Bio-Intelligence

“We will talk only about machines with very simple internal structures, too simple in fact to be interesting from the point of view of mechanical or electrical engineering. Interest arises, rather, when we look at these machines or vehicles as if they were animals, in a natural environment. We will be tempted, then, to use psychological language in describing their behavior. And yet we know very well that there is nothing in these vehicles that we have not put there ourselves.”

“It is also quite easy to observe the full repertoire of behavior of these machines–even if it goes beyond what we had originally planned, as it often does. But it is much more difficult to start from the outside and try to guess internal structure just from observation of behavior. It is actually impossible in theory to determine exactly what the hidden mechanism is without opening the box, since there are always many different mechanisms with identical behavior… A psychological consequence of this is the following: when we analyze a mechanism we tend to over estimate its complexity.”

Vehicles: Experiments in Synthetic Psychology p2 & p20, Valentino Braitenberg.

A strange animal like character is often the unintentional by-product of objects with the ability to sense, make decisions and act on the world. The Bio-Intelligence workshop celebrated this as a potentially powerful aesthetic and functional opportunity, exploring the design of behaviour in ‘intelligent’ textiles.

From the simplest bacteria, crustaceans, arachnids, plants and insects, right up to fish, birds, amphibians, reptiles and mammals; from individual creatures to whole social communities, we investigated how nature uses its ability to sense, think and act on the world. With this understanding we explored how the mimicry of bio-behaviour can inspire new design opportunities and the creation of ecologies of intelligent textiles communicating and interacting with each other and the world around them.