Material Ecology: Design for the Future 

In 2006, architect and designer Neri Oxman was still a doctoral student at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) when she proposed a radical new approach for the field of design. Oxman (1) quickly established herself as a rising star in design, having been featured in both peer-reviewed scholarly journals and popular magazines across the world.

In Oxman's view, early twenty-first-century architectural design was stubbornly rooted in the design principles of the industrial era. (2) Assembled with discrete, mass-produced, interchangeable parts, most structures were built like machines. Conventional construction processes, Oxman observed, were in contrast to the dynamic, organic ways most biological structures occur in (3) nature, there material is not a secondary but an essential aspect of design. By utilizing new 3-D printing technologies, Oxman argued, designers could begin to grow or fabricate structures from seamless, multifunctional materials that would be both integrated (4) into and responsive to the surrounding environment. The possibilities she imagined were remarkably creative: buildings made with breathable exteriors and concrete that could repair itself, like bone. Indeed, some might even be called poetic, such as indeed, some might even be called poetic, such as shell-like homes with insulation that functioned like a bird's plumage-raising and flattening feathers to regulate temperature.

Since Oxman introduced the concept, material ecology has garnered acclaim and influenced designers worldwide. In 2014, Simon (5) Schleicher an architectural designer at the University of Stuttgart, followed Oxman's biomimetic approach in solving a particular engineering (6) challenge: designing shading systems for irregularly shaped glass-paneled skyscrapers. External awnings, which are assembled out of standardized parts, often don't fit the atypical contours of modern buildings and are prone to weather damage. Recognizing the insufficiency of these traditional rigid-body devices, (7) Schleicher's designs were modeled on the elastic movement principles of plants. 

His solution was a single-material fade-shading structure that could cover a building like the petals on a flower, able to open and contract in response to changing weather conditions.

Schleicher's design (8) is just one application born from Oxman's progressive design philosophy. In fact, Oxman herself is at work (9) essaying the conceits of her fancy at MIT, where she is now a professor. Her recent projects include a 3-D printed garment designed for (10) keeping and sustaining life at a time of interstellar space travel and a room-sized structural dome spun entirely by silkworms.(11)  Unlike conventional housing structures, the silkworm-spun dome is beautiful, biodegradable, self-healing, and replicable.

Incompletely Complete Art 

(12) Universally celebrated for containing one of the most important art collections in the world, the Metropolitan Museum of Art is world famous for its vast collection of undisputed masterpieces, but at its newest gallery, the Met Breuer, an exhibition features works of art (13) beginning with those made by Renaissance masters and concluding with contemporary works. In spite of their great variety, the artworks in the exhibit, titled Unfinished: Thoughts Left Visible, share a striking commonality: whether it was because the artist could not keep working or made the deliberate decision to stop, each work is incomplete. Spanning five centuries of art with over 190 pieces, the exhibition explores the theme, with over 190 pieces, the exhibition explores the theme, fascinating to artists and art lovers alike, of how to know when a work of art is truly finished. 

Some works, such as Flemish painter Peter Paul Rubens's Henry IV at the Battle of Ivry, (14) was left unfinished due to circumstances outside of the artist's control. Rubens was living in Antwerp (in what is now Belgium) in 1628 when he began this (15) ambitious work, commissioned by Marie de Medicis, Queen of France, as part of a series documenting her late husband's great victories. Rubens (16) fills the enormous canvas with dynamic brushstrokes, sketching out a dramatic battle scene with a fierce, three-armed soldier at its (17) center; planning to paint over one arm later. Three years later, Rubens still had not decided which arm to remove when, frustrated that the now-exiled queen had sent him the wrong canvas dimensions and failed to make the expected payments, (18) and abandoning the painting for good. Henry IV was never sent to France, but Rubens’s significance as an artist ensured its status as one of Belgium's national treasures. 

Other artists may intentionally leave a work unfinished, as African American artist Kerry James Marshall did with his 2009 painting Untitled. (19) Although the painting within a painting is a conventional artistic motif, Marshall deploys it for a specific purpose: to address the lack of black subjects in Western art. As Marshall noted in a 2014 interview, "When I was growing up, I recognized my absence in the pantheon." The painting's incompleteness encourages viewers to imagine finishing the work themselves. (20) More than that, though, it provokes them to reflect on the scarcity of black subjects in the artistic canon. (21) Marshall is inspired by the work of African American artist Charles White. 

Andrea Bayer, the curator of the exhibition, says that unfinished works can be masterpieces in their own right and illuminate the process of artistic creation. (22) Paintings, by Rubens and Marshall, demonstrate that unfinished works can also provide valuable insights into the interplay between historical contexts and creative decisions. 

Giants of the Sea 

Mysticete whales are the giants of today's oceans-but when and why did they get so big? One hypothesis holds that around 30 million years ago, early in the whales' evolutionary history, gigantism (a typical length of 10 (23) meters) or more gave the whales a survival advantage because it meant they could outcompete smaller whales for prey. According to another hypothesis, gigantism evolved in the whales about 23 million years ago because larger mysticetes had been more successful than their smaller counterparts at defending themselves against massive predators. Recently, a group of researchers decided to evaluate both hypotheses. 

The researchers collected length data for living mysticete (24) species. They estimated the typical length of several mysticete species that are extinct, making the estimates from fossils. The first known mysticete species appeared around (25) 30 million years ago and is estimated by the researchers to have been 7 meters in length. Based on the hypotheses they were testing, the researchers had expected the fossil data to show a shift toward gigantism between 20 and 30 million years ago.

To the researchers' surprise, though, the data indicated that during this period, (26) the most abundant mysticete species had a typical length of only about 6 meters. In fact, the data (27) suggested that the shift toward gigantism did not occur until the last 10 million years. Today, the majority of mysticetes are more than 10 meters in length, with members of the longest species reaching nearly 25 meters.

To account for the unanticipated data, the researchers developed a new hypothesis: mysticetes grew in response to changes in climate. About 4.5 million years ago, Earth entered an ice age, with many cycles of glacial formation and (28) to retreat. Every time the glaciers melted, water carried nutrients from the land into shallow ocean waters, a process called runoff. Changes in air temperature caused wind patterns to shift, (29) that shift in turn triggered a process known as upwelling, causing nutrients from the deep ocean to rise up toward the surface. (30) However, more nutrients meant more available food.

[l] Together, runoff and upwelling created what one science journalist described (31) as: dense "buffets" for the mysticetes. [2] But these buffets were not continuous; they were patchy and seasonal. [3] According to paleobiologist Jorge Velez-Juarbe, a "large size allows [ a whale] to take a giant bite" and (32) vacillate more easily between areas rich in food. [ 4] A large body can also store more fat to sustain a whale between feedings. [5] The researchers believe that for these reasons, smaller mysticetes gave way to giant ones. (33)

Bearing Fruit with Community Gardens  

In 2011 residents of the Crown Heights neighborhood in Brooklyn, New York, turned a vacant local lot into a garden. They maintained the garden for years, beautifying the landscape and reaping fruits and vegetables-until a real estate company purchased the land and ultimately (34) succeeded in evicting the gardeners. After the (35) resident's forced departure, the land returned (36) back to being disused, subject to the slow process of commercial development.