Dream Beasts
Leonardo Da Vinci could arguably be described as one of the world’s first ever product design engineers. His love of both the arts and humanities and the sciences and technology has been the inspiration behind many great designs today.
London Design Festival
I spent the last weekend exploring Milan, Italy’s design capital. Milan is of course home to the most famous fashion week in the world, but also a whole host of fascinating museums and galleries, including many pieces by Da Vinci, who lived there for 20 years. As well as ‘The Last Supper’, Milan is home to The Leonardo Da Vinci Museum of Science and Technology. While I was there, there was an exhibition going on entitled ‘Dream Beasts’, by Dutch designer Theo Jansen. Jansen creates enormous, moving kinetic structures called ‘Strandbeests’ (beach creatures), that are designed to walk along the beach in an animalistic fashion, powered by only the wind.
These structures are all made from just PVC piping, wood and zip ties and are based on a mesh of triangles and links which convert the kinetic rotation of an axle into a stepping motion of six or more legs, mimicking how an insect or prehistoric skeleton might walk along a beach. Their most remarkable feature has to be that they are completely self-sustaining. They don’t use any engines or complicated technology; instead, completely relying on the wind to propel them along their chosen paths. Some do this through what Jansen calls a ‘stomach’, made up of plastic bottles that get pumped up as air passes through them. This happens using bicycle pumps that are driven using ‘wings’ at the front that flap in the breeze. Once the stomach is full, the air is released throughout the structure’s ‘muscles’. These muscles are pistons in tubes that move up and down, simulating the movement of the creature along the beach.
In true Darwinian form, Jansen’s creations have become more advanced over time in order to better carry out their intended function: survival. They do so using very basic sensors as their own form of perception. Some can detect when they have entered the water and will move up the beach away from the incoming tide. One can even sense when a storm is coming and anchor itself to the ground for protection. In making his models more and more advanced, Jansen is hoping to create a new breed of artificial intelligence that we will eventually release in herds onto beaches to live their own lives.
Jansen’s work is inspired by Da Vinci’s passion for both technological innovation and humanistic culture, and he works under the belief that:
“The boundaries between art and engineering exist only in our minds.”
This is definitely a motto I can get behind, as I believe all design must rely on both these facets in order to be great. You can see this come through with Jansen’s creatures, which combine both mechanics and the natural world to create a form of great engineering and great beauty. These structures are especially great in the way they evolve over time using iterative design to become better versions of themselves, which is something all designers must do when coming up with new concepts.
Now, I must confess: we never actually made it to the Dream Beasts exhibit and all my research had to be carried out online instead. As it turns out, every museum and gallery in Milan is closed on Mondays, which came as a huge disappointment as this was our final day of the trip. But I did get to visit an ossuary with real human skulls on the walls instead which was certainly a very interesting and unique design in its own way!