Straits Times 27 Nov 09;
What will Singapore, and the world, be like in 2050? There were plenty of ideas of what sort of sustainable communities were needed when thinkers and visionaries put their heads together at the International Council of Societies of Industrial Design's World Design Congress here this week. The designers looked at existing research and thought up new ways of life for societies 40 years on. Tan Hui Yee looks at four of the ideas
New tastes and power sources
DINNER is served, Sir, and we have a wonderful selection for you tonight: succulent barbecued sewer rat, lip-smacking Town Square pigeon pate with cockroach lollipop, a delightful, protein-rich treat, to finish.
And if Madam is a bit chilly out here on the restaurant balcony, try our house shawl, knitted from the chef's fluffy pet golden retriever.
It doesn't bear thinking about what the wine might be made from, but this new, no-waste world of 2050 will be hard to beat for sustainable practices.
The trick is to cultivate a taste for our local fauna, according to 5.5 designers, a Paris-based outfit roped in by South African group Design Indaba to think up ways to make communities self-sufficient.
London-based Dunne & Raby were equally keen to turn the whole idea of 'edible' on its head.
Why stop at growing edible plants, they ask? In the future, we could create digestive aids so that plants previously considered inedible to humans will gradually become new sources of food.
These robo-digestive systems could make the neighbourhood park a walk-in salad bar.
Or go in the reverse order and engineer the ornamental plants at home to make them edible. A bit of technology could turn that dust-gathering bonsai on the window ledge into a pretty good snack.
If that is too hard to digest, another London-based designer and researcher, Ms Revital Cohen, reckons humans could be engineered to power appliances.
The secret? Electricity-generating organs.
After all, there are precedents in nature: an electric eel uses electrocyte cells to produce electric currents from its abdomen.
It may be only a matter time before humans build an organ from artificial cells which can mimic this function and convert blood sugars in the body into electricity. With such an organ in place and charged up, you would just need to connect an appliance to two small nodes sticking out of your body to power it.
It sure puts people power in new light.
Feeding and housing a new Singapore
Straits Times 27 Nov 09;
IT IS a crisis that jumps from today's headlines: rising sea levels threaten to engulf Singapore and make life and economic activity intolerable for its five-million strong population.
While the risk seems real if the climate change experts are to be believed, so is the solution going by the architects at Woha.
The team put its collective heads together with boffins from the National University of Singapore and design firms Black Design and Obilia to devise a nifty answer: a ring of 15m-high dykes along the coastline that can double as freshwater reservoirs to supplement inland lakes.
Their blueprint seems to have all the bases covered. The dykes do not cost taxpayers too much because private developers buying coastal plots for projects have to integrate them into their projects.
As a result, the dykes take on many forms and guises - amusement parks, rolling cliffs, fruit valleys, even padi fields. They become tourist attractions in themselves.
Underground MRT tunnels are moved up as water levels rise but they carry more than just trains in this new world. Multi-level viaducts 15m above the ground stack bicycle lanes and running tracks on top of the train tracks.
And energy supplies are secure because the northern part of the island has become a solar farm. All buildings within the 100sqkm zone are fitted with rooftop mirrors directing sunlight onto a 900m 'energy tower' which then converts the sun's rays to electricity.
In the north-west, waves supply power. Underwater turbines harness the energy from seawater moving through a narrowed channel, built in front of lushly landscaped apartment blocks.
Meanwhile, Jurong has become a plantation to feed Singapore. The industrial buildings of old are stacked underneath fields that grow anything, from rice to coconuts. There are even fish farms within the compact 'plantation'.
The East Coast retains its laid-back charm. High-density housing developments stand above dykes integrated with attractions like seafood farms, scuba-diving schools and spas.
With seafront homes so appealing, older Housing Board flats inland fall out of favour. The vacant HDB blocks are converted to high-rise farms. Each block houses just one or two families, with the rest taken up by pigs, cows and chickens on some levels, and vegetables on others.
Farming, in 2050, has become a new-age industry in a country that has kept the tide at bay.
Car-sharing the smart way
Straits Times 27 Nov 09;
TRANSPORT planners call it the 'first mile, last mile' problem - how do you get people to give up cars when it takes ages on public transport to get to the subway station from their home?
The people at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology reckon they have cracked the conundrum - a vehicle-sharing system of thousands of small electric cars, foldable scooters and motorised bicycles.
These vehicles can be rented on a one-way basis and do not have to be returned to their original location. Users can park them at stations located at every two or three blocks, switch to a different vehicle, or even hop on public transport. Someone going grocery shopping can hire a bicycle to get to the supermarket and return in a hired electric car.
The system's flexibility saves the city precious space taken up by empty private cars waiting for owners in carparks, or large cars occupied only by the driver.
A tiered pricing system also manages the demand for these electric vehicles during different times of the day.
The genius of the plan partly lies in the vehicles themselves, says Mr Ryan Chin, a research assistant with the Smart Cities group at MIT's Media Laboratory.
It developed a prototype of an electric vehicle, called the CityCar (photo), which has special wheels that let it move sideways like a crab, making it perfect for tight parking spaces. To make it even more compact, the CityCar can also be 'folded' - three can fit into a standard sedan parking space.
The vehicle is charged by induction, the way electric toothbrushes are charged now. This wireless charging means that the car can be charged the moment it is driven into its designated lot, saving both time and space.
If enough CityCars are put on the road, they could also function as a source of emergency power, says Mr Chu. With a smart electricity grid in place, the power from each car's 20MW battery could be fed back into the system to power a city in the event of a blackout.
The electricity from 4,000 CityCars alone would be able to power a city like Boston for two minutes, he says.
Alternatively, having the same number of vehicles on our roads could serve as a back-up power plant for Singapore.
Virtual shopping, but in 3D
Straits Times 27 Nov 09;
IF YOU like the convenience of Internet shopping, you will love what's coming up by 2050 - instant purchase, instant goods.
Picture this: You want to buy a ring for your loved one, but instead of heading to the jewellers, you get on the Internet.
You click on a button to buy a blueprint of a design you like and transfer that information to a personal 3D printer. Within minutes, the machine has worked its magic and you have a carved band of metal in your hands.
Not science fiction, but a very real possibility in the next 40 years, says Mr Feng Zhu, a Chinese-American who runs the local FZD School of Design.
Industrial 3D printers that now create precise models from various resins will eventually become cheap enough to be used by the average person, he says.
The new world of possibilities this opens up for consumers seems endless.
Yet, Mr Feng's version of a 2050 world is not radically different from our world today. Its one key feature would be that technologies that are currently too expensive or limited to just military or industrial use will one day make their way into everyone's homes.
And even that feature is not that new. After all, Mr Feng points out, global positioning system technology existed in the military for close to 40 years before it made its way into civilian hands.
So three-dimensional mapping cameras used by the military now could soon be in use in everyday spaces like shopping centres.
Window displays armed with such technology will become interactive so they can scan the body types of passers-by. Shoppers will then be able to see images of themselves in the latest fashions without even stepping into a store. And if they like what they see in the window display, they can step into the shop confident that its assistants already know what sizes they require.
As more and more movies go digital, the clunky film reels of old will no longer need to be transported to cinemas for films to be screened.
Movie-goers need not fret if they miss the screening of their favourite film. They will be able to vote for a rerun via their mobile phone, and then head to a cinema when enough people indicate their interest in catching it.
Meanwhile, as more and more tiny storage devices come onstream, software will become portable. Software like Photoshop, for example, will no longer have to be installed in each machine but will be carried around in a credit card-sized device by each user.
When the user wants to access the programme, all he will need to do is stick the card into any computer, as is done with a USB flash drive.
