A graduate student from Israeli has taken a very open-minded approach on how best to power our mobile devices when on the go: jewelry designed to harness the body’s energy and transfer it to the gadget itself.
The devices are disturbing, especially given the fact that they’re embedded within the user’s veins. This superficial level of penetration is necessary, though, as it is the user’s movements and blood flow that turn the small wheel inside the device and generate electricity.
Naomi Kizhner, the designer of the jewelry, said that she wanted the jewelry to make people uncomfortable upon first sight. “I wanted to provoke the thought about how far will we go to in order to ‘feed’ our addiction in the world of declining resources,” she said in an interview with Cosmopolitan .
Three devices were created in total, and are all part of Kizhner’s project called “Energy Addicts.” There’s the Blinker, the E-Pulse Conductor, and the Blood Bridge.
“There are lots of developments of renewable energy resources, but the human body is a natural resource for energy that is constantly renewed, as long as we are alive,” Kizhner explains. “I wanted to explore the post-humanistic approach that sees the human body as a resource . . . Will we be willing to sacrifice our bodies in order to produce more energy? My intention is to provoke a discussion.”
While the point of the project is to produce a reaction from the audience, the fundamental idea behind it is an interesting one, especially as we as a society have now begun to embrace wearable technology in our everyday lives, starting with something as basic as a step counter to now smart watches to tomorrow’s more widespread adoption of Google Glass eyewear.
As we continue to use these gadgets — and become more dependent upon them — finding a never-ending resource of energy in order to power them may very well lead us to a day in which we’re not so much turned off by Kizhner’s solution, but actually come to embrace it.
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