In August, summer nights become dark and tiny lights shine in the Finnish forests and on country roads.
These lights, glowworms (Lampyris noctiluca), were one of the miracles of my childhood. Later on, learning of other living organisms that emit light, and of bioluminescence as a phenomenon, I started to wonder if this kind of biological effect could be recreated by humans.
Years later, in 2019, I witnessed my first transgenic dress at the Cooper Hewitt design museum in New York City [1]. Suspended in the air by hundreds of silk fibers, the dress gave off an eerie green glow under black light. The silk for this dress had been produced by bioengineered silkworms. They were given a gene from jellyfish that gave their silk a fluorescent green hue. The dress, called Tranceflora, was produced by a collaboration between artists, designers, a 300-year old Kyoto textile manufacturer, and scientists at Japan’s National Agricultural and Research Organization. It gives a hint of the future as genetic engineering enters into our everyday lives [2].
While the dress evoked the sort of wonder I felt as a child, another piece in the exhibit conjured a very contemporary anxiety. This was a kit that grants anyone access to one of the most sophisticated tools of biotechnology: CRISPR, a relatively new technology that won the 2020 Nobel Prize in Chemistry [3]. The kit can be ordered online by anyone via credit card. Josiah Zayner’s DIY Bacterial Gene Engineering CRISPR Kit gives materials, reagents, and step-by-step instructions on how to make precision edits to the DNA of yeast using CRISPR.
I asked myself, is biotech really a realm of play for people with any level of experience or intent? It conjured the broad array of safety and ethical issues related to genetic engineering. While I believe science needs to be open to more people, I simultaneously wonder about the limits to how open it should become.
My interest in biodesign lies in materials. If a small spider can produce seven different kinds of proteins for a web that is strong, durable, flexible, reactive to the environment, and biodegradable, why can’t humans do better with our own materials? Why must our manmade materials be so limited, and simultaneously so toxic to the environment?
Today, I feel lucky to have roots in the Finnish countryside. The older members of our small village have traditional knowledge and skills to make almost anything they need from the natural materials around them. My mother, for example, showed me how to grow flax and hemp and taught me all the steps from seeding flax to fiber processing. What a happy moment to hold a handful of self-grown shiny linen fibers! Born in the 1920’s, she was trained as a crafts teacher and passed to me skills in weaving, knitting, and sewing, along with the ethos of frugality and resource-efficiency that her generation had been forced to adopt during World War II. In recent years, while working in biomaterials research at Aalto University, I’ve come to recognize the value of her lessons. Though we can’t turn back the clock, we can learn and reinvent many things from the past.
Natural colors offer an example: Before industrialization and the invention of synthetic dyes, plants were used to dye textiles. Often my students use colorful plants for their dyeing experiments and are disappointed when their fabrics look beige or the vibrant colors quickly fade. Traditional techniques offer beautiful and durable tones from indigo, willow bark, fungi, and madder, to name a few. New options include dyeing with microbes, extracting plant compounds, and waterless dyeing processes. Further down the road, options may include nanoscale structural color, made not by pigments, but rather from molecular textures on a fabric. This is similar to the way butterflies produce radiant, often iridescent, patterns on their wings, and also why when you rub your finger on them, they decolorize. I eagerly follow these innovations, some renewing the old methods, some enabled by emerging biotechnologies.
To me biodesign means hope. Industrialization and urbanization have disconnected most people from nature. They lead their lives unaware of the origins of the foods they eat and textiles they wear, unaware of the connections between their behaviors and the environment around them. Biodesign is a powerful tool to rebuild this connection. It offers an opportunity to imagine and explore alternative ways to live. The changes we’ve caused to the climate and environment are now compounding crises; biodesign offers a glimmer of hope that we might face these global problems without triggering a slew of new ones.
“We are deliberately turning the world that was found into a world that is made,” wrote Christopher Preston in The Synthetic Age. Preston argues that humanity can now reengineer earth’s most fundamental processes, like constructing DNA or fabricating novel molecular structures. Now is the time to take full responsibility and start to make more self aware decisions. “These are not decisions that can be left in the hands of a select few. After all, the stakes for our species hardly can be higher,” Preston wrote [4].
I characterize biodesign as a collaborative practice and action. A single designer or scientist can be a driving force, but without support and community, the ideas can’t be scaled or have impact. Cross-disciplinary collaboration is demanding, and it requires not only curious minds and willingness to work together, but also the capacity to communicate and build human connections. The Aalto University CHEMARTS collaboration since 2011 has been an excellent testbed to explore various co-operative practices for biodesign, and to learn how to work together for a more sustainable material future.
[1] Nature—Cooper Hewitt Design Triennial. 10 May 2019-20 Jan. 2020, Cooper Hewitt, Smithsonian Design Museum, New York.
[2] Sputniko!, Masaya Kushino, Another Farm, in collaboration with National Agricultural and Research Organization, and Hosoo. Tranceflora–Amy’s Glowing Silk (Solo Exhibition). 2015, Gucci Gallery Shinjuku, Tokyo.
[3] Zayner, Josiah. DIY Bacterial Gene Engineering CRISPR Kit. Nature—Cooper Hewitt Design Triennial. 10 May 2019-20 Jan. 2020, Cooper Hewitt, Smithsonian Design Museum, New York.
[4] Preston, Christopher. The Synthetic Age: Outdesigning Evolution, Resurrecting Species, and Reengineering Our World. The MIT Press, 2019.
Cite This Essay
Kääriäinen, Prijo. “What Biodesign Means to Me.” Biodesigned: Issue 9, 11 November, 2021. Accessed [month, day, year].