Neri Oxman, a designer and professor at MIT’s Media Lab, and her students partnered with 3D printing company Stratasys and the computational design duo Deskriptiv to build four super-fab wearable skins that serve as bio-augmented space suits to help sustain life on planets with hostile environments. Because life on Mercury, Jupiter, or Saturn requires more than just a standard spacesuit, of course, and these looks to look for are JUST THE TICKET.
“Some are designed to photosynthesize, converting daylight into energy, others bio-mineralize to strengthen and augment human bone,” Oxman explains. In doing so, they offer a wild glimpse of a future in which the barriers between biology and technology have fallen away.
Mushtari, designed for life on the moons of Jupiter, is an external digestive tract that fits around the stomach. Oxman designed the organ system to digest biomass, absorb nutrients and expel waste. Humans would be able to convert daylight into consumable sucrose via photosynthetic bacteria that flows through the translucent 3-D printed tracts. “Imagine exposing yourself to the sun, generating sugar cubes in your pockets,” she says. As you move, the energy harvesting pockets digest the matter, creating an endless cycle of consumption and digestion.
Mushtari, designed for life on the moons of Jupiter, is an external digestive tract that fits around the stomach. Oxman designed the organ system to digest biomass, absorb nutrients and expel waste. Humans would be able to convert daylight into consumable sucrose via photosynthetic bacteria that flows through the translucent 3-D printed tracts. “Imagine exposing yourself to the sun, generating sugar cubes in your pockets,” she says. As you move, the energy harvesting pockets digest the matter, creating an endless cycle of consumption and digestion.
Zuhal‘s thin, fibrous material is covered in a dense, hairy texture which contains a bacteria that can convert the hydrocarbons found on Saturn’s moon Titan into food for human. It works by converting hydrocarbons into safe edible matter.
Qamar creates and stores oxygen using spherical pockets for algae-based air purification and biofuel collection to enable life on the moon.
The Otaared exoskeleton protects against Mercury’s lack of atmosphere by providing an antler-like exoskeleton that safeguards the head against impacts.
At this point, Wanderers is just design fiction. It’s a highly speculative solution to problems that can’t yet be solved in the real world. But it hints at a fascinating future where biology is synthesized for functionality that goes beyond what’s possible with traditional materials. Oxman says she and her students in the Mediated Matter group are currently developing 3-D printed microfluidic devices through which real living matter (for example, biologically engineered photosynthetic bacteria) can be pumped and manipulated.
It’s early days yet in the merging of synthetic biology and digital fabrication, but Oxman believes that eventually the field will enable an entirely new class of living materials that could be used in design and architecture—the capabilities of which could be both liberating and terrifying. “In the end,” says Oxman. “It’s clear that the incorporation of synthetic biology in product and architectural design will enable the transition from designs that are inspired by nature, to designs made with and by nature, to, possibly designing nature herself.”
(via Wired)
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