Bio-Logics: Designing with Nature

Founded by designer Natsai Audrey Chieza, Faber Futures is a design agency working with nature, design and technology to build materials and processes from living matter. Pioneers in the field of biodesign, their work questions how designers can collaborate with living systems to help tackle global problems such as pollution and waste.

As we enter 2020, resources are depleting, yet consumption is expanding to meet the demands of a growing population. Faber Futures is investigating whether biological systems could offer more efficient, and less harmful, alternatives to industrial production. This thinking is captured in Project Coelicolor, a project designed to minimise the use of water in textile dying by growing bacteria directly onto the textile instead of using synthetic dyes. Making bacteria the co-designer results in a chemical-free process that uses 500-times less water than usual.

For this display, Faber Futures presents design research, scientific experiments and prototypes that question whether we can achieve new processes for production that extract nature’s logic, rather than its resources. Could this radical new approach create a fairer and more sustainable future?