What Are We Made Of ?
What Are We Made Of ?
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Digital Scholarship Lab | Library 2nd Floor | 360° Room Screenings: Monday - Friday from 3-4pm
You have been transported to a distant future
and shrunken down to the microscopic level.
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Watch as your future unfolds from the perspective of the everyday materials, materials that allow man and the earth to coexist.
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*Special thanks to the Driscoll lab for their video contribution, as well as Dr. Dobbins for her invaluable help.
Transium
What if the sounds of your alarm could power your coffee maker?
Electricity is sourced from many resources: wind, water, fossil fuels, etc. So what if we used sound as a means to create electricity? When scientists look for sources of renewable energy, they also have to consider things like how much that energy source will cost to harness and how much of that energy source is available. While sound can technically be used as a means to make electricity, it is by no means effective enough to power a city…yet. In our imagined future, we see people having coffee makers with electrical components that are sensitive enough to efficiently harness the sound waves created from something as routine as a morning alarm. The alarm goes off, the energy is harnessed, and the coffee maker is powered, with just enough energy to create the daily cup of coffee.
Thnetium
What if our materials could shapeshift?
In our future, we see materials liberated from their single-use nature. Many materials cannot be recycled, or if they are recycled, cannot be turned into a product of equal or greater value. For this reason, it is often most cost effective to simply throw away a material and create a new one from scratch. Nevertheless, wiith the right chemistry, processing, and more, materials can be created that meet their intended purpose but can also be broken down and built anew. We want some materials to last as long as possible (hint hint see the next material) but others need to adapt and change with the needs of our society.
Nascium
What if buildings, bridges, and roads could repair themselves?
What you are seeing on the screen is a material that has fractured due to stress and is repaired with the help of microbes. We see a future where our infrastructure can work with manmade and the earth’s stressors. From seasonal weather to natural disasters, communities will not fear the repercussions of a bad storm, bad winter, or poor community on the quality of their infrastructure.
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Video Citation: K.-A. Leslie, R. Doane-Solomon, S. Arora, S. J. Curley, C. Szczepanski, and M. M. Driscoll, “Gel rupture during dynamic swelling,” Soft Matter, vol. 17, no. 6, pp. 1513–1520, 2021, doi: 10.1039/D0SM01718C.
Fibrium
What if your entire closet was a single set of fibers?
We see a future where every person owns a pair of high strength, wear resistant fibers and a weaving machine. Every day, the machine is fed a program that says what kind of clothes the user wants to wear. Then the fibers are woven into that pattern. Instead of focusing on selling physical articles of clothing, companies can create these clothing templates instead. Influencers can create trends with the templates, and fashion can live on. However, we won’t have heaps of cheap clothes sitting in pits in the earth…but we will still be very trendy.
