Print

The device that helped a baby breathe again, custom designed and 3D printed.

3D printing is used often in the design world to model things that you couldn't model manually (i.e. by hand) and the printers are getting more and more affordable, with some even becoming 'open source', so you can make your own using a design on the internet. The range of applications stretch to even the 3D printing of most of a gun, which is shocking and slightly disturbing.

Now there is a story of a bioresorbable splint being made by much finer biomedical processes that involve the scanning and modelling of a baby's breathing tube. Thanks to the University of Michigan and Glenn Green, M.D, with the cast (shown above), a skeleton can be made to help the breathing tube not collapse and then in 3 years time it will be reabsorbed into the body. There's engineering, medical design and materiality playing a big part in this innovation.

What's more, this concept may be able to be applied to other medical conditions. The custom made nature of the technology means that it is adaptable and with bodies being different from one to the other it will be great to see where this all goes.

Thanks to +Alice Pan for the heads up. It's been a few weeks since I've blogged - yesterday I had my mid-year presentation. Hopefully I'll find time to blog about it though! For other blogs on Creative Collision about science (and it does exist here as a category), visit the Science section.

Aqua

What better advertisement for a university for innovation in Peru than a billboard that demonstrates that innovation. The billboard collects humidity and has become a bit of a useful attraction for locals by providing filtered drinking water. I wish more advertisements were this useful, or at least this meaningful.

For more about UTEC's billboard, see the article by BBC.

Medicine

Often creativity is stereotyped as a fluffy practice where one paints or draws or designs something but creativity also encompasses a great deal of innovation. In fact, it's more of a culture for being able to think beyond the box. A blog post on Not Another Quarter-Life Crisis brings up this idea as the blogger (a medical doctor herself), commented on the role of creativity in the field of medicine and why it isn't an integrated part of medical work culture.

One of my fellow house officers paints in his spare time, another writes poetry. I can think of a couple who play musical instruments to a professional standard, and another few that composes on their nights off. I think overall we’re a pretty creative bunch, and handpicked for medical school because of our interests outside of academia.

And yet one of the biggest problems I have with the medical system is the lack of creativity.

Medical school is regimental, it rewards conformity, and rarely provides the opportunity for critical and creative thinking. Being a junior doctor is worse. Before becoming house officers we were told the most important skill to have in order to survive the next few years is time management. Not an ability to analyse or problem-solve, nor an ability to make decisions, but rather efficiency, an ability to keep your head down and finish the jobs.

Being new to the medical system we have different perspectives and fresh ideas, and yet we often lack the opportunity to express them. Who do we tell for it to be taken seriously? And who wants to listen to us naive idealists anyway?

I believe the formality of medical school and the ensuing hierarchy within the medical system is crushing our creative spirits, and the healthcare industry is losing out. Imagine if we can turn all those creative energies into innovations! How? I’m not exactly sure. Maybe a FedEx Day as this author recommends may help, maybe not. But let’s start brainstorming, and start nurturing those creative juices right from day one of medical school.

In a way medicine is built on a foundation of formality, procedure and (at times) bureaucracy, but none of our largest medical advances were ever made from conforming to procedure. Is scientific research creative? It might not be the kind of organic expression that you might expect from the word 'creativity', but it does create advances in medical practice.

Understandably, in today's world, conformity has become the norm - accountability and rigid systems efficiency doesn't allow much leeway for ideas, let alone change. Medicine might have a completely different feel if the 'creative juices' were a part of practicing medicine and this can be said for many other fields where followed processes is encouraged, even in 'creative' fields such as architecture (where planning permission can stifle even the most humble of designs).

Along the lines of creative problem solving, an article by New Scientist cites a journal which found that people who feel anger brainstorm in a more unstructured way, consistent with creative problem-solving. Anger is often seen as a negative emotion, but examples of how controlled anger can be used for great effect are people like Gandhi and Nelson Mandela. Of course, how you express or use your anger is up to you. To quote the former: "You must be the change you want to see in the world."

Thanks Alice for her blog (shown above) - you can see more from her on Not Another Quarter-Life Crisis. You can also see more about creativity and science here on Creative Collision.

Deadly

Today in the office I heard someone say "I wouldn't wish meningococcal on anyone!" (nor would I..) There's a real fear about the deadliest of diseases, the intangible danger and risk of catching one of these nasties belies the true from of these strange organisms.

Artist Luke Jerram takes these microscopic forms and, magnified countless times, creates glass sculptures. Whether or not a feat of biology or evolution, the established shape is mesmerisingly beautiful but at the same moment, terrifying. Terrifying that these shapes, honed to perfection for efficiency of invasion, can enter a blood stream and cause a horrific struggle with one's own body.

Aesthetically, are we drawn to these nature built forms? The prettiest of flowers vs these intricate forms. But once you know what it is - flashbacks from your biology textbook perhaps - these amazing creatures can really freak you out especially as a glass sculpture. Especially the virus one, more by common association more than anything.

I've come to notice there are an increasing number of posts that involve science on Creative Collision so now there is a new Science tag for those who might be interested in the marrying of science and creativity! As a great fan of science, they have some really amazing work out there and just because they aren't usually considered a creative discipline doesn't mean they don't work together.

Higgs

Many of us who are not involved with the science world probably heard about the ground breaking Higgs Boson 'discovery' but had no idea what it is or the relevance of it. I had the pleasure of having an engineering friend try to explain it to me (with fervour) but it was hopeless - I just didn't really get it.

The artist Josef Kristofoletti was given the task of visualising this phenomenon and I get this one! A mural of the Large Hadron Collider, it's a homage to the discovery but also something pretty for the rest of us. Look at how it transforms those budget tilt slab walls! Remember humans built this enormous piece of equipment, but the sheer scale of it is wondrous.

This guy is a human printer.

Destruction

The humble beginnings of the nuclear arsenal used around 1945 were not quite so humble. The Trinity Atomic Bomb pictured above was the first of the USA's repertoire of mass destruction and concentrates a mass of nuclear science, functional design and a will to destroy.

Martin Miller, a photographer who tends to disseminate the grit of mankind, created a visual perspective of the atomic bomb's history with a series called the "Manhattan Project". Reduced to objects devoid of humans, humanity seems to be sucked out of these images yet the subject itself has everything to do with humanity. It is a bare bones view of these weapons of mass destruction. However you see it, whether as an intriguing design or an alienesque calamity that a bunch of humans dreamt up, it is a very relevant topic of today and these images offer an objective look at what has led up to it.

Plastic

Recently the fashion publication Lucire did a feature on plastic surgery from a plastic surgeon's point of view. An article written by Dr Luciano Lanfranchi himself, he outlines the guidelines and concerns he has with his own field and practice. Many of the points mentioned are directly related to the creative disciplines in general.

Harmony, proportion and safety are in different ways applicable to other creative practitioners. In architecture, for example, harmony of the 'architectural intervention' with the existing fabric of the city must be maintained. Proportion of the spaces and how the building sits on the site a huge factor in urban design and safety for those who use the creative product is guarded by a tome of building standards.

The tricky thing about Dr Lanfranchi's form of art is that he is modifying the human body itself. Whereas a field such as fashion works with the body, plastic surgeons work on the body. We know the human body intimately - the human figure has been studied intensely from every angle, from medical anatomy to Da Vinci's detailed studies. The difficulty is in the involvement of a unique individual:

Even if these three fundamental concepts represent the meeting point between a plastic surgeon, an architect, a designer, and a musician, we rarely strike 1 + 1 = 2 in medicine, since there are a lot of possible variables that change from patient to patient.

That’s why we are all like single snowflakes: unique and unrepeatable.

So does medicine carry the ultimate burden of the creative? It works with the most fundamental building block of humanity - the body and in doing so, the mind. Nor is it sheer creation but working with the framework that already exists. I was surprised at how similar the issues that a plastic surgeon has to deal with are to the other creative arts - so vastly different but with the same undercurrents that we can all learn from.

Read the original article at Lucire's website.

Ferment

Fashion made from a scientifically derived process isn't something completely fresh off the mark, but fermenting your own fabric is an interesting concept and multi-layered in many ways. The notion suggested in the interview is that the designer, Suzanne Lee, is trying to convey science through fashion. And that is fashion in the sense that it becomes 'fashionable'.

Dreamy detailing can be achieved with that strange alienesque material, which is really quite brilliant considering it was previously alike to a piece of gelatin. Furthermore, the great attention to the process in this creative project strives towards the detail of the overall scheme; hydrophobia, and thickness and qualities of the material and how they translate into the final result of 'clothing'. Rigorous development such as this should bring forth a great deal of surprises. Possibly, all thanks to science.

Visit http://biocouture.posterous.com/ for more about Biocouture, the project, or read more at the New Scientist article. Yes, I am geeky and I love New Scientist. In a creative way.

Sparkle

Pretty image huh? It's all natural and glowy, and you almost expect it of an Apple computer. It's the thing of calming screensavers. So what is the story behind this image?

Sperm. So the story is, there have been experiments where scientists have tagged mice sperm with UV and been seeing how they react. They bunch together for the challenge at hand, so to speak. And what's more, if the sperm find sperm of another male, the "brothers" will bunch together and literally crush the opposition.

Charming. Don't you love how images can give you so many thousands of words but hide what might be the true story?

Sun

The field of science offers an array of interesting images. Things we would never see, for instance minuscule microorganisms or unimaginably distant galaxies. Recently, with the NASA's Solar Dynamics Observatory, the sun in which we are so attached to has been put under scrutiny, and with that, a whole new way of seeing the sun.

To most of us, the sun appears as the morphing ball of light that allows us to live, grow and survive. It is also fundamental to how we create creatively - so much is visual because of its light, a culture. With new technology, science is seeing the sun in a whole new way. Fascinatingly, these images are quite a beautiful spectacle in its own right. I wouldn't mind having one of these framed to remind us of the sun's seed of light.