Personal Infrastructures

Working on some link house-cleaning and came up with a few posts that seems to thread together in an interesting narrative. The first of this was a beautiful installation for the 'Flower Street BioReactor' via Dezeen: "Los Angeles architects Emergent have designed an installation filled with green algae that produce oil by photosynthesis." This sort of decentralization of energy generation, which seemed to be a 2009 emerging idea.




:: images via Dezeen

Another is a more functional pavement called Pavegen, which uses the ability to capture the continual motion of urban footsteps (via Inhabitat): "Every time a rubber Pavegen stone is stepped on it bends, producing kinetic energy that is either stored within lithium polymer batteries or distributed to nearby lights, information displays, and much more. Just five slabs spread over a lively sidewalk has the ability to generate enough energy to illuminate a bus stop throughout the night."


:: image via Inhabitat

We also carry with us powerful communication infrastructure, which uses more and more energy to stay powered. This leads to small-scale personal solar power for small devices, such as these skins for I-phones.


:: image via Treehugger

Or dual solar / wind charging like the K2 from Kinesis:


:: image via Treehugger

The ability to embed the landscape with energy-generation is one thing, but the logical next step will include a variety of wearable and portable and thus will become ubiquitous, as mentioned on Treehugger: "Yanko Design shows off an idea for a personal solar power pole. It's hardly a new idea (or hardly a bad idea...we love personal solar power around here), but the designer's concept image might slap us out of a gadget-obsessed stupor. When a beach scene looks like this, we know we're done for."


:: image via Treehugger

Perhaps this is just more junk to keep our ever expanding amount of junk running. When this is happening on the beach, it may be time to unplug.