Innovation and the role technology plays in design is at the forefront of Dubai Design Week’s Global Grad Show, 26 - 31 October, with an array of exciting experimental works exhibiting in the city, including the world’s first musical cactus!
Innovation and the role technology plays in design is at the forefront of Dubai Design Week’s Global Grad Show, 26 - 31 October, with an array of exciting experimental works exhibiting in the city, including the world’s first musical cactus!
Cactunes is an experimental project that attempts to stretch the limits of the smart home by infusing it with a sense of humour; questioning if our increasingly intimate relationship with gadgets can make life less logical and more magical.
The exciting design piece was designed by Pierre Charreau, Martin Hertig and Pauline Lemberger of ECAL/University of Art and Design in Lausanne, Switzerland.
By equipping household cactus plants with sensors and audio devices, the designers have transformed nature into a musical instrument. The Cactunes project invites people to touch the cacti to discover how they react. In doing so, the design challenges people’s ingrained sensitivities against touching cacti, and in the process, a small piece of the untapped potential of home automation becomes visible.
In 2014, the then second year industrial design, and media and interaction design students worked together on this project as a part of the Delirious Home exhibition. A playful interpretation of the “
‘smart home’.
ECAL is an internationally renowned university, and featuring regularly among the world’s top ten universities of art and design. In 2014, on the occasion of the Salone Internazionale del Mobile, ECAL has won the Milano Design Award for the best show for Delirious Home.
Delirious Home arose from the questioning of the incessant growth of technology in the home. Technology – or more precisely electronics – is often added to objects in order to let them sense us, automate our tasks or to make us forget them, the designers state of the project. Unfortunately until now technology has not become a real friend. Technology has become smart but without a sense of humour, let alone quirky unexpected behaviour. This lack of humanness became the starting point to imagine a home where reality takes a different turn, where objects behave in an uncanny way.
“After all; does being smart mean that you have to be predictable? We don’t think so!”