What's So Special About Natural Design?

You might alternately ask, "why is there a picture of breakfast on Techri-La?" But if you'll let me self-indulge for a bit, today's post begins with the image of an egg because I find it to be one of the most beautiful and inspiring forms in the world: simple and elegant, and distinctly feminine. It's also a great introduction to today's topic of biomimicry.

In a not-so-recent TED Talk, Janine Benyus calls biomimicry "the conscious emulation of life's genius." The term is typically used in engineering and design, confirming what most of us already know--natural forms seem to be better than synthetic forms. You'll often find biomimicry paired with sustainable design, the idea being that we can somehow harness the intelligence already programmed into the natural world. The egg, for example, inspired someone to create a luxury bed in its likeness, complete with light and sound therapy. One of the more interesting examples of biomimicry that I've run across lately is in these solar-powered street lamps. It makes sense that if you want to collect light in a solar array, you might want to arrange your array in a pattern similar to plants, since they've been collecting light for millions of years.

My question today is this: if design elements inspired by nature are somehow intrinsically better than those in the synthetic realm, why don't we see more designs emulating nature?

How Do Machines Affect Your Writing?

If you normally write with a pen and a piece of paper, does your writing change when you sit down to type at a keyboard? Or a cell phone? In the past, I used to run my own little experiments, sitting down with a piece of paper to write short stories (or bits of short stories) and then comparing those to stories written when sitting in front of a computer. Almost always, my thoughts were more fluid and coherent when writing at my computer. Sentences were longer, and I tended to write in longer stretches, with the end result that story sections seemed to be more complete. I'm still not sure exactly why this is, but I have some ideas. First of all, I'm left handed, and I write very slowly, with a death-grip on my pen, which means that it is physically painful for me to write for long periods of time. It's likely that this distraction, and the slow speed at which I'm able to translate my thoughts, prevent me from writing my best, because my body can't keep up with my ideas. Second, because I'm using my left hand, I believe that a very specific part of my brain (the right brain) is strongly engaged with the material going down onto the paper. When I type at a keyboard, I'm using both hands, and I believe that this physical process engages my brain differently--and in my case, more efficiently.

The direction of technology and media seems to be pushing us toward a new kind of orality, with video, podcasts, and very short messages (from text messages, Twitter, or Facebook) changing our primary channels for taking in information. Technologies like text-to-speech, and speech recognition, seem to be speeding this transition toward a more orally-driven culture, and I wonder how this affects the way we write.

What I find most interesting is the splintering into many different formats that are nothing like one-another. Take, for example, text messaging, a system that practically forbids punctuation and complete thoughts, and then compare that to videos on YouTube, which can be very professional and thought-provoking.

Have you noticed how your writing style changes when you're texting? Or posting to Twitter? Or maybe even writing a blog post?

How Will We Interact With Each Other?

For the last couple of weeks, I've been struggling to come up with an appropriate blog post. Today, it occurred to me that in my last few posts I addressed how people interact with computers, but I haven't yet talked about how computers are changing how people interact with each other. I was reminded of this while watching a recent talk from a Kansas State University Professor named Michael Wesch, whose thought-provoking videos on YouTube have really lit up the blogosphere over the last year or so.



Wesch has done an excellent job of documenting just exactly how technologies like YouTube transform the way we interact with one another, coming together in new ways to form communities that would not have been possible even four or five years ago. In the talk, he mentions author & Harvard Professor Robert Putnam, who's concerned that in America, the role of community and family may be diminishing. (In an NPR interview, Putnam cites some depressing statistics, such as a 60% decline for picnics, a 30% decline for families eating dinner together.) Despite these statistics, Wesch contends that we have new systems for interacting with one another, and this allows for people to come together in strange and wonderful ways.

If American communities are truly in decline, that would explain the recent surge of interest in social networks like Digg, Twitter, Facebook, etc., etc. People need personal interaction. With social forces like urban sprawl and career divergence splitting friends over greater distances, it's nice to have tools to help bridge that gap.

What tools do you use to keep in touch with your friends and family? How would you like to see these tools evolve over time?