Day 2

Second day of the program: clearing confusions, establishing goals, giving ideas and working together.

During the second day of the program we have the pleasure to hear a lecture from the prof. John Videler, he gave us two examples of how and what we can learn from nature: the first example was about the honey bees, they are a great source of inspiration for several applications if we observe their anatomy, social structure, honeycomb structure, way of communication, and so on; It called my attention the possibility to apply their dynamic air conditioning system for the design of our main project. The second example was about Bionics in telecommunication, was quite interesting as well, and it gave me a perspective of how to make the right question to find answers in nature, like in this case “How nature makes sure it sound signal is going to be heard?”.
Even though I was excited with these interesting lectures, I was still not sure of the real objective of the project we have to work on. Maybe for this reason I found hard to look for inspiration in artistic articles, because I think is more natural to have a real and clear goal in mind before we start looking for inspiration in several resources. For this reason, when the specific aspects in which we are going to focus were announced (energy, waste/food, shelter, educating/communicating and water), I was relief.
The brainstorm activity we did later was original, natural and quite useful, since it allowed us to express our ideas for the five different aspects of focus, and it facilitated the later discussion in the specific groups. In my group (water) we agreed to focus in four different aspects: gathering, treatment, distribution and heating/cooling system; I believe we can come out with an interesting result in the next days.

Chacon