Material Matters with Grant Gibson
In Material Matters, host Grant Gibson talks to a designer, maker, artist, architect, engineer, or scientist about a material or technique with which they’re intrinsically linked and discovers how it changed their lives and careers.
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Material Matters with Grant Gibson
Natsai Audrey Chieza on bacteria.
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Natsai Audrey Chieza is a designer who has built an extraordinary career by working with bacteria. She grew up in Zimbabwe, before moving to the UK at the age of 17 and training as an architect at Edinburgh University. Subsequently though, she changed tack and completed her MA on the Material Futures course at London’s Central Saint Martins.
Now through her experimental studio, Faber Futures, she operates between biology, design and our wider society, working, for instance, with microorganisms to find new, ecologically-sound, processes for dying our clothes.
As one magazine put it: ‘For Chieza, designing with biology presents unique opportunities to address significant ecological challenges, squaring the circle of sustainable production and finite resources.’
Her work has been exhibited in places such as the V&A, the London Design Museum, and the Bauhaus Dessau Foundation. She also has a wildly successful TED talk under her belt. More recently she has set up a multi-media storytelling platform with Ginkgo Bioworks, entitled Ferment TV, looking at the future of synthetic biology, Covid 19, Black Lives Matter and an array of other issues.
In this episode we discuss: growing up in Zimbabwe; racism in the design world; changing the way we consume; learning to work with bacteria; and why our future is biological. It’s kind of eclectic but hugely important.
Discover more about Natsai here.
And you can find out more about me and sign up to my newsletter here.
Hello and welcome to the latest episode of Material Matters with me, Brian Gibson. As regular listeners will know, the idea behind the show is that I speak to a designer, maker, artist, or architect about a material or technique with which they're intrinsically linked and discover how it changed their lives and careers. At the time of recording, new restrictions have just been announced, so we thought it prudent to record this episode over the internet. Nonetheless, it gives me huge pleasure to talk to Natsay Audrey Chiesa today. Natsa grew up in Zimbabwe before moving to the UK at the age of 17. She originally trained as an architect in Edinburgh before changing TAC and doing her MA on the Material Futures course at Central St. Martin's in London. Nowadays, to her experimental studio, Faber Futures, she operates between biology design and our wider society, working, for instance, with bacteria to find new ecologically sound processes for dyeing our clothes. As one magazine put it, for Chiesa, designing with biology presents unique opportunities to address significant ecological challenges, squaring the circle of sustainable production and finite resources. Her work and thinking has been exhibited in places such as the VA, the London Design Museum, and the Bauhaus Dessert Foundation. She also has a wildly successful TED Talk under her belt. More recently, she set up her own YouTube channel, Ferment TV, looking at issues surrounding synthetic biology, COVID-19, Black Lives Matter, and a panoply of other issues. Nat Sai, thank you so much for doing this. I really appreciate it.
SPEAKER_00No, it's my pleasure and thank you so much for having me.
SPEAKER_01I mean, first of all, can we check you're okay? I noticed on Instagram you had a very nasty-looking cycling accident recently. Are you recovered?
SPEAKER_00Yes, I well, sort of. Um turns out recovery happens in stages. So I fell over handlebars and landed on my face, and that's obviously where you see that sort of immediate trauma. Everything else was okay, uh, in theory, nothing serious. But I was swollen for a few days, but not too long after that subsided, and you can hardly tell apart from a couple of scars. But what's amazing is the the injuries that sort of emerge after the fact. So maybe like a week later, I sort of started developing other bruises. And then there's a psychological trauma, right? Of something like that. Uh so I tried really hard to get back onto the bike uh soon after the crash, which is fine, but um working on going down uh descent still that's that's tough, and you kind of have to psych yourself up for it. Um so while I was quite nonchalant and carefree on the bike before, now I'm like hyper-vigilant and aware and trying to get to the place where it's fun again.
SPEAKER_01Yeah.
SPEAKER_00So yeah, we'll see.
SPEAKER_01But you're not there yet.
SPEAKER_00Not not exactly. Um it's just amazing what you do when you're not concerned about what might happen to you.
SPEAKER_01Yeah, that's the joy of being young, mostly, I think, right?
SPEAKER_00Yeah, I think I aged like a decade back then.
SPEAKER_01I'm sorry to hear that. We met at the beginning of the year. You were about to have a show at the Design Museum, then the virus struck. What are the plans for it now? Will it be shown again?
SPEAKER_00Unfortunately not. Um it uh it was open for just over a week, and then you know, programming for institutions, right, is a long-term thing. So by the time things opened up again, it didn't make sense to open the doors with the project. So sadly, we missed out on that opportunity, but I'm sure there'll be other.
SPEAKER_01I mean it's been a tumultuous period, obviously, apart from the design museum thing. How have you coped?
SPEAKER_00I'm still trying to figure that out. I think I'm really fortunate that by and large, you know, our team is young. We've only really been working all of us together in the last sort of year, so we we knew how to manage each other, if that makes sense, in absence, right? All of our work disappeared overnight bar one contract, and fortunately for us, they wanted to build a project in response to the pandemic. Suddenly we had lots of work to do, and that's from NTV, we sort of partnered with a biotech startup uh to try to have like a real-time conversation around what was happening, and this developed into live broadcasting, and the the the production element of that, the curatorial element of that, the editorial, basically took up our entire summer.
SPEAKER_01Right. Okay.
SPEAKER_00And now we're at a place where you know we are consolidating and thinking what comes next, and fortunately had a break to ask myself that question. So, how are you doing? And and sort of determined that I, like everybody else, was finding a way to cope in quite extraordinary circumstances. But yeah, it's a really tough time to envisage the future in any real meaningful way and actually start to implement things. It's a bit of a process, I think, mentally, for anyone.
SPEAKER_01I was going to ask you about that actually later in the interview, but you've brought it up now. So let's talk about it now. Because I was interested in a post that you wrote on Instagram, which was after your accident, where it seems you're taking stock. You described it on the post as a gentle nudge to really get living. Is your life and career about to change, I wonder? You railed kind of against unpaid work and well-meaning but unresolved project proposals.
SPEAKER_00I think that we've just been in this cycle, and when I say we, I I just mean collectively we, right? It doesn't matter who you speak to, everyone's kind of complaining about the same things. Particularly in the creative industries. Everyone's really productive making stuff. Everyone's flying everywhere, everyone was flying everywhere. I I couldn't meet up with friends because we were always in a different country with one another doing things, talking about the things we'd like to be doing or had just finished doing. Opportunity after opportunity after opportunity is a really great thing, I think, when you are starting out really in your career. You're networking, you're building connections, uh, you're disseminating the work that you're doing. But it just made me think that's a lot of busyness. But what is it leading to? What tangible outcomes from that hectic lifestyle can you look at and say, I'm really proud of that? Or we are working on something that I have deliberately gone out there to seek and to get done. It just felt like there was so much happening and I couldn't even name it, which suggests there's too much happening. And there's too much happening because maybe we're not being discerning enough about what we're engaged with. And that's why I was talking about the unpaid work and the true value of giving your time to an endeavor and what you might expect back if not a paycheck, right? And for me, a paycheck is a very serious thing because it pays for my team, our our studio, etc. So just you know, this notion of taking stock is to recalibrate the bits and pieces of that puzzle that makes sense for us to be engaged in and why. What was so beautiful about the Ferment project was that it was the only thing we were working on for three solid months, and that just felt like such a privilege not to travel, to think editorial, but to meet with people, to speak with them, to ask them quite intentional questions about what it is that they do and what they want to do sort of post-pandemic. Um, some of the subject areas touched on the Black Lives Matter movement and what this has to do with COVID and testing regimes. You know, we had the opportunity to really try to go deep into the meaning of what it is that we're all engaged in when we're flying all over the place and trying to get projects started up and trying to find partnerships. And I think it just made me feel like it's time perhaps to just concentrate on a few quality things and be okay with disappointing others.
SPEAKER_01Yeah, yeah, yeah.
SPEAKER_00Not feeling obliged to say yes to an institution or to an individual whom you want to say yes to, but because it is a distraction from a more long-term goal. So I don't know that I have yet some kind of radical proposal for what my life is going to look like post-pandemic, but I think I know clearly what I don't want to take with me into that portal.
SPEAKER_01I was going to ask you about the Black Lives Matter movement, actually, because obviously there's been a lot of self-examination across the world, but also in the design industry. What is your take on that in the design world?
SPEAKER_00Um, what do you mean? What is my take specifically?
SPEAKER_01That's a very good question to ask. I guess do you think the design world is inherently racist?
SPEAKER_00Yes.
SPEAKER_01And how does one combat that? Have you experienced that racism yourself?
SPEAKER_00Um obviously, across the different domains that anyone interacts with when they go from being a student to being a practitioner, and now with our studio, one encounters racism in myriad different ways, right? So that's why my answer was very straight. Yes, it is. But specifically, what are we referring to here? From an educational point of view, institutions are racist, the curriculum is racist. That goes without saying, actually. I studied architecture, as you mentioned earlier, the history of Western architecture on the flip side of what we are taught is really a history of colonial exploitation, because that's what built it. So by the time you're creating that as the canon, you're already in a problematic space, because that notion of otherness or alternatives is shut down from the get-go. And so what we think is good design, what we pursue as design thinking, it's coming from this ahistoric paradigm, I think.
SPEAKER_01Yeah. Yeah.
SPEAKER_00So conceptually, it's not so much that um design is racist, it's that there's an entire lens no one's looked through. So it's impoverished, uh, it's malnourished, it's boring. It's really boring, my God.
SPEAKER_01Is that why you didn't get on at Edinburgh? Was it more than just that?
SPEAKER_00It's more than that. Edinburgh was really interesting. I wish I could go back in time. Do it again.
SPEAKER_01How would you do it differently?
SPEAKER_00I was the only black student. I counted myself as being the only black student the entire time I was there. So three years and then a year out. So already that's saying something, wow. Obviously, none of my tutors were black. The last time I was taught by a black teacher was when I was in high school in Zimbabwe. So what other kind of reinforcing factors exist in an institution that doesn't know what to do with you is is what I'm getting at. And so in terms of mentorship and guidance, it's it's it's zero. It's lacking so much. I think that there are class distinctions that are at play in the United Kingdom as well.
SPEAKER_01I was gonna ask about that. I mean, I wonder your course I'm guessing was pretty middle class as well, right?
SPEAKER_00I'd been living in this country for two years before I went to Edinburgh, and that's when my culture shock happened at Edinburgh. And it's again because people have limited, I think, exposure to people who are not like them. So it's very difficult to fit in in the first place, let alone if um you are in a racialized body. I don't think I ever experienced um overt racism, but I can see how I was perhaps somebody difficult to relate to, because uh as a black woman, perhaps that was a tricky imaginary space for some people. So I found it to be actually quite a lonely place to be as a result. But I kept my head down and just got the course done. And then I think because of this lack of um nothing stuck, nothing held me to architecture. I just wanted to try something new. I wanted to go somewhere where you know you could explore beyond traditional realms, other possibility spaces. So when I was studying at Edinburgh, I I used to spend all my money on fashion editorials because I could get lost in them.
SPEAKER_01And should you not have been reading the architectural review at that stage?
SPEAKER_00I had to yeah, I should have been, you should have, could have, would have. It was escapism, right? And what I was reading about um were the people who were part of this world, and in my imaginary space, it felt like a permissive environment to define yourself however you want to define yourself without judgment. So I just got it into my head that geez, it'd be really nice to go to Central St. Martin's because it seems like that's where all the cool kids hang out. So I was like, okay, well, if I'm going to go to Central St. Martin's, I better try and get onto the MA fashion course. And you know, the response there was, you have to do a foundation year. And I was like, I've just done four years of architecture. I am not starting from ground zero again. And then just one day in the studio, one evening, I um I found material futures. And I thought, gosh, that sounds like a fascinating uh course. At the time it was called Textile Futures, uh, and I'd been writing my dissertation on fashion and architecture um through the lens of deconstructivism. So textiles, materiality, technology, this was you know already quite a fascinating domain for me. So I took myself off to Central St. Martin's after graduation to start MA Textile Features. And while I thought that this could be, you know, a stepping stone into fashion within a couple of weeks of starting that course, I was like, I don't want to work in fashion. It's far more interesting to think about materiality, technology, culture. This is the space that I've been wanting to go deeper into.
SPEAKER_01Yeah, yeah. Can I just take you back a moment? Because I was intrigued. I mean, you said you'd play your time at Edinburgh differently if you had it again. So looking back on it now, how would you have changed what happened to you or what you did?
SPEAKER_00I wish I'd had the confidence to know that this curriculum was one-sided and that there were other territories to explore. I think I was a different person, so it's kind of futile maybe to think in those terms. But I wish I'd had the confidence to know that what I was being dealt with, it wasn't my fault that I couldn't relate to it and that it felt unfinished. I think looking at other people who were thriving, they were thriving because it was theirs. But I thought that it was because perhaps I wasn't good. Those are very different paradigms, aren't they? And um, you know, my final year I had a female tutor who said to me, Please stay. I don't know why you want to go. You're you're really good. That's what she said. Uh maybe three weeks before graduation, she was like, You're really good. And I was like, Wow, no one's ever told me that this entire time I've been here. This is the first piece of feedback I've received. Someone saying, I think you could be an architect. But it was too late by then. I've made up my mind.
SPEAKER_01When did you start working with the bacteria that we were talking about in the intro? It was at St. Martin's, I presume.
SPEAKER_00It was. Um so my final year project, it's a two-year master's, and you spend the first year and a half, maybe kind of working in group settings, determining and developing which direction you want to go into. I became really uh fascinated by an emerging field of biology called synthetic biology, because engineers and scientists were coming together to say we now have the tools to design from the bottom up uh living systems, and I kind of understood this in a material sense as being a paradigm shift away from digging up materials and transforming them to molecular biology that allows us to grow new material systems. And for lack of any kind of access to the tools, since I'm not a biologist, what I decided to focus on was the sort of speculative ethical dimensions of what it means to be able to design with living systems. But I wanted to do this in conversation with an expert in this field. So I reached out to Professor John Ward at University College London in my final year, uh, told him about my projects and asked him a few questions, and then eventually, you know, he was like, Well, you can come to the lab and you can learn how to grow some things, you know. Quite nebulous, and so I did.
SPEAKER_01What was that first time? You set foot in a lab, John Ward at UCL's lab, for the first time. You from a design background, obviously you're surrounded by biologists. What did you feel like walking in there, I wonder?
SPEAKER_00Out of place again. Um, I felt in the way. But I also felt like I'm used to this and I'm exactly where I'm supposed to be. I guess the invitation from John was, what would you like to do? And I took him up on that um and started pottering about by his bench. You know, he he would say, Okay, I made you some media. Um, you could run a few experiments, like you could lick the plate or put your hands on it. Um and I think what he was trying to show me was microbes are everywhere and they're corporeal, you know, they're off the body and they're off the air. Understand this, then you can start to make really interesting connections. And it was really interesting to just see um the sort of rigor that is required to engage with any of these processes. So I'm an art school student to that point. I come to the lab, I work on prepared you know, plates someone else has prepared for me. Um, I lick them, I put them in the incubator, and then um, you know, the kind of bugs that live in your mouth take just a couple of days to grow. So in theory, I should be back in a couple of days, but actually it's three weeks before I can be bothered to come back. Um which, you know, makes a few people quite upset because it's not cool to open um an incubator that has uh bacteria from someone's mouth growing in them. It doesn't smell great. So I learned pretty quickly that it's antisocial not to be in sync with the life cycle of the organisms you're working with. And that's still the case even with the organism we work with now. Biology is not this static thing. You might be growing in an isolated bacteria, but if you go past the life cycle of that organism long enough, then you're going to have contaminants which can have a knock-on effect on other people's experiments. So I learned very quickly that if I was going to do this with John, if I was going to be a designer in residence here, I I needed to be a little more committed and a little bit more focused. But just to answer your earlier question, when did I start working with this organism? As I was finalizing my design proposal for my master's project, John sort of said, Hey, I've got this organism, it's a soil dwelling streptomyces. Um, you can culture it and make some nice plates for your exhibition. So I did.
SPEAKER_01Sorry, make some plates as in like the whole material would be the bacteria or decorate plates.
SPEAKER_00No, no. Just literally culturing the organism onto a petri dish.
SPEAKER_01Right.
SPEAKER_00And he was like, Oh, maybe you can make it part of your exhibition and bless him. He didn't know what my project was, you know, in terms of the exhibition output, um the pieces. But but I sort of took him up on the offer because it was such a beautiful organism. And it did help to tell this narrative that I was trying to weave um a little bit. But for weeks and months after that, I just kept on staring at this plate, which by then had dried up and, you know, decayed, but y what you had on it was this single bacterium that had grown into a circle, branched out, almost flowered, bloomed, and it had produced lots of pigment. It was dark, dark, dark, dark blue. But I just thought, gosh, it's so beautiful, I wonder what you could do with it. So after graduation and that summer break, I sort of mustered the confidence to go back to John to say to him, Maybe I can work a little bit more with that organism, if you don't mind. I won't break anything, I promise.
SPEAKER_01And this is the streptomyces philo colour, right? Streptomyces.
SPEAKER_00Um sky blue.
SPEAKER_01Uh okay.
SPEAKER_00So yes, streptomyces are found in the soil.
SPEAKER_01It's the stuff that makes the smell when it rains, I believe.
SPEAKER_00Yes. Um they release a compound called diosmin, which is all around us and we've all experienced it. It gives Be true to its flavour. So it's a very kind of when you start to think of provenance and that sort of early experiment John uh you know gives me when he's like, put your hand on this Petri dish. Look, microbes everywhere. And then and then I I remember saying to him, but where did you because you know there's this minus 80 degree freezer in the lab and you know just full of stocks. Uh and I just wondered about where they all come from. What's the supply chain for that? Which is which seems like a really stupid question on one hand. But on the other hand, it's for me was very revealing just to be told quite simply that uh oh, I happen to isolate the one you're working with from my cactus plant. And that's when I was like, wow, okay, microbe soil everywhere. Okay, this this is a very interesting body of concepts to start to unpack.
SPEAKER_01Why does it pump out the pigment, I wonder?
SPEAKER_00It's actually part of an antibiotic production system when it does this. So in the soil, streptomyces are doing lots of different things. Um they decay organic matter, and in their quest for, if you like, survival, different kinds of organisms might produce an antibiotic to stave off others. So we don't know what is happening on a pigment level in the soil, but isolated we are seeing this pigment molecule at the stage where the antibiotic is being produced. Yes, what is happening in the soil versus what is happening in the lab and what you can control for start to take you into the domain of how do you actually work with this material as a process for design.
SPEAKER_01And did you immediately think, oh, I could dye a scarf with this? What was your process once you discovered this pigment?
SPEAKER_00I suppose because at the time I was working at the textile features research center, and I had people like Carol Callet around me who were really at the vanguard of this leap from textiles and to biodesign. I almost instinctively knew that there's an interface here between this microbial world and this textile world. And so if we're talking about colour, the next logical step is to try to establish whether or not this is a viable dye stuff. Um and so I started to pursue this line of inquiry, asking if it was possible to grow this organism and then to extract its pigment and then to maybe screen print with it. Um and that logic failed because the dye stuff in that form was not colorful, was not concentrated enough to work with a binder in any way that is permanent and producing a beautiful print. So it took me about a year to establish that actually I need to rethink what it means to be in partnership with this organism. What else is it doing that I've missed because I'm just trying to plug it into an existing framework? And again, you look at this petri dish and you're like, there's so much pigment. What if I just create a barrier between the medium and the organism? What if that barrier was a textile? Can the organism grow on the textile and deploy that pigment directly onto the textile so that I don't need to worry about high concentrations and what kind of solvents that pigment dissolves in to make it workable? And that that was the aha moment in many ways.
SPEAKER_01So this is something I wanted just to get right back to basics with this is why you needed to investigate this in the first instance. You know, what is wrong with the dyes we're using at the moment? What is wrong with the fashion industry?
SPEAKER_00So it's interesting you say that because my main motivation at the beginning was not trying to find a sustainable solution to any other broken system. I was more intrigued with how design and the role of the designer was could be shaped by these new technologies that were in emergence. It was only when I started to grow that organism onto the textile that I realized that I don't need much water and I didn't need any solvents to fix that dye onto the textile. It was almost like a 100% organic process. You could eat the Petri dish. That's when I thought, whoa, hang on a second, this is a holy grail territory for textile production to be able to save on water use and not to need any chemicals whatsoever in the process.
SPEAKER_01Because I think the figure that gets banded about is that it uses 500 times less water. I wonder if we can give some figures to this. How much water to dye one of your scarves, and how much water would the fashion industry usually use to conventionally dye a scarf?
SPEAKER_00It gets banded about because people want to have absolutes, but I think that figure is we always caveat it and say it really depends on the protocol, the materials you're trying to dye. But in circumstances, you know, I can dye a standard sort of 90 centimetre by 90 centimetre scarf with about 20 milliliters of water. And that's huge because even with using other natural dyes, you would need at least two or three litres of water. If we're talking about print, then it's a very different set of figures you might want to talk about because it depends on the print and it depends on the textile itself. I always posit that what we're working with is a system that is really um tied to the biology of the organism that is not wasting any resources throughout its life cycle. So the invitation there is for us to calibrate what does the organism need to be able to go through that cycle, to be able to deploy that pigment. And yes, we've looked at it to say in some cases it is up to 500 times less water for any given process than you'd find in industry. So some of the processes we've developed allow us to achieve a uniform dye or a more organic looking print or pattern, I should say. Or, you know, we've made samples of prints that we've designed on Illustrator that are then transformed through tooling into a process that we can actually have those organisms growing to that print. So when you start to calculate water use across all of those processes compared to what, say, a print process actually entails, we're in a really good place to challenge that status quo.
SPEAKER_01You talked about tooling, Natsa, and you know, as we've learned from Jurassic Park, nature has a habit of finding the way. Can you control how much pigment the bacteria releases? Can you achieve a repeatable pattern? Is that even desirable?
SPEAKER_00Can you control it? Yes, is the short answer, and we can come back to that. Can you get a repeat? And the answer to that is sort of, i.e. yes, but do we want that? Some people do. Some people really want that. Some people want to make denim jeans that are indigo colored. But there's always going to be a market for for randomized patterns, right? In 2017, I took myself to Ginkgo Bioworks, biotech startup in Boston, to basically implement a project in their labs that I'd been developing while I was doing a residency at Jaspis in Stockholm a few months before that. I didn't have lab space there, so it was time to think and to plot next steps. And what I wanted to try to figure out was what it meant to scale up some of the lab experiments that I'd um arrived at into some semblance of a collection. So if you have 12 different protocols that yield 12 different aesthetics, if a protocol is a recipe, is a methodology, if I get really good at that particular protocol, can I deploy it 10 times and arrive at the same aesthetic finish? Is the question. And if I can do that, then does that mean I can draw the collection, knowing what all of the protocols are before I even grow anything? So this is a really important aspect of our work, is having methods that yield very specific aesthetic outcomes that you can do over and over and over again and know that you will arrive at that aesthetic, but every single piece is different.
SPEAKER_01Could you give me an example of a protocol or a recipe or a methodology?
SPEAKER_00So we have a methodology for uniformity. There's a very specific way in which we treat the textile and uh the growth conditions of the organisms to arrive at something that just looks blue or pink, but we also have a protocol for something that looks like it's been spray painted onto the fabric. And we know that if you do this all the time, that's the result that you're going to yield. We have protocols for specific prints that we've designed on Illustrator and Transform that way, and we know that obviously the print stays the same. Maybe the color variations might shift a little bit. We have a protocol for creating color gradients. This organism is producing blue or red depending on the acidity of the environment. So you'll say, okay, how do we set up this experiment so that you have a gradient, for example? So these become your palette, if you like, for when you start to think of a collection. So when I went to Ginkgo Bioworks, I was able to execute on creating the first garment where I kind of knew what I wanted the outcome to be. And the experiment was, okay, if I do this, am I actually going to arrive at that? And then you do, and that was great. Uh, we made a silk dust coat and and this question of scale and repeatability.
SPEAKER_01Well, scale is a very important word. Everything I've seen you when you're talking at TED Talks of various other things, D Zine Day, all the clippings I've read, scale comes up time and time again. So being able to do this thing on an industrial level, I'm guessing.
SPEAKER_00Or not, right? I think for me, when you are a design practitioner trying to figure this out, you start with a standard size Petri dish. Um, it measures about eight centimeters in diameter. So all of your experiments pretty much start there. And the entire time you're thinking, gosh, I wish I could make this bigger. And you realize that when you make it bigger, let's say you move to a Petri dish with a diameter of 15 centimeters, that the parameters shift a little bit, the methodology changes. You you see in real terms what that means for the nutrients that you're using, uh right? The the the the recipe doubles. And you're like, okay, that's that's more water, that's more sugar, that's more yeast, etc. And all of the time as these parameters are changing, the design parameters also start to shift. And what you think you can do within any given um, right, if someone says I want to make a garment, there are lots of different ways to consider scaling the amount of fabric that is being dyed to actually achieve that. And so being able to make something in a petri dish versus being able to create an entire garment, that's a massive leap that has happened to make that possible in terms of scaling. And then by the time you've convinced people that this is actually really great and we need to see more of this, then the notion of scale changes to okay, how do you arrive at a place where you can scale for impact so that people can actually turn to this as an alternative to petrochemical-based modes of manufacturing? And that's where you are going into the industrial territory of things. And that's where you need to start thinking about business models and the kinds of constraints that determine perhaps how to think about scale.
SPEAKER_01What kind of constraints?
SPEAKER_00Environmental constraints.
SPEAKER_01Right.
SPEAKER_00For example. One thing that is really clear to me with this in you know burgeoning field is that we can choose to try to scale industrial chemicals uh so that they're aligned with the way in which petroleum-based chemicals scale, or we can recognize that that paradigm's over already, and that one of the things we can learn from these natural systems is how much we can actually scale. So, what are the limits biology imposes that we now need to understand and live within? So if I can grow 20 scarves in one week using this protocol, and those are the limits to that process, then the question is what's the business model that holds those limits? It's a worthwhile conversation to have.
SPEAKER_01Well, it is, and I wonder if you've reached any conclusions during your research.
SPEAKER_00I think it's very much a research by doing, and and we're trying to figure that out right now.
SPEAKER_01How open is the textile industry to this? I'm guessing there is some significant vested interest that would oppose the kind of change you're considering.
SPEAKER_00I've not really heard the opposition. I tend to hang out with people who are really interested in change. I think that people will struggle with the expectation somehow that this is a way to replace everything that exists. I've been trying to slowly introduce the notion of the drop-in replacement, but maybe I should just come out and say it. I was told when I went to Ginkgo first couple of weeks that your idea will never work. It will never work because the economics don't make sense. You will never be able to compete with the price of oil. So that's how everyone envisages it in industry, is great about the replacement. How much does it cost relative to what we already use, which is the petroleum derivative? So if you're building out a new fermentation process that produces compounds that are dye stuff, and you just want to extract them and plug them into an existing system, then yes, you are going to have to argue why that costs more than the petroleum derivative. If you are approaching it from the perspective that we are approaching it, where you are saying there is value beyond the isolated pigment, look at this entire system of making that is allowing you to design with the organism, then I think there's more value there. And the scale question shifts somewhat to being about scaling the value there rather than scaling the amount of pigment.
SPEAKER_01It's a longer road, presumably.
SPEAKER_00It is. But potentially that's where there is um there are more variables, there's more diversity in approach there, I think. That opens it up to being more than just one version of chemical production. And I've resisted for so long to enter the startup game because I thought that the only way in which you can actually make an impact in this industry is if you can industrialize and become an industrialist. And I thought to myself, well, I don't want to be a chemical manufacturer. But that's because I was thinking that the only way in which you can scale this is if you think of chemical manufacturing. It's my view that when you start to talk about craft design methodology and integrating that with the production of pigments with the organism, then you're designing a whole plethora of different routes to introduce these new systems into industrial production. And that's very much a design-led endeavor.
SPEAKER_01Can we talk about your background? You were born in Harari in Zimbabwe, but your family came over to the UK when you were 17. What did your parents do?
SPEAKER_00My dad is a doctor.
SPEAKER_01A medical doctor.
SPEAKER_00A medical doctor. He ran two GPU practices. I think he got a little bit bored and decided that he wanted to become an anaesthetist. So he came to the UK to train. He got a training number in the Scottish borders of all places, spent some time at Edinburgh before coming to London as a registrar, and that's when we moved to join him for what was supposed to be just maybe a one or two year stint, which was probably wishful thinking for my parents. Why would you move the entire family for just one year? Seems absurd to me. But we ended up staying because the um our economy in Zimbabwe collapsed, and yeah, we just ended up staying. My mum was one of those sort of uh job for lifers. I think she still is, technically speaking. She worked in finance at uh Lever Brothers, which is a subsidiary of Unilever, and at the time, in its sort of heyday, was doing most of the manufacturing for Unilever products for sub-Saharan Africa. Came here and started working at Unilever in Blackfriars, and that's what she still does.
SPEAKER_01Was there art in your house?
SPEAKER_00That's such a good question. Uh yes, through me.
SPEAKER_01Okay.
SPEAKER_00I didn't really have that as a there was nobody to be encouraged by in that regard from a professional point of view. But my grandmother did a lot to encourage me, I think, in that direction. I was always quite creative, and she was a teacher. At the end of every semester, she would bring all the leftover paints, and I would just love spending the entire holiday painting. And then I had a chat with my dad when I was 11, and he was like, What do you want to do with your life? And I was like, I want to be an artist. And he was like, next, like, try again. And then I was like, fine, I'll be an architect because I knew that that's a profession and it would be, you know, it's it's something tangible. My parents built their own house, so they know what that is, you know, um, to build a building. So I kind of knew quite early on that that was the foothold that would allow me to figure out the rest.
SPEAKER_01Was so much science? Because obviously you talk about your interest in biology at Central St. Martin's, but were you interested in biology before?
SPEAKER_00I can't say that I took an interest in it, but I think it was all around us because you know, from my dad's side of things, his brother, my uncle, lived down the road, he was also a doctor. So they always used to talk about bodies, right? All of the books in my dad study were about, you know, all the possible things that can go wrong with the body and all of the images that represent that. You know, I I had quite a constitution for all of the awful things that can happen to skin because I used to like with my little sister look through all the books and try and scare each other.
SPEAKER_01What was it like growing up in Zimbabwe? I mean, it's a country after all that only got its independence in 1980, I think I'm right in saying. And I'm at the age where I could remember the independence being on the news a lot. And I think Mugabe, and the West at least, was seen initially as this kind of quite popular figure, but then obviously that began to curdle.
SPEAKER_00Yeah, uh Zimbabwe, gosh, I was born soon after independence, five years later, and uh I was a born free, and it was an amazing childhood. Everything was great. I never thought I would leave. I thought I would leave to go to university and come back, but I don't think anyone could have anticipated that so much was going to change. Yeah, relations I like I like the term curdled, I'm going to use that.
unknownThank you.
SPEAKER_00Uh with the West definitely curdled, on the land reform question, which I think persists today. Who owns the land? And I think that's a worldwide everyone's asking themselves that question, whether it's the pipeline and the tar sands, um sovereign rights of indigenous people, Scotland asking the same question, I think. Even a friend of mine sent me a book this past week, The Book of Trespass by Nick Hayes, which is about who owns the land and what it means to have access to it, what it means to be excluded from it. And I think in Zimbabwe the reason why the war was fought in the first place to gain independence from the Smith government was to establish land rights of people whose land was taken away from them. So it was bound to happen. It was part of the Lancaster House Agreement that the land question was something to be dealt with post-independence, and then Tony Blair's government decided that it wasn't their government who signed that agreement, it wasn't their responsibility. And then comes attrition. I think that there was a a lack of patience with some factions in. our government and the the people who who fought the war, the veterans. And that's how things implode. And I think for a whole generation we lost the promise of independence because we had to leave the place that we were hoping to make our home.
SPEAKER_01Would you go back now, sorry?
SPEAKER_00I would love to go back, but I think that my time right now is better spent doing what I'm doing. I mean you know my sister went back a couple of years ago. I was like, what are you crazy? Lots of people go back. There are people always going back. And maybe I'm the crazy one for sticking around.
SPEAKER_01Let's talk about where you're at right now because I'm digressing a little bit. With Ginkgo, you've created this TV station or YouTube channel, Ferment TV. What's the thinking behind that?
SPEAKER_00So the thinking behind that is across I think all endeavors we've come to a bit of a dead end with an imaginative space to think of other ways of doing things. And at such a critical time in human history where climate change is the most existential crisis that we face, the loss of biodiversity. There's a real question about how emerging technologies are harnessed to actually speak to the conditions that we live in. And what we wanted to do with Ferment TV was to connect those dots across the multiple crises we're facing whether it's COVID 19 and the pandemic, climate change, the continual fight for racial justice, design justice how do we build a better world with the tools that we have? How do we ask better questions?
SPEAKER_01Design justice, I'm intrigued, can we define when you get into design justice, what areas are you getting into there?
SPEAKER_00It's huge. Sasha Kostanza Chuk has written a book about it. I highly recommend everyone buy it and read it, published by MIT Press. And it really focuses on this notion that communities do best when they together develop practices that are responding to their needs to build the world that they need. So the subtitle is Community led practices to build the worlds we need. And it really focuses on how design could actually really enhance the activities of marginalized communities that they might arrive at a place where we're able to dismantle structural inequities across many different domains. And it's tied to this question of you know liberation and ecological survival. So with Ferment we were trying to connect these different conversations that are happening in different domains. We had Alondra Nelson talking about COVID-19 and you know scientific racism and the the distribution of healthcare or lack thereof depending on the color of your skin. We had people like Carol Callay and Brenda Parker talking about the need for us to break silos in design and science making that we can actually share expertise to build out institutional frameworks to train a next generation of designers, scientists and architects. So we over you know a period of three or four months held these live discussions, 12 in total, that were really bringing together different experts from different fields to talk about or to at least start to roadmap other frameworks for us to think about synthetic biology. Drew Endy and and Daisy Ginsberg talked together about this notion of can we have a vision that we share in common? And if we can have a vision we can share in common, then what are the institutional frameworks we need to actually develop to start aligning technology with human and ecological development that ensures our survival on this planet.
SPEAKER_01It does cover a gamut of issues. I was watching a show you hosted last night with Sarah Richardson who's a microbiologist and I was intrigued by something you said actually where you said you'd never had any role models. Is that true? You talk about a roadmap I guess it shows that there has been no roadmap for the kind of work that you're doing.
SPEAKER_00For the kind of work that I've been doing sort of always the first to do something whether it's the first designer in residence in this lab or you know whatever. So the roadmap has never been entirely clear in having examples of people on that same trajectory. But with Sarah what's so amazing about her was that she was my first role model who was a scientist because the way in which she was talking about synthetic biology was how people in the humanities maybe were more fair with it.
SPEAKER_01Well it was interesting I got a C in GTSE biology uh it's not a strong suit. I thought the way she spoke incredibly accessible anybody could understand it and the world suddenly made a different kind of sense I guess I'd say she's a brilliant brilliant science communicator and she understands how vital a skill that is for someone in her shoes.
SPEAKER_00But beyond the science communication itself was the message which is we have so much diversity in nature why are we wanting to engineer yeast to produce all of our chemicals why are we trying to create that monoculture approach to such a diverse field of possibilities and we talked about the wild type organism you know we don't use synthetic biology in any of our processes because we've not needed to because this organism from John's cactus naturally produces this pigment. And the invitation I think from Sarah is to say well if it naturally does that then give it what it wants find out the strategies that keeps it happy in the same way that we've been domesticating other organisms agriculturally for example whereas synthetic biology is in its attempt to standardize production processes is funneling all of its efforts to the model organism, the single organism that is supposed to do so much. And still a big question mark about whether all of that is going to work. In terms of role model, I could really see someone from the scientific world saying it's okay to work with a wild type. It doesn't have to be engineered and there's actually a lot of value in figuring out how the wild type behaves and they are processes to domesticate that organism to the paradigm you are entering with it. And it just clicked to me that that's what I'd spent all of this time doing was getting to know this organism, nurturing it, trying to figure out why sometimes it doesn't grow and sometimes it grows beautifully and adjusting myself to that. In some ways it has domesticated me your entire workflow is completely tethered to its life cycle so when we're in the lab it's like everything has to shift in in that direction and and hardly ever the other way around.
SPEAKER_01I was going to ask you actually what your workshop studio looks like for the listeners. I mean is it more workshop or more lab?
SPEAKER_00It's more studio actually and then we work out of John's lab. We're interested to see what an evolution of that looks like but coronavirus was a bit of a break on that but for all intents and purposes we've always worked to very specific projects with the bacteria dyes. So we block out time to be based um at UCL to actually see those projects through and then we're working and distributing some of that work. So if we're creating a garment we'll work with a seamstress who helps take our ideas and sort of translate that into pattern pieces. So that side of production is taken care that way because we're not fashion designers right and then in terms of tooling we work with different kinds of fabricators to take what we're developing in-house and actually translate that into bits and pieces we can work with that are quite bespoke to the system within the lab. I'm excited to see how we kind of push forwards because I do want to be in a place where we have our own lab space to really push this.
SPEAKER_01This is what I was going to ask because I've taken up loads of your time so this is my final question. In terms of 10 years time do you have a vision of where you'll be um I do.
SPEAKER_00I do want to jinx it just tell us quietly nobody will hear you know what I want to do grant is to figure out the second piece of this we know that we have a really powerful new system of manufacturing. It's got so much potential and we haven't figured out all of the pieces we can only do that by trying. What I'm more interested in is whether or not you can marry that to a business model that makes sense for the kind of world we're entering. That means we need to re-establish what is enough, what is growth we need to establish what drives our motivations with any of these activities that we're engaged with, who else benefits from these activities. I'm interested in what those future business models are that are going to really see the potential that's at play, become the model way of doing biotech in the future. So maybe in 10 years' time I will have a few more answers about that.
SPEAKER_01Well we'll have to come back in 10 years and see how you've got on Natsai thank you so much for your time that was brilliant. Thank you very much. Thank you Grant To discover more about Natsai's work go to natsyaudry.co.uk there are images from the interviews as well as little films and other things on my Instagram page, Grant on Design and guess what? I have a new website. You can find all the podcasts that I've done, sign up to my newsletter and lots of other stuff at grantondesign.com. If you've enjoyed listening and want to see this podcast flourish then please rate and review on Apple Podcasts or wherever you listen to this from. And if you feel so inclined you can go to my Patreon page and make a pledge at patreon.com forward slash material matters. You'll be helping to take the message of the importance of materials, skill, craft and design to a whole new audience. Thanks so much for listening and please stay safe and well