Organic by design

As a product designer, Agustin Otegui’s has to “think big” about the objects he creates. From novel portable chairs made out of shovels to chrome radiators that look like modern works of art, he recasts the mundane in a modernist and functional new light.

Yet when he got thinking about how he could help with solutions to mitigate climate change he started thinking small. Very small, in fact.

His futuristic concept is called the Nano Vent-Skin (NVS) and the design — to wrap buildings in an organic lattice skin made up of micro wind turbines — is radical.
It’s an intriguing idea and an exciting confluence of cutting edge science and industrial design.

Back in 1959 American physicist Richard Feynman famously predicted that we’d be creating atom sized machines in the future.

Today, advances in nanotechnology — the science of impossibly small materials — are rapid. Scientific discoveries at nanoscale — one billionth of a meter — are finding their way out of the lab and into production, creating more efficient computer chips and coatings for glass.

It was all the big “green” projects around the world that got Otegui thinking about smaller solutions.

Otegui told CNN: “Instead of trying to build these huge turbines which are always getting bigger and bigger, I thought, why not do something on a small scale and use it on existing objects and buildings. I wanted to try to cover them like a crawling plants you see on facades.”

CNN