It’s similar to Alice in Wonderland. Kilobots, tiny robots with stick legs, gather and somehow organize themselves into configurations identical to ants. Artificial Robobee that is as big as honeybees, driven by solar cells, is set to ascend. It can function as a mini-drone to aid in rescue and search missions, conduct environmental mentorship, and even pollinate flowers. A bionic leaf can harness sunlight and store energy via artificial photosynthesis.
Here are some intriguing modern, sleek, and futuristic technology gadgets displayed in a contemporary “cabinet of curiosities” at the Cooper Hewitt Smithsonian Design Museum in New York City. Its Nancy and Edwin Marks Gallery is the home of (and support for) the museum’s well-known “Selects” series. Each year, twice a year, an artist, musician, designer, or creator is invited to curate an exhibition of their vision using objects from the 210,000 things that are part of the permanent collection at the museum. Previous guest curators have included TV producer/host Ellen DeGeneres, fashion designer Thom Browne and the British architect David Adjaye.
For the 18th installment, the museum, at first, contacted scientists. Matilda McQuaid, the deputy curator of the museum, approached Don Ingber, the director in charge of the Wyss Institute for Biologically Inspired Engineering at Harvard University, to put together an exhibition that demonstrates the way nature inspires design, using illustrations from the museum’s collection.
The Wyss Institute is now ten years old. Wyss Institute is ten years old. Wyss Institute has 375 full-time researchers and engineers from various fields who work together by using biological design principles to develop innovative technologies for industrial, environmental, and medical practical applications.
The seashell’s spiral seen in a teapot designed by Danish designer Arje Greigst is an organic shape that inspires methods and ways of developing materials that will be used shortly. Cooper Hewitt
As a single instance, the university faculty created a robot exoskeleton that wears a suit that can provide powered knee and hip motion that allows people suffering from injury to the spinal cord, including those with paraplegia, to stand up or walk and even climb. It is operated with an arm-mounted remote.
In assisting at precise intervals, the soft suit helps people use less energy when walking. It can also reduce injuries from strain and fatigue among factory workers and aid stroke patients to walk again. The suit was approved in 2016 by an independent business, ReWalk Robotics, which recently received FDA authorization to market it to help rehabilitate patients with sclerosis and stroke.
“We try to get things out of the lab and into the world,” Ingber describes. It is part of a consortium associated with the medical, design, and engineering faculties at Harvard and Tufts, MIT, and other medical schools, universities, and hospitals.
“I wanted a scientist and I knew Don was comfortable talking about art and design,” McQuaid declares. “I’d known him for years.”
He was invited to tour the vast warehouse at the museum in New Jersey for a day.
A synthetic Robobee similar to honeybees can be powered with solar panels and could be used like a mini-drone to assist in search and rescue missions, provide environmental mentorship, and even pollinate flowers. Matt Flynn, Cooper Hewitt donation of Harvard School of Engineering and Applied Sciences
“It was like Raiders of the Lost Ark,” Ingber recalls. “There were rooms full of Bakelite, pottery, posters, textiles, chairs.”
“I’m a researcher and a very visual person,” the man states. “I’d already read the museum’s website, and read catalogs of past exhibitions. I knew what I was looking to find.”
Four faculty members of the institute for faculty members from the Institute – Jennifer Lewis, Joanna Aizenberg, Radhika Nagpal, and Pamela Silver, Ingber decided on 60 items designed to illustrate how nature influenced the creation of these objects.
Specific selections were very personal.
When Ingber was a student at Yale studying biochemistry and molecular biophysics, Ingber was intrigued by the world of art.
He finally enrolled in an art class. There, it was that he saw an artwork which was inspired by sculpture artist Kenneth Snelson (1927-2016). It was an extraordinary sculpture made of a series of struts that were rigidly made from wood which were pulled up at different angles into a 3D form and kept open by a set of elastic cables. Snelson, whose sculptures utilized similar design principles but were constructed from stainless steel poles and tensile steel wires, was a student of the American architect, futurist, and inventor Buckminster Fuller.
Snelson discovered that, just like the spider web, tensional forces can be employed to support natural structures. Fuller claimed credit for this idea and identified this idea as “tensegrity,” or tensional integrity.
Wyss bioengineers develop new technologies by utilizing biological structures found in nature, but they strive to do more than just mimicry. The bio-implantable device reproduces arrays of human ligaments that aid shoulder reconstructive surgery by providing a scaffold for new tissue growth. Matt Flynn, Cooper Hewitt, Wyss Institute at Harvard University
To demonstrate how tensegrity is a concept, the exhibition features a replica of the original application to a U.S. patent for the geodesic dome that Fuller submitted to the government in 1951, along with an image of his rod-and-wire-sculpture.
“Tensegrity totally changed my path in life,” Ingber remembers.
“Tensegrity also explains how we stabilize our bodies, which are composed of multiple stiff, compression-bearing bones interconnected by tensed muscles, tendons and ligaments.”
Tensegrity prompted Ingber’s discovery that the same principle underlies how cells, molecules, tissues, organs, and other cells form to stabilize shapes and regulate functions.
McQuaid states that Ingber noticed that living cells have “cytoskeletal struts and tensed cables.”
Other examples of bio-inspiration to depict how designers and artists have used this technique throughout time are more concrete. We see how spirals found in nature, for instance, in seashells, can be seen by spiral staircases, Thonet bentwood chairs, shells-adorned Danish ceramic tea sets, and earrings Ted Muehling designed.
The more complicated issue is the purpose of the video that shows the bio-inspired Kilobots miniature robots in action. The TED Talks host Radhika Nagpal is the head of the Self-Organizing Systems Research Group at the Institute. Her group developed computer programs that allow the Kilobots to break up and then regroup in new ways, similar to what ants behave in nature.
“When I look at the intricate patterns of cells in a fruit fly wing, or the intricate patterns of fish schools that move as one through a coral reef, I am always struck by the feeling of unity–a single entity composed of many pieces,” Nagpal writes in the brochure for the exhibition. “Self-assembly happens across all natural scales, and in a manner that is synchronized with the material and the organisms and in a way that self-stabilizes and self-repairing. This concept is of great significance in the field of engineering, in both computation and the physical design of robots.”
She dreams that someday, employing her computer programming to control robots’ collective behavior; she’ll be able to command a crowd of robots to build sandbags and transport them to sites that flood and bridge or work in dangerous areas for humans.
A few exhibits in the exhibit were created to address particular problems, such as reducing carbon dioxide or producing oxygen.
Professor Pamela Silver and her collaborator Dan Nocera are working on a bionic plant that could produce artificial photosynthesis. It will use solar energy cells to break down water into oxygen and hydrogen. Genetically engineered bacteria within the leaf will eat carbon dioxide and hydrogen in the air. Leaves also produce fuel like living plants, as well as release oxygen. The sketch on paper is intended to demonstrate how the bionic leaf could function on the ground.
Then, there’s the innovative Organ-on-a-Chip developed by Ingber and his postdoctoral associate Dongeun Huh in 2009. This device is about similar to a small thumb drive, made of transparent silicone rubber and two tiny channels that are parallel and separated by a thinner porous membrane.
One channel is stuffed with human cells, like from a lung, and the other is filled with blood vessel cells and contains white cells that flow through it. Tissues within the device can be made to pulse as a human lung or an intestine (to recreate the functions of a living organ). In this microfluidic device, scientists add bacteria, drugs, or anything else to check the organ’s response.
If it is developed, the chip may provide an alternative to testing for drugs on humans and animals. It could also drastically reduce the cost and time needed to bring new medicines onto the market.
This Organ-on-a-Chip is patented and marketed by a company called Emulate, Inc.
These are only some examples of creations inspired by nature in the exhibit. It’s a long and arduous exhibit; however, it is worth the time required to soak it in. The science is exciting.