 Hi everyone. Welcome, good afternoon. This is our second salon of the afternoon. If you came and joined us for the first, we are thrilled to welcome everyone here today. This is our inaugural day for the Triennial, focused on nature. So we just opened this morning with the exhibition to the public. I am one of the co-curators. My name is Andrea Lips. I'm an associate curator of contemporary design. And one of the things we really wanted to do with you this afternoon is really celebrate a lot of the work that is on view in our galleries by inviting our designers here to explore some of the themes and ideas that are on view upstairs. So the one thing I really wanted to do today was to explore ideas around growth and encouraging growth and looking at biology at very disparate scales. And so I am joined today by three quite incredible designers. So Amy Congdon, whose presentation will be first. So Amy is a designer, a researcher, and a critical thinker who explores the boundaries between design, science, and technology. And even though her formal training is in textiles, she actually has almost a decade of hands-on lab expertise. She's been working with the tissue engineering and bio photonics department at King's College London. Did I get that right? All right, pretty good. And it's symbiotica, which is at the University of Western Australia. And so she is joined then by Marcus Cruz, who is an architect and professor of innovative environments at the Bartlett School of Architecture. And he's the director of BioID, which is a cross-disciplinary research platform between architecture and biochemical engineering, which focuses on new forms of bio-integrated design. And I like that idea of biointegration. And then Richard Beckett will be joining us with a presentation. He is an architect and designer from London and is a lecturer in bio-augmented design at the Bartlett School of Architecture. And again, bio-augmented design. Like this bio-integration, bio-augmentation is really interesting how we keep kind of thinking of ways to infuse biology and design. So Richard, I think, very interestingly studied physiology and biochemistry and worked as a physical property scientist before studying architecture. And his current research explores how living forms are integrated in our contemporary built environment. So with that welcome, we are first going to hear from each of our speakers. They're going to give very brief presentations. And then we're going to come up on stage and have a bit of a conversation then and open it up for questions to all of you. So Amy, I would like to welcome you. Thank you so much for the introduction, Andrea. And thank you so much for everyone for coming. As the slide says, my name is Amy Congden. And as Andrea mentioned, I am a textile designer by training. And when I tell most people that, they go, oh, great, you make cushions. Which is not exactly what I do, but it's one of the things I've been asked, usually in the back of taxi cabs. So when I learned and I trained the textile designer, this was sort of the environment that I was based in. I learned to knit, weave, sew, print, dye textiles, all of the things that you would do in that kind of environment. But then over the last eight years or so, I found myself in places like this, which is very different to what I was used to. Scientific laboratories. This is actually an image of the tissue engineering and biophotonics department at King's College London, which is based at Guy's Hospital, where I've been doing work for my PhD, which is called tissue engineer textiles. So bringing traditional textile techniques and combining them with tissue engineering. But I suppose the question that a lot of people ask when I pull up something like this is, how did you get to doing this? And how did a textile designer end up working with tissue engineers? And I have a very specific moment that I can trace back to where my interest came from. And actually, it's really lovely to be here today because it's actually all of this museum's fault. It was a show called Extreme Textiles. And one of the pieces, the image on the right, is of something called Nicknamed the Beautiful Snowflake, which is a digitally embroidered medical implant for someone, a patient who needed reconstructive surgery in his shoulder. So what the surgeon wanted was lots of different attachment points to sew the muscle back in place. Now the reason that embroidery was used is you can mimic natural structures in the body. With something like a weave, it's at right angles, and if you cut it, it frays. A knit will unravel if you've ever got hold of a sweater and started trying to pull it apart. You know how that ends, and it's very stretchy. So I was fascinated by the way that textiles was being used in sort of cutting edge science, but millennia old techniques, you know, a running stitch or a satin stitch, were being used to help repair the body. So I began researching and working in the field of tissue engineering. So tissue engineering really is a field that is involved in trying to repair the body. So using cells and scaffolds to try and grow replacement parts. That can be anything from tissue and skin, all the way to people who are looking to try and replace whole organs. It's still very much an experimental science, but it's very multidisciplinary, which is why I love it. And my work has been exploring how you can use different materials and traditional textile techniques to create scaffolds for cells. So scaffold very much like scaffolding of a building that you can put cells onto and help control the way they grow and how they orient themselves. So what you're seeing in this image here, so much of my work is looking down a microscope to see how things are going. It's very weird to suddenly work with things that you can't necessarily see with the naked eye. But this is a three-stranded plat, so the way you might plat your hair, and then on top of it are muscle cells, and they're the bright red things that you can see on there. And they're sort of individual fibres that are coming off from the plat. So because I'm saying so much of the work that I do, you look down a microscope to see how it's going. I also have worked with an illustrator to show what was happening to help sort of explain some of that. So you can see in this illustration, you can see the textile structure on the left, the cells on their own in the middle, and then the two combined on the right-hand image. And what you can see are the cells actually attaching to the individual fibres that make up the thread that are then platted into the scaffold. So by doing that, what I've found is that if you understand how to construct a textile structure, you can then start to have control over how the cells orient and how they grow. So with a muscle cell, you want them to align in a certain way, so you'd make a certain type of structure. So it's really interesting how you can bring that textile knowledge into something like the science of tissue engineering. And you can also even control where they don't grow. So I've been fascinated by bringing in ideas of things like resist dying, where you will put different things on a textile to stop a dye taking in certain areas. You can also make structures where you have some materials where cells love to grow and somewhere they won't grow. So you're controlling where you get growth and where you don't. Next, I wanted to quickly touch sort of on the context and the development of the work in nature, which has been part of this ongoing area of research for me. And it's looking at different types of scaffolds. So one of the process that comes from tissue engineering that I've been fascinated with is called decelerization. And this is where you take a biological structure. So it can be anything from an organ to a leaf, like you see here. And you remove the cells so that all you're left with is the architecture or the scaffold of that piece. So for example, in a leaf, it will be something like the cellulose is left behind. And that's been used in regenerative medicine to create biologically compatible scaffolds for organ repair. Above this, this is an image of a spinach leaf. So you can see it at the beginning on the left hand side. When things are decelerized, they usually lose most of their color. They become translucent. They're doing it with hearts. If you Google ghost heart, there's lots of beautiful images of translucent hearts that are being used and researched. So if you could seed a patient's own cells, hopefully you get a lack of a chance of rejection. That's definitely still in development, but this is sort of how it's being used for repair in the body. And then the image on the right hand side is of heart cells which have actually been shown to beat when they've been seeded onto the leaf. Because you can also use the vascular of the leaf to transport nutrients and things like that. So it's fascinating using traditional structures that you find in nature for sort of new applications. So a lot of my work has sort of straddled developing techniques or knowledge that could be both into regenerative medicine, but also future design applications. So I was interested in exploring this technique for a different purpose, that of hoketure or sort of high fashion. So for the work in The Nature Show, I've been decelerizing red rose petals. So the image on the top left. The bottom on the left is a decelerized red rose petal. So it's had all of its cells removed. And then I've been experimenting with seeding skin cells. So actually the skin cells I've been working with are cow skin cells. Onto that is a scaffold. And then here's a microscopic image of a decelerized rose petal. And you can see the sort of ghostly sort of almost sort of round or like hexagon shapes that are faint in the background. Those are the plant cell walls that are left over after the process. There's a vein running through it, which is sort of from the structure of the petal itself. And then all of the bright spots are skin cells, which are actually tracking the outside or the cell walls, which is really fascinating. When you look down a microscope, it's like when you see something in real life and then you take a picture, it's never quite the same. This one looks very much like a sort of a city with lots of lights shining when you look down the microscope. It's really beautiful. So all of this research fell into the work that's on display upstairs, which is designed to be a Kachurateliye workbench with an embroidery partially completed, a worksheet showing cells where I've grown different cells on different materials, everything from freshwater pearls to Swarovski crystals as well as the petals. And then bespokely designed tools and petal dishes to enable the creation of new materials and processes. So talking about the idea of encouraging growth, I know there's a very good reason why petal dishes are round, but if I was going to grow a rose petal, I'd like the dishes to be shaped in the size that I needed. So that was a very quick whistle stop through some of my work, but hopefully get to talk some more about it through the panel, but thank you. Thank you for the introduction as well, and thank you for inviting us. So by integrated design, can we control the sound? It could be, but very, very, very minor, the sound of the video. Is that possible? Good. So biointegrated design is this research platform that is existing between architecture and biochemical engineering. So I created this with a colleague of mine, Brenda Parker, not so long time ago at UCL. And what we have there is two year master's students in the two year master's course, doctoral studies and also externally funded research. So this is only a very quick snapshot of a few projects and themes that interest us. The thing with design and new materials is that we want to apply them to the future build environment. The problem really is the build environment is terribly unsustainable, as you all know, and we are looking for new ways of working from a very small scale to a bigger scale. Bioprinting is a very important area where we use robotic tools to extrude with a high level accuracy and definition of a variety of viscous materials. So in this case hydrogels with encapsulated algae that is photosynthetic while being immobilized in the medium. Hydrogels enable us to retain huge amounts of water, which is a great advantage so they can hydrate in a very slow manner any living materials. Here you can see also clay extrusions with robotics. So we are using clay as a material scaffold so that there is in a way an idea of multi-performance and multi-graded materials. We are working with the Centre for Nature Inspired Engineering at UCL as well. As you can see here we are trying to capture humidity and control airborne microbes in space architecture. So we are working with the European Space Agency. This is just starting. We are also growing new veneers through microbial induced silica precipitation. And this is to achieve a new sense of iridescence quality for architecture. Algae is obviously very important and of great relevance due to its multiple applications. For example we are using it in combination with a new type of cork creed medium. This is something we are developing with the University of Quimbra in Portugal where there are experts in this. And we are using quite a few self-generative computational models in order to define the variance of the geometry and how these porous areas can have a material's option to enhance growth. Bio-photovoltaics is of great interest to us. We have been working for a long time with Paulo Bombelli who is a world expert from Cambridge. In this field we want to integrate it into buildings. Our aim is to design components that enhance the photosynthetic area of algae so that we can extract more electric current than currently is possible. So there is a carbon fiber network that is inserted with a cathode and anode in strategic points of these dishes. And then the algae is kept moist due to the hydrogel substrate that feeds the algae with nutrients. So the aim really of these dishes that we had at the exhibition in the Pompidou was to create new systems for rooftops of buildings. Further area of great interest is bioremediation of water. You can see here microbial wastewater treatment is really important in areas of the world where pollution is diminishing the availability of potable water. So in these studies colleagues at biochemical engineering, in the biochemical labs, are studying the residence time of water and the heavy metal uptake. And we are now applying them onto tiles. And in a very recent move, a student of ours, Schniel Malik, with whom we were working, developed these ceramic tiles in Made in India. And we submitted them to the water designs future here in New York and actually won one of the categories and even the public vote, which was quite nice. I mean, as you can see here, the donations allow really the runoff of water to be spread in a very even and slow way over the entire wall surface. Lastly, bioreceptivity is something that we have been working on for a long time. Richard and I have been involved for a long time on this. And cryptograms, mosses, algae and lichens are of great interest and these are panels that we made for the Santa Pompidou exhibition and two other smaller panels that belong to another project are here in the show. So altogether, these few projects show that there's a variety of topics that we are keen on investigating. And for me personally, they are part of this idea of the future of cities becoming photosynthetic. In other words, our buildings need to move on to being these hard-shelled carcasses to become something much more soft and interactive. As you can see in these projects, there are lots of people involved. Interdisciplinary work always involves dozens of people. So one is always grateful that there's a sort of shared knowledge. And that's all for me. Thank you. Sorry, this is my fault because I'm unfortunate. What is it? Yeah, just to say as well, thank you very much for inviting us to talk here. And again, in introduction, Andrew mentioned that I had a previous background before I had studied architecture, which was in more in biochemistry. I made a shift towards architecture because I felt that science just wasn't my long-term future. I did it for sort of three or four years, was quite energetic about it at first, but it quickly became something I realised wasn't going to be the long-term aim. So I made this shift to study architecture, which seems a long time ago now. It wasn't really until I came to the Barclay, actually, until I met Marcus, who was my tutor at the time, who actually made me aware that I could probably use this background that I had in architecture, the two things that I'd always seen as completely separate. And suddenly there's this guy encouraging this kind of work. And so that really where my sort of journey began, and the bioreceptivity projects that Marcus showed at the end, you know, we were lucky enough to work on that together. And really it was the first kind of, it was quite a big step, I think, in the field of moving away from the petri dish. It was something we're always quite critical of when we first discussed this. For architecture, you can't stay in the petri dish. You have to get out. How do you do that? And I think that was that body of work was really a stepping stone for the work that I'm going on to now. So I'm hugely grateful to Marcus for sort of making me into this field. But my talk is, we use a lot of words, which tend to put bio in the front of it in this kind of arena. I think we're all kind of ready for a new word other than bio. Bio-augmented design, I'm differentiating, is a move actually to move away from focusing purely on sustainability, which might be a funny time to be talking about that since how widespread the agenda is at the moment. But there are other things that do relate to sustainability that we can focus on. And I think that by design, by fabrication, material-driven design, however you want to define your work has an interesting role to play in this. I'm just going to quickly go through a couple of projects that we run with RC7, which is a course on the B-Pro Masters course at the Bartlett that actually Marcus and myself ran together for a few years. And I think it's a good place to start in showing to how sort of defining bio-augmented design in that we can use living systems to augment architecture in some way that again moves purely beyond all those notions of sustainability. So the notion of the scaffold has become a very important thing. And so we're interested in how computational and generative scripts can become toolpaths for fabrication and how this can work on a scaffold for growth to happen. And so here we are seeing some more robotic work of these toolpaths, printing a scaffold here at the architectural scale and then at a much finer scale, which becomes the scaffold for the growth of species. Now, in this case, the students were working with mycelium, which again is a material that's kind of become well-known in the bio-design field. It's very quick to grow, and it has some interesting properties. But here we are testing the growth on the actual scaffolds. And so it's a cellulose-based material that allows the mycelium to grow. And here the augmentation process is the mycelium growing within the structure to stabilize. And here's the students' final output of this, which was a table. And then moving on with it in terms of a similar approach this year, we're interested in how we can actually really start to integrate living cells into this building species beyond purely just being a scaffold for growth. Could the growth actually start happening on that? And so we're looking at how we can different ways of fabricating these kind of toolpaths that come from geometries, but using new approaches to 3D printing and fabrication, using supported gel printing, which allows us or it affords us to not have to worry about gravity and these usual things that we have to worry. And so this is a new type of cheat-in material that we've developed, which is able to grow cells on it and within it, but it's also quite stiff. And it has the possibility to augment it with using bacteria that could buy lumenes as a visual thing, or it could be something that utilizes magnetic bacteria. I just actually have to go back to that slide. So the principle in... Oh, it's cold and cold. Sorry. Yeah. It's this interesting principle down here that's used in medicine where they can actually start to target illnesses within the body through the use of magnetics. And so they can introduce drugs into the body and then they can use magnets to target the drugs to the specific area. So it's used a lot in the notions of tumors where they can actually target the cancer drugs directly to the tumor so it doesn't have to waste a lot of time elsewhere in the body where it's not necessarily doing anything. This was quite an interesting idea for the project. Oh, goodness me. Sorry. Time presentation. Yeah. So the idea is that could we actually, in a similar way, start to move species and organisms around in a building to the areas they're needed? Because one question we've always had is, where should growth happen on a building? Where could it happen? And the answer really became that it would never be everywhere. So it might be needed, always needed to be in specific areas. And here's the students moving on to try this on an architectural scale here on a very simple geometrical arch. But yeah, playing on this idea that you could have a species growing on the material and within the material that could be then targeted to specific points for structural or even just purely aesthetic agendas. So that's that one. And then just to move on is to introduce you to another project that I've been working on which is to do with the notion of health. I wonder actually if I could ask for a quick show of hands if people have heard of the human microbiome. Is that okay? Good. I wasn't sure if it had come across in the same way. So it's a very interesting area that's not really so new but it's become quite common and widespread recently. But the point is that humans have a microbiome and we're covered in bacterial cells and other things too. And 50% of us is actually described as not being human, right? 50% of our cells are actually bacterial. But this has a huge implication for health and we're starting to realize now that our current antibiotic lifestyle, which is often described as being too clean but it's a more ingrained kind of cultural approach to just not accepting bacteria through this fear of them in our lifestyles. But we know very much now that the bacteria that exist in our gut play a key role with our brain in terms of decision making, in terms of health, in terms of well-being. And so the medical field is starting to understand the benefit of bacteria that not all bacteria are bad. In fact, many of them are good. But two, we have the indoor microbiome and our buildings also have a microbiome. And it's called the indoor microbiome. It's called the built environment microbiome. But this directly relates to our health as well. And one problem we have is that by assuming that all bacteria are bad, we have no role for them in our buildings. And so what we tend to do in many of our attempts at becoming sustainable, we tend to seal buildings off. We use a lot of mechanical ventilation. But what we're actually doing is removing ourselves from daily exposure to microbes, which is causing huge problems for autoimmune illness but also antimicrobial resistance. And so we've been running a project to start to look into this indoor microbiome. And here we're just doing some very simple culturing. And this is actually the small kitchen area, which is just next to my office. And these plates were out for 24 hours and of course had some growth. And then we can take those back to the lab and we can start to look at what's there. And it's not surprising, there's loads. But there's bacteria there, there's fungus there, there's probably viruses in there, there's protozoa in there. So it's nothing new that these exist. We know that. The problem is that in our buildings we're not getting as many of the outdoor microbes as we need and what we are being exposed to is predominantly human microbes which are not always necessarily good. And when you have a microbiologist who, Sean Nair is the guy working on this, he can look at a plate like that and very quickly get a sense of which ones are just nice environmental ones and which ones are potentially dangerous. And so the image on the right where you use a different type of agar, you use a mannitol salt agar, and it tells you which ones are pathogens. And so everything that's turned yellow, on that right side, is a pathogen. So even in a kitchen area in a fairly new building that's quite clean, has a huge amount of microbes and actually has pathogenic microbes, some of which are staphylococcus, which are antimicrobial resistance. They're called MRSA in the UK. I don't know if it has a different term. But these are antimicrobial resistant microbes that don't respond to antibiotics and this is a huge threat to our health as our current antibiotics are running out. We have to look at new ways to potentially be living in a post-antibiotic world. Now one way we've been interested in looking to do this is to actually start to integrate good bacteria into our building materials because we tend to not like bacteria on our materials in buildings. We tend to choose materials that are non-porous that are very easily cleanable. And so here we're doing the opposite. We're going through a material tinkering stage and trying to develop alongside that a microbiological methodology of incorporating, in this case, it's a strain of bacillus that we know has antimicrobial activity against staphylococcus. And so the images on the bottom right are sort of successful materials that we've manipulated in terms of their bioreceptivity to bacillus. And the bacillus are very happy to grow in there. They can survive in there for a long time. And when we put them back onto a plate, they grow again, which shows that they're viable. So we have this notion of a probiotic material. The image on the left there is an SEM micrograph. There's all the bacillus in there. They're doing something called sporulation, which is when they go into a low metabolic state, but they're still alive. And the image on the right, a tiny little image, a little material, can stop MRSA growing on it. So this notion of a probiotic architecture, which is related to health, still can relate to sustainability because I think health and well-being is part of a sustainable lifestyle, is an interesting area for us to look at. And so here we take it on beyond the petri dish again out of the lab. And we proposed it as a set of tiles. So there's four tile sets in the bottom there that give us variation, and we can put those together in different ways. And this is where we're at with it. So it's still quite early days with it. The image on the left there is a proposal for a wall tile situation. Really, I think where the future's going in is that we might start purposely growing bacteria in our buildings. Now, we don't exactly know what good bacteria are and bad bacteria. Well, we know what bad ones are. We don't necessarily know what good ones are because what might be good for somebody might not necessarily be good for somebody else. But potentially put vaccinations into our walls. Another quite contentious topic. But the point is, I think there needs to be a paradigm shift. We need to understand that bacteria are nature. We all see them as very separate. But bacteria are there. We've evolved with them over millions of years and they're essential to our health. And so bio-augmented design and probiotic design is looking at new ways that we can integrate these species, these bacteria into our buildings. That's it. Great. Thanks, you guys. It was interesting because when we were doing a lot of the research for this exhibition, I couldn't help but continue to consider how, of course, within modern design and a lot of design and architecture of the 20th century, growth itself was largely eschewed and was something that was kind of kept at bay. It was something that was not encouraged. We very much use often impervious materials, concrete and metals and whatnot. And what's so interesting that we've found to be happening is really, again, this encouragement of growth and it's happening at so many different scales within textiles, within architecture itself. So I wanted to start out just by asking you, why do you think this is important? Why is this happening? I'm trying to think how to start attacking that question. I mean, I think it's important that we have, this apparent that we've been through is about sort of, I mean, especially with making textiles or other materials, it's like the heat beaten treat. So take something from the air, sort of heat it, apply pressure, make things in that way. And we're now realizing that that's not the best for us or for the planet. So how do we think about ways that are more in collaboration with living systems? And I think that's probably a big part of what's pushing that shift now to be more collaborative. And it asks very different things of us as designers. You know, I've had, you know, working with materials that are living that you can't disappear and leave off. I mean, when I learned textiles, I could have left my samples in the studio for weeks on end and come back and they'd have been exactly the same. So I think that's how they're alive. And it also encourages you to have a very different relationship with what you make and how you make as well, which is fascinating. I think there is, there's four architects, this famous drawing that La Corbusia in the 20th century did of the, you know, of a sort of big tower and there's a balcony and they're looking out at sort of the distance and there's the green. separation and that was a bizarre contradiction because on the one hand buildings on Pilates meant that he wanted to give more green space to people but there was an inherent separation. It was great to look at and nature was this thing there out there. We architects and the modern society was living in a completely different environment and I think we clearly recognized that there was a real problem with that separation that were created as Richard was mentioning in the indoor health a real problem and that the separation is killing what is around us and ourselves so there's a real fascination in discovering that there is a totally new potential in what is growing and if we start realizing that what we grow we grow and design with that what we are growing we just enlarge the possibilities of what we can do on so many fronts and we are creating new materials new systems in which we can physically make things that go beyond the problems we have with the current materials so I think I think that image is really quite interesting to go back and realize how much it affected us and how we how much still our environment is actually inheriting that reality of that separation so yeah you know and it's interesting I mean that definitely is something that that curatorially we very much were reflective on even when we started out with this idea of an exhibition on nature how do you even define nature and does that is that inclusive of humans and of us you know and in many ways we started out almost thinking of it as this the separation somehow but no we're all a part of it you know and I think that we really are within the 21st century now embracing that and unfortunately seeing a part of the impact of you know often thinking that it was something that's separate you know and it's in so it's interesting actually Richard with you and so much of your work on this probiotic architecture if you will bio augmented architecture and really thinking about the microbiome of the interior and working with growth and bacteria that are at such a small tiny scale and yet with an architecture which is at such a big scale I mean how do you kind of traverse these worlds like how you know and and kind of bring all of it together and integrate it yeah I mean it's always it's always been our challenge I mean we've used the word interdisciplinary a few times and I think the majority of this work has to start at the laboratory scale it has to start in the petri dish because it's it's a notion of control it's it's something that's feasible to do and in many cases you you work with the notion of the sterile in a laboratory you're also faced with this thing then as well as the scale that when you come out of the laboratory sterile doesn't exist nature or bore sterility right and the mono culture the single approach to one so it doesn't exist because it's been discussed we you know you make one tiny change here it affects four or five other things there so as well as the scale you've got this notion of something that you can work on in the lab and it kind of does it thing I mean a lot of designers describe how living species don't behave themselves right they always do something different we'll magnify that by a thousand when you suddenly put that outside and it becomes part of the ecology right and it's something that the the only way you can do it is to test and that's why it's essential to actually for people involved in this is you have to get out of the laboratory actually you can't spend all of your time in the laboratory because I'm not sure it means much for the larger scale just to add to that I think the two really interesting aspects first of all clearly the idea of sterility and again back to the modernists was so much part of this idea that we lived in a sterile environment and design was aiming for a level of sterility and perfection and cleanliness and I think we we definitely went now beyond that and recognize that there's a level of imperfection and unpredictability in design but the the issue that is very difficult when the lab work is being scaled up is that we actually don't know how to scale up it's tremendously difficult a lot of the work can remain somehow in this sterile environment in a small scale and once it gets outdoors or we want to make it bigger the complexity of the problems either to control it and or lose that control or simply not being able to know what's going to happen when it's bigger it are tremendous and that's what I think the architects and cities in general and are not absorbing actually a lot of what is going on inside for instance such a museum like this one in this exhibition which is a lot of small interesting amazing things and you get out on the streets and you think oh my god there's a completely different reality here how how is this adjusting to what we are doing and it's not yet because we don't know how to scale up things it's really difficult you know and I think actually that idea of control is something which is really interesting right I mean can we ultimately control growth of cells of bacteria of organisms of algae is it is it you know into what extent yeah do we begin relinquishing some of that and what and what is the aesthetic then and how has that impacted I don't know if Amy you want to talk about that in your experience yeah I mean I think and I talked a lot about making scaffolds and the idea of being able to control it I mean to a certain extent but no you can't really control it it will do its own thing you might change something might change in the when you're culturing it and it will it may do something different so I think you have to look at it more as that you're working with and I think there's a there's a the idea of trying to keep sterile or trying to keep nature out especially in things like you know architecture and built environment or anywhere is that no the human need for control or wanting to control things and that's a difficult thing to sort of war against but you actually have to maybe adjust the thinking when you're when you're working with something that's living because it may do something totally unexpected and that is something you have to almost you have to be prepared for and scale is a really interesting one I just wanted to touch on I think that's one of the things that as a designer when you first start living with a living working with living systems that you have to get used to is I mean my first question was how big is a cell like I can't see it so I don't know how big it is and I'm used to working with things that I want to one that I can understand you know I like we were joking before the panel I work at this scale and these guys work at like building scale but you have it's a relation to yourself or once you start working with something that you can't see how do you even start trying to control a growth of something that you can't see and I have an interesting sort of relationship because I can't get hands-on with the material that I'm working with in lab because it doesn't have its own immune system so working with things like animal cells I have to work with it at arms length I have to use sterile tweezers and things like that and as a textile designer I'm used to getting hold of things and experiencing the material world through handling it and and I can't do that so it's it's all I'm almost had the the opposite journey where I've sort of come from outside of the lab and being able to touch everything to going into the lab and not being able to touch anything or I kill it so which is but that's what the idea of control you're almost playing like the world's worst game of operation and you have that one which buzzes if you touch it's like you know you're gonna kill some if you get a few and so it depends on what organism you're working with. The the panels we have upstairs when Richard and I started working on these bioreceptive panels the idea was really that we stop having control that is that we create a substrate that allows nature to do what it does well which is to self-regulate be in competition sometimes die sometimes be dormant sometimes sometimes be alive and we looked at tree barks at the time he thought isn't this amazing that we as architects always talk about skins when skin implies something very defensive very protective and barks do that but they also hosts for an entire ecology that just adjusts and is completely related to how the environment triggers barks to be colonized by lots of microorganisms and and cryptograms and we thought if buildings do that that will become much more interesting but you can't really define how they're going to look like you can define some of the macro geometries but what nature then will do is going to be pretty unpredictable and against the idea of the green walls where you sort of have to have the pot with the type of plant that at some point will die and then you have to get a new pot and you have to maintain it which is thought let's take let's take the hands off and let's this thing become what it is and that will be interesting and we had then an exhibition at a fair in a fair in London and we asked people who were around in this fair a pretty commercial fair was called eco build and do you know what do they think if they would be having panels on their houses or buildings and sometimes nothing would be growing and it was fascinating how people were open actually open to that idea so well that's what happens around us sometimes things die off that's fine it's no we don't have to have a golf course mentality all the time and so I think there is a shift going on already that people accept that it doesn't have to be all the time green and looking pretty it can in times also look quite different and that's fine it's that perception of nature I mean there's something we discussed so much when we're doing it nature is not green I mean it's everybody talks about green wash but we all do have this preconception of nature being the lush green condition and it's not it's different everywhere in the world it's cyclical it changes I mean one thing then in going back to the comment of control and although we were accepting that nature is going to do its thing the notion of control was always we drew an analogy with the garden in that if you let a garden just grow it becomes overgrown and it looks untidy and we don't like that and that's different from a meadow which is a meadow is not tended to but it has a level of control that's achieved through the ecology and and where do you stand on that as a designer because it's tough because if something looks out of control and unkempt people don't like it becomes even worse when you're comparing you know people tend to like green species and things when you're talking about bacteria and things that might grow a bit yellow and a bit kind of ugly looking that than the worst cases that that looks completely out of control people would be fearful of that and trust it so I do believe there is there is actually a need for a level of control but it's definitely not the top-down approach to design that we've we've done before it's it's about understanding how the species works what it needs and then allowing it to thrive in it in an environment you know and perhaps a part of that too is a level of expectation and a changing relationship with nature and what you expect either as a consumer or someone living within a space or having a home and being okay with you know panels that are not seated or not green or you know thinking about a nature that is self-regulatory if you will you know and and I think so much of even what what we're talking about is incredibly reflective of a changing relationship that all of us are having with nature and with design and with possibility well there is this sense we have of nature where we see nature as a as a photograph something that seems to be static and we all know it's not and there's this very interesting book written by this English evolutionary biologist called the inheritors of the earth where he says this is a long very slow motion film and in this film nature is evolving and changing and evolution doesn't mean for better or worse it's just changing and currently we are changing it massively and we are changing with it and it's changing us and a lot of what we are producing is starting to create another nature but it's it's just nature so we are part of it it's there's no distinction so that distinction that before existed it's sort of rather absurd and so it's quite interesting to imagine that these species are mutating we are helping them to mutate but they were mutating anyway in their own right and that creates really interesting discussions about how the world of microbes is changing and mutating because of our internal environments that we are creating or do you know the piece of there was a sort of piece of stone that came from in the previous presentations that was the result of some nuclear tests means things that were never there before but now they are part of what we consider nature so i think that that is part of that sort of level of slow evolution or change means that we don't have a control over it anyway it's that's what it is right you know and it's interesting too that you actually bring up this idea of you know of of slow evolution Richard and I were actually just even discussing yesterday i'm you know sort of endlessly fascinated about that hypothesis of of earth being an organism Gaia you know which was came out in the 70s or so and you know that in many ways you talk about scale i mean of course there's you know kind of you know the the one scale you know with kind of like three dimensions but you think about time as another scale and you know if you think about the earth itself being its own organism and moving at this unbelievably slow scale but here we are moving at such a different scale and speed and you know i think about all of your work and working with growth and cells and bacteria i mean you know like how do you deal with time scales even then of creating work because you're you're also very beholden to completely completely different time scales so if you want to comment on that absolutely i think it's something that you can't predict i mean you know it's it's fascinating i think i'll come back to the time scale but just the the idea of systems and there's an amazing book and then the author is escaping bits called the systems view of life and just thinking about growing that nothing grows in in or i think exists often in isolation and and when you're working with tissue culture a lot of people work with one cell type but that there's no place in the body that there's only one cell type everything is interfacing with everything else so when you work in the peachy dish that's almost like the edge for a tissue engineer to get out of the peachy dish is to not just grow skin cells you know but to grow it in connection next to to bone cells or to muscle or to castle it's just thinking about how everything interfaces and having a less of a sort of a regimented maybe almost engineering approach of trying to break everything down to its smallest consistent part but actually thinking about how does everything work together and one of those aspects is is definitely time you you have to the sort of time points that it was especially with tissue culture when you work with that it can be hours days months depending on what you're working with and what you're trying to achieve so that sort of gives you a different perspective and even just the research itself as a designer who's used to working on quick fast projects where you maybe have a turnaround in you know you could be working on a week project here you're looking at years worth of research and your idea of what it takes to bring something to fruition and the time that that takes shifts there's a patience that you have to sort of i think practice where you want to see things happen faster and you you can't you can't make it grow faster you just have to accept that it will take the time it needs and you have to work with that as one of your parameters hello yeah i think it's important as as a designer that you you have to make at various points you have to make quick leaps and it's something that the scientists can't do then we talk about always talk about the species being very slow but microbiologists are like even slower aren't they because they work in a different way because they're following science methodologies and i think it's important that when you're designing with this kind of stuff you you have to remember you are a designer and you're not just doing it you're not a scientist right you're borrowing a few scientific methodologies but we have the freedom to make leaps and that's how i see you have this kind of slow building project that's that's underpinned with scientific methodology so you have a level of rigor and a level of repeatability that's needed for this kind of work but as a designer you have to make leaps and actually that's where exhibitions come in very well because it gives you a deadline and you think oh my god i have to make something for this exhibition and we always talk about our pieces that end up in exhibitions and they're never quite the pieces you want them to be because of this thing right at some point you just have to say right what am i actually now going to design because if you constantly play in the scientist you never design anything so at this point i'm going to open it up to questions from our audience so if you have a question raise your hand high yes so and if you'll wait for the microphone to be passed to you thank you i think that may be something of a gap in your thinking and that is understanding more about the particularly the urban environments that you're going to be building in the whole smart city movement is one in which cities are understanding far more and getting much more data about the urban environment maybe some of the things you're talking about would succeed better if you knew more about that or connected more with the internet of things in chicago we have something called the array of things whole you know hundreds of sensors are being put in the center of the city and on university campuses to measure and record all kinds of data temperature the passage of vehicles level of pollutants and so on maybe to forge a relationship between what you are doing and the internet of things might be very interesting yeah i'm completely on board with that too i mean that the the starting point i think for our bioreceptivity work that we did together was was actually a criticism of the existing condition of the green wall um which you know if you look in academia you see images of cities that are green everywhere their realities our cities are not very green that the real condition was the green wall and the problem is that they've been hugely expensive and so that was our starting point could we come up with a way that was much cheaper didn't need this technical irrigation system embracing nature that way but having said that that doesn't mean we're technophobes and not interested in doing it and i i i do think it actually would be very important because the way that we can feed data into this and with the advent of technologies i mean with i know marcus very well isn't it we're we're both very interested in technology it's just that i think that was the starting point for the work and i think that as we we have to try and get this into city first and then start to think about the technology side of it afterwards well and actually i do have to just point out quickly when we were talking just before this panel you know one thing that marcus you pointed out was you know what we really actually need is almost like a role model of a building even you know to think about what you know how that could potentially integrate into that type of you know an environment with that by data i would add to that that obviously there is a lot of technology available um but there is an inherent problem i think that a lot of this technology has been added to buildings but it hasn't really changed how we design them really and the aesthetics of the buildings the way we use them hasn't really changed and that means that i think there's a lot of technology to monitor our environment and see what it does etc but our buildings are not really as responsive as we imagined and they they end up often and again back to the green walls what we didn't like was the fact that the sort of actually pseudo modernist buildings with green facades glued onto them and it was like a collage system and there was something very awkward about this and you think well if we can really grow our buildings then we will design them differently we will occupy the space and then experience it in a different way and we need still to rethink that somehow from scratch what we can't do is to design buildings and cities in the same way as we have done and add a lot of bits of technology to it because it's like having an ugly building with some very good piece of aircon but then after a few years we realize that there's some even better piece of aircon and then at some point we want passive cooling and get rid of it but it's still the same building and i think there is an evolution where we need to really rethink much more from scratch in a much more profound and holistic way how we design and how we experience this new building fabric of our city i see a question back here hi it's actually a bit carrying on what you mentioned Marcus and like what has been hinted throughout the panel is that i when it comes to working with students and young academics and new york new young upcoming designers and artists what have you seen has been the challenges in getting them to be willing to tinker and experiment with scientific elements scientific mathematical elements because or do you feel that they have they're entering the field already open-minded in wanting to experiment because you're saying that there needs to be evolutions and changes in how we design how we how and how we create but things that that would require a complete change in methodology and teaching in the first place well in fact we created this two-year master's course out of the necessity that one year was too short and and we are quite surprised of how many people are actually really increasingly interested in this hybrid field and how they're being open-minded to be challenged to work in different spaces being in the lab being in a in a traditional workshop or being in a design studio and it's hopefully going to breed a new a new group of thinkers of practitioners of designers that actually have a completely different sensibility and understanding in a very intuitive way i think in our case our intuition was formed in a very traditional way but we are fascinated with the possibilities of something new because hopefully this new generation is actually starting to become completely different in in the way they think and they will find it really awkward how we still in the top-down manner sketch something out and have maybe there's a different rationale and and i think these work methodologies are gradually evolving and they're evolving in this in this interdisciplinary way where the collaboration is not only in the traditional way where somebody has an expertise the other one has an expertise in the other one it's actually there's far more hybridity of people who have multiple bits of expertise and i think that's why it's becoming really in in our field i mean the the question we always used to get when when students arrived was which software are we using where's where's the the the labs with the computers sorry not the labs where's the where's the computer which what do we do and now the questions are changing and students are asking where's the lab what what lab equipment do we have who do we know in in ucl that can help me with this type of thing so the culture is definitely definitely changing i mean i would echo all that's been said i think it's up until now it is changing but there aren't that many courses where you can go and and learn it i think with a lot of us i mean myself certainly i sort of constructed my own sort of educational path where i sort of kept following what i was interested in but i had to seek out where i could go and learn different things i think there are courses you know very much like the one that richam and marcus one where you can you can do that and the labs that are starting to be integrated into universities which is fantastic i think i know definitely in in the uk in the education system is set up so is such that it's very siloed and that you're often told from a very young age you're either scientific or creative that somehow the two are mutually exclusive which is absolutely not the case um it's a cliche but if you said that to leana davinci he probably he would laugh at you um but but there is so there is something there but i think it was also important to say that you don't want to become a scientist like i am not a tissue engineer there are lots of people with phd's in that who are fantastic at it i want to know enough so i can have a conversation but to start that kind of that that collaboration and i do think it's a methodology and a way of working i think you can teach students to work um and you can have it to work in a way you don't necessarily even need to work with the organism it's about understanding materials it's about being able to structure experiments and about being inquisitive and working with materials or approaching a problem in a certain way which then can be transferred to any different you know multiple different technologies but it is a way of working and a way of being curious about the world and the materials that we use and the way we make things and maybe moving away from that top down approach to something that maybe is more bottom up where you sort of want to see what you can build by understanding multiple different things no i i i had the other day in experience with a student which really fascinated me we um we were in in the laboratory we're using some hydrogels and problem with hydrogels is you can't really three-dimensionalize them they sag and they have their weight and they have a viscosity and we did a field trip to Barcelona where we presented some work and the student came back and thought about the gaudi experiments with catenories and started producing catenories with hydrogels and there was this lady in the lab producing in an inverted manner these extrusions of hydrogel and then turned them around and i looked at it and i thought this is a new type of thinker she's actually combining structural thinking with spatial thinking with material thinking inside the laboratory and i can imagine her on the robot in the next few weeks already starting to do that and i think that is the way forward absolutely she's finding a new solution how to do this and i think in traditional ways he would stick sort of to the bits of the lab limitations that you have and somehow only remained it i love that so we have time for one more question sorry yeah back here hi um i work in the drawings and prints department here and so a lot of my time is spent thinking about keeping art and storage areas dry and cold and so i was also thinking i was overhearing some of the curators as they were installing the show talk about how the materials that might be more like environmentally friendly are not as friendly to the collections objects and that was a sort of push and pull that they were going through and i was thinking about architecture and um microbiology as you guys are speaking and wondering if you can think of um targeting applications of this type of interior microbiome in a way that would control an environment for art and collections objects since we are sitting in a museum um and sort of what the applications of that might look like good question just got yourself a first commission for the i don't know if i can answer it now but look i think a starting point so i mean it's an interesting concept there's a way to start thinking about something right i mean it's you know we unfortunately couldn't have living moss on our panels here because of because of that reason which is a shame but i i maybe can um to find some answer actually the the project a very very briefly mentioned that the european space agency is so interested in and starting to help us to develop is about a nano printing of very very small scale surfaces in which humidity can be absorbed and then retained and one of the problems they have we have with a space station is that to transport water is tremendously expensive so there's a loss of seven seven percent of water and this costs millions and therefore if there's a full cycle of recycling water means humidity in spaces is a real issue that then develops microbes etc and and and growth so um if actually we are able to in a passive way uh and and and through the learnings of models and nature how some of the lizards and somehow our species have actually this capacity to absorb through their surface geometry uh small tiny amounts of water and humidity from the air um and that's why the nature inspired and the biintegrated i think go hand in hand if we start doing that maybe our surfaces have a sort of veneering that can tackle some of these issues and it's partly a filtering system partly an absorption system and retention system that might help to control the environment just maybe you can help me with a reference was there a case of a library somewhere that has bats in it and the bats helped to keep the books dry did you hear this yes this is this library from the enlightenment period in outside lisbon in portugal where they have the bats that keep the the worms out of the books and this ancient library this absolutely phenomenal beautiful building at night has these gates and the bats come in and they never have a problem with worms and and and and lices and all sorts of other animals in their books in their ancient books so here we go some get some bats that is yeah exactly on that note i don't know that kubrick you it will be getting a bat brigade to protect our our objects but um but thank you so much to our panelists and to all of you um for joining us and we invite you to continue the conversation uh after the panel and we have another one following up at 645 on nature as architecture so thank you