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HOW WILL HOMES develop as families become more disparate? What exactly makes a home? How will the nature of home adapt to technology?
These are the types of questions being addressed by the latest exhibition at the Science Gallery at Trinity College Dublin.
Home\Sick starts today and runs until mid-July, offering visitors a chance to see what the future might look like inside the home.
A number of the installations examine long-distance relationships and the different ways couples may stay connected in the future.
Chatting by smartphone is active but one of the exhibits, the Good Night Lamp, is a more passive affair.
It is a physical object that’s connected to the internet and is paired with a similar lamp in your loved one’s home. If you turn on or off your lamp it, the lamp in your partner’s home does the same.
The idea is to let you share your mood or what you’re up to in a much more ambient way.
One of the other pieces takes this a step further.
Drinking Together While Apart was developed in collaboration with an Edinburgh couple who say they love relaxing together with a drink at the end of the day.
The piece acts by automatically pouring a glass of wine when its counterpart, a bottle opener, is used anywhere in the world.
The piece is part of an installation called Ritual Pieces. One of its developers, David Chatting, explains that they’re not designed so much as solutions, but to demonstrate the nature of how modern long-distance relationships work.
Adapting to robotics
Another one of the exhibits that catches the eye is With Robots, developed by Diego Trujillo of the National Autonomous University in Mexico.
It looks at how our houses may have to adapt to accommodate robots. Trujillo explains that, while many people imagine robots integrating into our lives, the reality could in fact be the opposite.
He demonstrates with a number of household items, like these plates and cups, showing how they may be adapted for robot interaction.
The black reader on the cups is a sensor which allows for robot interaction.
The sensor is also present on a collection of ‘robot toys’ that he developed to allow robots test their algorithms.
Discussing the integration of robotics into our lives, Trujillo and Science Gallery director Ian Brunswick explain one of the big questions: To what extent will we be willing to let it robots disrupt our lives?
For example, adding another handle to a cup might seem too much of a nuisance. But an extra sensor on our bedclothes to allow for robot washing? Well, that could seem more worthwhile.
“Most pieces in the show, you can see how it will benefit your life, but you can also see how it can kind of get in the way. Be a bit on impediment,” explains Brunswick.
How human-like we can make robots, at least in their motion, is plateauing very quickly. It will probably be easier to make our homes friendly to robots than it will to make robots friendly to our homes.
It think that’s what’s interesting about Home\Sick and this piece, it doesn’t ask how will technology change our lives but how our lives will change for technology.
The exhibition also features plants that act as natural fuses, bowls made from household dust and even an exhibit that tests the bacteria that grow inside people’s bellybuttons.
(You can go and get your bellybutton swabbed if you so wish).
A two-storey high artwork from local artist Fergal McCarthy portraying a Dublin lighthouse now dominates the centre of the Science Gallery.
Topically, there’s even Wash Lab, an interactive shower cubicle provoking questions around water usage.
And what about your smartphone beside your bed? Well, prepare for more bedside tech:
Home\Sick is curated by Anna Davies of TCD’s geography department and a number of other curators including Booker Prize winner Anne Enright.
It runs from today until 19 July.
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Might have been a good idea to check all that out before offering it to our kids luckily my wife was against it
Awh great, i knew there was a reason why i shouldn’t of got this.
At the time in Poland the Polish Health Minister would not grant permission for use because as a Doctor she said it had not been fully tested. Looks like she was right in some cases.
What about pregnant women being given this vaccine – wonder if they really know its effects on the unborn child.
I go it, as did my partner when the twins were getting their 6 months vaccinations. We both felt so desperate after it that we decided we weren’t going to give it to them at all…Boy am I happy now :)
Great now the idiots that are against vaccines will think they’re right all along just because of this little issue (in the big picture of things)
Of course many of these fools will claim vaccines cause autism but then they will convinently forget that the research they refer was proven to be false and misleading.
If these people think vaccines are so evil then they should take their chances with polio etc and see how their lives are
Let people look up “narcolepsy”, then “swine flu”, and decide which is worse. I’m still glad I got the jab last yea…zzzzzzzz.
IT AINT JUST A LITTLE ISSUE !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! >:(
I was always against this flu jab. How many people went like lemmings to their doctors with their kids without checking the back round. Its actually banned in a number of european countries! I’m sorry but I just don’t trust GPs to give me safe medicines. Drug company’s force pharmacies and doctors to administer certain drugs by withholding best selling painkillers and other medicines. A pharmacist told me this on the record.
I’m 18 and got the swine flu jab in school earlier this year. Less than 5 hours later, I was completely paralysed on my left hand side, right from my face, my arm and hand and leg, with severe chest pains. I was rushed to hospital to get a morphine injection and thankfully I was ok afterwards. I wouldn’t recommend the swine flu jab to anyone and no one else in my family got it. My family doctor seemed very against it after he found out what happened, but it was brushed aside after.
Wasn’t there a story about this from last year ? The risks were widely known and the links proven in other European countries already so why has it taken the HSE so long to respond and only recently remove it after tens of thousands of people, including children, have already had the vaccine here ?
Shockingly inept but that’s nothing new for the HSE.
I never got the jab and worked through two winters in a&e dept’s , the first year particularly bad with every 3rd patient suspected swine flu. Im def pro vaccines but for anyone who is young fit and healthy surely the jab is totally unnecessary .
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