With the goal of introducing “algae into our everyday lives”, industrial designer Hyunseok An has created an indoor micro-algae farm called The Coral.
The wall-mounted modular bioreactor is designed to grow algae as a food resource.
“Algae play a critical role in the sustainability of human life and our ecosystem. Algae are some of the most efficient CO2 scrubbers in the air, with ten times greater CO2 fixation than terrestrial plants,” explained An. “The 1974 UN World Food Conference deemed algae ‘the most ideal food for mankind,’ and NASA uses algae as dietary supplements on long-term space missions because of the rich, well-balanced nutritional content.”
“Even so, however, we may not fully enjoy algae’s outstanding benefits in our everyday lives,” said An. “Rather, we tend to dismiss it, associating it with negative feelings: mossy, slimy, gross. This isn’t strange, because we usually see algae in unpleasant situations—stagnant water, with a nauseous smell like pond scum—and these contexts influence our perception of algae as distasteful. Because of this emotional rejection, we might underestimate algae’s values, try to eliminate it from our everyday lives, and thus lose the potential benefit to our health and our environment.”
The Coral is composed of 16 culture cells in a four-by-four grid wall frame. Each culture cell grows roughly two grams of algae and with a biweekly cycle, The Coral is capable of growing a daily source of algae for consumption.
