In Vena Verbum

A cookbook of the future, a urine diary and a ‘painting’ made of lichens. Designers and researchers are really letting their hair down in Naturalis museum. Their brief is to produce works that playfully illustrate what comes under the umbrella category of genomics. There’s more than a hint of Wageningen in it too. With the help of horticultural researchers Henk Jalink and Rob van der Schoor, designer Tiddo Bakker came up with In Vena Verbum. A rotating iron construction with a plant at its heart. The plant is continually exposed to different light conditions and measurements of plant activity drive the movement. According to Bakker, this constitutes a symbiosis between technology and nature, ‘giving people more insight into their environment’. For less poetic souls, you can see the practicalities of how various things came about online. But if you go, don’t forget to enjoy the rest of the fabulous collection of fossils, animals and other natural wonders while you are at it.