RSS
Leonardo made a diskmaker, not something practical (yet) - but usually nothing interesting starts out being so...
hate dishes? the DishMaker is a new kind of appliance that can replace dishes altogether by making cups, bowls and plates on demand and recycling them when you're done. the device uses up the same room and energy as a dishwasher, while it replaces all the cabinets and dishes in your kitchen. the DishMaker takes advantage of a little-known shape-memory property of acrylic so that one dish can be recycled a thousand times without consuming the energy that does into a single-use ceramic dish.
I hate being a cynic, I really do, but from the pdf:
"Although the heating process helps to sterilize them dishes, food particles must still be removed by some other mechanism. Future versions will consider embedded dish-washing."
At which point the energy used will presumably rise to exceed that of washing dishes.
I doubt very much whether ceramic bowls, plates and mugs, and glasses are in any sense a significant contributor to landfill volume.
And what the heck is a single use ceramic dish? The paper posits an idea (on demand plastic vessels) in opposition to an even worse one of single use ceramic vessels on demand. Neither idea makes any sense. Unless broken, ceramic vessels last almost forever.
It's not the Diamond Age yet, but one thing we do have in ubiquity is cheap, well made, mass produced ceramic and glass vessels.
Now an underwear machine? That's something I could get behind...
Reply to this comment
yah- i dont think this is meant to save the world, but its a neat project.
Reply to this comment
I'm with nick...what in the world is a "single-use ceramic dish?" This thing might well be an alternative to single-use foam plates and such, and in that respect, well...fine.
But as an alternative to ceramics, the only thing it offers is superior breakage resistance.
Reply to this comment
I doubt very much whether ceramic bowls, plates and mugs, and glasses are in any sense a significant contributor to landfill volume.
Also, glass has no problem going through the recycling process as many times as you want -- unlike plastics that eventually "wear" out and go to landfill. Of course, that assumes the users actually recycle :P
----
The media lab's kitchen is pretty cool -- counter intelligence it's called.
http://www.media.mit.edu/ci/
Reply to this comment
I think what he means by "single-use ceramic dish" is something that might better be termed "single purpose".
His ugly red transparent disk can be an ugly red transparent bowl, an ugly red transparent shallow bowl or an ugly red transparent deep bowl. Wow, it's a multi-purpose dish! On the other hand, a beautiful Royal Albert dinner plate can never transcend its original design and will only ever be a beautiful dinner plate.
This contraption appears to be a solution to a problem that does not exist. The acrylic discs can only be moulded into a dish of the same diameter. That is, you can't make a dinner plate out of a side-plate blank. And even then, they can only be re-formed about 100 times before their shape-memory properties begin to degrade. After that, what are we meant to do with them? That's right kids, landfill! I can imagine them creating more landfill, not less.
I would like to take this opportunity to remind Mr. Bonanni that "Necessity is the mother of invention", not the other way around.
Reply to this comment
gang, it's a MIT student project and not for sale -- don't sweat it.
Reply to this comment
I love the comments here. It's like SlashDot was before all the geeks left (or got overwhelmed?) because even the negative comments are well thought out and well written. pt, these comments are a great thing. :-)
It is a wacky MIT project (there are so many of them) and it is cool, but, in the same way as time-travelling killer AI robots, this is one project that should stay in the lab.
Reply to this comment