Polymoss

Polymoss is a networked sculptural object by Joshua Clayton that senses and publishes air quality data. This iteration is a prototype for deployment in public space. The project is accompanied by a series of collaborative drawings that critically imagine the future of New York’s urban landscape. Polymoss grew out of my interest in public art ...

Treehouse Exploratorium Update

The treehouse project has evolved into an experiential environment in which visitors are invited to step out of the city and into an environment filled with inviting greenery that introduces a variety of urban farming techniques. Treehouses have long been seen as a sort of sanctuary or retreat where one can escape into an imaginative ...

Transforming Airshafts

PART 1: Origins revisited As an undergrad at Columbia, I quickly became acquainted with what it meant to “get shafted” in the housing lottery: there were, and are, always a number of doomed souls whose apartment windows opened onto dank, stagnant airshafts, usually a narrow column of space filled with darkness, trash, exhaust fumes, and ...

Hydroponic Farm – Final Presentation!

We have a new name for our project: Planting Steps.  We swapped out two of our drippers for regular drainage lines to adjust our water flow and replaced our glazed acrylic overflow pipes with copper for aesthetics and we added two sunlamps to showcase the indoor use.  We’re very excited to have it showcased in ...

ITPWC

ITPWC is a phytoremediation device based on the Eco-Machine systems developed by Dr. John Todd as well as research done by the ITPWC team on aquaponics systems. Built in the men’s bathroom on the Interactive Telecommunications Program floor, the objective of the project is to measure air quality and improve the overall ambiance of the space.

Neri Oxman: On Designing Form

from Pop Tech: Neri Oxman on Designing Form from PopTech on Vimeo. EXTRAS: Structuring Materiality: Design Fabrication of Heterogeneous Materials, by Neri Oxman

Paul Stamets TED talk on Mushrooms

Paul Stamets on 6 Ways Mushrooms Can Save the World

Crabsense update

This update highlights the set-up of our hermit crab vivarium, the data-gathering sensors, camera and sound recordings, the efforts to maintain proper humidity, the migration of the crabs to the sand, the beginning of molting, and the exciting sensor and crab responses to the addition of moss.

Food Systems in East Harlem: Update

In 2006, a community coalition compared the availability and cost of healthy foods in a racial/ethnic minority neighborhood in East Harlem, with those in the adjacent, largely White and affluent Upper East Side in New York City. The results were stunning: 18% of East Harlem stores stocked recommended foods, compared with 58% of stores in ...

Human Cheese: Work in Progress

Documentation of work-in-progress. FULL IMAGE HERE Searching for cheesemakers & microbiologists for collaboration. msimun[at]gmail.com

Hydroponic Farm Progress Report

It was time to test out the water flow and pumps.  We added hydroton after soaking them, we added the pump and saw are waterflow.  We only tested two bins at first before affecting our wooden bins.  It actually turned out we needed more than two holes per in to avoid overflow. The following weekend, ...

Better than Plastics? Insulation and Packaging from Mushrooms

From Global Whisperer: October 12, 2010 End of the Plastic Age – Eben Bayer and Gavin McIntyre at Ecovative Eben Bayer and Gavin McIntyre at Ecovative has developed a way to create packaging material and house insulation from mushrooms that are 100% compostable, more fire resistant than plastic alternatives, and created with absolutely zero petroleum ...

Living Systems Drawing 2

The second in our three-part series of living systems drawings, this sketch imagines and critiques urban micro-climates. In 1960, Buckminster Fuller and Shoji Sadao proposed a dome covering the entire width of Midtown Manhattan essentially to control weather within. We were intrigued by the perils and economics of privatized climate systems and how such an ...

Gengineered concrete-patching bacteria: BacillaFilla

From BoingBoing: Cory Doctorow at 10:14 PM Tuesday, Nov 16, 2010  “BacillaFilla,” is the pet-name given by University of Newcastle researchers to a gengineered bacterium based on Bacillus subtilis that has been modified to fill and bond cracks in cement caused by earthquakes and other violence. The bacteria burrow into the concrete until they have ...

The Buttonwood Project

A bit of history: For more backstory, visit j9er.com

Hydroponic Farm Update

We have bought all of the materials for our farm and we began building all of the box containers.  We chose to use standardized plant container, in order to ease the building process. Here are a few pictures of our work so far!

Crabsense Update

I wanted to post this picture of my fine collaborator Nisma Zaman holding Aragon, as she gently dips the hermie in a special water bath. For more in depth info about the project check out our respective blogs. And, stay tuned for some of that information to be posted here.

Bokashi Composting Revealed!

There are ways to produce the Bokashi mixture without having to buy expensive effective microorganisms… it just takes a bit of extra effort!

ITP WC: Building the Installation & Fixing the Code

During this past week we continued to make good progress on the ITP WC project. Our main objectives were to continue working on building the physical structure for the aquaponic installation and to fix issues with the sensors to ensure that we are able to get valid readings from the bathroom. The Physical Build After ...

Moss Graffiti

Our first attempt at moss graffiti went better than expected – two out of three designs where successful.  Overall, we learned a great deal about what is and is not possible with this living medium.  Our technique was simple enough graffiti fare: don’t ask permission, make a stencil, spray it with something (in this case, Elmer’s ...

Paul Mankiewicz Visit

Paul S. Mankiewicz, Ph.D., Biologist/Plant Scientist of the Gaia Institute visited our class today to give a talk titled “Integrating Ecosystems with Urban and Industrial Landscapes: Treating Water, Capturing Carbon, Enhancing Biodiversity and Removing Toxics with Waste-into-Resource Technologies.”

Potential uses of bamboo in airshafts

There are many obvious benefits of installing bamboo groves in airshaft spaces. These hardy tree weeds are beautiful, they provide excellent air remediation, they grow extremely fast, they can withstand the cold winter, and they can grow up to 75feet. They can also be harvested and used as building material, food, and even water filtration. ...

Local Sensing, Worldwide Sharing

Over the past week we have been making a lot of progress on our bathroom intervention project, ITP WC. Macaulay and Adib have been taking the lead on the physical design and planning for our installation, including the aquaponic system. They have completed some initial prototyping work and have begun to procure the materials for ...

Boswyck Farms Workshop

Michelle Temple, Mike Cohen and David Phillips attended a Hydroponics workshop taught by Lee Mandell at Boswyck Farms.

NYU Composting Initiatives

I am working with the sustainability taskforce at NYU to begin new student run composting initiatives. Currently, NYU implements large scale composting through NYU food services. This service collects the food waste from various dining halls and food establishments on campus and ships it a processing facility upstate. I am most interesting in experimenting with different methods of composting within ...

Lighting options in airshafts

Below are some examples of existing lighting options that could be customized for airshaft spaces. (Interesting work has been done on solar technology for space exploration and orbital greenhouses.) Incidentally, this post will be updated periodically as I gather more information about installation, maintenance needs, costs, etc. a)Solar Tracking Mirrors: Various solar tracking mirrors direct ...

ITP WC concept: whiteboard brainstorming

What do you get when you combine two visual people to tackle over-sized water bottles?

Brooklyn Grange Field Trip

Today the class visited Brooklyn Grange, the first independent, commercially viable rooftop farm in New York City. The farm’s founder Ben Flanner led the class on a tour of the farm and gave some perspective on approaching rooftop urban farming as a viable business model (vs. as a community garden or demonstration project). Ben and ...

Finding the Right Gas Sensors

Over the past couple of weeks we have been doing a lot of research regarding sensors that can detect the level of various gases present in our environment. Here is a topline overview of how we decided to move forward.

Captain Planet Belt Buckle: VOC monitoring & reporting

Turning everyday citizens into environmental action superheroes. Air quality in NYC is bad news. It’s not something that gives you pleasant dreams at night, or calms you as you pass yet another idling diesel truck. In an effort to better understand and report my exposure to volatile organic compounds, I’m designing a wearable VOC sensor ...

Human Cheese

A proposal to develop a create a system for the sourcing, creation, and distribution of human cheese. This project is an experiment, a process, an exploration, a provocation, and soon to be served for dinner.

Sensor/Controller Box

With the accessability of microcontrollers and sensors it has become increasingly possible to create a feedback system between living systems and the digital/human world. I have been doing research to understand what elements can be monitored that would give us information to improve and adjust the system in beneficial ways. Working with Windowfarms, the most ...

mossaeration

The air we breathe. I am interested in breath. The way we breathe, what influences the way we breathe and what is actually in the air. I am building 2 testing chambers to test the effectiveness of moss to improve air quality. Phytoremediation is the use of vegetation to contain, extract or degrade contaninants from ...

CrabSense

CrabSense is a project designed by Melissa Clarke and Nisma Zaman that will monitor hermit crabs in a vivarium and present visitors with both visualizations of their movements in relation to their environment and an augmented reality experience to place people inside their world. We chose hermit crabs because of their fascinating social behaviors, their need to moult, their desire to climb, and their multimodal senses…

Urban Treehouses

I’m intrigued by the idea of urban treehouses as a way of reconnecting with nature in a densely packed environment. How can we use existing natural elements (such as trees) as a foundation (in this case literal) for understanding the natural environment we’ve built over? What can treehouses teach us about sustainable building and biomimicry? ...

Design By Nature

We visited the Omega Institute over the weekend for Design By Nature.

Re-envisioning New York City, a pop-up book

Proposal: For Designing Living Systems, I propose to compile my research on NYC’s natural ecology, current environmental data,  and design and bioremediation solutions to produce a handmade pop-up book that offers visual renderings of the past (a la Mannahatta project), present, and, most importantly, the future for selected New York City sites. In this way, ...

Urban Farming for Kids

Our team has couple of possible schools in East Harlem that have expressed interest in working with us to develop an on-site intervention. We envision building a module for a student-centered project, maybe run over the course of a couple of afternoons or one long weekend day, to install a vertical/urban garden on premises, that incorporates some material ...

Material and Building Systems

How do we build like nature? How do we already reflect nature’s processes in fabrication and how might we do it better? I am researching methods of fabrication and the materials used, addressing questions of resource economy and strength or fitness. I am curious about how we resolve our aesthetics and desire for speed with natural processes.

Getting unshafted

Many of New York City’s apartment buildings offer a unique feature: the airshaft.  In the shape of a square or “u”, these airshafts were originally made to ensure airflow through apartments buildings, but more often than not, they are dark, stale spaces to open your windows to. I’m curious how feasible it would be to ...

Windowfarms

Windowfarms are vertical, hydroponic, modular, low-energy, high-yield edible window gardens built using low-impact or recycled local materials. A large scale version of the Windowfarms project was asked to exhibit in the 2010 Ars Electronica festival which focused on climate change and other forms of global remediation.

An Intro to EarthShips

While the Omega Institute is in the limelight in “Designing Living Systems” for its green building standard, I wanted to post some information about EarthShips as started by New Mexican architect Michael Reynolds. In terms of energy & material conservation, they beat Omega and every other LEEDS-certified building hands down (and are worth checking out ...

Vertical Farm Flat Pack

Project by David Phillips, Michael Cohen, Michelle Temple The resurgence of hydroponic farming has provided us with a unique opportunity to rethink the world.  No longer do we need to buy all of our groceries from a brand that ships them across the country.  Instead, it can be localized.  Hyper-localized, say, in your living room. ...

Living Wall + Phytoremediation proposal

Project Description: Our goal with the Living Wall is to see if we can measure and improve indoor air quality using living wall systems in a phytoremediation context. The first type of living wall we’d like to test out is plant based, and the second is made out of moss. Each wall consists of single ...

Living Systems Drawing 1

This is the first of a series of conceptual drawings done as a collaboration between Joshua Clayton and Adib Dada for Designing Living Systems. In the tradition of Archigram, each will imagine a future aspect of New York City’s built environment and quickly develop the idea with found imagery, collage, and graphite on paper. This ...

seed.

The user gets a seed. They plant the seed in their digital realm. The plant then grows based on the location of the user (weather, air, soil and water quality) and how well the person takes care of the plant. As the plant matures, it flowers and seeds. The user, then, can send the flowers (and seeds) to another user, so they can plant their own seed. This is the only way for another user to grow a plant. As the plants grow, they create an ecosystem of digital plants that then help to grow the community “tree”.

DIRT re ALITY

- INTRO – This project is about finding out the truth of the new york air condition and show it to people, so can drive people’s awareness and also want to tell people to take public transportation or walk or ride a bicycle instead of driving a car or take a taxi when u don’t ...

Ecological Hierarchy

Mycelium Networking

Proposed machine is a dynamic large petri dish for recording the changes in the mycelium growth. The x,y table drip system will allow using different chemicals to be inserted into the network, and the camera below will follow the reactions of the system.

ITP WC

A bathroom intervention that brings awareness to water waste and air quality issues in our public spaces.

Polymoss: A Networked Moss Sculpture

The physical object is a moss-covered polyhedron, approximately two feet in diameter. Each face of the surface would sustain a differnet type of moss, producing a multicolored green geometry. The sculpture would be connected to remote or local sensor readings of CO2 levels, fed live to the device from Pachube using an ethernet connection.

Vokashi

Fun with Vokashi.

R.U.S.T. Radical Urban Sustainable Training

The R.U.S.T. course is designed for anyone interested in learning specialized techniques for small-scale sustainable design in cities. Topics and hands-on projects include: bioremediation, rainwater harvesting, aquaculture, constructed wetlands/greywater, autonomous technologies, worm composting,
raised bed gardening and soil alchemy, city chickens and micro-livestock, struggles for land and gentrification, brownfield restoration, biofuels, wood gas and veggie oil vehicles, mycoscaping:edible and medicinal mushroom cultivation, energy depletion and climate justice, sustainable and efficient wood burning.

Phyto Universe

Usman Haque of Pachube Visits

Usman Haque, founder of Pachube, visited our class today to share some of his projects and to discuss ideas around capturing, storing, linking, aggregating, reporting and visualizing data. When word got out that he was coming to visit, we had to move him to a bigger room so other students at ITP could also sit ...

Dickson Despommier

Dickson Despommier visits the Living Systems class.