Tag Archives: gravity

Michael Jantzen Just Turned Solar into a 16-Arm Moving Sculpture

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Most renewable energy systems hide in plain sight. Rooftop solar panels blend into shingles, batteries sit in containers behind fences, and wind turbines spin in distant fields. They quietly do their jobs without helping anyone understand what happens inside them, which feels like a missed opportunity when you are trying to build support for systems that might keep the planet livable for another generation or two.

Michael Jantzen’s Solar and Gravity Powered Art and Science Pavilion treats that visibility problem as a design challenge. The conceptual structure combines a public exhibition space under an umbrella-shaped roof with a tall central tower supporting 16 long, weighted steel arms. Those arms lift and lower throughout the day, creating shifting silhouettes while demonstrating how solar power and gravity work together as a functional energy system rather than just theoretical concepts.

Designer: Michael Jantzen

The cycle works simply enough. A solar cell array at the top powers 16 winches that pull the weighted arms upward, storing potential energy. When the pavilion needs electricity, or when someone wants to change its shape, the arms fall back down under gravity. Their descent drives 16 generators that feed power to the building or local grid, turning stored height into usable electricity without batteries or other complex systems getting in the way.

Arriving on a sunny afternoon, you would see the arms at different angles around the tower, sometimes clustered vertically, sometimes fanned out like a mechanical flower. The shifting positions are not just decorative but are the visible result of energy being stored and released. You can read the building’s energy state in its skyline without needing a diagram, which turns out to be a surprisingly rare thing for infrastructure to offer at any scale.

Inside, the umbrella roof shelters a large floor for exhibitions, lectures, or performances. At the center, 16 cables drop through holes in the floor, each marked with an orange spot matching the orange-tipped arms outside. Those cables connect to winches and generators below, making the mechanical core part of the exhibition rather than something hidden. Visitors can track which arms are up or down by watching cables move, turning passive observation into something closer to active participation.

Of course, the setup means the building becomes a working model while hosting events about climate or technology. People walk through exhibitions while the structure demonstrates solar capture and gravity storage without needing to explain every detail. The pavilion functions as a tourist attraction, classroom, and public art that teaches through motion instead of asking you to absorb paragraphs about conversion rates nobody remembers afterward.

Jantzen’s proposal might never be built as drawn, but treating energy flows as choreography feels worth exploring. It hints at a future where infrastructure does not just work efficiently behind walls, it performs visibly in ways that invite people to understand systems that usually stay hidden until something breaks. Making those processes watchable might matter more than squeezing out another efficiency percentage point, which is something worth considering the next time we design places meant to teach.

The post Michael Jantzen Just Turned Solar into a 16-Arm Moving Sculpture first appeared on Yanko Design.

Odd drinking cup was designed to work in zero-gravity space without a straw

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Hollywood has romanticized the idea of living in space or on other planets, but our current technologies have yet to catch up to the future painted by science fiction. Never mind the risks of blasting off into space, living on a space station can be extremely challenging, especially in the absence of gravity. Zero-G, as it is often called, can be fun once in a while and in short bursts, but having to constantly live in that environment turns activities we consider normal and mundane into an exercise in patience. The simple act of drinking, for example, requires sipping from a straw all the time, not exactly the most comfortable method for enjoying precious Earth liquids in space. That’s the problem that this space cup solves, but it accomplishes this impressive feat by taking on a shape that is almost literally out of this world.

Designer: Donald Pettit, Mark Weislogel

It’s only logical that liquids wouldn’t stay still inside a cup without the power of gravity, which is why drinks in space are taken from pouches with straws attached to them. It’s a simple and practical solution that makes drinking feel more like a mechanical act of survival than something that is enjoyed and treasured like those on Earth. NASA researcher Mark Weislogel and NASA astronaut Donald Pettit worked together, the former on Earth, the other on the International Space Station, to come up with a design that brings back the comforting experience of drinking normally from a cup.

The secret behind this “zero gravity coffee cup” is twofold. One is the special design where the cup has sharp crevices where two edges meet. The other is the way liquid behaves when placed in such a receptacle in zero gravity. The liquid is naturally drawn to those narrow spaces following the principle of capillary channel flow and, as if by magic, actually sticks to those edges without spilling out.

Owning the title of being the first cup that was actually designed in space, this zero-gravity drinkware’s first form was actually just a sheet of Mylar taped together at the edges to form a teardrop-shaped container. Of course, such a design hardly counts as a comfortable cup to drink from, so a more refined 3D printed food-grade plastic cup was made on Earth. Another model, this time made from ceramic, was later developed and became the first patented product invented outside of our planet.

The space cup’s unusual shape has raised a few eyebrows, and while it’s now available for sale on Earth from some sources, it doesn’t have the same magical capabilities demonstrated in zero-gravity space. Its alien design, however, does show how outside-the-box thinking will be necessary to have more “normal” experiences in space, and we have to expect that the first generation of what we consider to be ordinary products will take on sometimes unusual forms just so they can function in the same way.

The post Odd drinking cup was designed to work in zero-gravity space without a straw first appeared on Yanko Design.