BIOC #1 - Individual Ideation - Sensitive Plant

Definition

Mimosa pudica, commonly known as "sensitive plant," "sleeping grass" or "touch-me-not," is a creeping annual or perennial herb often grown for its curiosity value: the compound leaves fold inward and droop when touched or shaken, re-opening minutes later.

Mimosa pudica is a member of the Mimosaceae family. Its name is derived from the Greek work for "mimic" and the Latin word for "bashful" or "shrinking." The species is native to South America and Central America, but is now a pantropical weed.

Features

Mimosa pudica has a thorny stem and pale green leaves resembling those of ferns. The leaves are bipinnately compound, with one or two pinnae pairs, and 10-26 leaflets per pinna. The leaves are known for closing in on themselves when touched or exposed to other stimuli such as fire and wind.

The prickly stem of the Mimosa pudica is slender and upright in a young plant and trails like a ground cover as the plant ages. The leaves grow in pairs on either side of three-inch stems branching off of the main stem.

Reproduction

Mimosa pudica seeds are spread by either water or their bristles, which stick to animal fur or human clothing. Mimosa pudica blooms in mid to late summer, producing fluffy pink flowers that take a spherical shape. Its flowers produce long seed pods, each with three to four light brown seeds and require either bees or the wind for pollination.

Energy Acquiring

Like many other legumes, the sensitive plant acquires energy from an association with nitrogen-fixing bacteria, which live within its root nodules. The plants make use of certain form of atmosphere nitrogen which converted by the bacteria, and then grow upon its aids.

Process of leaflet movement

The leaves of the Mimosa pudica have long fascinated people, because the leaflets fold together on touching, warming and shaking. This plant employs both nyctinastic and seismonastic movements. The first phenomenon is called seismonastic movement due to a rapid change in their internal (turgor) pressure and changes in membrane permeability in the pulvini cells in the leaf regions with rapid movement of calcium ions. It is the temporary movement of a plant in reaction to touch, warmth, or lack of water. This movement is accomplished by an electrical and chemical response in the plant. At night, the leaves also fold and bend, and reopen during the day, termed nyctonastic movements (reaction to absence of light).

l  Function

The opening and closing of the plants' leaflets and the entire leaf are controlled by a fluid filled sac-like structures found at the base of the compound leaf and each leaflet. The swollen base of the leaf stalk is called ‘pulvinus’. When the plant is touched, electrical signals are flashed by the cells. The cells in the ‘pulvinus’ respond to this signal by flushing out potassium and water. With the massive loss of water, the pulvinus bends over and the leaflets fold.

How do the leaflet movement feature work to its advantage?

The ability to fold its leaves may benefit the sensitive plant in three ways. It has been observed that folded and drooped leaves are not attractive to herbivores, and are often passed by in favor of more normal appearing leaves to eat. Plus, the sensitive plant may also fold its leaves in an attempt to exchange less water and prevent to be too dry. The undersides of leaves are lined with tiny holes, called stomata, through which the plants breathe. Plants lose significant amounts of water while exchanging gas through the stomata, so the plant can conserve water by closing off as many stomata as possible. Finally, sensitive plants close their leaves when not exposed to the sun, which the drooped leaves would thus exchange less heat. In what is called a "nyctinastic response" the plant responds to dropping levels of sunlight by closing its leaves, keeping them safe through the night.

Threats:

The sensitive plant is threatened and suffering from pests such as red spider mite, thrips and mealy bugs.

Creative Ideas from the leaflet movement feature

l  Safe Window

Based on the folding and bending feature of the sensitive plants, windows that are able to protect the house from theft or robbery can be developed by applying this leaflet movement function. Basically, the set or device which equipped with such function would not really appeared as plants’ leaves, but only takes advantage of Mimosa pudica’s smart and sensitive feature. Specifically, since the nyctinastic movement would cause drooped leaves during the night. The window would only implement the movement of seismonastic which would react to human’s touch. Once the thief intends to climb across the window and touches the screen, the set will automatically folding or bending like the sensitive plant and thus be able to catch the thief.

l Energy-saving and Thermostatic Greenhouse

      
      One of the remarkable movements that enable the sensitive plant to fold its leaves is seismonastic movement which is the temporary movement of a plant in reaction to touch, warmth, or lack of water. According to the benefits mentioned above from this movement, folded and drooped leaves exchange less heat and water than fully expanded leaves in attempt to become too dry,  hot or cold. This kind of adaptive feature could be used to create an energy-saving and thermostatic greenhouse for farmers and gardeners. The greenhouse could be covered with a fabric that functions like the sensitive plant. By controlling the temperature and moisture automatically like the sensitive plant, this kind of fabric (or other possible materials) would keep the greenhouse at a constant temperature and prevent the seedlings or flowers in the greenhouse from dryness and frostbite.

References:

1.       Barneby, R. (1991). Sensitivae censitae: a description of the genus Mimosa Linnaeus (Mimosaceae) in the New   World. New York Botanical Garden, New York.

2.       Weintraub, M. (1951). Leaf movements in Mimosa pudica L. New Phytol. 50: 357-382.

3.       http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mimosa_pudica

4.       http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thisgmonasty

5.       http://www.mls.sophia.ac.jp/~kanzawa/research-e.html

6.       http://www.hindu.com/thehindu/seta/2001/12/06/stories/2001120600130400.htm



Sawyer's Group Genius Big Points

The Collaborative Team

Seven key characteristics of effective creative teams:

l       Innovation emerges over time. Successful innovations happen when organizations combine just the right ideas in just the right structure.

l        Successful collaborative teams practice deep listening. Most people spend too much time planning their own actions and not enough time listening and observing others.

l        Team members build on their collaborators’ ideas. When teams practice deep listening, each new idea is an extension of the ideas that have come before.

l        Only afterwards does the meaning of each idea become clear. Ideas don’t take on their full importance until they’re taken up, reinterpreted, and applied by others. 

l        Surprising questions emerge. Most transformative creativity results when a group either thinks of a new way to frame a problem or finds a new problem that no one had noticed before.

l        Innovation is inefficient. Improvised innovation makes more mistakes, and has as many misses as hits.

l        Innovation emerges from the bottom up. The improvisational collaboration of the entire group translates moments of individual creativity into group innovation.

Conditions for group flow:

l        The group has a specific goal to achieve or problem to solve.

l        Everyone is fully engaged in deep listening in which members of the group don’t plan ahead what they’re going to say but speak in response to what they hear.

l        The group is focused on the natural progress emerging from members’ work, not on meeting a deadline set by management.

l       People are in control of their actions and their environment, when they feel autonomy, competence, and relatedness.

l        Each person is feely able to build their ideas on those just contributed by others.

l       All participants play an equal role in the collective creation.

l       All the players share an understanding of the group’s goals and share a communication style to respond mutually to each other.

l        Conversations are continuous, freewheeling, and spontaneous.

l        People listen to what’s being said, accept it fully, and then extend and build on it.

l       Tensions are in balance: convention and novelty, structure and improvisation, critical and freewheeling thinking, and listening and speaking.

Traditional brainstorming, which aims for volume, does not work. When groups are asked to suggest good, creative solutions, they have fewer ideas but those ideas are better than those generated using traditional brainstorming rules.

l        Don’t use groups for additive tasks—tasks that people could do separately and then sum up. Instead, use them for complex and improvisational tasks.

l        Keep groups to the minimum number of members required; this will reduce social loafing and production blocking.

l       Use a facilitator who knows the research about what brainstorming formats work the best, and who knows how to help the group avoid production blocking and social inhibition.

l        Because complex and unexpected innovations emerge from innovative groups as a whole, group rewards need to be in place.

l      Allow the group to alternate work with frequent breaks, and switch constantly between group and individual activity.

l        To take advantage of increased innovation of diverse groups, compose groups with complementary skills.

l       Keep in mind that group members who are low in social anxiety and who enjoy group interaction will perform better.

l       Brainstorming works best in an organization that enjoys a culture of innovation where brainstorming meetings are held so often that they’re just part of doing business.

The Collaborative Mind

The creative sparks are always embedded in a collaborative process with five basic stages:

1.      Preparation: This involves a period of working hard, studying the problem, and talking to everyone else working on it.

2.      Time off: The team member changes context and engages in other activities— often in conversation with others.

3.      The spark: During time off, a solution appears; but that solution is deeply embedded in the knowledge and social interactions of the preparation and time-off phases, and it builds on sparks that others have had.

4.      Selection: An “Aha!” feeling that doesn’t always mean the idea is good. Creative people are very good at selecting the best ideas for follow-up, or they collaborate with others in selecting them.

5.      Elaboration: Working out the idea typically requires a lot of additional ideas. Bringing them all together always requires social interaction and collaboration.

Some myths about creativity have been contradicted by experimental research:

l  “We’re blocked from creativity by our past experiences and our unwarranted assumptions.” To the contrary, eliminating the false assumption only makes the problem slightly easier.

l  “When you break out of your fixation, the solution should come quickly and easily in a spark of insight.” Instead, the “outside” hint opens up a new problem-solving domain, but that domain also requires expertise and prior experience.

l  “Insight solutions are independent of prior knowledge.” In reality, training in similar problems helps immensely.

Insight isn’t different from everyday thought; it moves forward, step by step, and even when we’re not consciously aware of what our minds are doing, we’re still using everyday brain processes.

Collaboration makes the mind more creative because working with others gives you new and unexpected concepts and makes it more likely that your mind will engage in the most creative types of conceptual creativity—combining distant concepts, elaborating concepts by modifying their core features, and creating new concepts.

Indirect speech, unlike explicit speech, is impossible to understand out of context. This context-dependence is called indexicality; the most creative speech is highly indexical—deeply embedded in the immediate social context. Indirect statements open up more possibilities for the listener, and resulting conversation becomes more a collaborative creation. Ideas that open possibilities contribute to innovation by making it easier for ideas to be reused to solve a different and unexpected problem elsewhere in the organization.

An organizational culture that fosters equivocally, improvised innovation, and constant conversation is a recipe for group genius.

The Collaborative Organization

Innovation today isn’t a sudden break with the past, a brilliant insight that one lone outsider pushes through to save the company. Just the opposite: Innovation today is a continuous process of small and constant change, and it’s built into the culture of successful companies.

The culture of collaborative organization is based on flexibility, connection, and conversation; improvised innovation is standard business practice. Companies that use smaller teams and fewer hierarchical levels are more innovative.

If innovation is linear, the idea stage can be separated out and placed in a more creative unit of the organization, and the execution can still take place in a more traditional bureaucratic structure. But although separation can be good for short-term creativity, it interferes with long-term innovation: An isolated “skunk works” usually has trouble communicating with the rest of the organization because innovation requires collaboration across the company.

The most transformative new products and systems emerge from many small sparks of insight. Successful innovative companies keep those small sparks coming fromthe organization, each spark inspiring the next one.  individuals throughout the organization, each spark coming from individuals throughout the organization, each spark inspiring the next one.

The most innovative companies do ten things that foster collaboration and innovation:

l       Keep many irons in the fire. Allow ideas to be tested quickly, less promising projects to be terminated early, and make all new sparks visible so that other teams can adopt them.

l       Create a department of surprise. One way that collaborative organizations recognize emerging ideas is with “idea marketplaces,” autonomous teams that identify radical innovations. These “departments of surprise” search for ideas throughout the company and are responsible for commercializing them.

l      Build spaces for creative conversation. Open spaces feed into the natural flow of collaborative innovation—helping ideas to move from one area to another, allowing spontaneous conversations to emerge, and strengthening informal information-sharing networks.

l       Allow time for ideas to emerge. Low-pressure situations allow for collaborative conversations to unfold, and that’s where innovations emerge.

l       Manage the risks of improvisation. When people are improvising, they must take time away from planned projects, improvisation can make it impossible to sustain a central vision and long-term strategy, and too many new ideas might bubble up.

l       Improvise on the edge of chaos. The most successful innovators use limited structures, not too rigid to prevent emergent innovation but not too lose to result in total chaos.

l        Manage knowledge for innovation. The collaborative organization excels at transferring to other groups the ideas that emerge from good improvisations.

l     Build dense networks. When information is shared through collaboration, and decision making is decentralized, there’s no need for a hierarchy to gather and channel information to a single decision maker. Instead, the manager is a catalyst and facilitator, acting as a connector between groups, a cross-pollinator and carrier of knowledge.

l       Ditch the organization chart. Create loosely coupled organizations. 

l        Measure the right things. First, count the proportion of time spent on small exploratory projects (more is better). Second, measure the average the average length of a project before being terminated (shorter is better). Third, examine how well the organization celebrates and rewards failure.

Collaborative webs are more important than creative people.

l  Each innovation builds incrementally on a long history of prior inventions. 

l  Successful innovation is a combination of many small sparks.

l  There is frequent interaction among teams.

l  Multiple discovery is common.

l  No one company can own the web.

To release the innovation potential of society:

l  Reduce copyright terms.

l  Reward small sparks.

l  Legalize modification of products for personal use.

l  Free employees from noncompete clauses.

l  Impose mandatory licensing. 

l  Pool patents across companies. 

l  Encourage industry-wide standards.

YTU #1 - Kenya Hara's design philosophy

Back to the Origin

A case study of Kenya Hara’s design philosophy

Objectives:

l  By discussing the case study of this famous Japanese designer, learn two of the most important creative concepts of his design philosophy – Redesign and Haptic, to think different, through introductions of several interesting examples from exhibitions directed by Kenya Hara.

l  By practicing the activities within the concepts and ideas, let people implement the concepts they learn in this case study to solve the challenges and problems we are encountered in daily life, thus get a deeper understanding on Hara’s creative philosophies.

l  By summarizing some implications and conclusions, make people start to think about the importance of going back to origin and applying sensation when it comes to designing and creativity, about the responsibility of sustainable designing and emphasize the accessibility of designing for normal people by extracting astounding ideas from the crevices of the very commonness of everyday life.

Course Outline:

1.       Who is Kenya Hara

2.       Back to origin – Redesign

 - Activities (Exercise on redesigning the toilet paper and chocolate bar)

3.       The art of constructing the information – Haptic (Awakening the senses)

4.     Implications (In this written lesson plan, this part is included in each course content below, but not shown separately.)

5.       Conclusion

6.       Further extensions

7.       Assessments

Course Content

1. Kenya Hara’s profile

Born in 1958, Kenya Hara is a graphic designer, professor at the Musashino Art University and, since 2002, the art director of MUJI. He is interested in designing “circumstances” or “conditions” rather than “things.” Mr. Hara has traveled the world widely in an attempt to investigate the meaning of “design.” He incorporated traditional Japanese cultural features in designing the opening and closing ceremonies of the Nagano Winter Olympics, as well as in the promotion of the Aichi EXPO. He has received numerous design awards, including the Japanese Cultural Design Award. His book, Design of Design (Iwanami Shoten, 2003) received the Suntory Arts and Science Award, and its new revised and expanded English edition, DESIGNING DESIGN (Lars Müller Publishers, Switzerland, 2007) has reached readers all over the world. (http://www.autumnschool.asia/biography.html)

Hara also collaborates often with creators around the world, giving them exciting projects to do in Japan, and by doing so is helping to build the next generation of an international design network with a strong base in Japan. All of this Kenya Hara has done because he is well-educated, cares deeply about the quality of life, and has a powerful set of ideas about what designers can do to make our lives truly pleasant, and what Japanese experience and understanding can do to add to this better future.

2. Back to Origin - Re-design

“Design is not the act of amazing an audience with the novelty of forms or materials; it is the originality that repeatedly extracts astounding ideas from the crevices of the very commonness of everyday life.” - Hara

For Hara, designing means to take the familiar and present it in a different way, different from the intuitive. Design creates change in the familiar. The familiar is the sum of all past experiences and memories, and what design do is to resonate them within it and present them in a renewed form. Thus, according to Hara, design is always re-design, and not new design.

Re-design does not create a new world, a new object; it creates changes in the extant, and as such it requires sensitivity toward individual and social past. It has to be sensitive and take affordance into consideration, the ability to change and be changed, it has to respect the whole and blend into it.

He pushed a project on this concept by inviting 32 designers to redesign 32 different objects that we are using every day: Children book, toilet paper, tea bag, matches, stamps, etc., provided people a new way to use these daily stuff. Those new faces became more easily to operate and efficient or even cut down the cost and give users a whole new experience.

What Hara wanted to prove in this project was that: in our normal daily life, we can still make amazing changes, from which the designs could bring a brand new revolution to our life. Design is not just endless exploitation, which will lead to the depletion of nature resources. If we use the number as an example, design is not pursuing 5, 6, 7, 8, 9…the key trick is to find 6.3 or 6.8 between 6 and 7, because between these two simple numbers there are a lot of, or infinite possibilities. His project can also inspire both designers and us about how do we redesign the object and make the new product to be sustainable.

Examples from the Redesign exhibition: (Pictures and details shown in PPT slides.)

Entry/Exit visa stamps

 Adhesive roll roach trap

Twig match

Disposable diapers

Activities: More to less

Living within your means can often be hard, especially in a society that courts consumerism. Concepts like portion control, green living, and thinking local for our weekly produce needs seem entirely feasible in our minds. Then we find ourselves wilting when confronted with a Costco-sized bargain. Of course I need twenty rolls of jumbo paper towels…

Whether we like it or not, we contribute to this dialogue between the consumer and the consumed. As consumers ourselves, we find it hard to resist splurging on what might be—for our world’s future—a wasteful purchase.

So for this challenge, help to reduce that waste! How can you use your design skills to make more out of less and encourage people to use that reduced quantity in a more mindful manner?

Exercise 1:

I will give the group a roll of toilet paper, and explain the problem we are facing with in the daily life: we often waste much more tissue paper in the bathroom than we really need. So there comes the question: how can you think about a solution to redesign the toilet paper that can help people use less?

Possible solution:

 

Shigeru Ban’s redesign of the conventional toilet paper roll, for Kenya Hara’s exhibition “RE-DESIGN”

The thinking behind the square toilet paper rolls is that it is more ecological. For one, the square tubes make the tissue paper form square shapes as well. This allows them to be packed with minimum empty space between the rolls (unlike the round toilet paper rolls) and thus more products can be transported at a time. The second point I will quote from Kenya Hara:

Placed into the dispenser and pulled out for use, the square rolls resists, with a clunky sound of “kata-kata-kata.” The conventional round roll, on the other hand, moves along smoothly, lightly pulled to the refrain of “suuh-suuh-suuh.” The traditional design gives you more paper than you need. The square toilet paper, on the other hand, generates resistance, functioning to reduce the consumption of resources and also deliver the message: economize. 

-Kenya Hara, ‘Designing Design’ pg. 27

Excercise 2:

A challenge inspired by designer Tithi Kutchamuch, who said “I buy Twix Extra because it’s only ten pence more expensive… I finish it in one go, and feel guilty for the rest of the day… Bargain food persuades people by playing with the value of money, which has brought a lot of problems to society: over nutrition, eating disorders, obesity, illness, guilt, wasting food, wasting resources, over production, etc. Can design make people buy food that offers less?”

Redesign the packaging of chocolate bar that is able to solve the problem above.

Possible solution:

Just make hollows in the chocolate bars with some cute shape such as hearts and rabbits, without cutting down the regular size, which will be pleasant looking as well as buying, even the truth turns out that people would eat less than usual.

3. The art of constructing the information – Haptic (Awakening the senses)

“Design is the provocation of the senses and a way to make us discern the world afresh.” - Hara

The term "haptic" means "relating or pleasant to the sense of touch". Long ago, we became a technology-driven society; that is technology leads not only the economy, but also society. On the other hand, we might expect that, going along with scientific progress, there might be an evolution of the making of objects pivoting on the pursuit of an arousal of the senses. That contrasting world would be called "sense driven".

The main point of design is not how to create an object, but how to stimulate the senses, "design of the senses", to create creative stimulation of human senses. Hara does not regard the senses as information receptors, but as openings to the world; the way in which man interacts with the world. Sensory experiences are integrative and cannot be separated and defined by means of the five senses - sight, hearing, touch, taste and smell. Just as sensation is integrative, thus too is meaning. Meaning is not obtained in the brain in our heads, but in all the "brains" scattered throughout our body, in all the memories ingrained in them. By exploring how senses work, the starting point of design changes, becomes different. The designer must think how he can awaken and stimulate the senses before he presents shape and color. If we focus on sensations we will discover an unexplored aspect of design. New sensory experiences design a renewed, different, and changing reality.

For the exhibition held in 2004, Hara asked 22 participants--including architects, designers, a traditional Japanese plasterer and the design team of a high-tech household electric appliances manufacturer-- to design an object motivated primarily by the goal of "awakening the senses". The concept of "haptic" becomes instantly tangible, benefitting tremendously from the participation of these brilliant creators. It talks about how to bring the natural feeling into the product and make users start to think about what’s the relation between man and environment.

Examples from the Haptic exhibition: 

Juice skin packaging

Nature textured geta

Gel remote control

Kami Tama hairy lanterns

                                  

                                     

4. Conclusions

Life is the origin of designing; we cannot be constrained by the presence form of products, but to go back to the starting point, to reconsider their functions and needs. And the ultimately purpose of design is to better our daily life.

The responsibility of designers is not only to complete a work creatively, but also to take the development of sustainable society into account, to express their attention and care on it.

Everyone could be a designer, because life is filled with “touching point” of creative design, which can be accessed by our basic sensations, and thus we could be able to taste, discover, design, and enjoy our daily life.

5   5. Further extensions

      

      The book: Kenya Hara, Designing the design (2007) Publisher: Lars Müller Publishers, Pages: 467

Some highlighting points:

•       Ex-formation (Make the known to be unknown)

•       White

•       Emptiness (Nothing, but everything)

Sources: Wikipedia + “Designing design” by Kenya Hara