[murmur] ben Harwood’s futurecraft blog

Project Totem Pole is an effort to ‘de-technologize’ the ‘grid’ (specifically energy and water systems) in such a way as to create a more ’sustainable’ production/storage/delivery system than we currently use in the ‘developed world.’ This project is not only an exploration into a potentially technically feasible product, but also a criticism of ‘our’ current ‘advanced technology’ which is in the process of being transferred to the developing world. My call is for the radical rethinking of the entire lifecycle of our energy production system in the hopes that we will not necessarily privelage the high-tech over the low-tech, the digital over the analog, the heavy centralized infrastructure over the lighter distributed hardware.

(small size board)

My new Totem Pole - the central source of water and energy - is powered by feet on bikes, rather than coal in power plants. The bikes power a water pump which draws water out of a dug well and up ~20′ into storage tanks (here depicted somewhat ironically as 55-gallon drums). this water represents stored potential energy, which can drive a water turbine when it it is withdrawn from the tanks, and in such a way produce electricity for various uses including night-time lighting (for security and enhanced activity) telecommunications (these towers could form the nodes of a wireless ethernet mesh network) or provide general ‘plugs’ for everyday uses - radios, computers, medical equipment. Bikes can also be used to generate electricity on their own using a common alternator and some other modest electrical equipment, skipping the water pump system.

The board provides examples of projects at MIT and Berkeley that have sucessfully harnessed the pedal power of a bike to pump water more than 20′ using a 2-stroke pump attached via belt between its cam and the bike’s rear wheel. These groups found that water could be pumped at approximately 12.5 gal/minute, or could produce about 150 watts. this represents a workable amount of both energy and water (considering a person only needs to consume 1 gallon of water per day to survive and a current laptop uses 30-60 watts).

I meant for the rendering to be provocative in a variety of cultural and metaphorical ways. After having slept a bit after my finals I think the images contained may appear a bit racist - that was not the intent though i can understand any criticism of the sort that might be levied. I was more trying to criticize the ‘western’ means of constructing highly toxic and resource-intensive support systems, which ‘we’ worship totemically and unquestioningly. The idea of totemic worship was originally produced based on anthropological work by such rich famous dead white europeans as E.E. Evans-Pritchard (regarding the Nuer tribe in Azande land ) and Sigmund Freud (esp. in the book “Totem and Taboo”) which offers a picture of ‘primitive’ worship of a central ‘totem’ which is looked on to produce life-sustaining resources. In the rendering i am importing an updated oil-derrick (our ‘western’ totem) that has been updated and de-technologized, (but which still smacks of western petro-central iconography) into an imagined “African” context. In retrospect however, I believe that a more technically descriptive and design-sensitive rendering could have advanced my real causes of de-gridding, de-technologizing, and sustainabilizing energy and water.

(full-size board at Flickr http://flickr.com/photos/20798518@N08/2120345753/ )

Digital Wayfinding // Locative Media Proposal

I am trying to make something that is both useful and pretty. something that is personalized. responsive. maybe even inspiring.

Project tinkerbell is a ‘locative media’ concept that allows pedestrians to find their ways to and from places, without maps, gps, or sixth sense. Essentially ‘Tinkerbell’ is a personal guide that leads you from place to place, but which also looks cool and creates an aesthetically interesting and exciting streetscape feature.

basically, tinkerbell consists of a series of RGB LED pixels that are somewhat lined up in a linear fashion, either on/in the ground, on building facades, along power/telephone lines. individuals would communicate with these pixels either via RF or via cell phone/PDA.

3 ways to use Tinkerbell

1. companionship  - if you want company, tinkerbell will light up and simply follow you where you go, your RFID lapel pin or cell phone would emit a signal to the nearest LED pixels which would illuminate based on your proximity to them.

2. Wayfinding - you type in an address into your phone, send it to tinkerbell, and she leads you to where you want to go. once you get there, you can put in another address and she’ll take you… say you’re new to boston and you need to find your way from South Station to the ICA, just text google for the ICA address then send it to tinkerbell, she’ll take you there…

3. Exploration - your friend tells you that williamsburg (brooklyn) is sweet. but you’re from atlanta and don’t know new york. your friend emails/texts you a route, which you forward to tinkerbell. once you get out of the subway, tinkerbell shows you the cool vegan fast food hang out, the experimental sound art gallery, the old sugar factory, then the hole-in-the-wall bar where your pal met his girlfriend. there might even be a website where you can post and download routes from known and unknown users.

All this would look really cool on a place-making level.

For implementation, I have also been thinking about a self-powered wireless strategy.

Marin Soljacic, an assistant professor in MIT’s Department of Physics and Research Laboratory of Electronics,  works on WiTricity, wireless electric transfer that is efficient and doesn’t hurt living things. I am imagining that these pixels could recieve power from some initial broadcast source, then could repeat this signal to the next pixels. Susanne Seitinger at the Media Lab has made ‘liberated pixels’ which are solar powered, addressable, wireless, and assignable. these pixels could be employed in this system, and the solar power could be used as a power boost for the wiTricity, instead of a primary power source. In a more complicated scenario, these pixels could also be the nodes of a WiFi mesh network for an urban environment, where they would create light and internet access, all wirelessly.

At some point I thought I’d be able to build a working prototype, but i think its probably too late in the semester for that.
So my project deliverable will be

a PR campaign (i.e.  video, text, graphic)
a proof-of-concept

Wireless power links

http://www.mit.edu/~soljacic/wireless_power.html

Liberated Pixel Links

http://cities.media.mit.edu/projects/liberated_pixels.html

I was in florence all this week with DUSP’s Digital City Design Workshop.

A major part of our *mission given by the city of florence was to study the local workshops in Oltrarno - on the other side of the Arno from the touristy old part of Florence.

We were trying to find ways to support these people’s work and craft. forthcoming…

we saw a lot of cool craft - from furniture making, to antique restoration, to gold leafing, etc…

the only guy i talked to who spoke english, and who had a thing i wanted to buy and could afford, was a t-shirt shop.

i bought a really dope t-shirt, which i need to post, but i have some pictures of it getting made…

I’m not sure what’s on this video yet, but it looks like (from the preview) that its the guy making t-shirts…

www.youtube.com/v/-F8Hpby7IH8

another one

www.youtube.com/v/rn-qybtstnE

here are some pictures…

http://www.flickr.com/photos/20798518@N08

Looking around my house I saw three things that had seen better days or were close to being trash:

-Dead bike tubes

-Miscellaneous Coat Hangers (once from dry cleaners?)

-My neighbors flowers and ivy (they’ll be dead soon, its getting cold)

So I thought to create a hanging garden system to save those things.

My bike goes through a lot of tubes.

coat hangers

So I used up my upload quota or i would have shown pictures of this thing flexing and draping on a building envelope…

These tubes get filled with soil, planted with rooted plants, like flowers and vines, maybe even vegetables..

you run coat hanger wire through the tubes and link the tubes together by tying the wire together.

You can attach a water hose and set it on a slow drip and drape these hanging modules around or on your house. They would therefore be modular and self contained. Different diameter tubing can be used to accomodate different root structure needs.

pretty cool…?

Ok - so this idea is still under development in secret conjunction with Bell Labs and 3M, but I am pleased to bring you an early prototype of spray cloth.

How it works:

An aerosol can contains two chambers.

1.In the first chamber is the base layer. The base layer sprays into a spider web-like mesh, which coats the surface of the body or furniture or other desired surface. This base coat is non-adhesive to most materials, such as skin or wood.

2. The second chamber contains a congealing substrate “Layer C” that binds to the base mesh layer. Layer B is chemically designed to receive and incorporate Layer C into its mesh to form a semi-rigid contiguous material.

The Base Layer acts like a spider web, and Layer C acts like very small flies or insects that get caught in the net. If there was enough netting surface, and enough flies, the composite material result would be a flexible and semi-rigid fabric. Now perhaps there is also a way for Layer B to be a fixative finishing layer which acts like a spider wrapping up the insects stuck in its net so as to keep them fixed into place.

In terms of fashion - layer C could contain various pigments, which would give the garment or cloth visual appeal. reserachers are currently experimenting with a plaid color, inspired by donny osmond, pictured below.

Preliminary research also suggests that spray clothing is also waterproof, yet breathable, and creates a slimming effect when applied properly.

HOW IT WORKS:

THE END RESULT:

Donny Osmond Says : “Spray Clothes : The Future is Now!”

Ok so here’s the skinny….

We all love solar energy, woohoo its cool. right. yeah. BUT, there’s so much more solar energy in space. SO…

What if we put a bunch of solar panels up in space, we could get like 10X the solar radiation per area that we would on earth. Plus, we could get like 24 hrs/day of sunlight potentially.

Then we could transform DC electricity from our PV into microwaves or lasers, and beam it down to earth to rectennas, which are rectifiers and antennas, which could convert microwaves/radio waves back to DC for transmission.

The other option would be to laser beam (yes, a frickin’ laser) energy down to the planet from the laser, which would solve the whole frequency/wavelength/large receiving rectenna issue. BUT the US is under treaty with Russia not to beam lasers from space towards the earth. Go figure…

Below are some very schematic images of what SPS might look like…

Here’s a concept by a Japanese team:

A note on solar power:  when the SPS idea was initially ideated in the 70’s, solar panel efficiency was around 7-10%. This made the whole project a tough sell. But today efficiencies are getting up around 50% (PV developed by NASA). Anyways, the JPL says now they’re reconsidering this idea and the DOD has put some money towards it… link below to a recent article.

Here’s some more technica-ish information i gathered from Wikipedia…

The Skinny on Tranmitting Power:

Power Transmission (DC to photons)
Wireless power transmission was early proposed to transfer energy from collection to the Earth’s surface. The power could be transmitted as either microwave or laser radiation at a variety of frequencies depending on system design. Whatever choice is made, the transmitting radiation would have to be non-ionizing to avoid potential disturbances either ecologically or biologically if it is to reach the Earth’s surface. This established an upper bound for the frequency used, as energy per photon, and so the ability to cause ionization, increases with frequency. Ionization of biological materials doesn’t begin until ultraviolet or higher frequencies so most radio frequencies will be acceptable for this.

As well, to minimize the sizes of the antennas used, the wavelength should be small (and frequency correspondingly high) since antenna efficiency increases as antenna size increases. But, higher radio frequencies are typically more absorbed in the atmosphere than lower radio frequencies.
For these reasons, 2.45 GHz has been proposed as being the most reasonable compromise. However, that frequency results in large antenna sizes at the GEO distance. A loitering stratospheric airship has been proposed to receive higher frequencies (or even laser beams), converting them to something like 2.45GHz for retransmission to the ground. The proposal has not been as carefully evaluated for engineering plausibility as other aspects of SPS design.

THE HISTORY
The SPS concept was first described in November 1968. At first it was regarded as impractical due to the lack of a workable method of sending power collected down to the Earth’s surface. This changed in 1973 when Peter Glaser was granted U.S. patent number 3,781,647 for his method of transmitting power to aver long distances (eg, from an SPS to the Earth’s surface) using microwaves from a, perhaps square kilometer, antenna on the satellite to a much larger one on the ground, which came to be known as a rectenna. Glaser then worked at Arthur D. Little, Inc., as a vice-president. NASA became interested and signed a contract with ADL to lead four other companies in a broader study in 1974. They found that, while the concept had several major problems — chiefly the expense of putting the required materials in orbit and the lack of experience on projects of this scale in space, it showed enough promise to merit further investigation and research.

During the period from 1978 - 1981 the US Congress authorized DOE and NASA to jointly investigate. They organized the Satellite Power System Concept Development and Evaluation Program. The study remains the most extensive performed to date. Several reports were published addressing various issues, together investigating most of the possible problems with such an engineering project.

(Nasa Rendering)

http://www.spacefuture.com/archive/conceptual_study_of_a_solar_power_satellite_sps_2000.shtml

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solar_power_satellite

http://www.foxnews.com/story/0,2933,265380,00.html

http://science.nasa.gov/headlines/y2001/ast23mar_1.htm

Here’s another cool solar product, which i helped develop:

Its a solar-powered backpack, made by voltaic systems out of new york.

These bags and packs will charge and power your mobile devices as you roam about.

They use lithium ion batteries as a transformer for the three 24% efficiency solar panels, which can generate something like 14 watts… pretty soon they’ll have a model out that can charge/run your laptop. now its mainly for satellite phones, cell phones, ipods, lights, gps, etc… small electronics…

More at voltaicsystems.com - if you want a bag i can probably get them for ya half-off ($150-ish)…

I found a ‘how to’ on instructibles about laser cutting bike stencils to make decals… and I just got a new bike and needed a name for it, so … I thought I’d call my bike “futurecraft” as in “hovercraft” or “spacecraft” to signify my hope that bikes are, while also being a craft of the past, hopefully the craft of the future as far as transportation devices go.

well, i tried to learn illustrator, photoshop, and cad in order to make this all work and its taken me a little longer… er… than expected. I have also never used a laser cutte, i am embarrassed to say…
also, all of harvard apparently waits until 3 am to laser cut so we’ll see how long i can wait along until i get too tired to drink more red bull.

The difficulty was trying to turn a picture of a bike chain link into a vector - based file,

then trying to make the letters “futurecraft” out of said chainlinks.

then trying to get cad to read and recognize my illustrator file (non-intel chip based pc not-withstanding, i.e. having to interface with a pc to do cad, both of which i dislike (cad and pc’s)). anyhoo.. let’s see if the laser cutters (”blonde” “brunetter” “redhead” or “ebony”) are open… let’s hope I don’t laser my fingers off…

Here’s my mad skillz in CAD…

not so finished yet

I decided at about 4 am that it was going to be too tough to get an appropriate stencil out of the chain lettering without putting significantly more thought into where the cutting path was in order to make the stencil hold together and still look like a chain when you spraypaint. When you make a stencil you have to cut the inverse of what you eventually want to see stenciled (duh!) so its a little difficult to execute when its really late at night…

Pictured below is ‘Redhead” my new trusty laser cutter… oh btw… this is my first time blogging as well as my first time laser cutting… I think i did a pretty slip-shod job on both!

oh, and i’m really bad at cad too, i couldn’t get the cad/cam set up to just cut the outline of the letters, it kept rasterizing instead of vectoring! Clearly computer/mechanical error is to blame : )

So in the end I just drew line segments in CAD to make the words “Futurecraft” and then cut that, which worked! anyways, its not my original vision but at least its something… now i just need to find some paint so i can apply the decal to my bike!

Et Voila!!

ok - signing off…

Ben

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