 Hi everyone and welcome. I am Andrea Lips, a curator of contemporary design here and I am honored to be sharing the stage tonight, moderating this conversation around materials and technology with three of our national design award winners. So by way of very brief introduction, sitting to my left is Neri Oxman who is our national design award winner for interaction design. Neri is an architect, a designer and inventor, a professor at MIT, the founder of the mediated matter group at the MIT Media Lab and that is a design practice. It really integrates computation, digital fabrication, biology, material science and much more really seeking and exploring the transformation of our relationship of the built in the natural environment. And next to Neri is Mikyung Kim. Mikyung is our national design award winner for landscape architecture and is the founder of your studio Mikyung Kim Design which is based in Boston, a landscape architecture and urban design firm where you very much are of course weaving nature and sculpture and a lot of the work that you do to solve urban resiliency issues with a deep connection and commitment to place making. And finally Christina Kim who is our national design award winner for fashion design. Christina is the co-founder and designer of DOSA which is a clothing accessories and housewares company that focuses on rethinking conventional fashion production and sustaining artisan cultures. So thank you to each of you for being here this evening. And I really actually wanted to start out with a question to you Mikyung. As a landscape architect how do you define a material in your practice? That's a broad question. It's a good question. Can you guys hear me in the back? Okay great. So I think the difference between design and landscape architecture and the two other kind of brilliant work that's flanking me is that I think we actually work with the materials of the natural world. Sometimes when I'm in an argument with architects I say if you look up and you can see the sky that's our realm. And so it's always about the materials themselves that often come or always come from the natural world depending on how much it's actually transformed. But it's also about highlighting the systems of the natural world so the materials actually show us how they change. So like Christina's work on the body our work is with the systems of the natural world. Our materials in general our practice is quite resilient so we don't go into a project saying we are a firm that uses stone or we are a firm that uses stainless steel but that we listen very carefully to the community and the site and the systems of the place to understand that. And so an example is a healing garden we did in Chicago where we spent a week meeting children in the hospital and some of them had never left the hospital the first three years of their life. They'd had heart transplants and they said can you bring a piece of Chicago into this garden for us. So we waited and we waited and we waited and a couple trees that were planted by Frederick Law Olmsted during the Columbian exposition fell. And we worked with an urban forester and he called me at around 11 and said some trees just fell do you want them. And so that's often the beginning of the story is that these materials have a kind of resonance that have meaning for the communities that we work with. I actually didn't know that about the trees and isn't there like a hand print? So that's that's a even longer story. So we we we decided we wanted to imprint the narrative of the children in this place and so I went there for three days with a colleague and we waited. So we told the hospital please let everybody know that we want children of all ages. And when we got there there was a line like we were rock stars and there are all these parents mothers in particular who just wanted their kids to be imprinted in this garden. And so we just we try to find all these different ways to bring meaning that are it's outside of ourselves in certain ways and it's kind of a mixing of culture and nature. You know and actually it's interesting that you mention this idea of systems of the natural world and you know thinking about nature's own intelligence if you will and I think about your work Neri and so much of what you're doing with materials and developing processes that enable some of those to be realized. What's your starting point? Tree. Starting point is a tree. I liked your answer especially because also for us and and when you you know when you ask about the starting point the starting point and the end point sort of meet at the same place I would say that for us as well a material is less of a product more of a process less about a kind of a final static product or object and more about a system of interactions between physical constraints and environmental constraints. And once you understand that's why I also called the group mediated matter and not material not a material based group but matter based group because matter is so much more generically defined can be so much more generically defined and so I think of the process much much like I think about the question about material and materiality and it reminds me of the wasp and the orchid right the delirium argument about is the wasp part of the orchid is the orchid part of the wasp you can't really cut a clean line between the organism and the plant because they each define itself and of course the wasp carries in a way nourishes the reproductive system of the the orchid and carries and enables its pollination etc and so there is a continuous dependency between elements of a particular system that define matter similarly in our process we don't take wood as wood or we don't define wood again as a static highly grained artifact but rather we start with a tree and we start with a molecular structure of that of that particular wood and we think how can we rather than cut trees how can we reinvent the process of growing wood from scratch and this is true for work we did with polymers and it's true for work we did with glass and silica silicate silicone it's true for work we did with shrimp shells and and biopolymers and so rather than starting with an end product the starting point is a set of constraints and a set of physical characterization of matter that is being chosen again whether it's fibers or cellular solids or again biopolymers and then understanding the range of control that we can leverage as designers to tune those physical and environmental properties i see friends in the audience smiling as to generate the product as to generate the final the final object so the process and the product are really interwoven and and i think it's true also for the other yeah actually i was gonna say i mean the yeah yeah the process and the product really are interwoven i mean thinking christina to you and the way in which you work with material um how do you approach material and the process of material in in your work you know i think in my case the material has such an intimate relationship with what i do and there are two things i think about one is how does it feel because it's something that we wear and i think about that but then also it has such a you know close relationship with our body and nature i think about where the materials come from in my case i mainly work with natural materials like cotton wool linen hemp and i kind of think about the whole i mean i kind of dissected from the seed from the growing and then the whole the whole journey that raw material takes and what kind of impact that that journey of the material impact makers so for example you know past 20 years i've been very conscious about using organic cotton because i was working in the fields in india where cotton was growing in organic and conventional and in the work i do where there a lot of the work is done by hand and i got to see firsthand the impact of conventional cotton has on spinner's hand and also it impacted you know their whole system so you know understanding what the raw materials can do i'm very conscious about choosing my own materials and then trying to support as much of a organically grown materials or not using chemicals or not going through as many processes i mean you know i do you know work with very simple basic tools and that that word that that's the world i feel very comfortable and i could relate to the people that i work with in that sense so it has been very much about the the life of a plant and that's what i do and that's how i start there almost seems to be a reverence for materials and the materials that are a part of each of your practices nary i'm curious to have you elaborate and talk about that a little bit more it's what it means to be a woman it is what it means to be alive right yeah um um i can i can do more of that um yes reverence in the sense of respect and reverence in the sense of honesty and reverence reverence in the sense of ingenuity and reverence in the sense of rigor and sensitivity um and for what the material wants to be and recently we've just completed that go ho ho pavilion we're we're happy to declare that we're designing and another one for you guys and um and you know and there are all these questions around uh you know how long would it last like the the previous the previous pavilion was just recently acquired for a major museum for permanent from a collection and all these questions came up um how long would it last it does it last like a Picasso you know how how many centuries could we count on it to left and and to all these questions we answered we don't know we don't know we don't know and i think i've i've been to the pantheon this part past august for the first time in my life and just having experienced this incredibly um you talk about reverence being in the pantheon that's like that's reverence and just being there and experiencing experiencing culture in nature in a structure that's been built uh you know that's 3500 years and more old and is still there and it's still it's it's still standing and signifies you know not only this incredible structure but signifies or embodies the values of of of a democratic society and then and then i thought about our recent structure um that is designed to you know to to dissociate in a single rain yeah and what does that mean um that when when you can design for decay you know you're not designing and and when that definition of sustainability switches um from time to quality does decay mean that the end of the legacy of that product or rather does the fact that the structure decays and dissociates uh and nourishes the ground and instead grows another tree means that it lasts longer than the pantheon it's just a different i think a different way of thinking about time and also about transformation so i think the most recent um taste in reverence in the age of global warming um and we should talk about global warming um and and in the age of all of these environmental havocs that are amongst us um this kind of sensitivity to timeless timeliness versus timelessness uh is extremely important for design and designers and designers that um you know that are um all about you know designing this perfect static obviously we talked about the modernist tradition um will not be able to enter the environmental the conversation in the context of the environmental challenges so i think the the sense of reverence that you speak of and that's such a beautiful word um has to do with the understanding of of tunability the and and the sensitivity and sensibility to the environment across spatial dimensions of course but across time dimensions as well yeah you know and it is interesting i mean as you and i were just talking about i mean this idea of decay and it really seems to have come out of this modernist tradition this idea of using materials that almost were impermeable and impervious to nature's fluctuations and rhythms itself you know that there was this kind of eschewing of change and of decay you know whereas now it seems like we're really beginning to turn some of that on its head and you know how do how do you as designers in your own practice embrace variation for instance do you want to talk to that mckyoung um i think to be a landscape architect you have to be a little irreverent because you're you know there is this very simplistic notion of um when i was a young child i had the good fortune of meeting dan kiley and um he kind of said well as a landscape architect you either have the option to be like god and make nature or be irreverent so it's very funny because they use the same kind of twist on words i think that for for us our work is always about time it's always about i i'm not decay as part of the consideration of what we do but there's also kind of an accretion there's it's things transform and it's not just the natural world because we do a lot of work in the city and we're interested in the kind of interface of culture and the natural world which is water for us in the city i mean it's just where is water going where is it coming and how do we manage it and so but for for us i think um as landscape architects you can't do your job and be too romantic because our job is to try to find how we fix the systems that we're slowly destroying in our in our in a kind of global way and how do we do that um some people are thinking about it in the kind of larger realm in the kind of um more strategic realm and then people designers like us we're doing it in a more granular level where every project we say how does it link to something else and how can we start to create a system after doing four or five projects in boston or something and so it is a um it's kind of uh reverent because you're trying to understand how nature actually works but irreverent because you're not trying to emulate the the form of god because you can or of the natural world because i i don't feel that we can ever beat the beauty of the natural world and the way in which and then you probably end up making things that are fixed right you fall in love with a certain moment and then you replicate that you know and it's again i feel like there are almost these themes that we kind of keep touching upon i mean thinking again even of like you know these systems and moments of of time and processes and you know thinking two ideas of where we find ourselves currently with climate change um and the environment and whatnot and i think a lot actually to your practice christina and you know really embracing all material you know once you have dedicated yourself to something that um you know you find these applications and ways to use every little bit of it i mean there's this just beauty in what that practice is which i think would be interesting to think about how that could replicate out you know how um how does that work for you in your practice as far as just you know working with the jamdani with these beautiful hand woven textiles and you know creating kind of these larger garments down into these tiny amulets well goes back to reverence for material um and for me it's two combination of two most of the material that i work with are made by hand but then also there's a whole layer of making from the fabric that we use hands to make the clothing and um and the you know i work mainly in india in mexico where you know the value of our making has a different value system than here and so that's one of the things that i thought about so for example i could create really design heavy work but it really lengthens the work of making itself but because like places like in india we you know our pay schedule pay rate is different so i just tried to make as much hand design work as possible to extend the life using as little natural material as possible but just add time value to it and so that we really don't tap into as much natural resources and also to create layers of work which where the artisans has to also put a lot of their design thinking because in you know one of the work that i do is try to create work with the leftover fabrics and the leftover fabric work involves a lot of ingenious thinking on the makers part so through that process i think you are able to create a dialogue with a designer and a maker which also creates some kind of a human relationship which i think is very important and through that human exchange between myself and the maker i think we add a lot of design value to it which allows us to sell it at higher price you know so i think um i think that all comes from really reverence for the natural material and our hands so how is your process then if you are using materials you can't predict in advance what their shapes are sizes do you draw things in advance or do you well there's a whole process so what we do is we let's say cut 500 meters and we have a like a pile where we just collect it and then we just kind of you know all of us myself and the makers we all kind of get into like a running shoes and we sort the fabric by shape and color and so there's a lot of physical activity which i think is very interesting because i also work with a lot of women and men who come from different backgrounds in India so they could be you know Muslims and Hindus and even in Hindu there's a whole layer of caste system that i deal with but by making it very physically active and that we all have to kind of the share this sorting process it kind of creates a certain amount of equality and it actually is really fun you know because most work that is involved in handwork is very sedentary and they don't move so i think it kind of creates certain amount of new way of thinking that i didn't think about before and active i think it's activating and active well and it speaks to collaboration too yes for sure i mean yeah as a designer i can't i could only have a certain amount of template but it's the makers who have to make a lot of decisions themselves choice of colors how do you put it together and i think that really creates a dynamic that probably didn't exist before in the kind of work that that i've been doing in my field and i think it's nice i mean you know as as you were getting to i mean that there is there's not really a predictability necessarily then in what the end product will be and being open to what that process is and and we also really really revere one of a kind so that also as value you find that when you bring those products here to the us that it's different now than it was at 15 years ago in terms of how the public perceives your work very much so yeah what's very much so i think also there's a kind of a movement people want to make things themselves so there's a lot of hand making that is happening in in our time and i think through that process people tend to understand things that are made by one person from beginning to the end there's a lot of a creative decision making and i think one could feel it there's certain amount of something that you really don't know but you feel something is different i think that comes from a lot of hand touch i think there's something about our hand that is unique and that energy i think somehow transmits it you know and even thinking of the intimacy of materials i mean in your particular case where they often end as garments worn on the body which is incredibly intimate um and you know just how all of the materials ultimately pervade our lives and our existence and sadly our oceans at this point i mean nary what do you think about the role of materials in design and moving forward the whole point behind material ecology is exactly that um uh a research area that is dedicated to understanding the principles behind the environmental and the physical properties of materials at large um to be able to shift um i would say the material world from um an ecology agnostic domain to one that operates like natural ecology if you think about the definition of ecology ecology defines the relationships between organisms and other organisms and organisms in their environment if you can apply that definition to the world of the artificial then you can enter a completely different world where everything we design from products wearables to buildings to cities um enters that ecology um the the work we started doing with water-based digital fabrication the thesis behind this work is is that really these robotic processes can eliminate the use and application uh in generation of plastics all together and so as of as of now there is no use for plastic um there is no reason why we should be continuously producing plastic when we have these other materials and processes that enable us you know to generate this bottle out of a um out of a biopolymer that can biodegrade on command and can grow into a perfume you know can transform into a perfume bottle or it can transform into a tree or it can transform into an edible and and so this area of programming matter um much in the same way in which we program life and program dna in the area of synthetic biology something that the team and I are very very interested in and how can we develop relationships between the program programming of matter and the programming of life and and link those two together to create together what we call material ecology and you know and you know it's it's a big deal when you can use a robotic arm to to print a six meter structure and control the molecular scale um of that of that structure you can literally control the alignment with crystallinity of of polymers um and and program the chemical behavior of a structure at an architectural stage uh scale so I think this is a really exciting moment for designers this this 2018 this moment is a very very exciting moment for design and designers across products across applications across disciplines across fields and and and and I think and I think that the ability to enter the design domains across these various uh across these various scales um you know not not as gods but as gardeners is is really really the key and not to be afraid that you know that an architect can operate as a chemist and vice versa yeah well you know and it's so interesting too because I mean we find ourselves living in such a fascinating time right I mean there really is this convergence with the digital and the biological which is enabling so much to happen I mean we're really just at the beginning of it and understanding what the impacts of this potentially could be and what they look like and we're really writing all the rules you know as we're sitting here talking about this um you know and and I think so often about it you know no longer even just being about a material perhaps making you know being neutral in its own ecosystem but how can it actually enhance potentially its host environment um you know are there any materials in particular that you're exploring a process right behind us and two images ago um absolutely um polymers that are printed to contain living matter that can interact with the human body by virtue of creating these selective filtering membranes that can allow vitamins or vitamin like fluids to enter the body to scan the body these already exist the question is of course how to make how to turn these processes into real-world products how to get them FDA approved and you know this will take a practice and this is something we're working on as well um but um but of course around fibers there's fascinating research uh and and products that are coming into the world especially one great example is a ford um link to MIT the ability to for example use um fibers as preform semiconductor preforms that are drawn from very very tall towers um from four four centimeter ish diameter to micron scale as you know as lasers um fibers that can can conduct sound can conduct light uh can act as medical devices um and can be organically potentially organically formed uh and so that that kind of interaction the ability to I would say to mediate between the natural environment the biological environment the natural environment the biological environment uh and and the designed environment um is is one that that is extremely extremely important the ability to sort of be able to translate these three currencies the digital the biological and the physical um is is one that is is a is a literacy is a literacy without which we can't we can't enter the next century yeah we can't afford to let's say right well and it's so interesting because I mean you know we we still are living a bit with the legacy of industrial production and a bit of the logic of what that was right and you know standardization and a romanticism pantheon yeah yeah right you know and and thinking about like that logic of standardization and um you know and stamping out I you know identically and whatnot and it's so interesting that I think in a way in each of your your own practices as diverse and divergent as they are in many ways actually touches upon all of that I mean thinking Christina to you know the fact that there is variation in each and every piece ultimately because of the maker because of the varied right we ourselves so yeah right I think it's interesting as hearing both of these kind of different processes how it's occurring to me I'm gonna say it for the first time so it might not make sense um that designers are almost mediators right now they have all these choices to that it's economically viable to create things that are handmade completely made by hand and then there is this other this is other end of the spectrum where we have this incredible technology that allows for us that machines can make things that are at incredible scales at the scales of buildings um and so I think it's really interesting that as designers we have a choice and we sometimes we start off as young designers um defined by the school we went to and the school chooses for us what's important and then we all as individuals we go out there and we start to um embed ourselves and in whatever we're interested in we find our soul in wherever we're going and um I think it's so I was thinking about what you were talking about and for us because there's a kind of there is a moment where we cut the ribbon and we say we passed the project to a public um but we do try to find that narrative there's a project we did in Korea where um and a lot of our stories are not known um where the story was that this source point was the place where north and south Korea would celebrate when they reunited and that was 1992 we're still having that discussion today but um what we did was we found quarries in the nine provinces of north and south Korea and we reached out to them and asked them to donate stone and so there are nine source points to the seven mile river and they all so there's a story about coming together and but it's also a story about just bringing people to the water and so but I don't know if people can there isn't a kind of each stone came and it was unique and we had to design it once we saw the piece and it was fabricated in Seoul but it sounds like it's a little different from your process where um it's more immediate you know well there's certain amount of template that we follow so for example you know we do have graded patterns and you know certain fabrics have a certain different requirements but once that has been achieved um artisans could put their signature into it so it does become quite unique and especially in the projects that we do where we use scraps so yeah I mean I guess that's the question I want to ask you Neri is that because a lot of things you do have a kind of mathematical and uh computer-based science foundation um how do you integrate because in the end the the things that you make feel very organic and very humane and what's that process like how does it differ from Christina where she starts with her hands but it seems yours starts with a more intellectual process and then moves through I think it's the same honestly um I think uh in the play in the more innovation is sort of the moment where the hand in the in in the machine unite I think I think it's the same um I think it's the aesthetics of thinking that defines the the physical aesthetics but it doesn't start with the physical aesthetics it starts with an intellectual aesthetics with a taste in thinking um that that defines the process uh yes there are there are folks on my team that compare the elegance of code you know to to the form of the elegance of computer code or the elegance of of um of uh um DNA code um to to the elegance of the the final product whether a a um organic object a non-organic object or a living being a living organism but I think in in the end um in the end it's it's sort of here it's a it's a philosophy that defines that defines the process that sort of calls calls upon the tools but in on the other hand it's not like on the other hand we do spend a long time being hard on each other and and um where is it is it in that kind of granule it's in the pasta we have to cook a ton to just be around food and around each other but we give each other a hard time until we get to that super magical uh uh point where is it in the coding then that you do that it's everything so do you code it and then you print it and then you try it again yeah yeah so okay so here here's the the the less romantic more scientific explanation um so the vis-a-vis the industrial revolution and and the modernist tradition and serialization and serialization on command um currently there there is is what we call a a dimensional mismatch between the built environment and the biological environment uh I said the built environment the biological environment in the natural environment that dimensional mismatch is for example uh expressed in how um our skins respond to heat versus how concrete responds to heat um on the scale of a skyscraper versus the scale of a body so there is what we call a dimensional mismatch okay so now if we as designers can reduce or perhaps eliminate that dimension dimensional mismatch and this does not have uh it it it of course it has to do with granularity and resolution but not only it also has to do with complexity if we can reduce or eliminate the dimensional mismatch then we enter material ecology then we enter an age where you will not be able to separate between the natural and the artificial this age is coming that that age require that ability that I call this material singularity to to arrive at a material singularity would require of us to eliminate completely the dimensional mismatch between those three environments the built environment the the the the natural environment the biological environment that that of course will generate a new form of of species it will affect how we evolve it will affect how we live to affect how we interact with each other and with our environments um so so what we try to do is get there and we're not there we haven't eliminated that dimensional mismatch but um projects that we do that do touch touch that um that uh ambition uh carry that aesthetics and vespers is a good example the the the the collection of death masks we recently uh published um and and exhibited um that the the the death mask becomes a life mask right it is designed at the resolution of the last breath of the where it is designed at the resolution of potentially stem cells it is designed to uh to um contain and operate uh at the level of an E. coli cell that can produce pigments antibiotics pigments on come uh melanin on command um and so once you get there uh not only the functionality of the product surprises you um and is not there to serve the human body or to serve the environment but rather there's this beautiful marriage this beautiful relationship between the two um but also you've entered into this kind of aesthetics that you're talking about so that's what we try that's what that's where so always trying to push the team in the team is divided into different projects each project tackles a different material system for each material system we aim to reduce that dimensional mismatch between the three domains okay so that's basically the secret of when you said everything I've never said that actually that's it publish yeah so when you say the dimensional mismatch because you're gonna have to come two levels down for me you um and that's a compliment um so you said so when you said skin to concrete I got it right yeah so where are you going so think about glass and leaf or right the the photosynthesis so I understand skin and concrete skin is flexible it can open and close concrete it has some but it's not and so it cracks and so for me it's like uh it's a huge problem and so is that the direction that things are moving in that yeah so the exactly materials have mimic yeah the things that are so amazing not mimic not mimic cannot stand this word not mimic but um but but um but perhaps um perhaps um uh arrive to a spatial and temporal uh gradation the ability to spatially let's say spatially vary the porosity of concrete on demand based on load conditions we'll get it closer to you know what what the calceless spongy bone how the spongy bone reacts to to load um and if you can do that in the time dimension as well then you've then sort of you reach the holy grail so it's very rich if you figure that out I don't know if rich we're not there yet still eating white rice but um but uh but it's um look you know I I said this before right we could be we could be printing coca-cola bottles from printed glass but that's not the point right the point is to use those technologies to do good for and with the environment and just takes a little bit more time um but but the secret really is in being able to we talked about to an ability gradation variation to to not only the physical properties of of the structure so in the sense of concrete porosity in the sense of skin elasticity um opacity in strength or or um in in the context of clothing um but also the temporal behavior the time based dimension and how these material materials and buildings and products marbles and cities change over time like the seasons and now with weather engineering that I mean add weather engineering to this and add like the geoscience and add all of these new innovations around um around the um the overall not only contamination but also possibility of designing climate uh you you have something very very powerful scary and ethically questionable but very powerful also yeah and actually um before we open it up to all of you I have one more question to actually related to aesthetics and you know thinking around I'm just thinking of even like a visual language right you know and and how do we develop even a new vocabulary and mindset for consumers around contemplating new materials you know because all of this is is is really different the way in which we might even anticipate using them you know thinking about a water bottle that you know potentially will degrade and we could eat and yeah I mean I mean I mean Google the right of Stravinsky talking about the ride of spring when he wrote that at the time he wrote the ride of spring yeah you know major musical piece right that changed the face of music forever yeah um and just look at the apartment building in the room where he sat and wrote this piece and how many years he suffered before before people could actually understand what it did to to music and musical perception the understanding of music and so language takes time I mean it just takes time and and and I'm sure we've all been faced with you know I mean at least I've been told are you guys too smart to build what's going on why can't it why it takes time and when you start from the technology and you don't start with a product you start as you say with a seed you start with a seed as Christina says so beautifully you start with a very very very the the origin point the the you know this tiny little seed that is designed programmed codified to grow it just it just takes more time and and there's a whole system of ethics and aesthetics and communication how do we talk about structures that are designed for decay on command at the resolution of the human breath in the context of flu I mean how does this relate to hospitalization how does this relate to the medical environment so I think it's just it will just take time but it's I mean it's already here um it's completely different different era than than the one you know the the one that's been given to us or inherited to us from modernism post-modern traditions I will open it up to the audience does anyone have a question for our panelists and award winners yes I guess right question I have for you is you mentioned the the how it how the cotton that's not organic affects the people that are actually weaving could you describe that a little bit more is it just I'm curious as to what does it actually do I'm very curious the chemicals from the sprays that they spray it I'm sorry guys it's really sad it kind almost eats the skin and their hands kind of look like the people who has had um I'm sorry I'm just trying leprosy yeah and I've worked in leprosy colonies so I know what their hands look like and there's very similar kind of a physical deformation that happens but you could also see when they're breathing the sound of the breathing is a little bit different and and and also it probably has something to do with the diet you know they're not you know the spinning job is not very well paid so it's probably a combination of many things but that's physically very visible when you see them hi oh that's really loud thank you so much I'm kind of curious about mic Young specifically about this idea of sort of materials the material singularity i the materials sort of one kind of material being able to adopt the characteristics of another kind of material and it feels like the value of materials being unique onto themselves specifically in a landscape setting and and that I appreciate the idea of the that materials could become more flexible but I think if we think back to kind of the idea of reverence that part of what at least for me makes me revere something is it's unique and specific nature and so what I'm wondering is sort of if we're thinking on the one hand about moving towards a space where maybe those natures can be blended or there's more flexibility like how how does how does that relate to you in the context of the natural systems that you were talking about it's interesting we should talk more after this I think like what what I said earlier about how we're managing nature and technology it's a it's a constant calibration that you do as a landscape architect there are some contexts where it makes sense to actually use a lot of technology and press the material to its limits and there are reasons why sometimes it's human need a lot of clinical projects healing gardens that we work on they require for us to find materials a lot of natural materials actually are absorbed germs in a way that are very harmful for very fragile patients but then there are times when you are working within a kind of larger stream you're working within a larger system and you're trying to show a reverence for that we do a lot of work in the city and we often come to a site that is very difficult it is unpopular it's not used it's quite harsh and the questions are more cultural the questions that our clients ask us rather than and we are the ones who bring the kind of resiliency piece we're the ones who demand you you must address the kind of systems that go through your site but I think it's a range and I think within our profession there's a desire to kind of try to fix that which I find quite peculiar because we work as landscape architects on so many different kinds of sites like we can work on a restoration of a river front we can work on a botanic gardens in Charlottesville Virginia in a town which has become known for these kind of political marches we can at the same time we're developing tableware for Swarovski crystals and so I think for landscape architects as nary said earlier there's no better time to be a designer and the more you can stretch your creative muscles and do many different things and show your own kind of creative resiliency the more interesting your practices we have a question in the back I guess the term ethics came up from a couple of you and I guess this is always an issue with technology that you can do things you can make things happen and the ethical tends to lag behind sometimes way behind what I'm hearing particularly in the way the term reverence has been circulating among you how do you in your various practices try to keep the technology and the ethics at least running closer together in your projects I should take this I always hear myself in the foot it says I always get this no you know you would think that I have the answer ready you would think right but I don't I really really don't because I there's no one day that goes by that I don't learn something new and I will not go to sleep until I've learned something new and and so it's just just how how we're wired on the team and that also means you know that you get exposed to the good and the bad I mean right the the the copy printer and the the communist the birth of communism you know the the the ability to 3d print guns and gun gun control controversy and and discussions around how to how to control and eliminate these these terrible shootings in in an age where we can print we can print guns does this mean we stopped doing research around 3d printing no it just means that we foster conversation we invite people to the team and most recently I've been thinking about and actually formulating a new position in mediated matter for an and sort of an ethics slash philosopher that could could just live with us see the work that we're doing and and and help us sort of direct the right conversations thankfully you know we are based at MIT MIT's health and environment is upon us with every procedure that we take on at the wet lab we go through MIT health and environment so we discuss all the repercussions across scales from the organism to to the human body to the built environment and of course for things that have not been FDA approved and and and will have impact on society at large obviously they don't they do not leave the the the wet lab a good example is Vespers recently in London where you know where we couldn't get the the microorganisms the synthetically engineered microorganisms through Heathrow and so we just kept the pigments and bleached the the coli and so so so there there's a system of control much like there's a system for controlling and tuning innovation there's also a system for controlling and tuning the ethical implications around this innovation and part of my roles or at least the roles I see myself responsible for is to foster and nourish and enable a healthy discussion around those topics most recently we've realized just as an example to make things even a bit more provocative let's say thought-provoking we've realized that you know that that we can synthetically engineer melanin the the the pigment that gives our skin its color and and you know and we were finding melanin in all the kingdoms of life the the plant kingdom the animal kingdom archaea bacteria it's just an incredible material it's an incredible material that is is is is biologically and mechanically so superior and yet societ societally and so destructive I mean right if you think about the symbolism around melanin and slavery and racism and all all these these you know difficult and challenging issues that revolve around a material and the sensitivity around it you know what what do you do in the face of the ability of enablement of using that material of tuning its tuning skin color on the fly in order to harness or enable a healthier life a healthier skin a healthier set of organans and and what what are the systems of costs that that are a part of such such such research really really important question you've asked and one that is now taking my team specifically from from from territory that's been pretty much charted because we've we haven't entered the the the the work so far has been culturally agnostic I mean taking shrimp shells and grinding them and producing products that are you know that replace plastics and and do good this is sort of a no-brainer but you know but entering that territory is is is charged it's it's scary it's exciting it's multidimensional and one thing that I've learned is there is no way to reduce the the the set of complexity around such issues to to an axiom and and if you're looking to reduce it to a single statement then you're probably you know you probably don't belong in that kind of search because one of one of the things we need to do surrounding you know conversations around ethics around technology is just be able to contain the complexity and hold it and look at it and you know in the and then apply good judgment in in the face of the embodiments in the product so very very complex and very interesting and and and potentially exciting work around this area and thank you for bringing it up and I think that we could really have an entire panel absolutely that so I think that's a brilliant answer to the question there's a second component which is for I assume a lot of people in the room are designers it's um uh technology has influenced the process of design and so it's really as nary said it's paying attention because you have more and more tools and there are certain schools of thought which says you should just allow technology to basically to punch a button and then it just does it and then there are and then I think there's a kind of um a kind of backlash of trying to say well we're a human and we make things with our hands and I think to be able to I think we are human we when we converse with different people when I converse with my four-year-old niece and I converse with nary and then I converse with the person in my hotel I use different voices and I think that as designers we just have to embrace the range of tools not be afraid of them but also be skeptical and be and make sure that we don't um technology our way out of our scope you know because I was at last year I was driving so you will end up with singularity we'll end up not in our car that's right and you know like AutoCAD is developing a system where they can develop a hundred options for the facade design of a high-rise tower in an hour and I could just see some of the developers that I know really loving that and the danger of that or the kind of grasshopper like the the people who say in my profession and in landscape architecture say uh that you collect all the data about the site and then you input it into a machine and that software whether it's grasshopper or or other kinds of data-driven software will yield you a design I have to say that is ethically questionable um and it's uh so it's just to be very careful you said where is that line and to constantly pay attention to it and I I want us to say one more thing I think women are really great at paying attention to that line so that's why you see I think all women and that is a fantastic place to sadly end our conversation which I think could go on and on but of course we do invite you to continue the conversation material futures ethical implications designers role in all of this upstairs in the great hall for our networking event so thank you everyone thank you to our panelists thank you