Manya Mohta

There is a lot of science in art and a lot of art in science. The past two weeks have been a rather great start to nanotechnology. Exploring what nanotechnology means and its applications. I still can not relate to the scale and function of these technologies and have let the ambiguity drive me to learn more about them. We started off with watching a few documentaries on how people have perceived the functionality of nanotechnology and the scale to which it can be taken. To start off with we did a group activity of developing a project with the application of nanotechnology, or to say jus develop a technology with very simple working. As designers venturing into science we wanted to find a solution to a problem, solve the big picture. During our brainstorming session we came up wit ideas such as Nano-CCTV’s, Hair synthesizers, mood hair and mood clothes, reading devices ad finally decided to make a life straw. Clean Drinking water is one of the most taxing challenges in today’s world. Every one is trying to find a solution to this problem and we thought of giving it a try as well. We wanted to work with the scale of the material that went into making the straw. We researched on properties of activated carbon and carbon nano tubes, and found out that activated carbon works as a an extremely porous substance and thus has a very large surface area available for adsorption or chemical reactions. It is already being used very commonly to remove impurities from water. Another study shows how single walled carbon nano tubes(SWNT) can be used to remove impurities from water such as bacteria and viruses.

Our LIFE STRAW