The Design Museum

This past Tuesday, our class visited the Design Museum to look at this year's Design of the Year. The winner this year was a design called "Microchips lined with human cells." Though fascinating and very relevant to my future career in biological sciences, I unfortunately was unable to read more about this design due to time constraints during our visit. However, I did get to read about a couple of designs that really caught my eye. The first was a type shoe that molds to your feet and also contains a layer of amoeba cells that form a sort second skin for your feet. Amoeba cells are unicellular organism that form colonies that allow the individual cells to act as one individual body. This makes amoeba cells very reactive to the environment and can change their conformations very quickly. The protocells created for this shoe become a semi-living object that are highly adaptive and responsive. The shoes could reconfigure instantaneously and offer more support under high impact circumstances. The second design that really caught my eye was a space suit that was designed to be much thinner than any space suit that had been created before. Along the outside of the suit, instead of just protecting the wearer from the elements of space, the material mimicked the actions of myofibril and actin proteins (which make up muscle fibers). The fibers in the suit are able to contract as the wearer moves his own muscles, which allows the wearer to potentially have more contractile force. Both of these designs were amazing examples that combined the world of design with the world of biology, which was very near and dear to my heart as a biology major!

Here is the actual amoeba shoe!

A picture of the shoe in action.

Here is a picture of the space suit with the material made up of fibers.