BCI
Location: Park City, Utah
Time: 4 PM
Local Conditions - 72 degrees, sunny, and dry at about 7,000ft elevation
Be — Close your eyes. Spend a full 10 minutes just sitting there, “being”, with your eyes closed, sensing the place around you. Don’t try to notice anything in particular, or process what you are observing. Do use all of your senses (besides sight!), perhaps focusing on one sense at a time. Include senses like sense of gravity, sense of direction, and sense of well-being.
As I sat in this location I could hear hikers going by, the rustling of the aspen leaves in the slight occasional breeze. The sun was warm and air a bit cooler and light. I could hear chipmunks and occasionally a crow.
Contemplate — Notice the wide variety of different (and unique and beautiful!) functional strategies there are at your natural spot.
The leaves are turning color everywhere and in the mid-afternoon sun the colors are amazing. The sky is a clear a vivid blue. I notice that the trees are at different stages of changing depending on the species, elevation and exposure so there are bunches and bands of color. I decide to remind myself a bit more about this process….First let's think about why some trees drop their leaves before winter. In the winter, it would take a lot of energy and water for plants to keep their leaves healthy. But winter is cold, dry, and usually there isn't much sun (which helps give plants energy). So, instead of trying to keep their leaves, some plants drop their leaves and seal the spots on their branches where the leaves had been attached.
How is this related to what makes leaves colorful?
Leaves are colored by molecules called pigments. The pigment that causes leaves to be green is chlorophyll. Chlorophyll is important for plants to make food using sunlight. During spring and summer when there is plenty of sunlight, plants make a lot of chlorophyll.
In autumn when it starts to get cold, some plants stop making chlorophyll. Instead, those plants break down chlorophyll into smaller molecules. As chlorophyll goes away, other pigments start to show their colors. This is why leaves turn yellow or red in fall.
In fall, plants break down and reabsorb chlorophyll, letting the colors of other pigments show through.
The color change usually happens before the leaves fall off of the tree. Why might that be? It takes a lot of energy to make chlorophyll. If the plants break down the chlorophyll and move it out of their leaves before the leaves fall, plants save energy. The plants can reabsorb the molecules that makeup chlorophyll. Then, when it's warm and sunny enough to grow again, the plants can use those molecules to remake the chlorophyll. That way the plants don't have to make chlorophyll from scratch.
There are other pigments in leaves called carotenoids. Carotenoids are yellow and orange. Anthocyanins are other plant pigments that are only made in the fall. These pigments cause red, pink, or purple colors. Anthocyanins also protect leaves from being eaten or getting sunburned.
So the different colors in leaves are caused by changes in the pigments. When the weather changes, some plants break down all the green pigment. This lets beautiful yellows, oranges, and reds come through in the fall.(ASU)
Imagine — How you might use 4-5 of these strategies as the basis to a radically innovative new product design? You don't have to sketch the design (unless you want to); the focus here is on imagining how you can apply these functions to the world.
There seems to be a lot of wasted energy in many systems - could there be ways for systems to better monitor their energy in response to needs versus just constantly running on set amounts?
Can we better think about how things are colored and absorb light and heat to better have things working with their environments and energy flows - things that absorb or reflect heat
Can color be used to signal change to create needed responses
The trees I was sitting in were Aspens which are one organism with many branches and intricately tied to mycorrhizal systems underground - can we better think about how we use nutrients and how to manage waste or recycle nutrients within our systems