technology and science, the core team at P3i is made .... and the worlds of engineering and computer science ..... BSc,
our MANIFESTO
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NORTHUMBRIA UNIVERSITY’s P3i is a well equipped team of innovators investigating and demonstrating new Printable, Paintable, Programmable ‘intelligent’ material solutions [P3i] to address human centred needs or concerns
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The P3i Studio-Lab is a creative interdisciplinary ‘design as research’ Interaction environment that explores future ways of living through design led materials and technology interrogation. D:STEM
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Operating in the grey space between art, design, technology and science, the core team at P3i is made up of hybrid practitioners who inhabit new innovation methodologies through materials exploration. We pioneer product applications for future bodies, objects and spaces that currently stem from three thematic and integrated areas of Ambient, Supersense and BioExplore. A studio-lab in the design capital – London, a stone’s throw from Silicon roundabout – enables P3i to attract international collaborative researchers. P3i integrates engineering, biology, fashion and product design for academic and commercial longrange research. Our team co-habits to collectively create future products for anticipated lifestyles, addressing contemporary cultures in important areas of development – social, economic and environmental technology futures. Our research focuses on 10 years and beyond where we explore, invent, prototype and demonstrate physical, digital and biological applications offering vital insights through applied research to commercial opportunities. Our centre is design-led, needs-driven, technology anchored and solutions-focused. We believe that the Design STEM (science, technology, engineering and mathematics) interaction approach is a critical and innovative route to elucidating answers to questions that will improve people’s lives through creative interventions in our material world.
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our core values
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Examining emerging future ways of living by identifying, interrogating and defining design issues
Taking design fiction into design fact: validation through making
Attracting international talent to evolve the new D:STEM craftsmen
Building product solutions from the molecule up: a platform for materials exploration and innovation
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Biological atelier – biological systems as a design paradigm
Soft machines as hybrid ecosystems – a new paradigm for the design of human-centred material environments
From materiality to material experience: experimenting with the fundamental values of our material world – in body, on body,
Putting human needs first through solution-based design for a cogno- envirosocio- techno integrated world
Developing the Design:STEM non-disciplinary vocabulary and methodology accessible to all stakeholders
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Examining emerging future ways of living by identifying, interrogating and defining design issues
UK plc has two outstanding pools of expertise, skills, experience and talent, which could contribute significantly to innovative product, process and experiential commercial platforms. First, there are world-leading academic expertise and infrastructure in advanced materials research, development and exploitation (R, D and E) from bio and biomedical materials through conductive polymeric materials to nanoscale, responsive and adaptive materials emerging from UK university departments in physics, chemistry, medicine, bioscience, materials science and engineering. Secondly, there are world-leading academic and practice-based design solutions and innovation from globally recognized applied design (architecture, product, graphics, fashion and interaction design).
A designer’s relationship to the STEM agenda is fundamental as we strive to imagine and invent smart material interactions, considering the invisible elements of design, as well as the constantly challenging meaning of sustainable and ethical design alongside championing design’s poetic and aesthetic meaning. Today designers and engineers have begun to cohabit and become more collaborative in rigorously questioning the functional profile of the products of tomorrow. Focus is now on ‘metadesign’, new hybrid designers need to revisit primitive ‘hunter gather’ instincts and bravely apply them to emerging non-disciplinary landscapes and hone expertise necessary to realise the solution’ as part of their skill set to define future ways of living.
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Taking design fiction into design fact: validation through making
State-of-the-art ‘smart’ and active materials are currently awkward, unwieldy, burdensome, clumsy and self-conscious and yet to be a commercial commodity. ‘Generation Digital’ is the first consumer group to have a thirst for these disruptive technologies. Emotional and sensitive technologies are beginning to emerge in the market, creating a need to innovate in the field of paintable, printable, programmable intelligent responsive materials (P3i). Only recently have we seen biomimetic textiles become more porous, reducing permeability to air and increasing insulation properties as well as materials offering sustainable and biological manufacturing futures where we grow consumer products from micro-organisms. Suddenly, a collection of materials are within reach to consumers that promise products with complex functional profiles that are adaptable, anticipatory and trustworthy, can improve psychological and physiological comfort and ultimately enhance wellbeing.
How and why our future products take shape is defined by applied design and engineering that, in turn, is informed by advances in our STEM world that provides us with the ingredients and toolkits with which to transform concept to artifact. Many design organisations probe the future to identify potential lifestyle scenarios and instigate debate by developing hybrid methodologies. By combining design with social science, the outcomes of this work have begun to challenge how we question lifestyle futures. At P3i we use these critical design methodologies then merge collaboratively with established STEM approaches to create platforms that imagine, create, assess, demonstrate, evaluate then evolve.
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Attracting international talent to evolve the new D:STEM craftsmen
Currently we are at a crossroads where material and life sciences, electronic and mechanical engineering and design have the opportunity to shape future consumer products. However with major investments being made in the STEM (science, technology, engineering and mathematics) subjects, the creative industry is left isolated and not able to continue to contribute without parallel investment from government. Never before has there been a more vital time to develop and implement a D:STEM research community where design, science and engineering fuse to create future innovation. A great example of this is one of the leading champions of global commercial technologies: Sir Jonathan Ive of Apple, a designer trained in the UK at Northumbria University in industrial design in the late 1980s. With this in mind Northumbria University was compelled to probe design futures and courageously set out to establish a D:STEM environment across dual campuses in London and Newcastle, to explore Future Ways of Living through materials exploration and pioneering product applications for future bodies, objects and spaces.
At P3i we intend to trail-blaze in this area by setting up key postgraduate programmes that deliver training in our core values enabling hybrid designers, engineers and scientists to cohabit in a lab/studio environment. Our aim is to cultivate an ‘ecosystem’ where our practitioners research, develop, demonstrate and exploit (RDD and E) new design paradigms. P3i will work with key industrial partners and seek academic funding to secure the D:STEM agenda.
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Building product solutions from the molecule up: a platform for materials exploration and innovation ‘Dots, Lines, Surfaces and Structures’ is a design approach used at P3i to work through the length scales from the opportunities offered by nano and micro scale materials and technologies in the transition from meso to macro scale design solutions. A major benefit, which stems from the uptake of OFEDs (Organic Field Effect Devices), is the fact that many of the ‘active’ materials can be synthesized in the form of conductive polymeric and responsive gel solutions. This flexibility, when coupled to a phase transformation such as a chemical reaction, a cross linkage step, a solidification, a drying or a curing step, allows the transition of bulk fluid to controllable physical forms, i.e., droplet and spray production (‘dots’) onto surfaces, fibre spinning and material phase transformation (‘lines’), screen printing, thin film, multilayer extrusion and novel biochemical transformations (‘surfaces’) and rapid prototyping, injection molding, tailoring and self organisation (‘structures’). In turn these methodologies allow designers to create both the desired 2D and 3D materials to experiment with multiple composite forms, previously untried. This is even more in evidence when using organic conformable components in the form of polymers, gels, biomaterials, hybrid thin films and composits which have novel outcomes.
In the above, ‘dots’ translate to planar, sheet to sheet printing, using Drop on Demand (DoD) ink jet for small and large area applications. ‘Lines’ translate to fibres, for weaving, knitting, sewing and embroidery, for relatively large area applications. ‘Surfaces’ translate to large area screen printing, reel to reel web-based printing and multilayer, thin film extrusion for very large area applications and the crossover to 3D supramolecular objects, which can be fashioned digitally, through to rapid prototyping and 3D printing. ‘Structures’ are created by self and directed assembly or macroscopic rapid prototyping of active polymers and inks; this variety and flexibility will accelerate the rate of ‘active’ polymer material science uptake and the implementation into the creative industries through social and technological innovations. With such a range of new design-led material functionality, coupled with mechanical flexibility and conformability, it is possible to envision a wide-ranging needs and market-driven new experiential products.
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Digital – physical design integration: the convergence of biology, polymers and electronics for polyvalent surfaces
It is recognised that the design world in the twentieth century imagined the future initially as material-centred, and the worlds of engineering and computer science envisioned it either as inhabited by ‘smarter’ products or the material man-made world as a subordinate to some overarching communications and responsive information structure. In the future, it can be reasonably argued, now that the true meaning and effectiveness of intelligent environments are lighter in aspiration than the above, they must operate in multiple contexts and simultaneously interact with the transient behaviour and needs of human life and cope with unprecedented economic and environmental pressures. At P3i we are concerned with the integration of intangible matter, such as communications, data generation and collection, and sensing with the tangible materiality of our bodies, objects and spaces.
We have the increasingly practical use of polymer electronics, which can fit almost invisibly into everyday objects, due to their lightness, flexibility and near transparency. Coupled to this is the ability now for designers to be able to experiment with these new materials and material technologies, and an increasing tendency to look to nature and biology for design paradigms. These activities come together in a form of tangible and effective convergence; a system incorporating ambient intelligence with designer-friendly materials and manufacturing techniques, which can be put together to create functional and durable products and services, but can also be created at relatively low cost and often by ‘on demand’ needs.
DESIGN-LED
NEEDS-DRIVEN
TECHNOLOGY ANCHORED
SOLUTION FOCUSED
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Biological atelier – biological systems as a design paradigm With synthetic materials we make use of fast and easy processing techniques in the melt, but until now these processing methods did not allow the ordering at the nanoscale that makes natural biomaterials so unique. However, the first attempts in structure formation during processing (apart from crystallisation) have been made, making use of molecular recognition and self assembly. All developments that contribute to a reduction of burning oil as an energy source will become extremely important in the near future, e.g. the development of light weight construction materials for the built environment and the automobile sector, the development of functional materials for fuel cells, solar cells and organic photovoltaics, materials for other alternative energy sources, as well as the storage and management of energy use, e.g. organic lighting. Natural materials are completely recyclable and nature works in closed loops consuming minimum energy. In the synthetic approach to the creation of materials, cheap monomers are based on the cracking of fossil raw materials. Our focus is then on low cost and getting out the best possible structural properties and is, not yet, on complete recyclability or optimised thermodynamics. Although, ultimately, we will have to work in closed loops too, for the time being, as long as we are burning 92% of the crude oil produced for energy production, energy recovery for polymeric materials waste will be an accepted way of recycling. Furthermore, our processes, as we want them to be fast, will be consuming high amounts of energy.
Before we make the jump towards real renewable resources, we will first have to make the jump from burning fossil resources to using them as raw materials. Only at that moment will re-use and ‘back to feed stock’ recycling become a sensible activity. Ultimately, the price of crude oil will increase significantly and as sources ‘dry-up’, the renewable resources, such as biomass, wind and solar power may become cost competitive. It is striking that nature succeeds, despite the limited number of building blocks, in getting adequate structural properties anyway. Nature is able to do this by complete control at the molecular level by ordering at nanoscale and highly efficient macroscopic design. At this moment, we are only able to simulate such structures with synthetic composites, using supercomputing. Nature seems to be able to reproduce these structures. The production of such structures with synthetic materials is still beyond present capabilities. However, the exploitation of the great synergy between the fields of material sciences and life sciences, P3i is a platform ideally placed to define opportunities in the overlapping domain.
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Soft machines as hybrid eco-systems – a new paradigm for the design of human centred material environments
Many leading scientists and futurologists propose that by the twenty-third century it is predicted that humans will be made up of complex neural computational architectures resident within the brain and the human body will house millions of biological sensors that will enable super human powers and detection. The team at P3i envision multisensory, intelligent, responsive and anticipatory environments where advanced skins and surfaces fuse human and built environment into a synthetic, ‘post-biological eco-system’. The convergence of biology, electronics and polymers impacts on product development in preventative medicine, medical device design, assistive living, health and wellness (i.e. mental health, sleep disorders). In the past twenty years, there has been a growing interest worldwide in biocompatible materials for medical applications and for sustainable product development. This research activity has supported the emerging field of tissue engineering and drug/device delivery combinations and, most recently, applications in molecular medicine, such as protein, cell and gene therapy, as well as new horizons in the use of fermentation technology.
It is evident that many of the building blocks of twenty-first century materials innovation are now in place. Four major areas of advancement, i.e. information technology, biotechnology, nanotechnology and neural networks, are converging to create a host of new opportunities through biomedical and bio responsive materials, where enabling binary code (0s and 1s) will eventually be replaced by A, T, C and G (DNA code) to yield a bioelectronic basis for rapid and massively expanded logic and memory. The architecture of communication systems can be seen as very similar to that of the human nervous system. As biomaterials research progresses over the next two decades, several areas of development will push the frontiers of medical innovation, nanotechnology and sensors topping the list.
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Next is biomimetics, the ability to use materials to mimic the ways in which nature manages materials within and around the body. Fourth on the list are environmentally responsive materials, which respond to an external stimulus, such as temperature, light, electricity, pH etc. In parallel with these will be robotics and highly sensitive and intuitive human-computer interfaces. The final area is biodegradable materials; over the coming decades, two of the most significant driving forces in biomaterials research and implementation will be the combination of biotechnology and information technology. The biotech revolution is already afoot; advances in systems biology have also emerged in the last few years. Today, there are many clinical studies underway in gene therapy and stem cell biology. These, and other biological routes to improved therapies, will very likely include some form of device that will be used to deliver, house, protect or monitor the therapy being applied.Sensors and actuators have also become vital to medical developments from an information & action standpoint.
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To help manage patients’ diseases and illness, physicians and researchers need to gather a variety of physiological data. Such physiological measurements have to be converted quickly into electrical signals, which in turn can be captured, analysed and stored as data, transmitted outside the body for further analysis and interpretation. These two trends, the growth of infotech and biotech, will transform traditional medical technologies and the results will revolutionize healthcare. The above convergence will provide the equivalent of a ‘killer app’ for future advances in plastic and printable electronics, which in turn will drive the need for more ambient designs for embedded products and services. The P3i platform enables the convergence of bio-inspired, compatible, engineered materials with applied design to develop smart artificial environments, surfaces, skins and structures that will form a post-biological eco-system whose inhabitants will benefit from enhanced ways of living.
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From materiality to material experience: experimenting with the fundamental values of our material world – in body, on body, around body
As biological matter moves out of the laboratory into the everyday and materials become atmospherical, we will need to use all of our senses to look for meaning in relations, representation, environments and emotions in materials of the twenty-first century and their application. As we position ourselves against a coherent background of culture, location and time as hybrid designers, we will need to blur the boundaries of our disciplines to decipher unique product propositions. The material world we inhabit is becoming ever more digital, at P3i our intention is to determine and demonstrate innovative design-led interventions that resonate with the way we experience our material world. This requires an understanding of how we, as individuals and communities, interact with our material world and utilise this data to inform how we construct the man-made products of tomorrow and beyond.
Recent advances in digital technologies have exposed anxieties and trust issues about surveillance, anonymous security, privacy and freedom of information. This is not any different from other emerging technologies however, with both GM crops and nanoscience and technology having similar issues. P3i are interested in mapping the exchange between ethical shifts and technology impact.
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Putting human needs first through solution based design for a cognoenviro- socio- techno integrated world Consumer markets are essentially virtual concepts to enable firms and analysts to understand, target and even influence consumer needs through branded strategies. Hence, segmentation such as demographics, buying patterns, lifestyle preferences, such as club memberships, education and product categories are forged. Based on such segmentations of market, analysts develop a perception upon which to develop their strategy, operations, products and services – often with relatively little or no direct engagement with individual consumers they target. Somewhere in this mass segmentation of markets and its trends resides the individual with their personal and specific needs. Just as there are no families in the UK with 1.7 children, there will always be a gap between market analysis and the specific needs of any individual. The increased emphasis on the commercialisation of products and services places a greater emphasis on value – tailored services (and experiences) that meet the specific needs, wants, wishes and lifestyle of the individual. The era of mass production aimed at mass consumption required businesses to view value as residing – or somehow being lodged – in the products they manufactured and the assets they owned. However, individuals especially in urban setting are changing what is seen as ‘value’ and ‘values’. Out of the very abundance of new opportunities, applications and knowledge created from our industrial society, have emerged more sophisticated individuals who place a higher value on self expression, personalisation,
experience, participation and influence, preferring autonomy and diversity rather than hierarchy, authority and conformity. They are information and knowledge rich, time-hungry and willing to share the views, seeking to develop their own perspective on life and act upon it. These individuals express a new desire towards consumption, based on a trend towards social as well as technological innovation and access to the services and products that are more specific to their needs and better fit into self determined lifestyles. Social innovation is shifting value away from processes, assets and products, ultimately to the individual’s space. This requires both new business and technological models in particular, a new science and design in society approach to the way in which we envisage the twentyfirst century developing to meet the needs of consumers and society. In this new socio-enviro-techno integrated world, human needs come first. Economies revolve around the important realities of food, housing and healthcare. We live within the earth’s capabilities and this itself allows for significant opportunities in sustainable products, services and macro systems. Stemming from this macroscale landscape, in the coming decade and beyond, how will consumers and communities and their needs change? A new understanding is needed of what ‘value’ and ‘values’ truly mean.
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Developing the Design:STEM non-disciplinary vocabulary and methodology accessible to all stakeholders
Each stakeholder within a D:STEM environment has a discreet and discipline specific vocabulary that enables effective communication within itself. Common words across the disciplines do not carry equivalent meanings and assumptions can lead to misunderstandings and failures. Success depends upon the ability to decode the vocabularies and communications of the constituent disciplines. There are many examples of successful interdisciplinary ventures where these challenges have been overcome but they are predominantly contained within specific interdisciplinary partnerships and groups who, having
once overcome the challenge of shared communication, continue working within those architectures of expertise. In order to grow and develop the essential transdisciplinary approaches of the twenty-first century it follows that trans-disciplinary communication must become more fluid. As part of our working process at P3i we aim to move beyond the position of decoding adjacent discipline specific communication to one of recoding a shared trans-disciplinary vocabulary within our context of ‘Future Ways of Living’.
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PROF. RAYMOND OLIVER
ANNE TOOMEY
DR VERONIKA KAPSALI
NANCY TILBURY
LYNDSAY WILLIAMS
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Interested? This is how you can work with us
At P3i we have three routes of engagement, each of which can involve both industry and academia. The first is our ‘Imagineering’ studio-lab where the P3i team works on long-range research across our ‘Future Ways of Living’ platform through sensory applications, biomaterials explorations, ambient and interactive environments and emerging futures. The second is our open innovation culture, which concentrates on bringing far futures to near future through demonstration and delivery. Thirdly, we have a range of education, outreach and public engagement activities that include lectures and exhibitions, residencies, publications, MPhil, MRes and PhD.
For more information please contact: Prof Raymond Oliver BSc, PhD, DEng, FREng, FIChemE, CEng Chair, Active and Interactive Materials Northumbria University School of Design, London 1-15 Bradley Close White Lion Street Islington N19 PN +44 191 204 8834
[email protected]
NEVER BEFORE HAS THERE BEEN A MORE VITAL TIME TO DEVELOP AND IMPLEMENT A D:STEM RESEARCH COMMUNITY WHERE DESIGN, SCIENCE AND ENGINEERING FUSE TO CREATE FUTURE INNOVATION.
September 2012 P3i Studio-Lab would like to thank the following: Royal Academy of Engineering, Mike Davies CBE, Professor Susanne Kuechler, Magpie Studio, Seb & Co., Sapphire Goss, NASA, Akzo Nobel, Studio XO, MMT Textiles, Parliament Hill School, Arrowscience, Girton Labs, Prof Clelia Dispenza.
P3i Team: Professor Raymond Oliver, Anne Toomey, Dr Veronika Kapsali, Nancy Tilbury. P3i Research design assistants: Lauren Bowker, Niamh O’Connor, Lynn Tandler, Oliver Poyntz, Alexander Bone.
