, some don't think at all.
This is only one of the topics that we talked about in our introduction to presence and the design of trust.

Today was an interesting but also confusing day. We talked about presence, trust and the YUTPA. How does time, place, relation and action effect the degree of trust you put in something or someone?

I think it can be an effective tool in architecture and design to help understand why some configurations are succesfull and others aren't. Because if you aproach the problem of trust with the YUTPA-model, it become clear that trust can be orchestrated - and therefor designed.

Right now, it's still not completely clear for me but I'm looking forward to discovering this concept. And hopefully apply it succesful in my own field of work - architecture.

FOOD

Our topic was "food"! We have made a story of a woman who was going to a market to buy food for her family. The first choice was to choose the market and then the stall. All choices of her depends on reputation, image of the goods, prices and knowledge. Possible problems she could encounter are "no money" and "buy by phone". The solution of the case of "no money" was that the seller had to trust the woman instead of the other way around. She could pay later or make a arrangement. When buying by phone the contact between buyer and seller changes. There is no body language and body sense possible and so the risk of trust is higher. One way of knowing someone is trustworthy is to know other experiences and reputations. Buy by phone the woman have to trust the seller more because it doesn't consist of direct contact between buyer and seller. In this case the social network between all buyers is very important for them to make decisions. So be careful in selecting your food and seller!

If we think how can we be inspired to make our products better, we should take a deep sight to the nature and learn how it works...

If we think how can we be inspired to make our products better, we should take a deep sight to the nature and learn how it works.

It is a big challenge for us reducing the energy we waste while we make better and better products. But, how can we do this?

If we reflect for a while about this, we realised that the observation of the world we live in is the biggest source of inspiration. Inevitably, we should be able to learn from nature and bring it to every little thing we do. By doing this, we can reduce the energy and the amount of material we need to perform our goals as the same we create richer and more complex structures.

In th XV century, Leonardo da Vinci show us how can we perform biomimicry. Now, we should face the challenge and continue the way he opened to make our world a better place to live in.

Nature as model, measure & mentor

- Heliotrope Sun-tracking System
- CO2 as feedstock
- East Gate Building (cooling system)
- Kalundborg Industrial Symbiosis
- InterfaceFLOR Entropy & Tactile

Biomimicry is the only way to design and create a society conduced to life by learning from nature.

Development should be in touch with life, so how can we design our products and create a society conduced to life ? This question is answered by biomimicry.Following the life's principles we will be able to reach this objective.
These principles are:
1) Evolve to survive

At this point what we need to consider is that our design should be prepared to face any sort of conditions and changes.Getting information and learning which strategies will make us success are necessary to reach this.

2)Be resource(Material and energy) efficient

Our design should be efficient in a such a way that all functions expected to be implemented should be included in just one element.

Consuming energy,as less as possible,is also important at this point as well as using recycling materials and fitting form to function.

3)Adapt to changing conditions

The main idea is embody resilience through variation, redundancy and decentralization.Incorporating diversity would be helpful here.

4) Integrate development with growth

What this life's principle means is the progressive growth and development of our design. This proccess should go on little by little.Combining modular and nested components is the key to get at this point.

5)Be locally attuned and responsive

The key ideas we can use to define what this principle means are win-win interactions between our design and the surrounding enviroment,and feedback loops which can make our design reacts in a reasonable way by learning from nature phenomenas which repeat themselves.

6)Use life-friendly chemistry

Chemistry is nowadays one of the most important enemies of sustainability.Therefore changing this is in our hands and we can reach this by making a not agressive use of it. How can we reach this? the answer is in this life principle:do chemistry in water, break down products into benign constituents and build selectively with a small subset of elements.

What we have to do next is to integrate these principles into design by scoping, evaluating and creating always considering biology.

Taking a deeper look at nature, we find how it works. From this observation, and the effort of every member of the comunity, we can build the foundations of a better world to live in...

Taking a deeper look at nature, we find how it works. From this observation, and the effort of every member of the comunity, we can build the foundations of a better world to live in.

We need to understand life's principles in order to understand how nature works, creates life and complex structures, adapts to the changing conditions, be self-efficience and manage to survive. So, lets have a look at the most important issues that matters to the industry.

Maybe the most important thing we need to learn nowadays is about being resource efficience in order to use low energy processes, recycle materials to keep them in a closed loop and inegrate different functions in one single solution.

Also, we should take care of being able to adapt to changing conditions and respond to dynamic contexts without forgetting to integrate with the surrounding environment.

Accompanying this principales with propper observation and appropiate performance we will be able to see nature as a model and get some inspiration from them to build our future.

InterfaceFLOR is a company that produces carpets by using Life's Principles. But what do these principles consist of? The aim is to design while using this conditions, so sunstainability isn't an issu anymore. Here's a little tutorial.

1. Evolve to survive. For example: a certain type of moths changed color as species over little time to adapt to his changing context.
2. Be resource efficient. Like a drumfish' placing of teeth to grind his food.
3. Integrate development with growth. Think of the way a baby grows in the mothers womb.
4. Adapt to changing conditions. For example the tree who lets go of her leaves when winter comes.
5. Be locally attuned and responsive. Like the musquito, who finds his prey by detecting CO2-emmision.
6. Use life-friendly chemistry. In contrast with the heat-, beat- and treatmethod most industries are using these days. Imagine the peacock with his beautyfull colors. These colors aren't really the peacocks colors. But they are generated by de fraction of the light reflecting from its feathers. Clever!

InterfaceFLOR tries to incorporate these principles by recycling there tiles, reducing waste thanks to a clever cuttingmachine, use ecofriendly products (no glue!), and reducing the transport because by having different factories on every continent.

Thanks to their care for the environment and their products, interfaceFLOR is the number two eco friendly company in the world. I don't want this article to be an advertisement for this company but an appeal to look at the problems we face today in a different way. Lets get inspired!

like a tool

- Creating: more ideas
- Evaluating: pre-tests for success
- Scoping: changes mind-set

Having the oportunity of visiting a company involved in biomimicry is one of the best experience we could have enjoyed. And we have already done it. Awesome experience!

Having the oportunity of visiting a company involved in biomimicry is one of the best experience we could have enjoyed. And we have already done it. Awesome experience!

In the morning we had some lectures with some professionals of the company to discover the foundations of biomimicry and how they apply all this concepts to the production process.

After that, we could visit the factory and the labs where they create and test their carpets and learn some stuff about the history and the values of the company.

I'd like to emphasize this values, which I found very interesting:

Eliminate waste
Benign emissions
Renewable energy
Closing the loop
Resource efficient transportation
Sensitizing stakeholders
Redesign comerce

Incorporating this values into the production process of every company, from the biggest to the smallest, is clearly the way we should follow.

Biomimicry – innovation inspired by nature

>>How do we love all children of all species for all time? <<
- Waste doesn’t exist – waste is food
- Nature doesn´t waste
- Cherish / stimulate diversity
- GOAL: a delightfully diverse, safe, healthy and just world economically and equitably!
Observe: Energy – supply → growing population is no problem!

>>The natural step: what can we do?<<
Nothing disappears: All mass and energy in the universe is conserved. There is Value in Structure: food and petrol are valuable.

>>Ecological Footprint: How do we know?<<
- 2 problems: current ways of producing and consuming and growing population
- similar to funnel TNS
- in a green world accounting will flourish!!!!

To mimic biology, that’s what biomimicry is all about. Sounds easy when you put it like that. But as you can guess, there’s a lot more to it. The starting-point is the fact that life creates conditions conductive to life. So when we’re able to mimic nature, we’re able to mimic life. But how to do this?

You can already sense that this is a very different approach than the heat-, beat- and treatmethod we all know and is eagerly being used by the industry. In nature, things are being created in water, without any waste, and the only energy source being used is the sun. Can we produce in the same way? To find out we have to start by looking at nature, finding out how nature solves similar problems. When we have found these solution, the real challenge starts. How to apply these principles to your own design? Let me give you a little example:

Our design aim is to create a self-providing and self-organizing grid by which a city is being fed by using one – rather big – allotment. One of the problems we have to face is delivering the food on time, before it goes bad. Using Ask Nature we found a few examples in nature who have to deal with the same problem.

Let’s start with the ants. They created a storage system in which food from different sources is being mixed. By doing this, you would only eat a little bit of the bad source and a lot of the good sources.
Snakes deal very differently with the same problem. They conserve their food by using ‘just-in-time manufacturing’ by only producing the toxic chemicals when needed.

So far for the ‘getting inspired by nature’. The next step is to apply these examples to our design.. I’m curious where this will take us!

Once we have learned the basics of biomimicry, is time to apply this concepts to our project. So the question is, how can we be inspired by nature in order to apply to human feeding (food and water)?

Once we have learned the basics of biomimicry, is time to apply this concepts to our project. So the question is, how can we be inspired by nature in order to apply to human feeding (food and water)?

First, we had to decide what we wanted our design to do. So as we conclude that our design should provide food and clean water to our community in a way that we use the less energy we can, getting this energy mainly of renewable energies. Also, it is very important to import the less things we can from the outside. Additionally, we should provide clean water to the population and be more efficient in the distribution of the food. Non-negotiables for our design are being self-efficient and resource efficient.

Once we have analized what we wanted to do, it is time to find some models in the nature which could help us in our design. And I have to remark that this is an amazing step to work in. It is absolutely amazing how camels can store water, how colonies of ants distribute food after a famine, how snakes can protect from dehydratation by their skin or how can snakes, again, can conserve resources just-in-time.

From now on, we have the job of learning from nature and its models and create ours based on all those things we've learnt.

After all this week working and making some researches, we have designed a system which provides food to the population by using a smart fridge.

At first we consider a whole food system which included also farms and a mechanism to obtain energy and material to feed the animals and the plants, as well as packed and distributed the food and had a big emergency stock to store some food if any disaster happened.

This was the beginning of the system that later we have designed for the final presentation. In this design we focus on the providing part. So in this project each family or person has its own smart fridge, which let them order and select the products that they need and they want. They could also go to the farm and buy the products if they prefer. The transportation of the food and the technology that we need is supposed to exist in 2050.

After producing the food, the food gets divided into two lines.

The first line will be responsible to dilivre the food directly from the field to the consumers' houses. By ruling out the supermarket, everybody gets their food for a reasonable price, and the farmers can also earn enough. The second line goes straight to the emergency stock.

How can we face the challege of distributing and selling food in a more efficient and comfortable way in 2050 ??

The question is, what are we going to use to integrate the distribution of food in our smart grid? And the answer to this quiestion is: the SMART FRIDGE.

We are going to be able to change the model we use to distribute food. Now, we can consider that we have a descentralized model in which everyone of us need to go to the supermarket to get food. By integrating the smart fridge into the smart grid, we can have a distributed system without hiercachies in which everyone of us are equal.

So the smart grid is not only going to automate the process of selling and distributing food, it is algo going to make a direct link between producers and consumers. This is going to allow us to have a fair trade-off between us (as consumers) and them (as producers). This fact leds into a more sustainable society.

By 2050, we are going to be able to have all of this if we wish. Only we have to add a computer processing unit and a display to the fridges we already have and we can improve the way we distribute and buy food. Moreover this is real, and we are actually developing. Our challenge is to bring it to the society and integrate it in our lives.

But, what can this smart fridge do for us? Let's have a look at it...

We can introduce food and drinks (apples, milk, beer, etc) we usually consume and the fridge will be automatically able to provide those goods to us. Also it will track the amount of stock it has of all those products and when we are close to be run out of them it will request some more to our sources. But, what happens if we want to eat a lobster tomorrow? We can request to our fridge and it will ask for having a lobster for us by tomorrow.

Also, it is a good idea to get some advices from our fridge in order to have a healthy feeding.

Furthermore, we have had to deal with the problem of having a emergency stock of food. As we all are lazy guys, we can order the food to take care of it and forget about it. And we can also send some information to the fridge and it will be able to predict some complicated situations (like a strike in transport for example) and increase the amount of emergency stock we have stored. As it is a very important part of our project, we are going have a deeper reflection about it in other article.

Quantity of food that must be kept on hand at all times to provide for an effective response to an emergency.

Emergency situations can happen anytime. Whether you live in a region prone to forest fires, floods, or twisters, it’s important to prepare for a disaster, even if they don’t happen often. Having an emergency supply of food is one important part of the preparation process.

Seeing how snakes produce poisson just when they want to kill an animal to eat, we can design a providing food system taking inspiration in this fact.

Some snakes, like the rattlesnake and the grass snake, are venomous just when they want to.
They produce the toxic chemicals that they use to kill only when they want to eat.

Attending to this fact we decided to design a very fast and efficient system which provides the enough quantity of food that the consumer really needs and as soon as possible. So we reduce the waste generation and the consumer has not to buy food for a week, he or she gets the food that he/she wants and in the moment he/she wants.

`FOOD`URE in the year 2050

We designed a smart grid that will distribute the food being produced in the city in a efficient and intelligent way. It is based on just-in-time manufacturing.
In each neighbourhood there will be a farm that produces the food in a healthy, biological way. After the production, the food will be divided into two lines.
The first line will distribute the food directly to the homes. We cut out the role of the supermarket. By doing this the vegetables will always be fresh, the consumers will pay less and the farmers will earn more. There is also the possibility to go to the farm to see and pick the vegetables yourself. Of course it will be cheaper when you pick it yourself.
When there is more food being produced than ordered, the overabundance will go to the second line. This is the emergency stock were the food can be dried or put into cans.
People can order the food by using their smart fridge.