Archive for March, 2010

Boston March Fellow: DIY Bioengineered Inks

Thursday, March 18th, 2010

Things have been quiet from Boston for a little bit: we’ve been swamped readying the new, improved, and expanded Awesome Foundation for the Arts and Sciences website — and been repping it up at conferences and the like. But, to all those who have been asking, yes, yes, we’re still in business.

Extremely proud today to announce that our March Awesome Fellow is Charles Fracchia (that guy above). His idea? To create pens that draw from actually living, growing ink cartridges. Excerpting from his proposal:

“I want to develop a set of bioengineered inks to be used with various pen types ranging from gel pens to fountain pens. As an intern at ginkgo bioworks and avid DIYbiologist, I have access to a number of bugs engineered with proteins that result in colour production. I want to make special cultures that can then be packaged as ink cartridges to be used with ordinary pens.”

For all you science dorks out there, there’s some neat little possibilities when you start growing your own ink:

“This would allow artists and enthusiasts to draw with awesome engineered inks. The great thing about using bioengineering to produce the colour, is that you can engineer them in circuits so to create “conditional inks”. For example, using a promoter activated by high temperature in front of the colour producing gene, we can create a colour that will only be expressed when the temperature reaches 35 degrees centigrade. Besides creating different conditional inks (temperature, presence of heavy metals, milk …), I would like to use the money to make different viscosity inks. I want to make the ink using a mix of glycerol and culture media.”

Best of all, this method will be DIY and accessible, so you’ll be able to make these pens all own your lonesome, if you’re so inclined. 

And THAT, my friends, is how we do some awesome. We’re planning to put together an event in Boston on April 23rd for Charles to exhibit his work and for everyone to play around with drawing with real living ink. If you’re interested, stay tuned to our Twitter account for more details!

Posted by Tim Hwang at 12:38 am Comments

Providence Chapter February Awesome Foundation Winner to Build Materials Petting Zoo

Wednesday, March 17th, 2010

The Providence Chapter of the Awesome Foundation for Arts and Sciences has selected Matt Grigsby to receive its February award. Grigsby will use the Awesome Foundation Grant to create a “Materials PettingZoo” showcasing textile, industrial, consumer products and residential construction materials that offer ecologically sensible solutions to more traditional products.

Moving beyond descriptions and pictures of such materials, the materials zoo will encourage participants to touch, feel and directly interact with a variety of materials, offering a novel and interactive way to help people of all ages get educated and exposed to spectacular sustainable materials.

“The goal of the Materials PettingZoo is to have lots of fun while educating people about on the best sustainable material alternatives and technologies available,” says Grigsby.  “With this on-site and hands-on educational event, the PettingZoo serves as an approachable way for the community to gain real knowledge of what a sustainable material or technology truly can be.”

Grigsby, an industrial designer and sustainability expert, has been collecting and investigating sustainable materials for years.  With this grant, Grigsby will expand his collection and improve the design of his mobile “zoo” so that it can be displayed in more locations and at events across the city.

Each sample in the PettingZoo is accompanied by an information card that discusses the material or technologies’ sustainability attributes, manufacturing notes, performance specifications, cost, and information about where to purchase.

With support from the Awesome Foundation, Grigsby hopes to excite, inspire and educate the community in Providence about a wide variety of exciting environmental materials and local resources for sustainability.

“We are aiming to boost awareness of available options for materials and get the community engaged in many of the great cost effective, high-quality eco material and technology solutions out there. These materials and technologies can be used by home owners, contractors, the business community, designers, artists, architects, and anyone else who might need to use a material for any type of project,” he says.

More about Matt

Matt is an Industrial Designer, entrepreneur, and sustainability expert. He oversees operations and partnerships at Ecolect, the worlds leading materials library and design firm devoted to utilizing ecologically minded materials and technologies. Ecolect consults to help others in industries such as Architecture, Product Design, and Engineering do the same. His firm has collected the best available information on the leading sustainable materials available today. They catalog everything from responsibly-sourced plywood, to low impact inks, recycled non-toxic plastics, and much, much more. He has successfully completed projects for companies including Hasbro, LG Electronics, and Schick. His work has appeared in media outlets such as the BBC, Metropolis, Dwell, Make, Architectural Digest, TreeHugger, Planet Green, and Core 77.

Posted by Melissa Withers at 9:49 am Comments

AF-NYC’s Second Award – The Anywhere Organ

Tuesday, March 9th, 2010

Congratulations to Matthew Borgatti and his Anywhere Organ!  AF-NYC loved his idea as much as bagels, coffee and bialys (and more). We kept our second award choice a surprise until last night’s second AF-NYC party at Zeitzeff in the LES, which was packed full of NYC’s most super, Awesome people.

M@ and his AF Award (picture @magnify)

Here’s M@’s original application:

Pipe organs are incredible, awesome instruments. One incredible aspect that contributes to their awesomeness is their ability to play a space. Each space an organ resides in reacts differently, creating different tones, and essentially allowing room for an infinite variety of instruments. Unfortunately nearly every pipe organ in existence is bolted irrevocably into a wall staring longingly at fornications all day. This is why I’m creating the Anywhere Organ.

I’ve designed a system where each note, each pipe of a pipe organ is attached to a central air supply through a hose. The air to each organ pipe is controlled by a solenoid valve articulated through Arduino. I’m writing modules to take MIDI keyboard information and translate it to the valves. Each hose is independent making for an octopus like instrument where each separate pipe can be installed with care and consideration relative to the space. This means the instrument can be installed anywhere; a park, a fire escape, an abandoned warehouse, a secret underwater cave. The pipes can be distributed to take advantage each location’s specific character and personality. It also means that anyone can participate in the project and take a turn. I’d like to get people playing with the Anywhere Organ so they can see the effect space has on music and sound, so they have a public venue to fool around with music, and to have an opportunity to collaborate with other musical artists to create new sounds with it.

Churches are switching over to digital music. This means they’re saving the expense of cleaning, tuning, and clearing dead pigeons out of organ pipes. It’s sad to see such a cool instrument phased out for the sake of cost and convenience but it’s inevitable. This also means that there are entire registers of pipes for sale on Ebay for a song. I’m slowly buying these up. I’m also reaching out to the awesome music and hacking scene in Brooklyn to begin finding collaborators who want to help create new music with the system and help me find amazing venues to install the project in. Here is a picture picture showing my conception of the system installed in a park: http://sinbox.org/whereverorgan.jpg

Thank your for your time. I hope the idea of this project makes you as excited as it makes me.

-M@

M@ talking with AF-NYC’s Lee-Sean Huang, Jesse Chan-Norris and Douglas Repetto (picture @magnify)

Listen to M@’s acceptance speech here and more pictures of last night’s event here.

Posted by Catherine White at 4:53 pm Comments