Global Design New York University: Spotlight: BLOOM

Monday, September 3, 2012

Spotlight: BLOOM - "The Game"

BLOOM is an urban toy, a distributed social game and collective “gardening” experience that seeks the engagement of people in order to construct fuzzy BLOOM formations. A massive population of cells is introduced through the main “portal” of the game constructed by designers. The collective act of coming to one place and building something becomes a shared memory for each person attending. None of the pieces can do anything on its own, only by putting together thousands of them is when the game and the BLOOM garden emerge. The energy for BLOOM construction is sourced from people’s interactions. It becomes impossible to forecast what you can do with such game! BLOOM cells are all equal, but by recombining their 3 connections, infinity of different formations can emerge. You can try to intuitively assemble a chair or a bench, or construct a canopy. Due to the flexibility and resilience of the building cells, the ‘rules’ of the game can be bent; you can twist them to find different shapes and discover new configurations! Like in the clouds, you can read the shapes in BLOOM formations… is it a swan, a rabbit, a space ship??

BLOOM: The Game

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MISSION

Global warming effects pose new challenges to the architecture, landscape architecture, and urban design communities. The immediate response has been a turn toward a host of energy-saving technologies. What has rarely been addressed, however, is the problem of scale. How can the designer make sure that global solutions do not come at the expense of local traditions, cultures, and environments? By placing human rational, emotional, technological, and social needs at the center of our environmental concerns, we propose a new GLOBAL [Global Local Open Border Architecture and Landscape] design initiative.

We seek a Global yet still Local design that can Open the sociopolitical Borders that all too often separate Architecture from its Landscape. The overreaching aim is to develop a language of design that can create proximity between individual responsibility and the current global environmental crisis. We see environmental problems as a crisis of human alienation from the natural world, and our initiative will explore ways in which design can reformat the unfortunate separation. In our plea for proximity between the individual and the global we will explore, in the words of Maurice Merleau-Ponty, a design that is "as close to the beyond as to things near" when we evoke "our power to imagine ourselves elsewhere."