Is it a serious proposal? Auger, who is from Britain, hedges. The science of smell, he notes, is serious, and he cites research into smell as a marker for genetic compatibility. He said he was fascinated by science and scientists, who were "creating amazing possibilities of what it means to be human. But they don't necessarily understand what to be human is. That's where design can play a very important role."
So while scientists have studied the ways that smell might have developed to warn humans of food gone bad or an approaching fire, it is up to designers to encourage people to think about what is lost when we have "fire alarms and sell-by dates and fridges" and, for that matter, deodorants and perfume.
Other projects try to build by nature's plan. Joris Laarman, a designer in the Netherlands, is designing chairs and sofas based on his research into the way that bone grows - giving support where needed and removing material where less support is required. A result is an eerily elegant assortment of legs that form a whole, using software that mimics evolutionary processes. "I try to create beautiful objects that make sense," Laarman said.
And what can we make of the display of "dressing the meat of tomorrow"? It is a fanciful representation of what meat might look like when tissues for food can be cultivated cheaply in vats instead of through grazing and slaughtering. Practical applications that would bring the cost of "cruelty-free" tissue down to affordable prices are years away, at best.
But James King, a British designer who created the prototype for the brave new meat, said edible tissues from the lab opened possibilities for what cultured meat might look like. "It's not designed by the anatomy of the animal," King said. Instead of slabs of steak, he envisions a delicate design that resembles "the cross section of a cow."
Some of the objects have an otherworldly beauty. Tomas Gabzdil Libertiny, who lives in the Netherlands, studied bees and developed scaffolding he could use to enlist them in the manufacture of objects. His beeswax vase, a golden wonder that droops slightly on a pedestal near the entrance to the exhibition, exemplifies what he calls "slow prototyping." Like the "slow food" movement, he sees his vase as showing the way to a kind of thing that demands attention and respect, in part because it is not just knocked out by a machine - it embodies, he said, "the sort of thrill in the heart that you get when you see an object that has magic."
Mandelbrot, a professor emeritus of mathematical science at Yale, spoke with joy in an interview about the new exhibition, but also with an air that suggested he was wondering why it had taken so long for the world to catch up to him. "I have been fighting on that front for a very long time," he said.
Mandelbrot said the separation of science and aesthetics had always puzzled and frustrated him, though now "the separation is decreasing, or vanishing," as more people find ways to bridge the gap.
Bly, of Seed, agreed. Bringing diverse disciplines together corrects a mistake in intellectual history and "harks back to the Renaissance," he said, adding: "We created disciplines. Nature didn't create disciplines.
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