Transcriber: Robert Tucker Reviewer: Sebastian Betti
I grew up at a time when the space race
seemed to have influenced the design of everything around me.
I was a child of the seventies,
I was a massive science-fiction fan,
I was transfixed by TV and movies like 2001, Star Trek and Star Wars.
The design of the future seemed so exciting,
it felt like
we would all be living in houses that looked like this,
even the name of this house was "Futuro".
It was made from reinforced polyester plastic
and it was designed so that it could be mass-produced and situated in any location.
As a child I couldn't think
of anywhere cooler that you might live.
And what kind of car would you park outside this house?
For me there was only one choice,
the legendary Ferrari Modulo.
It was designed by Pininfarina, the Italian styling house,
forty-four years ago
and for me it was a complete dream.
The whole roof
slid forward, so just climbing into it was an adventure.
And what would you wear inside this car?
This is not a car that you get into wearing jeans and t-shirts.
No, no, no.
Nothing less than one of Pierre Cardin's space people
would look right sitting inside this car.
Sixties fashion designers like Cardin, Andre Koresh, Paco Rabanne,
they were really responsible for creating the future aesthetic look.
They even suggested that people in the future might be wearing all-in-one jump suits;
I mean, as if.
(Laughter)
Their vision, these futuristic fashions were made from materials
like moulded plastics, synthetic fibres,
all kinds of vinyl.
But those space-age materials relied on a petrochemical industry
which was creating new polymer science
and those designs weren't in fact
very sustainable or indeed practical.
The Futuro house had to be taken off the market in the mid-1970s
because of the oil crisis
which made the production
prohibitively expensive.
The Modulo car,
well, it was only ever a concept.
It was far too low to be road legal
and in fact it could only drive in a straight line.
As for plastic clothes and synthetic fibres,
well, if you've ever worn them, you know that they don't breath.
they're not very comfortable,
so,
you know, they had limitations.
As a child my future,
plastic-fantastic future,
really didn't include a world that looked like this.
Several decades later
we know that those so-called future materials
really wasn't a sustainable pattern of behaviour
and we know today that we need to radically rethink
raw materials, manufacturing, consumption and so forth.
I did follow my childhood dream
to be a designer
and I went into fashion
but I continued being excited by science and technology.
But what I was looking for was a vision for the future which
was positive in some way
and i started to research
what that long-term future vision might be
and I wrote a book
about the future of fashion but not
about what we might wear next season but what we might be wearing in fifty years time.
One of the
things I've discovered in researching that was that if you want to find out about the future,
don't ask a designer, ask a scientist.
One of the most interesting people I met
was a biologist
and when I put it to him that I was searching for the future vision of fashion,
he replied,
"You could grow it."
He explained that micro-organisms
like bacteria and yeast
can also produce textile-like fibres.
They don't need to grow in a field,
this can happen in a liquid.
Wow, here was a vision of the future that I had never seen or heard of before,
a dress emerging from a vat of liquid.
So I no longer work with this
instead I work with this.
My threads went from being visible to invisible,
but essentially the material
is the same, it's cellulose.
I no longer think about cloth
in terms of oil or fields,
I think about it in terms of my microbes and recipes.
So this is a recipe for a jacket.
Sugary green tea,
some microbes
and a little time.
So this is a fermentation solution,
the dark shadow that you can see at the bottom
is a living organism.
It's a symbiotic mix of yeast and bacteria
that when they feed on the sugar nutrient
spin nanofibrils of cellulose.
And these come together and form fibres.
Over time that forms a thick mat on the surface.
So these are growth baths set up in my design studio.
On the left you can see it just set up, so there's the living culture just been put in
and there's a sensor that that regulates the temperature.
Two weeks later
there's the material that's formed on the surface.
When it's ready and I'm happy with the thickness, I just wash it out
and lay it on
a wooden board so that it can air dry.
And something which is two centimetres in thickness when it's wet
will once all the water has evaporated will dry down
to be less than half a millimetre in thickness.
And depending on the recipe and how it's made,
it can feel anything like a paper
to something which is more like a leather texture,
which means that you can cut it and sew it
like you might a conventional garment.
So here is a garment which has been hand-sewn together just as it's
emerging from a vat of indigo.
And this is it finished.
So this is a jacket which is just made from sugary tea and some microbes.
That means it's completely compostable.
So if you wanted to, you could throw it out with your vegetable peelings
and it will naturally biodegrade.
Or,
you could think of it like this,
instead of throwing it in the washing machine with some soap,
what would happen if you put in some micro-organisms
and some nutrient solution?
What if instead of
washing your clothes, you fed them?
Some bugs would eat the dirt,
so they would clean the garment,
but others might start to actually grow onto the existing structure.
So what would happen if you could actually regrow something?
If you get bored of it, don't throw it away,
grow into a different shape.
As a designer I now
am excited about the future
around living materials.
We're just at the start
of biology and design coming together,
creating all kinds of exciting new materials.
And there are many people
doing this kind of work.
For example, people are actually looking at making silk into a liquid
that you can put into a 3D printer,
so that you could make something
like a pair of spectacles.
There are people
taking the waste crops from something like carrots
and turning it into an organic carbon fibre-like material,
so that you could make something tough,
like a skateboard.
If you could harness organic materials from the natural world what would you choose to make with it?
Personally,
I would quite like a mother of pearl
version of one of these.
And how did you to come here today?
Maybe you wore one of these.
So creating
consumer products from biomaterials
has many advantages.
Obviously we need to make products which can
be easily and safely biodegraded.
But what if we could actually harness the unique qualities of those materials?
I'm not talking about mimicking nature;
the future of design is going to be about
working with and improving upon what's there already.
So emerging science like
synthetic biology is enabling us to think about how we might
actually engineer
new additional beneficial functions
into organic matter.
So returning to your cycle helmet,
let's imagine a future where it's not based on an oil-based plastic,
but instead was made by this guy.
Thank you very much.
(Applause)