I wasn’t introduced to biodesign in a lab.

I was introduced to it through family storytelling, food making, and crafting with natural materials as I sat on my grandma’s lanai in Kahului, Hawaii. It was on that shaded porch where my father taught me and my sister to make pinwheels of hibiscus flowers and boats of bamboo leaves. 

We learned to make everyday items and special celebratory items, such as leis, from the materials around us: plumeria flowers, kukui nuts, mango wood, haole koa seeds, hau bark, sea glass, and beach sand. Carefully sorted mason jars of recycled and organic materials collected over three generations lined the garage. These jars were the legacy of life on sugarcane and pineapple plantations where immigrant families, identified by numbers and paid in credit to the plantation store, saved everything. To understand a biomaterial was to know its story and to imagine new ones. My dad shared each item’s Hawaiian and Japanese name and the legends that connected them to the land and the people. 

Biodesign to me is storytelling and slow making with nature. It is communion: communion with each other and the organisms with which we work; communion with ourselves as humans across time; communion with the world around us; and communion with the future. Through this communion, we share where we have come from, reframe who we are, and hint at where we are going. Biodesign is imagination, biology, and culture. 

Many decades since I left Hawaii, mason jars are stacked in the back of my garage in Cupertino, California, which I turned into a makerspace and biodesign lab in 2017. Mealworms eat polystyrene in bins, mycelium masks grow in fogged up bags, kombucha cultures thicken in bento boxes, and silkworms spin fiber in woven baskets suspended above the worktable. My garage is a playful space that mirrors the Maui porch of my childhood. While we used to squat on the ground working with hand tools, in my lab today, we use a laser cutter, vacuum former, and 3D printers.

The tools may have changed, but the goals have not. In Cupertino where relationships have been atomized to the level of the individual, it’s through material culture, of which waste and packaging are so much a part, that I see possibilities for growing connective community fibers. My sculptural collages incorporate materials usually thrown away, such as Asian food wrappers, family rice bags, and bioplastics made from cultural food ingredients like agar, cactus fruit, and shrimp shells. 

In our rapidly shifting neighborhoods, where gentrification has dispersed generations of local families and Covid-19 has diminished our communal spaces, we need to build a deeper sense of place and identity. As we combine artifacts from our varied lived experiences with artifacts grown from local materials, the stories that emerge can help us find new purpose and identify the lines that connect us to each other and our environment.

Lately, I’ve been growing a quilt. I feed artifacts from my daily life to mycelium, which slowly turn into fuzzy tiles, then I hand stitch them with quilting thread. Making quilts recalls the communal crafts of a thriftier time, but by adding a biological element—mycelium—I am witnessing a thing come into existence, watching it breathe. It is a slow process of carefully adjusting moisture levels over weeks as their respiration fogs up the interior of their incubation bags. I check them daily to observe the fungus sending delicate hyphae strands into the nopales fibers, cocoa bean husks, and bacterial cellulose grown in cactus syrup. I hope the final quilt will resemble a traditional quilt. In January, I’ll be showing at the San Jose Museum of Quilts & Textiles as part of my artist’s residency and the BioQuilts project. 

Informing this project are workshops where I taught teens to make their own mycelium quilt squares as part of my education work at BioJam Camp, a program I co-founded with Rolando Perez. In a strange way, mycelium uses our material identity as its substrate. It feeds on the things that make us us, the things that bring us comfort on a sad afternoon, or joy when we’re in a garden. One student brought in dried love-in-a-mist pods from her yard, another brought used tea leaves from India, a third brought instant ramen, the food she often eats as a busy student. They pressed these materials with live mycelium and created living castings that reflect self and culture.

Recently, I was going through old letters and found one from my father that included a cartoon he drew about collecting kapok pods as a child and then as an adult. The note had been tucked into a box full of kapok pods and their fluffy seeds which he had carefully packed and mailed to share with my children and me. He explained that he used to collect them with his grandma to stuff zabuton pillows and that my grandmother in Chattanooga used the same seeds to stuff dolls she would sew, a story of seeds connecting across generations and cultures.

Daily we shed a trail of ephemera and discarded scraps that carry the rhythms of our everyday choices and exchanges with the world. And while we most often ignore these artifacts, memorializing the chain of stories that brought them into our lives may be the best and only way to understand where they belong after they leave our lives.

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Cite This Essay
Takara, Corinne Okada. “What Biodesign Means to Me.” Biodesigned: Issue 3, 17 September, 2020. Accessed [month, day, year].