Other Biological Futures

Natsai Audrey Chieza, founder of Faber Futures, as many of you will already know, is a designer who has dedicated the past eight years of her practice to developing new ways to form materials through biodesign. One example are her gorgeous, otherworldly textiles, dyed using pigments derived from bacteria. Alexandra Daisy Ginsberg is an artist also researching the design of living matter, especially investigating how human values shape material culture and science. Daisy has spent ten years researching the design of living matter, and is lead author of "Synthetic Aesthetics: Investigating Synthetic Biology’s Design's on Nature". She scooped up the London Design Medal for Emerging Talent in 2012 and has since exhibited international, not least as MoMA in New York and the Museum of Contemporary Art, Tokyo.

Over the last decade, Natsai and Daisy have been exploring the design of living matter and its potential implications. In 2013 Daisy lead curated a seminal exhibition at the Science Gallery at Trinity College Dublin titled “Grow Your Own… Life After Nature”, inviting visitors to consider some of the potentially groundbreaking applications and uncertain implications of synthetic life. Natsai was commissioned to produce her first collection of textiles dyed using her innovative process for the exhibition.

In a new project for MIT Media Lab and MIT Press, Natsai and Daisy collaborate on the fourth issue of the Journal of Design and Science. With the theme of “Other Biological Futures,” the issue looks at biodesign, the design of, with, or from biology. Biodesign is being promoted by scientists and designers as an ecological remedy, a technological challenge, an economic opportunity, and a manufacturing and industrial revolution. In their editorial, Natsai and Daisy ask whether biodesign in practice really can make things better, and what that might look like. Initiating conversations between scientists, designers, curators, artists, bioengineers, activists, historians, and more, all who are somehow “other” to each other, the issue identifies the difficulties they see emerging in the evolving practice of biodesign, and opens up new directions for investigation around the complex issues in biodesign, around the world.

The conversations are being released serially and consider different kinds of colonisation in biodesign, raise ethical issues in designing living matter and, reach beyond established networks and cultures to encourage the imagination of “other biological futures”.

Find out more about Natsai’s other, equally mind-blowing projects, over on her client page here.