Hasta La Ideas

Dezeen and MINI Frontiers: Suzanne Lee of BioCouture explains how she makes clothes that are “grown using bacteria” in this movie filmed at the Wearable Futures conference in London in December.

“There’s a whole spectrum of organisms that can grow material,” says Lee, who founded BioCouture to explore how organisms like bacteria, yeast, fungi and algae could be harnessed to produce fabrics.

Lee showed the Wearable Futures audience a range of jackets and shoes made from bio-materials produced by bacteria in a vat of liquid to produce bacterial cellulose – a material that has similar properties to leather.

“The recipe that I’ve been exploring to grow a piece of clothing is using a symbiotic mix of yeast and bacteria,” she said. “It’s a fermentation method that grows you bacterial cellulose. It’s kind of like a vegetable leather if you like.”

She adds: “What attracts me to it is that it’s compostable. It’s not just biodegradable, it’s compostable. So you could throw it away like you would your vegetable peelings.”

BioCouture is a London-based design consultancy that is pioneering the use of bio-materials for the fashion, sportswear and luxury sectors.

Lee is a former senior research fellow at the School of Fashion & Textiles at Central Saint Martin’s College of Art & Design, and author of the 2007 book Fashioning The Future: tomorrow’s wardrobe, which was the first publication to explore how technology could transform fashion.

“Through an engagement with biology I’m really excited about how we can think about organisms like microbes as the factories of the future,” says Lee. “What most people know BioCouture for is a series of garments that were grown using bacteria. So the fibres, the material itself and the formation of the garment has been done by a microbe rather than a plant.”

In future, Lee believes that clothing materials themselves could be living organisms that could work symbiotically with the body to nourish it and even monitor it for signs of disease.

“What we have right now are living organisms making us materials, but then the organism is killed and the material just exists like any other,” she says.

“But I can imagine that we will eventually move towards the material itself being living while it’s on you, and having a direct relationship to your whole body in this happy micro-biome environment and perhaps diagnosing and treating, nourishing in some way the body surface so becoming part of your wellbeing.”

The two-day Wearable Futures conference explored how smart materials and new technologies are helping to make wearable technology one of the most talked-about topics in the fields of design and technology.

The music featured in the movie is a track by DJ Kimon. You can listen to his music on Dezeen Music Project.

Dezeen and MINI Frontiers is a year-long collaboration with MINI exploring how design and technology are coming together to shape the future.

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Dezeen and MINI Frontiers: augmented reality technology will revolutionise the way we navigate cities, says Andy Millns of 3D production company Inition in the second part of our interview.

Augmented reality devices that are tiny enough to “sit in your eye” will soon add layers of digital information over the real world, says Millns.

Users will be able to see whole cities with information layered on top of them via tiny devices placed in the eye, completely changing their urban experience, he claims.

“When we can track natural features in the city we can [then] bring in all sorts of information layered on to the urban view.” This could include information related to travel, shopping, the proximity of friends and so on.

The adoption of this technology will be helped by the second major development Millns predicts.

“Most augmented reality so far [works] using a two-dimensional flat marker,” says Millns, referring to 2D-printed marker patterns that interface with digital models on devices like iPads to render augmented reality views.

This tracking method limits augmented reality to fairly rudimentary usages – but not for long.

“In the future we won’t need [to use] two-dimensional specific markers, the augmented reality app will just track the natural environment”, he says.

Couple this with more sophisticated viewing technologies, and the use of augmented reality will soar, Millns claims: “When we have devices that just sit in your eye and it’s not obvious you are wearing them – that’s when augmented reality will really take off.”

Today’s augmented reality relies on an intermediary device such as a smartphone or tablet, on which the user sees an “augmented” version of the world.

“One example of using augmented reality that people might be familiar with is using a tablet,” says Millns. “We use a live image via the camera and we layer on objects to make them appear as if they are really there.”

This technology is used at Dezeen’s Imagine Shop at Selfridges that features two installations developed by Inition, an augmented-reality watch store and a walkaround digital model of Zaha Hadid’s £300 million superyacht.

The augmented reality Dezeen Watch Store pop-up allows customers to virtually try on a range of watches. By wrapping a paper “marker” around their wrist and looking at a screen, customers can see the watches modelled on their wrists in real time.

Customers can also explore an augmented reality scale model of Zaha Hadid Architects’ 90-metre Jazz superyacht using a tablet computer.

By pointing an iPad at a printed marker resting on a platform, they can view and walk round the yacht as if it was really there.

Based in Shoreditch, east London, Inition specialises in using new technologies such as virtual and augmented reality to create a range of experiences and installations.

Inition has built augmented reality models for several developers to help promote their buildings as well as architects, including Zaha Hadid for whom they developed a model which explored the effects of different airflows and lighting on the building.

We interviewed Andy Millns in Inition’s Shoreditch studio. The music featured in the movie is a track by Floyd Lavine. You can listen to Lavine’s music on Dezeen Music Project.

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will change how we see the world appeared first on Dezeen.

Today we’re launching Dezeen and MINI Frontiers – a major, year-long collaboration with MINI that will explore how design and technology are coming together to shape the future.

Over the coming year we’ll be looking at some of the most exciting developments in emerging fields such as augmented reality, wearable technology, synthetic biology, robotics and mobility.

Subtitled “Where design and technology connect”, Dezeen and MINI Frontiers will take us on a journey of discovery. Through a series of videos we’ll be speaking to the most interesting, established and emerging talents from around the world who are working at the frontiers of these disciplines.

We’ll be investigating the way that connectivity between previously separate disciplines is creating new hybrids, new originals and new ways of working that promise to change for the better the way we live and work.

We look forward to sharing our discoveries with you over the next 12 months.

Look out for our first movie tomorrow, in which Andy Millns of 3D technology company Inition discusses how virtual reality is fast becoming as life-like as the real world.

In September we’ll be teaming up with six leading creatives to explore the future of mobility in an exhibition at London Design Festival – details to be announced soon.

Marcus Fairs
Editor-in-chief, Dezeen

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