Possible futures from the intersection of nature tech and society Natsai Audrey Chieza
Transcriber:
In 1998, my friends and I
won a national art competition.
The prize was a week in Disneyland Paris,
with hundreds of other children
from across the world,
as delegates to UNESCO’s
International Children’s Summit.
Now this was no ordinary
trip to Disneyland.
Between running riot in the park
and making friends,
we workshopped the future of this planet.
How could we overcome
the problems of pollution
and their threats to human
and environmental health?
How could we guarantee
universal human rights
of equality, justice and dignity?
Towards the end of the summit,
we created a 20-year time capsule,
with each country planting a vision
of the future they hoped for.
But as I look around today,
it’s clear to me that those visions
have not come true yet.
We’re confronted by the same crises,
made infinitely worse through decades
of geopolitical inaction.
We now face global existential risks
as a result of the climate emergency,
with the world’s least-resourced
and most disenfranchised
made more vulnerable despite
having contributed least to the problem.
That trip to Disneyland
taught me that art and design
had the power to imagine
other possible futures.
The question is:
“How do we actually build them?”
Today, I lead a design agency
called Faber Futures,
and my team and I design
at the intersection of biology,
technology and society.
Through research
and development collaborations,
partnerships, and other strategies,
we model a future in which both people
and planet can thrive
and where the role that biotechnology
plays is shaped through plural visions.
Our design work prototypes the future.
We have developed toxin-free,
water-efficient textile dye processes
with a pigment-producing bacterium,
pioneering new ways
of thinking about circular design
for the textile and fashion industries.
You’ve probably already heard
of data surveillance,
but what if it was biological?
Using open-source data
on the human microbiome,
we’ve created experiential artworks
that engage with the ethics of DNA mining.
How can we embed a culture
of multidisciplinary codesign
from within the industry of biotechnology?
To find out, we designed
the Ginkgo Creative Residency,
which invites creative practitioners
to spend several months
developing their own projects
from within the Ginkgo Bioworks foundry.
We also generate and publish
unique and expansive dialogues
between people with different
types of knowledges –
Afrofuturists with astrobiologists,
food researchers
with Indigenous campaigners.
The stories that they and others tell
give us the tools we need to imagine
other biological futures.
Design deeply permeates all of our lives,
and yet we tend to recognize things
and not the complex systems
that actually produce them.
My team and I explore these systems,
connecting fields
like culture and technology,
ecology and economics.
We identify problems, and where value
and values can be created.
We like to think about a design brief
as an instruction manual,
mapping the context of the problem,
and where we might find solutions.
Getting there might involve
establishing new networks,
building new tools,
and even infrastructure.
How all of these pieces
interact with one another
can determine research and development,
material specification,
manufacturing and distribution.
Who ultimately benefits,
and at what environmental cost.
So you can start to imagine
the kinds of systems that might drive
the design of your smartphone
or even a rideshare service.
But when it comes
to the design of biology,
things become a little bit more abstract.
Organism engineers design microbes
to do industrially useful things,
like bioremediate toxic waste sites
or replace petroleum-based textiles
with renewable ones.
To architect this level of biological
precision and performance at scale,
tools like DNA sequencing, automation
and machine learning are essential.
They allow the organism engineers
to really zoom in on biology,
asking scientific questions
to solve deep technical challenges.
Successful solutions
designed at a molecular scale
eventually interact
with those at a planetary one.
But if all of the research and development
focuses on the technical question alone,
then what do we risk
by excluding the broader context?
We’ve all spent over a year now
living at an unprecedented intersection
between biology, technology and society.
We’ve witnessed, with the rapid
development of the COVID-19 vaccine,
that although techno-fixes
offer us a critical remedy,
they don’t always provide a panaceum,
and that’s because the real world
is a complex social and economic one,
where dominant systems
determine the distribution of benefits.
It will be another two years
before hundreds of millions
across the world
receive their emergency vaccines,
which, in a globalized world,
risks undermining its efficacy
on all our communities.
Scientific endeavors
have long been considered separate
to real-world contexts,
an idea that places profound limitations
on the promises of biotechnology.
By missing the full scope of design,
we may think we’re solving problems
and realize later that actually,
not much has changed.
And a similar logic is emerging
in biotechnology for consumer
goods and industry.
So far, it offers innovations
for commodities markets,
drop-in replacements
that change problematic ingredients,
and yet sustain prevailing mindsets
and dynamics of power.
Again, technically sound solutions
that unwittingly reinforce
social and ecological inequities.
Addressing these asymmetries
requires us to take
a more revolutionary approach,
one that begins by asking
“What kind of a world do we wish for?”
So what if we could do both?
What if we could design
at the molecular scale,
with the real world in mind?
A more integrated approach
to designing with biology
requires us to ask more nuanced questions;
not “What will people buy,”
but “What if we put communities,
rather than commodities, first.”
“Could distributed biotechnology
enable people to find
local solutions to local problems?”
“Can we move beyond a biotechnology
that creates monocultures
to one which, like nature itself,
embraces a multiplicity of adaptations?”
“How do we equip
the next generation with the tools,
spaces and communities they need
to broaden their skills,
knowledge and ideas?”
An incredible amount of work
that begins to address these questions
is already underway.
The Open Bioeconomy Lab,
which has nodes in the UK,
Ghana and Cameroon,
designs open-source research tools
to expand geographies of innovation
into resource-constrained contexts.
Over thousands of years,
we’ve domesticated plants
to make them edible,
creating nutrient-rich, diverse
and delicious food cultures.
MicroByre wants to do the same,
but for microbes.
The San Francisco based start-up
assembles diverse microbial libraries
for a more resilient biological toolkit.
Imagine the expanded color palettes
and different applications,
from different types
of pigment-producing bacteria.
And from London’s famed art school,
Central Saint Martins,
students from different disciplines
are generating new
sustainable design practices
from biological medium.
You’ll find them at work in a wet lab,
nested between historic fashion textiles
and architecture departments,
a radical reunification
of the arts and sciences in education.
Many examples of this type of systemic
design work in biotechnology exist –
piece them together, and you start
to glimpse different visions
of our biological futures.
I don’t know what happened
to the time capsule
we left behind in Paris,
but I do remember wishing
for a more just and meaningful world,
where all of nature can thrive.
In their own significant ways,
technology and design have played
their role in denying us this,
but it’s in our power to change that.
Fundamentally,
this means recognizing that the design
of, with and from biology
is designing systems and not stuff,
and that with a truly ambitious
design proposition,
one that’s based on values
that center flourishing,
caretaking and equity.
We have the opportunity to build
truly transformative systems,
systems that open up holistic measures
of value and impact,
and how we think about scaling innovation
and doing business
for the futures we now need.