🟢Possible futures from the intersection of nature, tech and society
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.