CCCB Open_Sailing taller

Open_Sailing has been invited in Barcelona by the CCCB  for a lecture (below you can see the slideshow) and for a day-long workshop, as a part of the NOW festival and Atopia. 

NOW is a reflection on the present based on the scientific, technological, artistic, social and spiritual transformations that are taking place at the start of the 21st century. It is a process of research, creation and dissemination that aims to bring together different local and international agents involved in the actions that are promoting a change of paradigm in the information and knowledge society and in globalised cultures.

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Lecture
The first day, Cesar Harada presented Open_Sailing on a more historical perspective, explaining how it developed and where it is going, slideshow below.

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Workshop
The second day 27 person participated the Open_Sailing workshop with Cesar Harada, Ruairi Glynn, Ollie Palmer, Carla Colet Castano. It was about dance, sensible linear - branched and complex networks, mapping, tagging, geostrategy, group and decision making, adhocracy, object oriented politics, open architecture, town-planning, renewable energies, sustainable design, hedonism, fun, architecture of play.

Here is the structure of the workshop as a simpler array of instructions :

Dance
1. walk
2. run
stretch
3. walk eyes closed
4. run eyes closed
5. linear network - walk eyes closed
6. linear network - walk eyes closed - somebody takes the lead
7. branched network - walk eyes closed
8. branched network - walk eyes closed - somebody takes the lead
9. complex network - walk eyes closed
10. complex network - walk eyes closed - somebody takes the lead
11. splitting the group is sub-groups

Map
1. cover the floor with a large paper
2. draw YOUR world map


Tag
1. have 2 colours stikers : one "like" color, one "dislike" color
2. tag the map, write words on tags
3. map the whole world


Individual desire
1. think of where you personaly would prefer to live according to your map and tags


Group decision of a location
1. make a decision, as group, of one location, where you all agree to go together


Group decision of activities
1. as a group decide one activity in this new location


Individual involvment
1. as an individual, choose your activity within this group


Craft of the system
1. describe your location, group activity, personal activity, how the system would work (food, energy, political, technology ...)


Design of the system
1. optimize your system


Fabrication of models
1. as a group, fabricate the physical model of what you have been describing


Public presentation and debate
1. present your group work to other groups of works
2. compare, discuss.
3. general debate : what happened? what did you enjoy? what did you not enjoy? what did you learn? what will remain in your memory? How will this workshop affect your future life?

thanks !



Promotional video



download flv 12.mb

Proposal : Open_Sailing_01 Technical Drawing

We have now the design of the Open_Sailing_01 ready to submit to the British maritime authorities. This ship design has been tested in the water on models (iteration 1, iteration 2), so we have confirmed that the vessel is :
- large enough to host 4 people and equipment
- self-righting, hard to capsize, automatically fliping back in place
- insubmersible, resitant to internal pressure
- impact resistant, composite skin made of recycled material (see rogue waves)
- complying with SOLAS regulations and much more...



Download the ready-to-print 10 pages pdf technical drawing folder 13mb.

Download the 3d model on google 3D warehouse, sketchup, .dwg, .3ds.





front

right


left

back

top

bottom

Loic Dussud, Jean Marvaldi, IFREMER

I was lucky enough to meet Loic Dussud, Head of Mechanical Developments at the IFREMER in Brest, Bretagne France. His work consists in developping the instrumentation and exploration tools for ocean observation and analysis, involving managing 20 specialists in oceanography, biology, mechanics, electronics, computer sciences... His background is in ship engineering.
I think he is the best person we could think of to start with, he knows everything about what we are trying to achieve, it has more than 20 years of experience sending objects on the surface and at the bottom of the oceans for science missions.









Flickr set of photos of IFREMER Brest.

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General concept

I presented him the general concept... He was very curious and patient.
He said, it looks like a sea farm (see aquaculture), with many floating modules.
It has a central shelter, looking like a submarine / flying saucer / fallout shelter with a weight at the bottom, a very smooth object with no flat face, to resist the 100t/m2 impact of 30m high waves.

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In motion, static (farming), defensive.

(Comments on above drawing) The idea is that a flexible structure, allows to:
1. Sail, dragging behing the various objects constituting the food, water and energy "farm".
2. Static, with a good weather, deploying the units, offering more space for culture, more stability.
3. Protective / retracted when the situation is threatening : more compact not to be dislocated in the violence of wind and waves, more vertical with weight concentrated to insure vertical sustain.

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Materials

I pointed out my interest in building structures with organic materials, ocean-available material :
- to provide a "natural" habitat for fauna and flora
- to have a ressource that grows, like the Uros people - building ships in locally growing reed, or papyrus boats, knowing that will be a lot of maintenance work.
- simply not to become a form of pollution ourselves!
He was a bit skeptic on the use of ocean materials.

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I presented Loic Dussud some ideas of energy modules I had, mostly LOW-FI adaptation of larger exisiting renewable technologies...
Quickly he redirected me to his colleague Jean Marvaldi, Specialist of renewable energies at the IFREMER, amazing person too.

The metronome solenoid

This energy system is based on a couple of physcial principles : the buoy, metronome, solenoid, spring.

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I observed that the Pelamis power principle is exellent, but it is too expensive to implement and difficult to scale up and maintain. I was very inspired by the shake torch (video). I bought one for £0.75, shaking for a minutes provided a reasonnable LED to light for almost 48hours non-stop... promising.



So the "metronome solemoid" system I propose is made of simple buoys that continuously move on the surface of the ocean, it is possible to amplify the movement of a single buoy by placing the counterweight higher when there is not much waves, lower when there are big waves. The intermediary arms, which are where the solenoid system is, produces energy when the structure is moved by its environment. Each module can have several "male &/or "female" parts, so you would need an articulated structure or "sexualy complementary" nodes to produce energy with. This system would be quite cheap, not very powerfull, but interesting for a small living unit. Tom Hulbert (luckybite.co.uk) pointed out that we need to do tests and calculations to see if it has some competitive potential versus solar or windmill power, or we can think of how to combine...

We might be interested in tensegrity mecanisms to have minimal sustaining structures:

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The air pressure module

The air pressure is very simple idea too : having the minimum of moving parts to reduce maintenance and fragility.

It is a tiny scale adaptation of the wave or tidal power station above : just transforming air mouvement into electricity through a turbine.





The ideas are :
- to divide the main air tube in many small tubes, each of them having their own pair of IN and OUT valves to harness even the smallest surface mouvements. The valves are made of a simple sandwich of 2 plastic plates holding a silicon (or maybe teflon) sheet with 3/4 - opened circles. Above the sandwich a layer of air circuit conveys air INPUTS and OUTPUTS to a central turbine, or for any type of work.

You can have many floating modules, or snap them into a platform, the bigger the platform, the more rigidity and more potential amplitude in wave oscillation -> energy produced.

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It is a very simple idea : concentrate sun heat and dissipating it in the water, creating a micro climate to attract certain variety of molluscs, fishes.
I am not sure what species we are likely to attract, we need to study this in depth, test this. Apparently any floating object is quickly colonised.

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solar oven, heat disspiation, sea shell culture, micro-climate

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Energy animals VS energy network

So, I wonder if we may converge all these technologies into "hybrid energy animals", or, instead isolate the functions into modules that all feed into a central "mother" shelter?
The "energy animals" have been several times been preferred to modules : less connections, less cables = efficiency, economy, more robust.
For the implementation of the technology, Jean Marvaldi recommends to :
- test separately each technology and mesure the production of each component
- associate them and see if they cancel -or- amplify each other work...

Let's order the parts and try it up!

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Loic Dussud introduced me to Yvon Legay of the Institute of marine Prevention in Lorient, and recommended me to contact prof. Paul D. Mitcheson, at the Imperial College London, researching in micro-power generators and their associated power electronics.

Voronoi generative architecture

If I google "Voronoi architecture" I get some cool looking things :

A Voronoi diagram is a way of decomposition or subdivision of space based on an initial set of objects or points (for more information http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Voronoi). Voronoi diagrams have countless applications from statistics to biology and urban planning. Lately they are becoming ‘popular’ also in architectural design. There are indeed a number of reasons making Voronoi diagrams useful in architectural design:
a. Their structural properties, both in 2d and 3d.
b. As a way to subdivide/organize space, based on proximity/closest neighbor.
c. The fact that they can describe many natural formations, like soap bubbles, sponges or bone cells.

[source http://object-e.blogspot.com]

And we need to be a bit critical about this :

"the real question is why would you want to make a Voronoi (or any algorithm) to begin with? What is it responding to within the discourse?
Rather, what do any of these parametric exercises offer an architect beside something that 'looks cool' or 'looks complex' or 'looks irregular'? It's not like you can plug programmatic or site or material data into it, it is all geomtric "input." This way of working seems more like pure geometry and little bit of structure. It's not like you are done once you have your honeycomb mesh." [source : http://www.archinect.com]

So yes, let's not make a Voronoi cool looking structure because it looks cool, it is not taking anyone anywhere...
Because we are armies of cool people doing this research already :
http://dip16.blogspot.com/
http://www.emergentarchitecture.com/about_analogies.php?id=30

And one of the best sources is here (about the algorythmic beauty of plants) :
http://algorithmicbotany.org/papers/
like this one:
http://algorithmicbotany.org/papers/tissues.fsmp2004.html

And again, this is how some people use their Voronoi background to semi-aumotate the building of a "rational city" [source http://twak.blogspot.com]:

Acali Expedition

Le 13 mai 1973 (était-ce un vendredi?), 5 hommes et 6 femmes qui ne se connaissaient ni d'Eve ni d'Adam, embarquaient pour une expérience humaine unique de 101 jours en mer sur le radeau "Acali" (du nom d'une province mexicaine). Une coque de noix dessinée par l'architecte britannique Colin Mudie, reconstructeur, entre autres, de l'Argo amarré à Gênes.

A lire ou à relire, "L'expédition Acali" par l'anthropologue mexicain Santiago Genovès, le premier radeau moderne à ralier l'Afrique au Mexique. Je n'ai trouvé aucun site internet y faisant référence, alors bonne lecture. Santiago Genovès a participé aux expéditions Ra 1 et Ra 2 de Thor Heyerdahl, navigateur, anthropologue et archéologue ayant traversé l'Atlantique sur des radeaux en papyrus.

Extrait: "Entre les chercheurs qui restèrent à terre et nous qui prîmes la mer se produisirent des heurts; il y eut de l'envie, de la jalousie, de la peur. Dans le radeau et loin du radeau. Dans la science et hors de la science. C'est de tout cela qu'il s'agit dans le projet Acali".

20 ans après l' "Acali", l'expédition "Hsu-Fu" reliait la Chine aux côtes de l'Amérique en jonque traditionnelle de bambou. [source : http://www.leblognautique.com/livres/index.html]

Open_Sailing has been hacked, but hey, we'll never give up.

We've been hacked... But we are not dead !