Tag Archives: Design Academy Eindhoven

This self-sustainable cloud server is powered by the energy of growing tomatoes indoor!

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Picture a post-apocalyptic future where human beings don’t have the liberty of dependence on power stations. Self-sustainable systems are the norm and utilizing every ounce of available energy is vital for survival. A dystopian tech-infused future world where computing systems don’t have any external source of abundant energy. Straight out from that sci-fi futuristic scenario is the Warm Earth server system by Ilja Schamle, a Design Academy Eindhoven graduate.

The DIY cloud server system embodies the symbiotic relationship between technology and nature. This project is all about utilizing the renewable energy extracted out of tomato vines to solely run the cloud server. In turn, the energy produced by the heat dissipation is cyclically used to maintain the optimum temperature for the vegetables to grow. As concept-like this might seem, the project was a part of the Missed Your Call graduate exhibition at the Milan design week.

The DIY project houses the tomato plants within the server racks and the server is mounted on the exterior of the rig. The ventilation shaft equipped with fans, channels the hot air to the interior of the cabinet – essentially turning it into a greenhouse. Tomatoes power the server courtesy of the plant-microbial fuel cell technology developed by researchers at Wageningen University, Netherlands. This turns vegetables into batteries – literally!

Nothing goes to waste as the plants perform photosynthesis – turning sunlight into chemical energy, and storing the sugars and proteins. The excess nutrition is excreted via the roots as waste, where the bacteria break it down to release energy. This energy is then leveraged as electricity. Since the servers are indoors, the solar-powered grow lamps act as a source of sunlight. The electrons released by microbes are attracted to iron and the activated-carbon grid functioning as a conductor is placed at the bottom of the pot. For now, the system can produce energy to sustain a single website, and we can expect this to develop into a massive system with more research and development.

Warm Earth is a self-sustainable geeky mashup that not many could think of before this. According to Schamle, the amount of content consumed at present and in the future is destined to rise and the energy required to run such systems is going to be colossal. The artificial ecosystem will change the perception of data centers as being mere dungeons for hosting servers. They will become an important entity of future homes, where they aren’t kept hidden from sight!

Designer: Ilja Schamle

Taking the moving pictures rather literally!

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The Cycling Cinema takes the drive-in experience and turns it into a drive-around experience! Combining human love for cinema with Netherland’s love for cycling, the beautiful Cycling Cinema is an all in one theater experience that Milan Tak of the Design Academy Eindhoven developed out of his love of sharing his favorite movies with his friends. He created the Cycling Cinema, a highly Art Deco styled moving movie-theater fully built in with a projector and screen, speakers, a popcorn machine, and even those retro movie theater signboards with the replaceable letters that will spell out the movies Milan curates for his friends! I’m loving the 1920s style language (when the cinema truly exploded with the talkies making their debut), and everything else from the colors to the font selection. 10/10 would come to watch movies in their friend’s backyards with the Cycling Cinema!

Designer: Milan Tak

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Dynamic Chair Replaces the Mouse with Your Body

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Bionic Chair

Now that there are all sorts of mindblowing computers out there, maybe it’s time to bring office furniture into discussion. More precisely, the chair you sit in while using the computer.

What if, through some wicked engineering, the chair would enable your body to be used as a mouse? Starting from idea that sitting still in a chair all day long (or at least 8 hours) is bad for your health, Govert Flint, a recent graduate of Design Academy Eindhoven in the Netherlands created the Dynamic Chair, a seat that motivates you to keep moving all the time. Either that, or the pointer on the screen won’t move at all.

Flint, who enjoys dancing quite a lot, thought of ways to integrate fluid movement patterns into the design of this bionic chair: “It started with my questions about why I like to dance so much, and how it was possible I couldn’t enjoy my work as an architect in an office environment.”

The designer is well aware of the health problems caused by conventional chairs: “Standing desks damage cartilage similarly to sitting. While we sit, we don’t massage our cartilage. Even in our sleep, our body needs to move the joints and therefore has frequent motions.”

At the moment, the bionic chair is but a prototype, but I really hope that Flint will get the necessary support for turning this into a mass-produced item, regardless of how expensive it will get. This product achieves something that not many chairs are capable of: making the user happy, not just fit.

Of course, Flint also knows that there are still a lot of improvements that could be made: “It gets quite close to a comfortable sensation, but will need serious development before someone can work in it for a full day. But many people say that it feels much better than how it looks.”

Don’t expect to use such a chair for gaming, though! The pointer’s movement isn’t that fluid, for the time being, not to mention that a simple RTS or MMORPG game could exhaust the player in just a few minutes.

“At the moment it feels like playing a game to click on an item,” pointed out Flint. “The aim is to make a computer interface that allows people to work with typing, graphics, editing software, browsing and music making for daily use, without having the feeling it goes against their intuition.”

This exercise in design has a simple, but beautiful goal: “My quest is to find an integration of movement, function, and emotions.”

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