the future of prosthetics

"The Immaculate" is a concept prosthetic arm by Norwegian design student Hans Huseklepp that I came across while doing style research on robotic arms for UMASS. I'm interested the integration of technology into the human spectrum and prosthetics seem to be the ultimate amalgamation of this. Huseklepp's concept works because it's able to jump the "uncanny valley" (aka: it's not creepy). Simple, elegant, and recognizable form factors that act as an extension of the human arm without trying to replicate it. Nice work.

Paolo Soleri

Arcology: The City in the Image of Man was first published by MIT in 1969 and is Paolo Soleri's vision of how urban planing can help us to evolve as a species and have less impact on our environment. Architecture meets philosophy in beautify sketched diagrams and alien looking structures. "The phenomenon then of the city, a congruent, humanized micro-universe sustained by the neonatural layer (the physical construct of the city), is an untracomplex organism whose centralized brain is the instrument that works for the satisfaction of the thousands of epidermal individual minds bound together by forces of society and culture" (p 12).
I've only started to dip my toes in this books and am completely intrigued. Could a utopian structure like this work or would it become a ghetto like so many others? We know that form can influence function but the line is so finely drawn that a near hit can be a complete miss.

Soleri and his students have been working since 1970 on an arcology, Arcosanti, north of Phoenix, Arizona. Want to go?