Assignment 4 - Artifact From the Near Future

For this assignment, I decided to try using Animatron again. This site is very useful for making videos.

The first time I used it was for my remix of Shyna's "Me in 30 Seconds". For this project, I decided to make a video clip for a fictional evening news show, highlighting a technology we may be seeing more of in the near future, which is the use of 3D printing for organ transplantation. It took me a while to think of a fun artifact from the near future to make, but I finally settled on 3D printed organs. I was definitely inspired and influenced by Fernando Barbella's Signs From the Near Future. My case study of Barbella's project can be found here. There was a bit of trial and error with layering the audio and video, but since this was my second go at using Animatron, making this video wasn't too bad. I think I'm actually starting to enjoy using Animatron. And I'm sure I've only scratched the surface on what Animatron is capable of. Here is my final product.




Maybe someday soon, every hospital will offer 3D printed organ transplantation and live organ transplants will be a thing of the past. Sure, perhaps there may still be some instances where we will still need living tissue for transplants, but I can realistically see a near future in which we save more lives by using 3D printed organs made of cells and microchips. Bioprinting is a growing field, and results over the years continue to be promising. Scientists are developing tissue scaffolds and organs-on-chips, and this can have a profound global impact. Imagine a world where dialysis is no longer necessary for people with kidney failure. Imagine not having to be on an organ donor waitlist after a near-fatal accident. These advances will likely happen within our lifetime according to a number of researchers and engineers, some optimistically projecting that the bioprinting of organs and their transplantation will become mainstream within the next decade. Check out this article from The Economist that came out early this year for a brief overview of what is to come. Just last year, a group of researchers at Harvard developed the first fully 3D printed heart-on-a-chip.

Postscriptum -- The 3D printed heart in the video is just a plastic model 😉 You can watch a heart-on-a-chip being made here. This fully-functioning 3D printed heart-on-a-chip looks nothing like a human heart. I was taking an artistic liberty by putting a picture of a 3D printed plastic heart. I don't want to lose my science "street cred" 😁