Design for dolphins and other non-humans
I visited a sciency design exhibit and share some pictures. Plus, the usual interesting links
Last week I visited the Design Museum in London to see the press preview of the new More Than Human exhibit. It’s the kind of exhibit that you would usually find at the Science Gallery or the Wellcome Collection, with art directly inspired by and informing research. The concept of More Than Human is to put a spotlight on design that is not just made for people but that keeps all of nature in mind.
The image above is a photo I took of the large mural by César Rodríguez-Garavito and Elena Landinez, which incorporates phrases from various documents that assign legal rights to rivers. I didn’t really get to include this in my Forbes summary, where I focused more on works that tapped into mycelium and pollinators, but I thought it was a nice picture for the newsletter. I also briefly mentioned that my favourite part of the exhibit was a 1974 proposal by the collective Ant Farm to build an underwater dolphin language learning laboratory, but I didn’t include pictures there.
Here are some of the “dolphin embassy” images.
You can read my longer review of the exhibit on Forbes.
Interesting Links
Billions of phones can detect and warn about nearby earthquakes. By Jeremy Hsu for New Scientist.
The 16th-century artist who created the first compendium of insect drawings. By Grace Ebert for Colossal
Neanderthals might have shared family recipes. By Molly Glick for Nautilus
Art meets AI to reinvent tomorrow’s food systems. By Hannah Docter-Loeb for Horizon
The Wellcome Photography Prize announced its winners. (One of them is the cholesterol image I already noticed when I highlighted the shortlist last month.)
Some of the things I link to are behind “metered paywalls”: you can access them as long as you haven’t already read too many articles in that publication.