Solar Intelligence

When it comes to the average solar panel, they all look exactly alike, but are serving drastically different contexts, said designers and educators Provides Ng, Alberto Fernandez, and David Doria at their research collective’s, REAr (Rational Energy ARchitects), brainstorming session hosted by The Bartlett on Wednesday evening. The three asked: How can we reach consensus on solar transitions as humans, who are inherently diverse? Drawing upon interdisciplinary examples from the Dyson sphere, to works such as Jonah Freeman’s “The Franklin Abraham,” to biodesign, the session showcased the collective’s speculative design projects where they look to other organisms: Plants do not have to agree on everything to survive; they compete and collaborate, and each species develops its own method for collective light harvesting. Equipped with bio-inspired intelligence and rule-based and machine learning systems, REAr explores the circular feedback between machines and humans. In perpetually visualizing and iterating on possible reconfigurations of these relationships, their projects explore the possibility of such a decentralized energy system in the near future.