YouSaid · the spoken record

Neri Oxman

lines on the record: 149
first: 2023-09-01
most recent: 2023-09-01
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

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“So we did this project called Vespers, and those were basically death masks that was said as a process for designing a living product. What happens? And we looked at, I remember looking at Beethoven's deathmask and Agamemnon's death mask and just studying how they were created. And really they were sort of geometrically attuned to the face of the dead. And what we wanted to do is create a death mask that was not based on the shape of the wear, but rather was based on their legacy and their biology. And maybe we could harness a few stem cells there for future generations or contain the last breath, Lazarus, which preceded Vespers was a project where we designed a mask to contain a single breath, a last breath of the wear.”
2023-09-01 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #394 – Neri Oxman: Biology, Art, and Science of Design & Engineering with Nature · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“That notion of I want you to want or I need you to need or that there's always something, a deeper truth behind what is on the surface. And so I like to go to the second and tertiary derivative of things and discover new truths about them through that. But what have I learned about organisms?”
2023-09-01 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #394 – Neri Oxman: Biology, Art, and Science of Design & Engineering with Nature · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, that's my relationship. God, I want I like to believe in believing. Most great things in life are second derivatives of things. But that's part of another.”
2023-09-01 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #394 – Neri Oxman: Biology, Art, and Science of Design & Engineering with Nature · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, that's a beautiful question. What have I learned? I've learned that, you know, we also worked with shrimpshells with Aguja. We built this tower on the roof of SF Moma, which by a couple of months ago until it was on the roof, we've shown this structure completely biodegrade into then, well, not completely, but almost completely biodegrade to the soil. And this notion that a product or part, an organism or part of that organism can reincarnate is very, very moving thought to me because I Want to believe that I believe in reincarnation?”
2023-09-01 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #394 – Neri Oxman: Biology, Art, and Science of Design & Engineering with Nature · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Of consumable products and architectural environments only, but we love that moment where these technologies and by the way, every one of these projects that we created involve the creation of a new technology, whether it be a glass printer or the spinning robot or the life support system for the bee colony, they all involved a technology that was associated with the project. And I never ever, ever, ever want to let that part go because I love love technology so much, but also another element of this is always these projects, if they're great, they reveal new knowledge about or new science about the topic that you're investigating, be it silkworms or bees or glass. That's why I say I always tell my team it should be at MoMA and the cover of nature or science.”
2023-09-01 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #394 – Neri Oxman: Biology, Art, and Science of Design & Engineering with Nature · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“At pheromones that are associated with a B and thinking of those pheromones being released inside the capsules, the capsule that goes to outer space, they returned back to the media lab roof and those bees were alive and kicking and reproductive and they continued to create comb. And it ended with a beautiful nature paper that the team and I published together. We gave them gold nanoparticles and silver nanoparticles because we were interested if bees recycle wax. It was known forever that bees do not recycle the wax. And by feeding them these gold nanoparticles, we were able to prove that the bees actually do recycle the wax. The reason I'm bringing this forward is because we don't view ourselves as designers.”
2023-09-01 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #394 – Neri Oxman: Biology, Art, and Science of Design & Engineering with Nature · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“To outer space, the bees returned, they were not reproductive. And some of them died. And we thought, well, is there a way in which we can create a life support system, almost like a small mini biolab of a queen and her retinue that would be sent in this blue origin new shepherd mission, in this one cell? And so that's if the synthetic APU is an architectural project, in this case this second synthetic API was a product. It was right. So from an architectural controlled environment to a product scale control environment. And this bio lab, this life support system for bees was designed to provide the bees with all the conditions that they needed. And we looked at that time at the Nasanov pheromone that the queen uses to guide the other bees. And we looked.”
2023-09-01 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #394 – Neri Oxman: Biology, Art, and Science of Design & Engineering with Nature · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“In nearby Somerville. We had robots. Our team schlept there every day with our tools and machines and we made it happen. And the neighbors were very happy. And they got to get a ton of honey at the end of the winter. And those bees, of course, were released into the wild at the end of the winter, alive and kicking. In order to actually experiment with the robotic queen and idea or concept, we had to prove obviously that we can create this space for bees. And then after that, we had this amazing opportunity to send the bees to space on Blue Shepherd mission that is part of Blue Origin. And we, of course, said, yes, we'll take a slot. We said, okay, can we outdo NASA? So NASA in 1982 had an experiment where they sent bees to.”
2023-09-01 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #394 – Neri Oxman: Biology, Art, and Science of Design & Engineering with Nature · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Before you template, right? Before you can design with, you have to design for, right? You have to create this space of mutualism, space of sort of shared connection between you and the organism. And with bees, it started as the synthetic apiary. And we have proven that that curated environment where we design the space with high levels of control of temperature, humidity, and light. And we've proven that they were reproductive and alive. And we realized, wow, this environment that we created can help augment bees in the winter season in any city around the world where bees survive and thrive in the summer and spring seasons and could this be a kind of a new urban typology, an architectural typology of symbiosis, of mutualism between organisms and humans, where these, by the way, the synthetic API was in a”
2023-09-01 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #394 – Neri Oxman: Biology, Art, and Science of Design & Engineering with Nature · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So we've built what we call a synthetic apiary. And the synthetic apiary was designed as an environment that was a perpetual spring environment for the bees of Massachusetts. They go in hibernation, of course, during the winter season, and then we lose 80% of them or more during that period. We were thinking, okay, what if we created this environment where”
2023-09-01 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #394 – Neri Oxman: Biology, Art, and Science of Design & Engineering with Nature · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Ya, and the cool thing is it can apply to a human on an individual basis or a silkworm or a bee or a microbe, a microbe that has agency, or by virtue of a template. Cofabrication where we're digitally fabricating with other organisms that live across the various kingdoms of life. And those were silkworms and bees. And with bees, which we've sent to outer space and returned healthily and they were reproductive.”
2023-09-01 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #394 – Neri Oxman: Biology, Art, and Science of Design & Engineering with Nature · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Between opportunity, like starting like this and going like this, opening and closing. And this really, I think, is analogous to human empowerment given an infinite wide array of choices. What is the choice that you make to enable to empower, to provide you with the agency that you need?”
2023-09-01 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #394 – Neri Oxman: Biology, Art, and Science of Design & Engineering with Nature · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Christoph is the master here But really, we were thinking, again, what does nature want? Nature wants to increase the information dimension and reduce entropy. What do we want? We kind of want the same thing. We want more, but we want order, right? And this goes back to your conversation with Yoshaba, stochastic versus deterministic languages or processes. His definition or the definition he found was that an agent is empowered. If the entropy of the distribution of all of its states is high, while the entropy of the distribution of a single state given a choice, given an action, is low, meaning that kind of, yeah, duality.”
2023-09-01 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #394 – Neri Oxman: Biology, Art, and Science of Design & Engineering with Nature · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Speaking of emergence and empowerment because we're constantly moving between those as if they're equals on the team. And one of them Christophe shared with me a mathematical equation for what does it mean to empower nature? And what is empowerment in nature look like? And that relates to emergence, and we can go back to emergence in a few moments, but I want to say it so that I know that I've learned it. I can use it later.”
2023-09-01 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #394 – Neri Oxman: Biology, Art, and Science of Design & Engineering with Nature · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Seems like it was produced by a swarm silk community. But of course it wasn't. It's a bunch of biological agents working together to assemble this thing. That's really, really fascinating to us. How can technology augment or enable a swarm-like behavior and creatures that have not been designed to work as swarms?”
2023-09-01 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #394 – Neri Oxman: Biology, Art, and Science of Design & Engineering with Nature · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Between silkworms that are not a swarm based organism. They're not like the bees and the termites. They don't work together and they don't have social orders amongst them, the queen and the drones, etc. They're all the same in a way, right? And here what was so exciting for us is that these computational and fabrication technologies enable the silkworm to sort of kind of hop from the branch in ecology of worms to the branch in ecology of maybe human-like intelligence where they could connect and communicate by virtue of feeling or rubbing against each other in an area that was hotter or colder. So the product that we got at the end, the variation of density of fiber and the distribution of the fiber and the transparency, the product at the end.”
2023-09-01 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #394 – Neri Oxman: Biology, Art, and Science of Design & Engineering with Nature · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“But whenever you have these templating strategies, you have sort of control over nature, right? But the question is, is there a world in which we can move from templating, from providing these computational material and immaterial physical and molecular platforms that guide nature, almost like guiding a product almost like a gardener to a problem or an opportunity of emergence where that biological organism assumes agency by virtue of accessing the robotic code and saying now I own the code, I get to do what I want with this code? Let me show you what this pavilion may look like or this product may look like. And I think one of the exciting moments for us is when we realize that these robotic platforms that were designed initially as templates actually inspired, if I may, a kind of collaboration and cooperation.”
2023-09-01 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #394 – Neri Oxman: Biology, Art, and Science of Design & Engineering with Nature · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“That's a really great question. What happens is that at some point, the templating strategies, and as you said, correctly, there were geometrical templating, material templating, environmental templating, chemical templating, if you're using pheromones to guide the movement of bees in the absence of a queen where you have a robotic queen.”
2023-09-01 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #394 – Neri Oxman: Biology, Art, and Science of Design & Engineering with Nature · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“But really, those silkworms are not, yes, they're not designed to be like humans, right? They're not designed to connect, communicate, and build things that are bigger than themselves through connection and communication.”
2023-09-01 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #394 – Neri Oxman: Biology, Art, and Science of Design & Engineering with Nature · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I'm enjoying this so much. I always like people say I always speak in Nichien paragraphs. They're way too long. And this is wonderful. This is like heaven.”
2023-09-01 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #394 – Neri Oxman: Biology, Art, and Science of Design & Engineering with Nature · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Industry has is why did we in the first place author this organism 4,000 years ago that is unable to fly and is just there to basically live as to serve a human need, which is textiles. And so here we were fascinated by the computational kind of biology dimension of silkworms. But along the way, by the way, this is great. I never get to tell the full story.”
2023-09-01 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #394 – Neri Oxman: Biology, Art, and Science of Design & Engineering with Nature · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Actually, very primitive, but they have incredible ability to communicate and connect with each other. So if you think about the entire all of nature, The termites ace on communication, but their material sophistication is crap, right? It's just saliva and feces and some soil particles that are built to create these incredible termine mounds at the scale that when compared to human skyscrapers transcend all of buildable scales, at least in terms of what we have today in architectural practice just relative to the size of the termite. But when you look at the silkworm, The silkworm has zero connection and communication across silkworms. They were not designed to connect and communicate with each other. They're sort of a human design species because the domesticated silk moth creates the cocoon. We then produce the silk of it and then it dies. So it has dysfunctional wings. It cannot fly. And that's another problem that the sericulture”
2023-09-01 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #394 – Neri Oxman: Biology, Art, and Science of Design & Engineering with Nature · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“If they're placed on a desk or a horizontal surface, they will go about creating their cocoon. Only the cocoon would be flat because they're constantly looking for a vertical post in order to use that post as an anchor to spin the cocoon. But in the absence of that post, on surfaces that are less than twenty-one millimeters and flat, they will spin flat patches. And we say, aha, let's work with them to produce this dome as a set of flat patches. And a silkworm, mind you, is quite an egocentric creature. And actually, the furthest you go, you move forward in evolution by natural selection, the more... Egoism you find in creatures. So, when you think about termites, right, their material sophistication is”
2023-09-01 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #394 – Neri Oxman: Biology, Art, and Science of Design & Engineering with Nature · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Materials to chemical compounds saracen and fibrin. The Saracen is sort of the glue of the cocoon. The fibrin is the fiber base material of the cocoon. And through fibers and glue, and that's true for so many systems in nature, lots of fiber and glue. And that architecture allows them to metamorphosize. And in the process, they vary the properties of that silk thread. So it's stiffer or softer depending on where it is in the section of the cocoon. And so we were trying to emulate this robotically with a 3D printer that was six-axis kuka arm one of these baby cups. And we're trying to emulate that process computationally and build something very large when one of my students now, a brilliant industrial engineer roboticist on my team, Marcus said, well, you know, we were just playing with those silkworms and enjoying their presence when we realized that”
2023-09-01 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #394 – Neri Oxman: Biology, Art, and Science of Design & Engineering with Nature · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“seventeen thousand five hundred and thirty two. So each of these silkworms threads are about one mile in distance. And they're beautiful. And just thinking about the amount of material, you know, it's a bit like thinking about the length of capillary vessels that grow in your belly when you're pregnant to feed that incredible new life form. Just nature is amazing. But back to the silkworms, I think I had three months to build this incredible pavilion, but we couldn't figure out how to, we were thinking of emulating the process of how a silkworm goes about building its incredible architecture, this cocoon over the period of 24 to 72 hours. And it builds a cocoon basically to protect itself. It's a beautiful form of architecture. And it uses pretty much just to”
2023-09-01 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #394 – Neri Oxman: Biology, Art, and Science of Design & Engineering with Nature · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“4 These are sort of the 42s of the Enchanted New Universe. And back at MIT, we said instead of betting on all of these organisms, let's approach them as almost like movement in a symphony and let's kind of lean into what we can learn from each of these organisms in the context of building a project in an architectural scale. And those usually were pavilions.”
2023-09-01 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #394 – Neri Oxman: Biology, Art, and Science of Design & Engineering with Nature · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Or it's the mycelium. There's a lot of mushrooms around for good and bad. And it's cellulose or it's fake bananas or the workhorse E. coli. But these hero organisms are being bedded on as like the What's the one answer that solves everything the hitchhiker's”
2023-09-01 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #394 – Neri Oxman: Biology, Art, and Science of Design & Engineering with Nature · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And that's what's happening in pharma and in biomaterials, and by the way, precision ag and new food design technologies as people are betting on a hero organism is sort of how I think of it. And the hero organism is sometimes it's the palm oil or”
2023-09-01 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #394 – Neri Oxman: Biology, Art, and Science of Design & Engineering with Nature · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Duet could dance together to create these products. So, just a few examples with silk pavilion. We've had a couple of pavilions made of silk. And the second one, which was the bigger one, which ended up at the Museum of Modern Art with my friend, an incredible mentor, Paul Antonelli, that pavilion was six meter tall and it was produced by silkworms. And there we had different types of templates. There were physical templates that were basically just these water-soluble meshes upon which the silkworms were spinning. And then there were environmental templates, which was a robot basically applying variation of environmental conditions such as heat and light to guide the movement of the silkworm.”
2023-09-01 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #394 – Neri Oxman: Biology, Art, and Science of Design & Engineering with Nature · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Again, the challenge, as you say, was to grow them. And we classified them into fibers, cellular, solids, biopolymers, pigments. And in each of the examples, although the material was different, sometimes we used fibers. Sometimes we used silk with silkworms and honey with bees or comb as the structural material. With vespers, we used synthetically engineered bacteria to produce pigments, although the materials were different and the hero organisms were different, the philosophy was always the same. The approach was really an approach of computational templating. That templating allowed us to create templates for the natural environment where nature and technology could”
2023-09-01 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #394 – Neri Oxman: Biology, Art, and Science of Design & Engineering with Nature · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yes, and just take a step back over the 10 years, the Media Did Matter group, which was my group at MIT. Has sort of dedicated itself to bio based design would be a suitcase word, but sort of thinking about that synergy between nature and culture, biology and technology. And we attempted to build a suite of embodiments, let's say, that they ended up in amazing museums and amazing shows. And we wrote patents and papers on them, but they were still N of ones.”
2023-09-01 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #394 – Neri Oxman: Biology, Art, and Science of Design & Engineering with Nature · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And the factory is great too. I'm very, very excited. In October, we'll share first renditions of some of this work. And in February, we'll invite you to the lab”
2023-09-01 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #394 – Neri Oxman: Biology, Art, and Science of Design & Engineering with Nature · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So that's one thing that we're trying to solve for is how to create a product that is materially computationally, robotically novel and goes through all of these phases from the creation, from this carbon recycling technology to the product, to literally how do you think about reinventing an industry that is focused on assembly and putting things together.”
2023-09-01 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #394 – Neri Oxman: Biology, Art, and Science of Design & Engineering with Nature · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yes, either using plant matter or using bacteria. But we are really looking at carbon recycling technologies that start with methane or wastewater and end with this wonderful reincarnation of a thing that doesn't need to end up in a composting site but can just be thrown into the ground and grow olive and find peace. And there's a lot of textile-based work out there that is focused on one single element in this long chain, like let's create leather out of mycelium or let's create textile out of cellulose, but then it stops there and you get to assembling the shoe or the wearable and you need a little bit of glue and you need a little bit of this material and a little bit of that material to make it water resistant and then it's over.”
2023-09-01 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #394 – Neri Oxman: Biology, Art, and Science of Design & Engineering with Nature · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah. It starts from CO2 and it ends with something that you can literally eat. So the world's first entirely biodegradable, biompatible biorenewable product.”
2023-09-01 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #394 – Neri Oxman: Biology, Art, and Science of Design & Engineering with Nature · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Exactly, it goes back to that 11.5 quintillion times the bandwidth that humans have now arrived at and giving that to nature and seeing what happens there. Can animals actually use this interface to know that they need to run away from fire? Can plants use this interface to increase the rate of photosynthesis in the presence of a smoke cloud? Can they do this quote unquote automatically without a kind of a top-down brute force policy based method that's authored and deployed by humans? And so this work really relates to that interface with the natural world. And then there's a second area in the company which focuses on growing products. And here we're focusing on a single product that starts from CO2. It becomes a product, it's consumed, it's used, it's worn by human, and then it goes back to the soil and it grows an edible fruit plant.”
2023-09-01 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #394 – Neri Oxman: Biology, Art, and Science of Design & Engineering with Nature · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, the built and the grown, nature and culture, technology and biology, but we're constantly seeking to ask how can we build, design, and deploy products in three scales, the molecular scale, which I've briefly hinted to in there. Molecular scale, we're really looking to understand whether there is a universal language to nature and what that language is and then build a tool that I think and dream of it is the iPhone for nature if nature had an iPhone. What would that iPhone look like?”
2023-09-01 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #394 – Neri Oxman: Biology, Art, and Science of Design & Engineering with Nature · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“You know, I think they're first like you, they're humanists first. They come from different disciplines and different disciplinary backgrounds. And just as an example, we have a brilliant designer who is just a mathematical genius and a computer scientist and a mechanical engineer who is trained as a synthetic biologist. And now we're hiring a microbiologist and a chemist, architects of course and designers, roboticists. So it's really, it's Noah's Ark, right? Two of each.”
2023-09-01 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #394 – Neri Oxman: Biology, Art, and Science of Design & Engineering with Nature · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Fight against the dimensional mismatch between things made and things grown, right? And as designers, we are educated to think in X, Y, and Z. And that's pretty much where architectural education ends and biological education begins. So in reducing that dimensional mismatch, we're missing out on opportunities to create things made as if grown. But in the natural environment, we're asking, can we provide nature with this extra dimensions? And again, I'm not sure what nature wants, but I'm curious as to what happens when you provide these tools to the natural environment, obviously with responsibility, obviously with control, obviously with ethics and moral code. But is there a world in which nature can help fix itself using those tools?”
2023-09-01 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #394 – Neri Oxman: Biology, Art, and Science of Design & Engineering with Nature · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yes, so we keep coming back to this answer of nature wants to increase information, but decrease entropy, right? So find order, but constantly increase the information scale. And this is true for what our work also tries to do because we're constantly trying to”
2023-09-01 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #394 – Neri Oxman: Biology, Art, and Science of Design & Engineering with Nature · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Of course, large language models are based on Google and search engines and so on and so forth. And we don't have this data currently. And part of our mission is to do just that. I'm trying to quantify and understand the language that exists across all kingdoms of life, across all five kingdoms of life. And if we can understand that language, is there a way for us to first make sense of it, find logic in it, and then generate certain computational tools that empower nature to build better crops, to increase the level of biodiversity. In the company, we're constantly asking, what does nature want? What does nature want from a compute view?”
2023-09-01 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #394 – Neri Oxman: Biology, Art, and Science of Design & Engineering with Nature · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“What does it mean for nature to have access to the cloud, the kind of bandwidth that we're talking about, sort of think neural link for nature? Since the first computer, and you know this by heart probably better than I do, but we're both MIT lifers, we today have computational power that is one trillion times the power that we had in those times we have 26.5 trillion times the bandwidth and 11.5 quintillion times the memory, which is in Approach and access such incredible bandwidth and we're asking what if nature had that bandwidth so beyond genes and evolution if there was a way to augment nature and allow it access to the world of bits what does nature look like now and can nature make decisions for herself as opposed to being guided and guarded and abused by humankind”
2023-09-01 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #394 – Neri Oxman: Biology, Art, and Science of Design & Engineering with Nature · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, so in 2005, I called this material ecology. I thought, what if all material, all things materials would be considered part of ecology and would have a positive impact on the ecology, where we work together to help each other, all things nature, all things human? And again, you can say that that wisdom in nature exists in fungi. Many mushroom lovers always contest my thesis here saying, well, we have the mushroom network and we have the mother trees and they're all connected. And why don't we just simply hack into mushrooms? Well, first of all, yes, they're connected, but that network stops when there is a physical gap. That network does not necessarily enable the whales in the Dominican to connect with an olive tree in Israel, to connect with a weeping willow in Montana. And that's sort of a world that I'm dreaming about.”
2023-09-01 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #394 – Neri Oxman: Biology, Art, and Science of Design & Engineering with Nature · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Can be read and written to as or thought of or perceived of as nature grown. That's sort of the Turing test for the company, or at least that's how I started. I thought, well, grow everything. That's sort of the slogan. Let's grow everything. And if we grow everything, is there a world in which driving a car is better for nature than a world in which there are no cars? Is there, is it possible that a world in which you build buildings in cities, that those buildings and cities actually augment and heal nature as opposed to their absence? Is there a world in which we now go back to that kind of synergy between nature and humans where you cannot separate between grown and made? And it doesn't even matter.”
2023-09-01 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #394 – Neri Oxman: Biology, Art, and Science of Design & Engineering with Nature · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“On the planet, where do we go from here? And you've heard the expression more phones than bones and the anthropomass and the anthropocene and the technosphere sort of outweighing the biosphere. But now we are really trying to look at is there a way in which all things technosphere are designed as if they are part of the biosphere, meaning if you could today grow instead of build everything and anything, if you could grow an iPhone, if you could grow a car, what would that world look like where the touring test for sort of this kind of, I call this material ecology approach, but this notion that everything material, everything that you design in the physical universe?”
2023-09-01 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #394 – Neri Oxman: Biology, Art, and Science of Design & Engineering with Nature · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Professor from the Weisman Institute who came up with his definition of anthropomas in twenty twenty when he identified that twenty twenty was the crossover year when anthropomass exceeded biomass on the planet. So all of the design goods that we have created and brought into the world now outweigh all of the biomass, including of course all plastics and wearables building cities, but also asphalt and concrete all outweigh the scale of the biomass. And actually that was a moment. You know how in life there are moments that be a handful of moments that get you to course correct and it was a zoom conversation with Ron and that was a moment for me when I realized that that imbalance now we've superseded the biomass.”
2023-09-01 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #394 – Neri Oxman: Biology, Art, and Science of Design & Engineering with Nature · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yes, yes, I absolutely believe that there is so much to nature that we still have not leveraged and we still have not understood and we still haven't. And so much of our work is design, but a lot of it is science, is unveiling and finding new truths about the natural world that we were not aware before. Everybody talks about intelligence these days, but I like to think that nature has kind of wisdom that exists beyond intelligence or above intelligence. And it's that wisdom that we're trying to tap into through technology. If you think about humans versus nature, at least in the realm, at least in the context of definition, nature is everything but anthropomas. And I'm using Guan Milo, who is an incredible...”
2023-09-01 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #394 – Neri Oxman: Biology, Art, and Science of Design & Engineering with Nature · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yes, and we're looking for it. I think that from, let's say, from the beginning of mankind, going back to 200,000 years, the products that we have designed have separated us from nature. And it's ironic that the things that we designed and produced as humankind, those are exactly the things that separated us. Before that, we were totally and completely connected. And I want to return to that world.”
2023-09-01 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #394 – Neri Oxman: Biology, Art, and Science of Design & Engineering with Nature · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I do. And I think of nature in that way in general, in the context of design specifically. I think of nature as everything that isn't anthropomass, everything that is not produced by humankind. The birds and the rocks and everything in between, fungi, elephants, whales,”
2023-09-01 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #394 – Neri Oxman: Biology, Art, and Science of Design & Engineering with Nature · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source