Explanation from Petr:
The exhibit is an active relaxation and rehabilitation bath with special features that permit the changeability of water volume (0-410 L) and provides a pleasant form of relaxation due to its continual and smooth changes to the ergonomical shape of the structure. The bottom contour of the bath adjusts in order to conform to the required position and height of the user. The various geometrical changes to the shape enables the bath to be “shortened” for example, creating a backing for the legs in order to maximize on comfort.

For the purpose of saving on water consumption, one can simply change the depth of the bath so it becomes shallow or select a shape that is most suitable for the user. The changes to the shape of the bath floor can be modified & readjusted anytime. Another wonderful trait of the bath is that it is equally convenient for bathing children, because one can adjust a safe depth of bath, reducing risk of drowning as well as being equipped with soft finish of the base. In addition to creating minimal dimensions, the bath itself can be used as a baby changing table. Getting in and out of the bath tub is simple and effortless. There’s no need to climb over edges of the bath. This way, it is beneficial for people with physical disability or those completely immobile.

Uniquely, in this bath we can experience an unmissable feeling of soft, rippling of the bath floor during bathing or when having a massage. This is a new form of relaxation which we can daringly refer to as “kinetic therapy”. The type of technology used forms system of 10 pneumatic pistons (compressed air powering pistons) and includes inclinable segments covered with soft upholstery. This lining creates a pleasant feeling without causing pressure on the body even in the case when the bath is low filled or during the filling or draining of the bath tub. The movable segments are covered by special, highly elastic, hygienic and strong foil (used in the concept of BMW Gina. The geometric shape of the head rest can be partially changed and is also made from movable structures, covered in flexible foil. The type of material`s used are synthetic rock (e.g. ceramics, plastic shroud), glass, elastic foil.

Other systems used are classic hydro/air massaging jets capable of being rotated and powered by electric motor. The connection to mains water supply, water outlet, air and hydro massage jet is through flexible hosing. The bottom of the tub is sealed and the whole base can be raised or lowered over a flat surface of the inner side-panels of the bath. That is how water tightness is ensured.

Everything is controlled electronically with a remote control. As a result, it is possible to select filling/draining of the bath, change water temperature, adjust hydro/air massage settings (duration, intensity, cycle program) and change the shape of the bath floor whit comfortably resting in the bath tub. This is done with the help of sensor button on the display of a remote control. The geometry of the bath can be altered simply by means of accessing touch display screen on the remote control. Naturally, the program remembers previous settings and if the conditions allow, the bath immediately fulfills the command of the user. Simultaneously however, whilst making the change, the height of the water surface, its volume and temperature as well as the total water consumption is electronically monitored.

The filling of the bath is possible through water inlets positioned right beneath the head rest, whilst draining is carried out through the segment located in the middle of the bath tub. If we were to come back to the principle of shaping the bath floor, an alternative method exists, which replaces pneumatic pistons and electrically tilted segments with air pouch system (ballonet). In addition, the foil covering the surface of various segments can also be replaced with a variety of other materials available on the market, that have similar properties.

Designer : Petr Kubik

Text from Adam :
There are over 400,000 reported drownings and 8 – 10 times as much near drowning experiences worldwide every year. In the UK there are 500 annual drownings. These figures have remained the same for nearly 20 years which tells us that any current equipment and practice is not having the required impact to reduce these numbers.

I have been a beach lifeguard for a number of years and further primary and secondary research has shown that there are a number of key problems that reduce the survival rate of beach users.
These problems are:

• Slow response time
• Surveillance
• Lifeguard safety
• Human limitation of lifeguards

From this research it was decided to look to the future to see what could potentially be new directions for beach safety equipment, this design is therefore based for the year 2020.

The design process was in close collaboration with the BSA (British Surfing Association) headquarters in Newquay (UK). Starting with brainstorming where no idea was a bad idea, followed by concept generation and a wide variety of modeling and system/ scenario testing, the design took innovation from nature, new and existing technologies and user testing.

Explanation of final design

The ‘Mantra’ lives on the sea bed during peak seasons just off the coast of beaches; it uses small hairs on its surface to collect and store energy from tides and waves (called ‘Super Cillia Skin’). It detects distress and drowning using electro sensors coupled with sonar which even today are highly sensitive, for example heartbeats and movements can easily be monitored. When a casualty is detected it swims up to 15mph using SMAs in the wings. The victim is carefully picked up onto an inbuilt stretcher where they are carried on top the water using hydrofoils and impellers. The ‘Mantra’ is always in constant communication with lifeguards and so is met at a specific beach location by lifeguards and ambulances where an EAP is in place and the stretcher is removed without disturbing the patient, who in the worst case scenario may have neck injuries.

Stretchers are replaced and the ‘Mantra’ can assume its position at sea once more. The whole process is estimated to take under 2 minutes.

The final design as can be seen from images, uses biomimicry from a manta ray for many reasons –

• Large flat surface area for all weather stability
• Excellent turning circle and manouverability
• Excellent strength to weight ratio
• Low energy travel
• Considered as a non aggressive creature/ form

Advantages of ‘Mantra’:

• Removal of contact with bodily fluid
• Safety of lifeguards
• Immediate response time
• Completely automated
• Better for spinal and other injuries
• Aesthetics
• Function
• Sustainable

Designer : Adam Scott

[Press Release]

Ancona, Italy. September 22, 2009. WHY, Wally Hermès Yachts, today unveils a revolutionary
approach to cruising in motor yachts with the presentation of a full size model of its first born, an
innovative 58 metre-long 38 metre-wide yacht, in Ancona’s shipyard.

Wally Hermès Yachts: a joint-venture.
WHY is the result of the joint-venture signed in June 2008 between Hermès and Wally, to develop a new type of motor yacht redefining the art of living on the sea. The iconic Parisian house and the iconic Monaco yacht brand formed an equal partnership whereby each company is fully involved in all aspects of the conception and design of each project. Pierre-Alexis Dumas, Artistic Director of Hermès says : “When we met, in autumn 2007, Luca Bassani Antivari, President of Wally had thought about asking Hermès to accessorise the interior of one of his boats. I was impressed by the daring of his projects. My instinct was to get on board with him and go and seek out new territories in yacht design, but I had no interest in speed.”

Luca Bassani Antivari explains: “What I’ve always liked about Hermès, aside from its intrinsic quality, is its audacity and radicalism; its desire to go beyond trends, to make no compromises and to maintain the authenticity of the house. Wally shares the same values, ‘Hermès-on-Land’, ‘Wally-on-Sea’: inevitably our paths had to cross.”

WHY 58×38
The common values of the two brands have led to a first yacht that offers an unparalleled living space at sea. WHY was developed to give life to this concept assembling a team of dedicated talents in design, engineering, and naval architecture.

Then the tried and tested Norwegian Ramform hull characterised by exceptional and unprecedented stability and volume and spotted by Luca Bassani Antivari, revealed itself as the ideal choice to be adapted to the WHY 58×38 project.

Following this unique adaptation, the decks and the interiors were developed in accordance with the fundamental credo of WHY, ‘form-equals-function’. Thus were born other innovations in the world of mega yachts: patios generously flooding the interior with natural light, photovoltaic panels on the glass hull sides, as well as on the roof opening, like Venetian blinds, a 25 metre-long forward end swimming pool, and a 36-metre aft deck beach.
WHY 58×38 offers comfort, privacy, stability, space, independence and sustainability.

Sustainability
“We are very interested in creating a yacht that will have a low environmental impact”, says Pierre-Alexis Dumas. “Its relationship with the sea must be respectful and easy. WHY intends to offer a new way of moving over water by creating an innovative way of managing and recycling its sources and uses of energy.”
“If you want to go totally ecological, it’s only sailing yacht. The reality is that today, 90 % of the market is powerboats, echoes Luca Bassani Antivari. Our aim is to reduce diesel consumption per year and per yacht: 20 to 30 % for propulsion and 40 to 50 % for generation.”

Thanks to its specific hull, WHY 58×38 requires less power at cruising speed than a boat of equal size. Its diesel-electric propulsion is the most efficient motorisation today, and the surface of the photovoltaic panels, almost 900 square metres, covers most of the boat’s auxiliary system needs.

WHY Research and Development plan to optimize this project’s energy consumption by improving the isolation of the yacht and the heat recovery of its engines, and is also investigating the latest wind energy production and wind propulsion system technologies.

In comparison to a yacht of the same size, WHY 58×38 has been conceived to reduce drastically its energy consumption, saving up to 200 tons of diesel per year.
The WHY R & D program includes tank testing for hull stability in the SSPA facilities in Sweden, and the construction of a full-scale mock-up in order to allow the design team to fine tune the living areas correctly in accordance with the hull’s unique shape.

“The WHY 58X38 yacht looks very unfamiliar but it remains on a human scale. Space is the greatest luxury on the sea, but I believe the new luxury will be the time to enjoy it”, concludes Pierre-Alexis Dumas.

Designer : Pierre-Alexis Dumas, Luca Bassani Antivari, Gabriele Pezzini, and MauroSculli

Super functional applications are the key attribute of Burst. It supports revolutionary video conferencing which will help the deaf and hearing impaired aside from offering many other advantages. The innovative technology of combining a mobile device with a protection product has made it as functional and usable as a personal computer. Moreover, it is packed with various category games to make it a nice piece for all range of gamers. Other highlighted features of Burst include HD projected web browsing, document and media editing, video conferencing and online gaming. It can make user to send and receive calls, take pictures and video, download and listen to music and many more.

Designer : DJ German and Ryan King

Designer : Jinsun Park and Seonkeun Park

Designer : David Lee, Yuna Kim, and Hansub Lee

Designer : Matthias Pugin

[Press Release]

DRAGONFLY, A METABOLIC FARM FOR URBAN AGRICULTURE

2009 : 800 MILLION OF URBAN FARMERS FOR RESPONSIBLE ECO-CITIES

The world of fast-food and frozen food is over! The urban keen interest of the beginning of our Century turns toward the garden flat bringing back the countryside in our overcrowded cities fighting from now on for a community urban agriculture able to contribute to the durability of the city and to rethink the food production.

On the roofs, terraces, balconies, in the hollow of the non-built public spaces, in the interior yards and the suspended greenhouses, the eco-warrior aspires to escape from its competitive and consumeristic universe imposed by the laws of the market. He desires to cultivate its immediate landscape so as to better take root in the ground by creating his own ecologic and alimentary biodiversity. The consumer becomes from then on producer and the garden inhabitant !

From the Parisian « worker gardens » to the « community gardens » of New York going though Muscovite « vegetable squares », eight hundred million of urban farmers, i.e. more than one human being out of ten, consume nowadays chlorophyllous products from these cosmopolitan kitchen gardens. These new gardens, aware of the emergency to reduce our fuel consumption and the necessity to modify our behaviour facing the climatic changes, decrease thus their environmental impact and build eco-responsible cities on a community way.

2025 : 5.5 BILLION OF CITY SLICKERS FACING THE FOOD CHALLENGE OF THE 21ST CENTURY

According to the PNUD (Programme of the United Nations for the Development), the worldwide urban population will go from 3.1 billion of inhabitants in 2009 up to 5.5 billion of inhabitants within 2025. Looking for a positive energetic assessment, the contemporary city aims within fifteen years at producing cleanly and intensively more energy than it consumes so as to pack this urban exodus! It develops therefore the urban agriculture to become food self-sufficient by recycling at the same time its liquid waste by phyto-purification, its solid waste in fertilizers by composting and by producing energy by biomass, photovoltaic cells and other renewable energies (thermic solar, photovoltaic solar, wind, tide-turbine energies…).

In order to avoid the asphixiation of the planet and the feeding of its 9 billion of inhabitants within 2050, it deals thus with reinventing the traditional energetic pattern between the city and the countryside between western countries, emerging countries and developing countries. This sums up as following: on the one hand import of natural and food resources, and on the other hand export of waste and pollution. The ecologic city aims at reintegrating the farming function on the urban scale by emphasizing the role of the urban agriculture in the use and the reuse of natural resources and biodegradable waste so as to close the loop of ecologic flows.

The urban agriculture can feed the city without any pesticide or chemical fungicide (whose toxicity is proved on the human being : cancer, sterility…), and make it less food dependant of its backcountry or other regions of the world. Organising the distribution of fresh products in short circuits, that means linked directly with the consumer, the urban agriculture complete thus the traditional agriculture. In addition to the nutritive quality of the produced and consumed food, the urban agriculture is also a growth lever of the urban unemployment market and the local economy. It is used directly as a social link in the conciliation of the primary needs of the newcomers with the challenge of their integration in the life of the city, fighting thus against poverty and exclusion. On the sanitary level, this farm approach presents also an interesting potential for the decontamination of polluted grounds and undergrounds as well as for he purification of the polluted atmosphere in CO2.

Due to the fuel crisis and climatical change, the rural agriculture of the western countries must answer to the worldwide food crisis of the developing countries and mainly Africa. Its role is from now on to produce (with an increase estimated of 60% within 2050) all the foodstuffs transportable by boat such as cereals or corn. This is based on the evolution of the science and the most advanced biotechnologies. In addition to this nutritious role, the rural agriculture is newly challenged to recycle its own culture rebus for the green chemistry in order to produce the bio fuel called “second generation fuel” using the energy of non-consumable materials from the plants, that means fibres such as celluloses.

DRAGONFLY, A NOURISHING VERTICALY CULTIVATED CENTRAL PARK

The architecture has to be in the service of this new agriculture and to design this new social desire in this context of ecologic mutation and food autonomy! The Dragonfly project suggests therefore building a prototype of urban farm offering around a mixed programme of housing, offices and laboratories in ecological engineering, farming spaces which are vertically laid out in several floors and partly cultivated by its own inhabitants. This vertical farm sets up all the sustainable applications in organic agriculture based on the intensive production varied according to the rhythm of the seasons. This nourishing agriculture is furthermore in favour of the reuse of biodegradable waste and the keeping of energy and renewable resources for a planning of ecosystemic densification.

Floor by floor, the tower superposes not only stock farming ensuring the production of meat, milk, poultry and eggs but also farming grounds, true biological reactors continuously regenerated with organic humus. It diversifies the cultivated varieties to avoid the washing of stratums of soft substratum. Thus, the cultures succeed one another vertically according to their agronomical ability to provide some elements of the ground between the essences that are sowed and harvested. The tower, true living organism, becomes thus metabolic and self-sufficient in water, energy, and bio-fertilizing. Nothing is lost; everything is recyclable to a continuous auto-feeding!

A BIONIC AND ENERGETICALLY SELF-SUFFICIENT ARCHITECTURE
The architecture of Dragonfly prototype suggests reinventing the vertical building (that outlined the urbanistic booming of New York City since the 19th Century) as structurally and functionally as ecologically and energetically.

To ensure the social diversity and a permanent life cycle (24h/24) in the tower, the mixed programmation is mainly laid out around two poles of housing and work places. Around housings, offices and research laboratories as well as the most private to the most public agricultural and leisure spaces are designed in gardens, kitchen gardens, orchards, meadows, rice fields, farms and suspended fields. The distribution of flows is made around a true safe spine spreading in loop the numerous elevators, the goods elevators and stair wells serving all the levels by separating simultaneously the inputs and the outputs recycled from plants, animals and human beings.

Architecturally, the functional organisation is represented by two oblong towers symetrically arranged in pair around a huge climatic greenhouse that links them and deploys itself between two crystalline wings. These very light wings in glass and steel retake the loads of the building and are directly inspired from the structure of the dragonfly wings coming from the family of “Odonata Anisoptera” whose transparent membrane is very finely nervured. Two inhabited rings buttress around these wings. Their organically chiselled exo-structure accommodates the inter-climatic spaces that receive the agrarian cultures. They buttress.

The whole set forms «double layer» architecture in bee nest mesh that exploits the solar passive energy at its maximum level, by accumulating the warm air in the winter in the thickness of the exo-structure, and by cooling the atmosphere by natural ventilation and by evapo-perpiration of the plants in the summer. Protecting thus the cultures from climatic changes in New York (from -25.5°C in the winter to +41°C in the summer), these plug spaces are useful to reflect on the agriculture not anymore in terms of surface area but really in terms of volume. Actually, whereas grounds nourish orchards, each wall and each ceiling are metamorphosed into three-dimensional kitchen gardens. The interior frontages of the housing and offices throw towards the skyline of New York the cantilever of their hydrophonic balconies with hexagonal section thanks to what it multiplies the culture layers by floors. The vegetation abounds, the earth is swarming of insects and animals are freely brought up in holding tanks by urban consumers with low income. The architecture becomes eatable!

Designer : Vincent Callebaut Architect

Elliot says :
This project was completed in the fall of 2008 under the direction of David Ruy and Karel Klein of RuyKlein. The intention was to develop sensitivities to surface conditions. The work included physical and digital modeling experiments in cloth. The site is a redevelopment of the Queens Museum at the World’s Fair site in Queens, New York. The museum contains a permanent display of a very large-scale model of New York City’s five boroughs.

Unexpectedly the physical modeling of the cloth produced a most interesting and unintended result. This unexpected result however, provided a fantastic jumping off point for digital exploration. By raising the program off the ground level a public space is created under the building that offers access round the clock, offering space for events even when the museum is closed.

A structural lattice provides ample interior spaces while creating a process that significantly simplifies construction. A plastic ‘bladder’ is inflated inside the structural lattice, then a layer of Concrete Canvass is laid on top, sprayed with water, and sets on the outside of the lattice.

As for the interior, I wanted to create a sense of corporeality. To accomplish this I have taken the top lines of the interior of the shell and pulled them out in a manner that creates a landscape that must be negotiated in three dimensions. The interior walls would be constructed out of stacked glass, creating translucent divisions of the rooms.

Designer : Elliot White via Dezeen

From the designer :
We bring up a new American icon in the subject of Brave and Bold. We were inspired by Harley-Davidson, the American motorcycle symbol and Pontiac-Firebird, a muscle car, therefore we designed the body from which is dynamic and progressive.

The entire body has been designed to have the wheels in front of it like motorcycles, so it is totally different from other cars. The wheel design, which is unique and aggressive, maximizes the design of the body. We call the wheels “the Transforming Multifunctional Wheels”.

A wheel has 24 spokes and each spoke is made up by a special carbon-fiber which has very strong elastic characteristic. The wheel associates a caterpillar tread of tanks. And each spoke can tilt 15 degrees back and forth to be formed to steer the car without any additional steering equipment. The wheels transform and the body tilts in the same direction when the car changes its direction so you can drive safely and dynamically.

Each spoke is constructed independently so that you do not need to replace whole wheel when the tire is flatted but only spokes which are flattened. Therefore, it is an environment-friendly concept. The body can minimize impact of collision to a driver by its body construction of the arms of the wheels. Due to the advantage of the construction, it can run easily off-road, such as the deserts of the United States of America.

Designer : Su-Yang Park & Chang-Hoe Heo