Design & Innovation

My favorite piece from the Design and the Elastic Mind show was called Bee’s Project. It is a proposed new way of diagnosing health issues using trained bees. There is a glass vessel that a patient would blow into and inside the vessel would be a few bees trained to identify a particular scent that would correspond to cancer, the fertility cycle, or other health related concerns. Within the vessel is a smaller chamber that has a small entrance, where the bees would enter if they sense an odor they have been trained to detect. I found this to be an awesome example of how nature can play a role in design and how a very simplistic design can transform an already acute sense into a powerful tool.

For some photos and more information go to…

http://www.moma.org/exhibitions/2008/elasticmind/#/77/

I went to NYC yesterday to see Design and the Elastic Mind at the MOMA.  It is a show dedicated to design and its impact on the world.  The ideas and pieces range from nanoscale designs using DNA to global data visualizations.  Given the immensity of the range of scale and the variability of the pieces the lines between engineer, scientist, and designer become blurred.  In many of the designs the designer is acting like a scientist, exploring new areas of research and attempting to develop new products based on the findings.  The show is only up until Monday May 12th but I would highly suggest seeing it this weekend if possible.  There is also an online exhibition of the show at http://www.moma.org/exhibitions/2008/elasticmind/