 So in this next section, we've been talking a lot about biology and living cells, and so nothing grows in a vacuum, well maybe tardigrades, but in this next section, we're gonna talk about cultivating, which is making the space and bringing people into the space that enables this work to happen. So first we'll hear from Professor Orkan Telon, who's a professor at the University of Pennsylvania and also founded BioRealize, and made desktop bioreactor, which you can see outside. Then Professor Jean-Anne Dagdevren, who's a professor here, runs the conformable decoders group. She'll talk about some of her really cool work in wearable sensors and that are actually being tested on people, so bringing people into the equation through that. And Kit McDonald from Ginko BioWorks, the organism company, and then we'll conclude all of the inspiration talks with Professor David Kong, who runs the community, the director of the community biotech initiative here, also the professor for the course, How to Grow, Almost Anything. Yeah, so with that, I'd advise. Yeah, thanks for having me here. It's a pleasure to be back to MIT Media Lab. I am an alum from 10 years ago. I did my PhD in design and computation, and I'm now a professor of University of Pennsylvania. And I would like to start with saying that I like to, I work in the space of biology and design, but on a different scale. So in the morning, we have heard a lot of people talking about engineering organisms and how the organisms actually enable different capabilities, they sense, respond, store. But I come from a space of design where we work on a different scale. So I learned and study a lot of different microorganisms, but then I realized that my entry point would not be just organisms themselves, but what do we do with them when we put them into different contexts? Today, after many decades of biology research, we are coming to a place where we work with organisms either for fabricating new materials or making new kinds of applications with them in food, medicine, cosmetics, and so on. But the core thing is really how do we bring the organisms into the world of designers so that we can imagine new applications for it? We have seen the history of the media lab for decades where we work with electronics, computation, media, and now biology is in the hands of not only scientists and engineers, but also designers who are shaping the imagination of the field. So I'll walk you through a number of projects and I'll try to show you the design process of how things work in the hands of a designer. So all of this information can help us to think about new futures when we think about the global interfaces in the workshop session. So my work works on different scales, so I work with different materials. Sometimes with concrete, how do you use living organisms to biomineralize so that you leverage off their existing skills and imagine them into new contexts so not only to reproduce concrete that we make for buildings, but concrete is a new material that can be used in other contexts. I'll show you how it works in the future. And then how do we think about plastic, not only as plastic that is only in bottles, but plastic that has new kinds of applications, not only something that we like to, it's like a horror case, everyone on the planet wants to get rid of plastic, but what does it mean to reimagine plastic when it eats itself, when its tasks are done, when it needs to become a packaging material, it inflates itself, and when it needs to disappear, it disappears by itself. So instead of fielding the guilt, how do we design the materials into new design concepts? So as designers, we are also not interested in thinking about materials, but materials always in application in other products, in our lives as different applications or in different contexts where they really bring a lot of value. So plastics are bad in a packaging context, but maybe plastics can be reinvented in with biology for different applications. So this is a work that Hyun mentioned that we did with Design Lab a couple of years ago, we did collaboration with Puma. Let me show you a little bit about how biology can be actually embedded into packaging. So when we think about interfaces, we always think about humans interacting with the live organisms, humans interacting with information, humans interacting with the physical world, but we also can design interfaces for live organisms. So organisms interacting with materials and their environment. So interface design can actually be something that we can program where the organisms start to degrade the material, start to produce the material, start to make the carbon dioxide that inflate the material so that you can see the packaging taking the shape of the shoe. And then when the organisms are done, they start, when the packaging's rolled is done, the organisms start to degrade the material itself. So as you can see, there are a lot of design considerations that are in place, the packaging, the size, how long the packaging needs to live and how actually we can get rid of it when it's done. But to bring you back to the context of the interface related to humans, not only interfaces between living organisms and the body and other materials, what does it mean to think about these new biointerfaces on ourselves? So we have seen tattoos on our body that are imagined by researchers here, but not everyone is interested in like embedding biosensors onto the skin, right? So we have to come up with new ways to encapsulate, contain the organisms inside different media so that we can interface them with our bodies in a comfortable way. So maybe they should be optional so that when we don't need them, when we need them to sense something, we can attach them to ourselves and we don't want need time, we should be able to remove them. So interfaces can become maybe single use, one time only, and on demand when we need to. So you're looking at a video where the person is putting the stickers that have the organisms inside them, which respond to the carbon dioxide. When there's pollution, they change color. You get instant feedback, and when you're done with your run, you can take them off and recycle them. So some of this work is also outside. I'll point you to this. So I brought the examples. You can see the living materials themselves in design context so that we can have a conversation around them. What does it mean to design with them and what kind of other forms that you can bring? So just to pay a little attention to this, where do I see I can make a contribution to this community is, as a designer, I think a lot about what does it mean to bring, to think about the relationship between organisms and different materials? Because when you have a living organism that you need to keep alive, feed, and protect it from other species around so that they don't cause containment, you have to think about how do I embed them into the materials? So you have seen the nice little sticker, but before we arrived to the sticker, we tested all kinds of different materials where maybe some of macro paper, microfluidics could actually be used for encapsulating these organisms for different form factors, for different applications. So designer's role is always about prototyping, iterating with new materials so that we can find new context for the science that we are learning in this room. So these are very quick and dirty prototypes, but this shows you the challenge of how do you move from the liquid design space of life to the three-dimensional physical product space that we consume in our everyday lives. So it's not easy to take the liquids, prevent them to dry, feed the organisms, and keep them healthy and safe, not only for our safety, but their own safety in applications. So a lot of work takes place when you take the biology from the lab into the design studio to try to keep them in a contained form. I'm going through a couple of examples. There's never a right form. The design of the form is always in negotiation with the experience of the users, how costly it is to produce it. When you write the paper and publish in a journal, the work is done, but if you wanna scale things up, you need recipes, you need repeatable solutions so that manufacturers can produce them. So how do we arrive to this? I love the organoids solution from the previous presentation. So these are the organoids that I made in the kitchen using kitchen level equipment with home-grade organisms, they are not living, but as you can see in these little bubbles, you have live organisms that can actually come together and form new materials, and when you impose them to light, they can break down and become disposable. How do you do this in your kitchen as opposed to a very resourceful lab? Is my important research question. So I'll show you one more detailed project and I will stop. How do you bring, how do we grow not only the organisms, the interfaces, but also to grow the different kinds of interactions to the, and embed them into the lifespan of a product? Because when we think about interfaces or physical products, we always assume that they live forever, but biology doesn't live forever. So you either need to renew it, our bodies constantly renew their cells, but when we think about interfaces, we don't think about them renewable. We don't think about them changeable and active. Biology does that, but in our product design, we have to accommodate that one minute sign. So very quickly, this is a paper furniture that we designed at Pratt University in New York together. This is made of paper that is going through a particular process called vulcanization. We embed different kinds of hydrogels onto the surface of the paper so that we can embed different organisms in different layers so that we can bring different kinds of qualities to it so you live different in the environment, they can detect things from the environment as biosensors, but also things that can change in terms of style, aesthetics, and texture. Because design is not only about just finding a function that is in terms of a known utility, but in terms of style and how it finds a place in people's values whether in different social classes, cultures, and so on. So we did a lot of experimentation with a tool that you can see outside, which is a portable bioreactor that I hope will make biology more accessible to designers who doesn't have the tools and the means to explore and prototype the things. Here's a little video of how it works. For example, you bring it, you wanna test how an organism grows, how a biofilm forms on a different material. You actually put it inside these, let me play the video, you can put it inside these disposable vessels, put your cultures in, grow them and image them and sense them while they're growing so you can really record the recipe of which organism under which conditions really interact with this material. This information is very crucial if you really wanna push into design applications because otherwise the information that you can read from a paper, scientific paper, will be very difficult to reproduce. So we can talk about this for hours about what does it mean for designers to really reproduce scientific work. I will show you a couple of more images of how different experimentations can be made, how organisms not only respond to the outside environment, but also the curvature of a material, the humidity of a material, how they stick around, how long do they last? Like we never think about interfaces in terms of duration, but all biologists, time-based and durational. So what does it mean for designing durational interfaces? So I will show a couple of more slides. You will see the objects at the end, but I'll leave you with this slide because these are conversation points for the afternoon. Which organisms we pick? How do we embed them into different materials? What does it mean to design the life cycle of a product? Like when the living organisms inside, what is how long do they need to live? How soon they need to be done so that you can think about the afterlife of product whether it's decomposing it or upcycling it into a new product as an ingredient. So I'll stop here and thank you very much for listening.