English | EN Daan Roosegaarde: techno-poet, artist, entrepreneur
Oct 10, 2014
Smart Highway on CNN – Daan Roosegaarde interviewed from Studio Roosegaarde on Vimeo
This techno-poet, artist, entrepreneur and self-proclaimed hippie with a business plan operates from the Netherlands and Shanghai: http://www.studioroosegaarde.net. Innovation is his passion and perhaps also his driving force. This is very clear if we combine two of his credos as follows: “get the hell out of here with your opinion, we need a proposal”, because “innovation is the longing to jointly discover something.” It is impossible to tickle yourself, you have to do that together.
We can enforce innovation by connecting, by learning from one another. To do so, we have to pass through three thankless stages: that of ‘it’s impossible’, that of ‘it’s not allowed’ and that of ‘it already exists’. Innovation never comes just out of the blue, you always build on a basis of existing reality. The process is never one of copy-paste but rather copy-morph. The Smart Highway project, in conjunction with Heijmans, the Dutch building magnate, is a good example of such development. The “Glowing Lines” pilot project has been executed on the Dutch N329 road, and version 2.0 will soon be completed. The Smart Highway has immediately become a much-discussed export product, which is the reason why Daan Roosegaarde has now established friendly relations with Jet Bussemaker, the Dutch Minister of Education, Culture and Science.
There is worldwide interest in the frequently simple but invariably effective innovations devised by Studio Roosegaarde, which include roadprinters that print out children’s drawings on the road, a park in Beijing that functions as the largest smog ‘vacuum cleaner’ in the world and makes so-called ‘diamond rings’ by subjecting the thus accumulated sludge to high pressure, shirts as bicycle lighting, and a chair that gives an electric shock on the butt as soon as the occupant utters the innovation killing words ‘Yes but …’
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