Explore design and technology innovations with top Dezeen and MINI Frontiers movies
After 18 months exploring the intersection between design and technology, our multi-award-winning collaboration with MINI has come to an end. From music-making gloves to glow-in-the-dark trees, here's our round up of the five most popular movies in the series.
Our movie featuring Royal College of Art graduate Julian Melchiorri's synthetic biological leaf (top) is the most watched Dezeen and MINI Frontiers video – and the most popular movie ever published on Dezeen – clocking up over 700,000 plays.
The artificial leaf absorbs water and carbon dioxide to produce oxygen, just like a plant, which Melchiorri claims could enable long-distance space travel in future.
Following close behind is our exclusive video interview with musician Imogen Heap, in which she demonstrates her Mi.Mu music-making gloves. The gloves allow her to interact with her computer remotely via hand gestures, which she claims could "change the way we make music."
The movie has been watched over 400,000 times and beat media giants the Guardian, CNN, Vice and Google to win the People's Voice poll for best technology movie at this year's Webby Awards.
For our third most popular movie we travelled to SXSW in Austin, Texas, where we interviewed Dutch designer Daan Roosegaarde about his plans to genetically engineer glow-in-the-dark trees to replace streetlights.
Roosegaarde had just got hold of his first sample of a bioluminescent house plant, which he was unable to get delivered to his Rotterdam studio because of strict EU regulations around the use of genetically modified plants.
3D-printed food was the subject of the next most watched movie in the series. Food designer Chloé Rutzerveld showed us her concept for "healthy and sustainable" 3D-printed snacks that sprout plants and mushrooms for flavour when we visited Dutch Design Week in Eindhoven last year.
Rounding off the top five is a movie about using drones in the construction industry. Architect Ammar Mirjan explained how drones with cable dispensers attached could be used to quickly weave tensile structures over a void.
Launched in February 2014, Dezeen and MINI Frontiers was a major content collaboration between Dezeen and MINI, which explored how design and technology are coming together to shape the future.
Through a series of exclusive movies and a major London exhibition (above), we investigated exciting developments in emerging fields such as wearable technology and synthetic biology as well as looking at how technology is transforming disciplines including transport, fashion, music and architecture.
The video content has been watched over two million times and won numerous awards. As well as the Webby award for technology video of the year, it was named Commercial Campaign of the Year at the British media Awards 2015 and won the Commercial Partnership category at the AOP Digital Publishing Awards 2015.
Look out for our next collaboration with MINI, which will be announced in the coming months.
