Everyone loves a good TED Talk, here’s one of our favorites:
In this innovative TED Talk, Faber Futures Founder Natsai Audrey Chieza, says for a more just and sustainable future, it’s time for a radical approach to design. As an internationally recognized leader in the field of biodesign, Chieza’s innovation lab focuses on tackling big societal problems through the intersection of technology, design, and biology.
What does this mean in practice?
Designers at Faber Futures have developed toxin-free, water-efficient textile dye with a pigment-producing bacterium for the textile and fashion industries bringing a new take to circular design.
Faber Futures is also combining the study of open-source data on the human microbiome with the ethics of DNA mining. By seeking underrepresented voices from Afrofuturists to astrobiologists, food researchers to Indigenous campaigners, Faber Futures is trying to create new ways of thinking about humanity’s impact on the planet.
According to Chieza, we tend to focus on “things” and not the complex systems that actually produce them. At Faber Futures, designers examine these complex systems to make the connections among culture, technology, ecology and economics. They treat design as an instruction manual to map the context of the problem and possible solutions.
Solutions might involve establishing new networks, tools or infrastructure or looking at the interactions among them.
One example of this concept at work is the design of microbes for an industrial setting. Microbes can be designed to clean up toxic waste sites or replace petroleum-based textiles with renewable ones. Tools like DNA sequencing, automation and machine learning are key to allowing organism engineers to solve these technical challenges.
Biological design solutions must also consider the social and economic contexts because technology, divorced from real-life will not have the desired long-term impact. Chieza says that “by missing the full scope of design, we may think we’re solving problems and realize later that actually, not much has changed.”
This is already happening in the field of biotechnology for consumer goods where drop-in replacements for harmful ingredients ignore that broader context and reinforce social and ecological inequities.
Chieza says we need a more revolutionary approach that asks the big questions, “what kind of world do we wish for?” She argues we should be focusing on communities not commodities, distributing biotechnology to create local solutions, and giving the next generation the tools they will need to broaden their ideas and knowledge.
A good example of a distributive approach is the Open Bioeconomy Lab which operates in the UK, Ghana and Cameroon to design open-source research tools that can be used in resource-constrained environments. Instead of a north-south or more developed country to less developed country approach, the Open Bioeconomy Lab distributes its tools equitably throughout its network.
Another approach to enabling access to technology is by San Francisco based start-up MicroByre. It is assembling microbial libraries to create a more resilient biological toolkit that can be applied around the world.
And at London’s Central Saint Martins art school, students are creating sustainable design practices based on biological materials.
To create a more just and sustainable future, Chieza says we need to harness the power of technology to redesign systems not products. By transforming systems holistically around shared values of equity, caretaking, and sustainability we have the opportunity to change the world in new and meaningful ways.