Cycling Solutions

The world has lots of problems. We don’t see most of them as we live in a fairly luxurious, first world country. In this studio we’ll be looking at some problems faced by third world countries and areas of natural and manmade disasters.

The solutions we come up with will be made of different classes of materials:

1. Using only materials likely to be found in a third world countries.
2. Using only materials likely to be found in a disaster area in a first world country
3. Using inexpensive First world technologies to create solutions that could be provided as aid to third world or disaster areas.

In all cases, our solutions will have to be durable and easy to fix if they break, as people’s quality of life will depend on them.

Sean Stevens

Alternative Energy Artist, Scientist

Since Sean was six years old, he has always taken things apart to see how they worked. This innate curiosity about how things work lead him to explore computer programming, human perception, robotics, alternative energy, Sound, lighting, LASERs, Interactivity, the internet, and how it can all tie into community. He discovered that most complex systems can be considered to be made of modules. With the right input and output, these modules can be made to act independently.
Recombined in new ways, the modules can create new and interesting things. Working with systems in this way allows us to create faster, since we don’t necessarily have to understand the modules on every level to use them. Sean is currently working on lowRes, a primarily human powered, large scale, mobile, modular, interactive art piece. With lowRes, Sean hopes to create something that is enjoyable, but when you think about it really makes a statement.

Links:
Sean Stevens
Sustainable Sound

Dr. Zoz Brooks

PhD, Robotic Life Group, Media Lab, MIT

Dr. Zoz Brooks is an engineer, artist and graduate of the MIT Media Laboratory’s Robotic Life group, where he wrote his PhD dissertation on engineering strategies for improving human-robot communication while maintaining wide research interests including rapid prototyping and robotic fabrication techniques. Since receiving his PhD he has endeavoured to make the understanding of science, robotics and rapid prototyping accessible to an international audience by co-hosting
and producing for the television shows “Prototype This!” and “Time Warp” on the Discovery Channel, and teaching as a Visiting Professor in the Graduate School of Culture Technology and the Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering at KAIST in South Korea.

links:
Zoz Brooks: Prototype This!