I started life as a fashion designer, working closely with textile designers and fabric suppliers. But today, I can no longer see or talk to my new collaborators, because they're in the soil beneath our feet, on the shelves of our supermarkets and in the beer I'm going to drink when I finish this talk.
I'm talking about microbes and designing with life. Fifteen years ago, I completely changed both what I worked with and how I worked after a revelatory collaboration with a biologist.
Our project gave me a different perspective on life, introducing a whole new world of possibility around how we can design and make things. I discovered a radical manufacturing proposition: biofabrication.
Literally, fabricating with biology. What does that mean?
Well, instead of processing plants, animals or oil to make consumer materials, we might grow materials directly with living organisms. In what many are terming "the Fourth Industrial Revolution," we're thinking about the new factories as being living cells.
Bacteria, algae, fungi, yeast: our latest design tools include those of biotechnology. My own journey in biofabrication started with a project called "Biocouture."
The provocation was that instead of growing a plant, like cotton, in a field over several months, we could use microbes to grow a similar cellulose material in a lab in a few days. Using a certain species of bacteria in a nutrient-rich liquid, we fermented threads of cellulose that self-organized into a sheet of fabric.
I dried the fabric I had grown and cut and sewed it into a range of garments, shoes and bags. In other words, in one lab we grew materials and turned them into a range of products in a matter of days.
And this is in contrast to currents methods of fabric production, where a plant is grown, just the cotton part is harvested, processed into a yarn, woven into a fabric and then potentially shipped across oceans before being cut and sewn into a garment. All of that can take months.
So these prototypes indicated a field offering significant resource efficiencies. From reducing the water, energy and chemistry needed in the production of a material, through to generating zero waste, we grew fabrics to finished form—if you like, "biological additive manufacture."
