BIOMATERIAL BEYOND HUMAN

BIOMATERIAL BEYOND HUMAN, 2023

Made in collaboration with Bioengineering students at Imperial College London, led by Dr Naomi Nakayama, and the science team including Ritesh Ghosh, Oliver Hernandez Fernandez, Elif Gediz Kocaoglan, Alice Malivert, Sam Mason, Dhanya Radhakrishnan

In creating work for Beyond Human, we explore transdisciplinary investigations and how we can work with non-humans. The disciplines of science, technology, design and creativity came together through collaborative practice. The collaborations were formed between Bioengineering students from Imperial College London and Industrial Design students from Central Saint Martins. Together, they made a series of experiments, growing biomaterials from oat plants and mycelium fungi. Their concepts explore how we may work with living materials and non-humans to consider beyond the human world.

Some themes emerging from the collaborations include:

- how might we collaborate with non-humans to create our world together and what relationships will these build?

- can we define wider parameters of success when creating and using living systems and biomaterials?

- how might we harness the properties of organisms such as plants and mycelium to create living materials?

- how might communities of living organisms enhance the properties of what we can make and our relationship with the process?

1. Returning to Nature by Gladys Diaz Armas & Emma Griffiths