FutureAir

Author: Simone Rothman

Ross Lovegrove at the Centre Pompidou

April 2017

The Centre Pompidou in Paris devotes a first “forward-looking retrospective” to the work of the industrial designer Ross Lovegrove, reflecting an overall vision of design based on the natural evolutionary process. The exhibition looks back at this quest for new paradigms in creation, at the crossroads of art, design, technology and nature.

“The idea of ‘convergence’ is important because it brings art and science together. It is an overall approach to design that ought to play an essential role in the 21st-century ‘Renaissance’ we are currently experiencing, which will lead to tangible creative principles that concern us all, wherever we are in the world,” he says.

For Ross Lovegrove, designers are interpreters or “sculptors” of technology. His objects with their dynamic shapes, seemingly in virtual movement, reflect digital developments in the contemporary world while opening out to new ways of living, marked by a “sustainable” awareness of the world where form harmonizes with nature. The designer draws on the growth principles of natural forms to conceive complex structures with innovative materials, focusing on the lightness of form and use. Biomimicry and the minimal use of energy are central to his approach.

Ross Lovegrove’s intelligent use of materials and industrial processes is unique.
Through designs that range from everyday objects to cars, aviation and architecture, the designer has developed the concept of “DNA” (Design, Nature, Art), creating a powerful link between digital technologies, the science of materials and organic forms. As well as observing nature, he draws fundamental inspiration from the hole-riddled sculptural forms of Henry Moore, the paintings of Francis Bacon and the “kinetic” sculptures of Tony Cragg.

Ross Lovegrove is one of the few designers who makes biology, anthropology, physics and ecology central to his work, and promotes a humanistic vision of design as part of a holistic approach to creation. In his view, “the idea of convergence intimates a time where the merging of all things takes the form of a profound change in the way we see and make the physical world around us”.

“Design is a sphere that is continually being reinvented. Because it involves transforming natural resources into useful objects, the designer is at the very heart of today’s technological issues, which affect not only our own emotional and aesthetic state but also our collective awareness as human beings – a species that is ever rapidly evolving and needs to adapt continuously.” Ross Lovegrove

Photo Credit: Arturo Tedeshi

Lovegrove and the Future of Air

April 2017

Design “Intraspective” at the Pompidou Center in Paris from April 12 – July 3, 2017, is a must see, while work continues on Lovegrove’s next venture: Re-imagining indoor air.

FutureAir, established in New York in 2014 by Simone Rothman and Ross Lovegrove, along with a team of scientists from Harvard, MIT and Columbia, sets out to provide increased awareness, highly innovative, smart-control applications and actionable products to monitor and deliver comfort and purity as well as energy efficiency for indoor air.

As the go-to platform for 21st century air-conditioning, FutureAir brings new awareness to the critical issue of indoor air pollution and its effect on health, comfort, productivity and general wellbeing. Sophisticated and affordable sensor technology developed by FutureAir, identifies harmful gas emissions and dust particulates, while monitoring room temperature and humidity to provide optimal thermal or “real-feel” indoor air comfort for home, school and office as well as in hotels and hospitals. Additionally FutureAir products, enabled with IoT device-to-device communication, regulate excessive energy output and “cooling waste” to reduce overconsumption and greenhouse gases emissions into our atmosphere.

The sleek Ross Lovegrove biomimetic designs for FutureAir products create a new standard for an industry sorely lacking in aesthetics. His late-career emphasis on Convergent Design, which combines emerging technology with new materials, is particularly evident in Lovegrove’s new designs for FutureAir. His organic, earth-centric works are inspired by the logic and beauty of nature mixed with social and environmental consciousness. “This idea of Convergence”, Lovegrove explains, “is an inevitability in this day and age, when we are looking for a new model of industrialization”. “Design will become more bespoke as we make only what we need and design’s beauty and logic creep in as ecology and as evolutionary. More and more designers will be asked to do something useful, to do something relevant.”

The future of quality air and the optimal indoor environment has found its designer. Ross Lovegrove…now partnering with science to evolve the way we breathe and live.

Photo credit: Andrew Bordwin

Air Pollution Brings Down The Stock Market

April 2017

“Every time air quality decreased by one standard deviation, we saw a 12% reduction in stock returns.”

Comparing daily data from the S&P 500 index with daily air-quality data from an EPA sensor close to Wall Street, Professor Anthony Heyes and his colleagues from the University of Ottawa found a connection between higher pollution and lower stock performance concluding that air pollution brings down the stock market.

Apparently being exposed to bad air can make you feel depressed which in turn can reduce your cognitive capability. Bad moods and lower cognitive capabilities tend to reduce the appetite for risk, associated with lower returns.

For the complete article, click here

Interview by Scott Berinato

FutureAir Meets BigRep ONE

March 2017

The BigRep ONE 3D printer has become an essential tool for FutureAir in this phase of prototyping. At the earliest stages in our product development cycle having the ability to make full scale, high quality, 3D prints of our product has been huge.

Headquartered in Berlin-Kreuzberg, BigRep is a cool, manufacturing-oriented, German company with a creative product portfolio, and the BigRep ONE has an open design as well as an intuitive graphical user interface. And of course, it is precise… as we would expect from the Germans!

FutureAir at New Lab

March 2017

FutureAir recently made New Lab our permanent home and we could not be happier about it. Residing in the historic Brooklyn Navy Yard, New Lab is “a community of hardware-centric designers, engineers, and entrepreneurs leveraging advanced technologies to create meaningful new products” co-created by David Belt and Scott Cohen. Some of the most exciting aspects of the New Lab community come from Belt’s and Cohen’s commitment to thinking about what constitutes newness and innovation through history. The historical significance of New Lab’s site, a former machine shop for “every major ship launched during World Wars One and Two,” is such a part of its current mission as a manufacturing hub for hardware startups. The level of thought and detail in New Lab’s design continues to inspire for precisely this reason. Instead of being an environment that looks new now, New Lab has futurist elements from several historical periods, and it is one of the most user friendly environments we have ever been in.

Cool Air at Pérez Museum

March 2017

The Pérez Art Museum in Miami, Florida, PAMM, has as incredible a building as it does a mission. Founded in 1984 and originally called the Center for Fine Arts, PAMM began as a partnership with the Metropolitan Dade County Government showing only temporary exhibitions. Later evolving into a private museum with a permanent collection dedicated to international art of the 20th and 21st centuries, PAMM’s mission continues to be to reflect Miami’s “diverse community and pivotal geographic location at the crossroads of the Americas.” Its sustainable waterfront facility is designed by Herzog & de Meuron to do just this.

Inspired in large part by Florida’s mangrove trees, Herzog & de Meuron’s design sits over the waterfront in a similar fashion to the trees themselves. PAMM’s many narrow columns and horizontal canopy veranda structure facilitate community oriented visitor experience while continuing to be innovative and sustainable. In a place as warm and rainy as Miami, sustainable air cooling practices were important for the cite specificity of PAMM’s design and continue to be one of the buildings biggest environmentally integrative strengths. In addition, PAMM’s builders were the first in America to use the cobiax system, a technological process that creates a similarly coffered foundation to the Parthenon in Rome, reducing the amount of concrete used for the facility.

Similarly economical, the trellis patterns of PAMM’s ceiling/ canopy save both material and energy. On the north side of the building where there is relatively little sun hitting the structure, the trellis pattern is the least dense, while on the south side, the trellis pattern creates as much shade as possible to keep visitors naturally comfortable. Simultaneously, air conditioning units reside in PAMM’s gallery floors, sending cool air immediately to visitors, and then exhausting through slots in the ceiling as the air gets warmer, avoiding wasting energy by cooling an entire gallery from top to bottom. PAMM’s hanging gardens, which are watered internally, naturally cool air that passes through them. Instead of letting frequent rainwater runoff create drainage patterns that could hurt the building’s surroundings, the foliage system at the center of PAMM’s structure allows water to pass straight through the building and then percolate back into the ground.

These aspects and much more make PAMM such a thoughtfully designed facility that we absolutely love to visit.

The Case For Optimism

February 2017

Six minutes into Al Gore’s 2016 Ted Talk, “The Case For Optimism on Climate Change,” and I do not feel very optimistic. The brilliant Gore has concisely, clearly, and grippingly laid out the status of global warming today, and it is grim. But, while I wait for the talk to shift from terrifying diagnoses to exciting statistics about strides made in energy efficiency, which it ultimately does, I begin to notice what it is about Gore’s tone that instills a sense of comfort in me regardless. What is comforting about Gore’s attitude is his futurism. He does not lament the past for a single moment, and he understands that global warming is the reality we live in, a reality that affects every part of our lives. He embraces this reality, and he has solutions. At a political moment when partisan disagreement is a sore subject for everyone Gore focuses his energy on practical ways for all of us to invest in a sustainable future. As his talk turns to the strides made by the Paris Agreement, it becomes clear that the biggest inspiration he gets is from the people who have fought and will continue to fight for what they believe in.

24 Hours of Reality

February 2017

Just weeks after the 2016 Presidential Election, this year’s 6th annual 24 Hours of Reality live streamed show came at a time of global transition with regards to the climate movement. Spending each hour of December 5-6th focusing on each of the top 24 carbon-emitting countries of the year, Al Gore devoted a full 24 hour day to solutions. With the Paris Agreement recently entering into force across the world, 24 Hours of Reality was a way for Gore to collectively and publicly make concrete what to so many of us can feel like nothing more than impending doom. While the prospect of world-wide accountability can be daunting, Gore brought together leaders from across the world to discuss the details of each of the 24 countries. Always using scientific rigor with political specificity, Gore’s devotion to global praxis reminds us what activism looks like in the 21st century.

VERGE 16: IoT + Circular Economy

September 2016

The Verge 16, a conference and expo focusing on the technologies and systems that accelerate sustainability solutions in a climate constrained world, featured the Circular Economy as one of its tracks this year.

Companies like Nike and Google are applying the circular economy to their operations. Nike remanufactures material from used sneakers while Google reuses its old hardware in new data centers. According to Barbara Grady, Senior Writer at the GreenBiz Group:

“In a perfect circular economy, resources mined from the earth would be reused over and over, while biological resources would be used as long as possible and then returned to the earth in a biologically sound way.”

A main takeaway from the conference was that IoT is ripe for facilitating the circular economy in the manufacturing and resource recovery processes.

“Because IoT technology allows “things” to communicate with each other and share information about their location, functionality and working condition through sensors which beam information to central databases housed in the cloud, systems can be designed to trace the use of a material from when it was first used in manufacturing a product to its fate in product disassembly, recovery and reuse.”

Resources
https://www.greenbiz.com/article/circular-economy-1-trillion-opportunity
https://www.greenbiz.com/events/verge/santa-clara/2016

Lovegrove FORBES Feature Part 2!

September 2016

To learn about some of Lovegrove’s most world changing and influential designs to date, including his exquisite Supernatural Chair (photographed above), read Part 2 of his Forbes feature here.