Social Good Engineering Magazine: GineersNow Social Innovation GineersNow Engineering Magazine Issue No. 001 | Page 26

Photo Sources
Top: Royal College of Art
Top 3, Right: Frame Web
Bottom 2, Right: This is Paper
DESIGN ENGINEERING
ARTWORK
MADE BY
ELECTRICITY
by Farrel Pinto
It demands an extreme interest
and attention to know even the
minutest detail of an object that
nobody else would ever be interest-
ed in. The air cond itioner cools you
down while a room heater brings
your body temperature to normal.
However, there’s hardly anyone of
us who would have ever shown
interest in knowing what mecha-
nism works behind them or how
their electric circuits are connected,
unless you’re an engineer. Here’s
another character.

Designer Cindy Strobach
is different from most of us. For her
graduate presentation at London’s
Royal College of Art, she chose to
do something out of ordinary. She
decided to visualize the insides of
commonplace electronic objects,
specifically, a toaster and a speaker.
She used silk, organic dye made
from cabbage juice, and a pair
of electrodes to create colorful
“X-rays” (of sorts) of the internal
structures of these objects, which
completely resemble Abstract Ex-
pressionist paintings or Shibori tie-
dye. This technique, called “Electro
Colour”, was described as “painting
with electricity”. The printing pro-
cess she used was based upon the
principle of electrolysis of water,
which describes the decomposition
of water (H20) into oxygen and
hydrogen gas when an electric
current is passed through. The
water, in her experiment, was the
red cabbage juice.

The technique she used
is simple. She stained a piece of silk
with an organic dye made from red
cabbage juice. This created a bright
monochromatic square laid on top
of the inner circuit board of the
toaster and the speaker. This was
then connected to a negative and
a positive electrode. The negative
electrode converts into alkaline and
the positive electrode into acidic,
which then sends electric currents
through the silk. The color of the
dye changes as the current passes
through it, which creates impres-
sions in midnight blues, mustard
yellows, and blacks. The appliances
are, then, draped with these dyed
“X-rays” from outside, picturing
their skeletal internal circuitry
from the outside. It looks like a hu-
man wearing one of those skeleton
T-shirts.

The new experiment
exudes a new understanding to the
everyday product and technologies
we used on a daily basis. Creativity
is truly not limited to canvas, it can
take any form you might not even
think of.
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