Saco-Indonesia.com — Sebuah Perkembangan ilmu pengetahuan selalu menarik untuk disimak. Penemuan-penemuan baru semakin memudahkan hidup manusia di mana depan. Tampaknya, hasil desain Tashia Tucker juga akan memberikan efek serupa.
Dengan menggunakan teknologi yang dibayangkan oleh Tucker, bangunan di masa depan dapat menggunakan lantai yang mengandung bakteri sintetis. Bakteri ini dapat memakan kotoran dan membersihkan kaki orang yang melintas di atasnya.
Tucker menamai teknologi yang dibayangkannya ini dengan Synthetic Biology: The Future of Adaptive Living Environments. Proyek tersebut mengeksplorasi kemungkinan penggunaan biologi sintetis yang bisa digunakan dalam bidang arsitektur. Teknologi ini bisa menciptakan permukaan "cerdas" mengandung bakteri.
"Saya pikir dalam 10 tahun ke depan, kita akan mulai melihat pengembangan permukaan yang didesain secara biologis di laboratorium. Dalam kurun waktu 15 sampai 20 tahun mendatang, tersedia bagi masyarakat," ujar Tucker.
Sebagai seorang mahasiswa jurusan desain di Universitas Drexel, Philadelphia, Amerika Serikat, Tucker menampilkan simulasi cara kerja permukaan, penutup lantai "cerdas" yang berisi bakteri hasil modifikasi. Tidak hanya mampu memakan kotoran dan membersihkan kaki penggunanya, permukaan ini juga memberikan peringatan jika ada bahan-bahan berbahaya menempel padanya.
"Proyek ini menggunakan fabrikasi digital, proses-mikro, proyeksi video, teknologi game, dan lainnya untuk menstimulasi bagaimana bakteria yang sudah di-hack ini mampu berfungsi sebagai permukaan dan material di masa depan," imbuh Tucker.
Meski masih dalam bentuk simulasi, Tucker mengajak masyarakat dunia membayangkan berbagai kemudahan yang ditawarkan oleh penemuan semacam ini. Ia mencontohkan lantai yang dapat mendeteksi kotoran dan secara otomatis membersihkan kaki penggunanya dari berbagai bahan berbahaya. Bakteri dalam permukaan hasil desain Tucker akan mengeluarkan warna tertentu dan menunjukkan jenis toksin yang menempel di kaki penggunanya.
Dia juga mencontohkan permukaan serupa yang secara khusus didesain bagi permukaan meja dapur. Untuk simulasi ini, Tucker menggunakan permukaan silikon di atas sensor tekan yang dioperasikan oleh Nintendo gaming mat dan dihubungkan dengan prosesor mikro Arduino dan sebuah proyektor.
Permukaan hasil desain Tucker ini akan mengeluarkan warna tertentu yang akan menjadi indikator bagi penggunanya. Misalnya, penggunanya alergi terhadap kacang, maka ketika ada kandungan kacang pada makanan yang diolah di atas permukaan tersebut, bakteri di dalam permukaannya akan berubah warna menjadi kuning.
"Aplikasi ini juga berpengaruh pada industri kesehatan. Rumah sakit, peralatan bedah, dan perlengkapan medis bisa secara visual memberi amaran jika lingkungan di sekitarnya aman dan bersih," ujarnya.
Tucker bahkan membuat dinding responsif dari selulosa. Karyanya ini mendemonstrasikan bagaimana bakteri dapat diprogram untuk merespons gerakan manusia dan membentuk pola tertentu.
Hasil desain Tucker ini adalah sebagian kecil dari produk The Design Futures Lab, sebuah grup penelitian trans-disiplin ilmu yang ada di Westphal College of Media Arts & Design di Drexel University. Principal Investigator, Assistant Professor Nicole Koltick merupakan direktur laboratorium tersebut. Koltick-lah yang menyediakan berbagai visi dan membimbing proyek-proyek di bawah agenda penelitian kohesif.
Jadi, mampukah material cerdas seperti ini memudahkan hidup di masa depan? Tentu saja. Namun, kita semua masih harus menunggu, menurut Tucker, setidaknya 15 sampai 20 tahun mendatang untuk mendapatkan teknologi semacam ini.
Sumber :www.dezeen.com/kompas.com
Editor : Maulana Lee
Ditemukan INOVASI, Pelapis Lantai Pembersih Kaki Manusia!
Late in April, after Native American actors walked off in disgust from the set of Adam Sandler’s latest film, a western sendup that its distributor, Netflix, has defended as being equally offensive to all, a glow of pride spread through several Native American communities.
Tantoo Cardinal, a Canadian indigenous actress who played Black Shawl in “Dances With Wolves,” recalled thinking to herself, “It’s come.” Larry Sellers, who starred as Cloud Dancing in the 1990s television show “Dr. Quinn, Medicine Woman,” thought, “It’s about time.” Jesse Wente, who is Ojibwe and directs film programming at the TIFF Bell Lightbox in Toronto, found himself encouraged and surprised. There are so few film roles for indigenous actors, he said, that walking off the set of a major production showed real mettle.
But what didn’t surprise Mr. Wente was the content of the script. According to the actors who walked off the set, the film, titled “The Ridiculous Six,” included a Native American woman who passes out and is revived after white men douse her with alcohol, and another woman squatting to urinate while lighting a peace pipe. “There’s enough history at this point to have set some expectations around these sort of Hollywood depictions,” Mr. Wente said.
The walkout prompted a rhetorical “What do you expect from an Adam Sandler film?,” and a Netflix spokesman said that in the movie, blacks, Mexicans and whites were lampooned as well. But Native American actors and critics said a broader issue was at stake. While mainstream portrayals of native peoples have, Mr. Wente said, become “incrementally better” over the decades, he and others say, they remain far from accurate and reflect a lack of opportunities for Native American performers. What’s more, as Native Americans hunger for representation on screen, critics say the absence of three-dimensional portrayals has very real off-screen consequences.
“Our people are still healing from historical trauma,” said Loren Anthony, one of the actors who walked out. “Our youth are still trying to figure out who they are, where they fit in this society. Kids are killing themselves. They’re not proud of who they are.” They also don’t, he added, see themselves on prime time television or the big screen. Netflix noted while about five people walked off the “The Ridiculous Six” set, 100 or so Native American actors and extras stayed.
But in interviews, nearly a dozen Native American actors and film industry experts said that Mr. Sandler’s humor perpetuated decades-old negative stereotypes. Mr. Anthony said such depictions helped feed the despondency many Native Americans feel, with deadly results: Native Americans have the highest suicide rate out of all the country’s ethnicities.
The on-screen problem is twofold, Mr. Anthony and others said: There’s a paucity of roles for Native Americans — according to the Screen Actors Guild in 2008 they accounted for 0.3 percent of all on-screen parts (those figures have yet to be updated), compared to about 2 percent of the general population — and Native American actors are often perceived in a narrow way.
In his Peabody Award-winning documentary “Reel Injun,” the Cree filmmaker Neil Diamond explored Hollywood depictions of Native Americans over the years, and found they fell into a few stereotypical categories: the Noble Savage, the Drunk Indian, the Mystic, the Indian Princess, the backward tribal people futilely fighting John Wayne and manifest destiny. While the 1990 film “Dances With Wolves” won praise for depicting Native Americans as fully fleshed out human beings, not all indigenous people embraced it. It was still told, critics said, from the colonialists’ point of view. In an interview, John Trudell, a Santee Sioux writer, actor (“Thunderheart”) and the former chairman of the American Indian Movement, described the film as “a story of two white people.”
“God bless ‘Dances with Wolves,’ ” Michael Horse, who played Deputy Hawk in “Twin Peaks,” said sarcastically. “Even ‘Avatar.’ Someone’s got to come save the tribal people.”
Dan Spilo, a partner at Industry Entertainment who represents Adam Beach, one of today’s most prominent Native American actors, said while typecasting dogs many minorities, it is especially intractable when it comes to Native Americans. Casting directors, he said, rarely cast them as police officers, doctors or lawyers. “There’s the belief that the Native American character should be on reservations or riding a horse,” he said.
“We don’t see ourselves,” Mr. Horse said. “We’re still an antiquated culture to them, and to the rest of the world.”
Ms. Cardinal said she was once turned down for the role of the wife of a child-abusing cop because the filmmakers felt that casting her would somehow be “too political.”
Another sore point is the long run of white actors playing American Indians, among them Burt Lancaster, Rock Hudson, Audrey Hepburn and, more recently, Johnny Depp, whose depiction of Tonto in the 2013 film “Lone Ranger,” was viewed as racist by detractors. There are, of course, exceptions. The former A&E series “Longmire,” which, as it happens, will now be on Netflix, was roundly praised for its depiction of life on a Northern Cheyenne reservation, with Lou Diamond Phillips, who is of Cherokee descent, playing a Northern Cheyenne man.
Others also point to the success of Mr. Beach, who played a Mohawk detective in “Law & Order: Special Victims Unit” and landed a starring role in the forthcoming D C Comics picture “Suicide Squad.” Mr. Beach said he had come across insulting scripts backed by people who don’t see anything wrong with them.
“I’d rather starve than do something that is offensive to my ancestral roots,” Mr. Beach said. “But I think there will always be attempts to drawn on the weakness of native people’s struggles. The savage Indian will always be the savage Indian. The white man will always be smarter and more cunning. The cavalry will always win.”
The solution, Mr. Wente, Mr. Trudell and others said, lies in getting more stories written by and starring Native Americans. But Mr. Wente noted that while independent indigenous film has blossomed in the last two decades, mainstream depictions have yet to catch up. “You have to stop expecting for Hollywood to correct it, because there seems to be no ability or desire to correct it,” Mr. Wente said.
There have been calls to boycott Netflix but, writing for Indian Country Today Media Network, which first broke news of the walk off, the filmmaker Brian Young noted that the distributor also offered a number of films by or about Native Americans.
The furor around “The Ridiculous Six” may drive more people to see it. Then one of the questions that Mr. Trudell, echoing others, had about the film will be answered: “Who the hell laughs at this stuff?”
Native American Actors Work to Overcome a Long-Documented Bias