Via The Guardian via WMMNA

-----

Going to waste … Philips is bringing methane back in the kitchen design for its new Microbial Home, which features a bio-digester (centre)

"(...)

But if Bulthaup is modernism taken to its logical extreme, what if everything modernism taught us about the kitchen is wrong? What if bacteria and manual labour are the future of the kitchen? Philips recently unveiled a concept kitchen as part of its Microbial Home system, in which the central component is a bio-digester kitchen island. The idea is simple: bacteria digests food and toilet waste and turns it into methane gas for cooking and lighting. It's a self-sustaining domestic ecosystem, and it presents an alternative vision to the clinical kitchen, inviting the microbes and the rotting vegetable peel back in.

(...)"

More about it on The Guardian.

Personal comment:

An interesting and funny article by Justin McGuirck about modernism, Orwell, Reyner Banham and... the kitchen!

Via WMMNA

-----

Taken out from a post (Lemonade Igloo, salt deserts and other landscape wonders) by Régine Debatty about the work of photographer Scarlett Hooft Gaafland on WMMNA, this lemonade house make me think of houses that you could eventually drink before you move... providing the inhabitant with some sort of "house" nutrient... 

As a reminder as well of some vernacular, farm type of architectures in the Alps, when in winter everything was in close(d) circuitry: the animals --mostly cows-- were living in the lower level of the house producing heat for the inhabitants, while also producing food. Inhabitants, animals and architecture were in a sort of symbiotic relationship.

Lemonade Igloo, Igloolik Series, Arctic Canada, 2007-2008

Three-dimensional printers are getting a lot of hype at the moment. In February, MakerBot Industries started shipping its Thing-o-Matic desktop 3D printer, which, at just $1,225, "democratizes" 3D printing, allowing you to "live in the cutting-edge personal manufacturing future of tomorrow!" The same month, the typically restrained Economist headlined a story "Print me a Stradivarius: How a New Manufacturing Technology Will Change the World." Business Insider even called it "The Next Trillion Dollar Industry."

The idea, for those of you who aren't familiar with it, is pretty simple. You create a 3D design on your computer or download a premade blueprint. Then you press print. Your printer squirts materials out of a nozzle that is sort of like an ink jet printhead, and builds up the object gradually, one layer at a time. When it finishes and the object has cooled, you have a new thing. Not a picture of a thing, but the thing itself.

And people are already using the technology to print all sorts of things—pesticide-free plastic bug repellents, new ears, and videogame cars.

They're also printing food.

For example, both the BBC and the CBC have recently reported on the 3D food printer being tested at Cornell University's Computational Synthesis Lab (CCSL). So far, the team there have created miniature space shuttles made out of ground scallops and melted cheese, chocolate letters, and cubes of raw turkey and celery, mixed with hydrocolloids to create a gel.

Meanwhile, across the pond, tech company Bits from Bytes are collaborating with the University of the West of England to try to print mashed potatoes.

The somewhat underwhelming aesthetic results of these experiments do not discourage 3D food printing's proponents, who dream of the chance to rapidly prototype and tweak new flavor and texture combinations, the ability to digitally control nutrient intake and ensure food safety, and the possibility that, one day, your mom will be able to send you a slice of her apple pie over email. And, undoubtedly, if 3D food printers become as ubiquitous as personal computers, it will utterly change the way we think about food, as well as reshape the built environment, from kitchen design to supermarket layout.

To find out more about how these 3D food printers actually work and how they might change our lives, I talked to Marcelo Coelho, an industrial designer with MIT Media Lab's Fluid Interfaces Group. Last year, he and Amit Zoran released a series of concept drawings for a digital gastronomy project they called Cornucopia. Now, Coelho has created a prototype digital chocolatier—a personal, 3D candy printer. Our conversation is below.

GOOD: The last time we talked, in February 2010, you had come up with these concept drawings. Can you talk through the process of turning them into a working prototype.

Coelho: We started by looking at what was possible using real world technology. The biggest challenge in making a 3D food printer is controlling the food. We experimented with different types of ingredients and with different kinds of valve design. I’m definitely not a food engineer, so I went through a whole process of getting a better sense of the properties of the foodstuffs that I was working with and what sorts of devices have been invented to work with each of them on the industrial scale. I looked at a lot of books about the design of machines for food factories.

Eventually, I arrived at a prototype that combined chocolate and nuts in different amounts. The machine has a little carousel with two different types of chocolate and two different types of nuts—just regular chocolate, white chocolate, almonds, and walnuts, bought from a store. I designed a graphical user interface so you can just click on the food that you want and it gets added to the design. So, for example, you might click on the chocolate and a tiny little bit of chocolate gets added to that candy design. Then you might do a layer of nuts, and you keep selecting the amount and the arrangement of those layers. When you're done, you just hit the candy button, and the machine goes through the process of printing it out.

I really tried to show what happened while the machine was making the candy, so as the machine starts to extrude the chocolate and the walnuts, the graphic representation of the candy on the user interface also shows what’s happening—you see the layers appearing on the virtual candy as it's appearing on the physical candy. I think that's an important part of the process, so that people could see how the food is coming to be what it is.

GOOD: So do you actually have to design the whole candy before it even starts printing?

Coelho: No, you can do as much as you want, and then just hit the candy button and whatever you've created so far will get printed.

GOOD: That's good, because I can easily see how you would design something that looks good and then as it prints, realize, you know what, I want a little bit more chocolate…

Coelho: Absolutely. So you could print two layers of chocolate, stop and then put a marshmellow in the middle of this thing by hand and then print some more layers of chocolate and nuts. I think creating this symbiosis between the machine and the people using it is very important.

GOOD: When other people tested the prototype and printed candy for themselves, did they do things that you weren’t expecting with it?

Coelho: I think the most surprising things was how much people liked their candies. They tasted really good. I was a bit surprised. I don’t know why, because we used good chocolate and real nuts and we were just depositing them in different ways, but I thought the candy was going to taste funny. I also think people were just fascinated by the idea of making candy. There’s a lot of creative space in candy design.

GOOD: One practical question: How do you keep the chocolate at the right temperature so it can extrude? Do you add something to the mix, or is it just melted chocolate?

Coelho: It’s melted chocolate, and there’s a hidden film that goes in the chocolate tube with a heating element and a thermostat, so you can heat it and then keep it at a steady temperature. The heating is more localized at the bottom, near the valve.

GOOD: How do you top it up?

Coelho: You just buy a bag of chocolate chips from the grocery store and tip it into the tube.

GOOD: Given that this is a prototype, what are some of the things you would need to refine before production?

Coelho: There are a few things. Right now, it takes about a minute for the candy to harden. We could speed that up by putting the entire machine inside a little chamber, for better temperature control. Another thing is that over time the valves start getting clogged and you have to take the whole thing apart. I would like it to be super easy to detach the valves and just pop them into the dishwasher. But each of these things is a separate and really hard design challenge.

It does work pretty well, but the next step is to build it so it works reliably for a long time and also combine this printing carousel with a plotter, so that we can not only control the type and amount of food that is dispensed, but also create lines with it.

GOOD:  In some ways, what a device like this is doing is putting the tools that are already in a factory into people’s houses. What’s the interest and value, for you, in taking these industrial food processing techniques and building them at the scale of the home kitchen.

Coelho: There are several layers to it, but I think it all comes down to idea of giving people more information. I think of information in two different ways: one is just learning about what you’re eating and the second is actually becoming a part of the information design process or part of the food production process.

So you’re right: There’s plenty of stuff at the grocery store that is made in a factory using these kinds of extruding devices at an industrial scale. But most people have no idea what goes in to making them. I wanted to create a machine that would let people have more information about what they're eating and how it's made, and then, on top of that, also be able to make choices and design their own food.

GOOD: I could see some people looking at this and saying, "Why not just eat a bar of chocolate and some nuts? What’s the point in going through this whole 3D printing process?"

Coelho: That’s a good question, and it goes back to where this project started. I noticed that every aspect of the design world has been really affected by 3D printers, and people spend a lot of time talking about the idea of these machines being in everyone’s homes one day and how it will revolutionize everything. Those conversations made me realize that right now, the only thing that most people really design or create in their own homes is the food they cook. For example, my parents never make anything ever—but they cook frequently, if not every day. So I thought that food would be a really interesting place to explore the potential of domestic digital design.

GOOD: So a 3D food printer is actually a vehicle for people to take something that they’re familiar with doing, which is cooking, and introduce them to design thinking.

Coelho: Exactly. I think it also unleashes an infinite amount of possibilities. When you think about the kinds of things you can do on your computer in terms of design—simple things, like a Photoshop blur filter, for instance—it makes you wonder what a blur filter for food would be? What would it do and taste like? I think there's a really exciting opportunity to give people the same sort of one-button design tools they have on their computer, but for food.

GOOD: Did you build this prototype just to experiment with the ideas, or are you interested in developing it into something I could actually buy at Williams Sonoma?

Coelho: I would love to take it into production! I actually think designers have a big responsibility to explain what's possible and what's not possible, as well as just coming up with creative ideas. When Amit and I put out our concept designs this time last year, people wrote about them as if they were real, and that was really frustrating to me. I had never created concept renderings before, and it made me realize the responsibility of creating a fantastically realistic image—people look at it and think it exists. I think it's important to make that distinction between concept and reality clear because it affects society's reaction to new technologies, as well as what kind of research gets funded and what doesn’t.

Anyway, that's the part of the design process that I really like, the part where you actually try making it and see what works and what doesn't.

Images: (1) Digital chocolatier, Marcelo Coelho; (2) Scallop and cheese spaceshuttle, Cornell University/French Culinary Institute, via the CBC; (3) Turkey and celery square, photo by Dan Cohen, via the BBC; (4) Printed mashed potatoes, via Fabbaloo; (5) Digital chocolatier, Marcelo Coelho; (6) Graphical User Interface, Marcelo Coelho; (7) Graphical User Interface, Marcelo Coelho; (8) Digital chocolatier, Marcelo Coelho; (9) Digital chocolatier, Marcelo Coelho; (10) Concept drawing for a digital fabricator, Marcelo Coelho.

Via GOOD

-----

(...) -- Taken out from a longer post about food and architecture by Nicola Twilley --

This vertical greenhouse from 1966 was apparently "a space-saving sensation," with a built-in automatic elevator to rotate crops. Eat your heart out, Dickson Despommier!

(...)

Personal comment:

I just saw this picture in an article from Nicola Twilley that makes me think of a project we did back in 2008, Tower of Atmospheric Relations (and that in some other ways retro-confirm the project's hypothesis of a vertical greenhouse building / climate exhibition and clock).

Related Links:

Images from MIT Fluid Interface Group

Everyone is talking about local food, farmers markets and like, cooking? Who has time for that? And really, is Michael Pollan serious with his Rule #2- "Don't eat anything your great-grandmother wouldn't recognize as food." Why bother even having an MIT if you are going to think that way?

Make shows us how Marcelo Coelho and Amit Zoran of the Fluid Interfaces Group at MIT propose a much greener, more efficient, waste-free process: Print out your dinner.

-----

Via Treehugger

Personal comment:

Looks like a future hybrid between old food artifacts dedicated to the conquest of space (pills and paste in tubes tasting like food) and 3d model printing. Maybe will be go toward a new type of room in our living spaces. Instead of the kitchen, we will have the printing room (where we'll print food, objects and magazines...)

[Greenhouses being erected in Jittu, Ethiopia via NYT] Two weeks ago, in an article entitled ‘Is There Such a Thing as Agro-Imperialism‘, the New York Times reported that financially wealthy but resource-poor nations in the Middle East and Asia are attempting to ensure food security by buying up large tracks of arable land in Africa, “seeking to outsource their food production to places where fields are cheap and abundant.”

The rising food prices last year left many wealthy nations feeling vulnerably aware of their food insecurity. Some fluctuations, such as the spike in food prices, may be transitory, but others, such as global population growth and water scarcity, show not signs of abaiting, and have created a global market for farmland.

The article points out that “because much of the world’s arable land is already in use — almost 90 percent by some accounts – if one excludes forests and fragile ecosystems — the search has led to the countries least touched by development, in Africa, which contains one of the earth’s last large reserves of underused land.” Research by the International Food Policy Research Institute (IFPRI), the International Institute for Environment and Development and advocacy groups such as Grain, suggests that huge tracts of Africa’s agricultural lands are being sold, off the radar.

[Satellite measurements of vegetation. Map by Robert Simmon, based on GIMMS vegetation data and World Wildlife Fund ecoregions data.]

There is, of course, an irony that a continent which is persistently beset by large-scale famine is seeing its land sold off, in order to sustain wealthy neighboring nations.

Foreign investors — some governments, some private interests — are promising to construct infrastructure, bring new technologies, create jobs and boost the productivity of underused land so that it not only feeds overseas markets but also more Africans. It remains to be seen, however, whether local farmers and African citizens will reap any of the benefit of this agro-imperialism.

Other nations, including China, India, South Korea and the UAE are also joining the global land-buy.

[Land buyers and sellers, via mongabay.com]

Great interactive map of global land transactions found here. The first green revolution, which began in 1945, enabled developing nations to achieve food independence. Mexico was the first ‘test site’ of this green revolution, through programs largely funded by the Ford and Rockefeller foundations, and India was the second poster child of the green revolution. There have been numerous attempts to introduce the versions of the Mexican and Indian project into Africa, but these programs have generally been less successful, due in small part to environmental factors, and in large part to political and economic instability.

This second version of an African green revolution seems far more ominous, leaving poorer nations to sell off the rights to their own survival.

Pruned posted a while back describing how European nations were considering spending upward of “£5bn on a string of giant solar power stations along the Mediterranean desert shores of northern Africa and the Middle East, with the hopes that Africa could provide part of their energy needs, basically turning the continent into one giant solar power plant.”

In an optimistic scenario, Africa nations will see lush fields of food supported by a robust infrastructure of water and electricity delivery – an African ‘Broadacre City’. However, if the resource imperialism of the 19^th and early 20th centuries is anything to judge by, the outlook for Africa isn’t rosy, both in terms of environmental impact and the possibility of wealth trickling down to local farmers.

Nations as global supermarket?

-----

Via InfraNet Lab

Recueilli par PHILIPPE BROCHEN

Dans un magasin de Lucknow, dans le nord de l'Inde, le 6 juillet. (REUTERS)

-----

Via Libération

This is a must-see. The beautifully made infographic animated movie "It's Time for Real / Eat Local, Eat Real" highlights the increasing tendency of food importation, and how this phenomenon influences the economy, the environment and our neighborhoods. The message is mainly meant for Canadians, but certainly applies universally.

The movie, with a graphical style similar to the Stranger than Fiction opening scene, is part of the campaign Eat Real, Eat Local [eatrealeatlocal.ca], by the Unilever brand Hellman's. More information about the design process and creation of the movie can be found at the Glossy project page:

"We all found the statistics pretty eye opening. I think everyone involved changed the way we buy our food. Yoho's wife had a baby girl in the middle of the project, and I grew a playoff beard which I've been reluctant to shave (just superstitious I guess). Challenges early on were the levels of legal approval the team at Unilever and Ogilvy had to go through on all the stats. Everyone wanted to make sure that the information was fair and irrefutable. All the food in the shoot was Canadian, which is no small challenge in spring. I don't think I've ever been hugged by agency and their clients in twenty years in the business. That was definitely a high point."

You can watch the video HERE.

-----

Via Information aesthetics

Personal comment:

"Information design" (motion, 3d) en rapport avec le post ci-dessous bien sûr. Concerne le canada, mais a le mérite de donner de la visibilité aux chiffres.