Bio and Agry zero
“I love a good verb. In fact I think all nouns should be verbs, including ‘naturing’ as opposed to ‘nature’.” - Neri Oxman
This week we were naturing design and designing nature. We were studying about how important it is to us designers to be able to think and use tools as scientists. Not to mention, that today’s world require a scientific knowledge from the world of conscious makers and thinkers…
The introduction
The first day we were introduced to our lecturers and to the world of biology. To a world that many of us was already introduced, but kept asleep for many years. How they sad it will be all the basics, starting actually from zero. There was a surprising tension in my brain, all the old memories came from nowhere but they didn’t meet the language we used on this course. So now I had to learn how to use this language - the language of biology used by a designer, for theoretical concepts to practical applications.
Nuria walked us through the whole path from: “nothing to something, from life to cellular life” - from quantum mechanics, biochemistry, microbiology, molecular biology to cellular biology.
We talked about planetary wellbeing and talked through many problems our society is facing nowadays. So, then we started practicing tools and methods that can help us later when we try to find answers to our own planetary research questions.
The practical part
Before we would start anything, we studied about how can we design our home laboratories and what are the tools we need for the methods we are studying about. We learnt the most important rules, how to move around a laboratory and what not to do…
We studied about:
- How to grow spirulina and kombucha
- Different types of microscopes and their usage
- The cultivation os microorganisms
I will explain the last a bit more detailed:
Microorganism cultivations
Through our first experiment we analysed many different environments and the magical living organisms they have. We prepared different variations of mediums to cultivate certain types of microorganisms.
Environment
1. The Bicing bike’s left handler, one of our classmate’s (Chris) bikes’ handle
2. My left and right hands
Hypothesis
1.I will find more diverse cultures on the sharing economy bike, than on the individual one. I am especially interested in the different bacterias behaviour between each other.
2.In that sample the lactobacillus will be more active, than the hands I analysed. I am also looking for the difference between the hand that touches object, that are also touched by many other, than the more passive hand.
After a week of seeing all these biological systems and studying how to speak and understand the language, our task was to hypothetically design an organism and to write a synopsis about a research paper.
Here you can download:
- The synopsis about the Unmapped complexity of our diet