If you are a designer eager to find more sustainable material choices for your creative inventions, you might want to hit the BioCouture workshop during Beirut Design Week. Fashion visionary Suzanne Lee will give participants a glimpse into the future of conscious design by teaching participants how to grow their very own living materials from microbes such as bacteria (check out these bacteria lacy numbers by Sarine Zaken from Israel).
BioCouture is a London-based design consultancy that is exploring a more sustainable way to develop materials. Forget plastic that doesn’t biodegrade. Forget wood that depletes our forests.
Nature offers a bounty of more renewable materials that simply require a little love to cultivate.
Founder and director Suzanne Lee has turned to living organisms such as bacteria, fungi and algae, as well as cellulose, chitin and protein fibers like silk to pioneer materials for future consumer products.
And now she is going to share her knowledge with Beirut’s forward-thinking design community.
In each interactive three hour workshop, where food and kitchen utensils are the only materials required, Lee will demonstrate how to grow a culture using a specific recipe.
She will also encourage discussion about local alternatives and potential applications for the material grown – be it in the fashion world or design.
Sarine Zaken’s lacy bacteria
Everyone will be given a culture so that they can continue to experiment at home.
For a sense of the bio-designed future towards which Lee is heading, check out the BioCouture-grown shoe (below) currently on display in Paris as part of the “Alive/En Vie” exhibition.
Also, take a peek at her book Fashioning The Future: tomorrow’s wardrobe.
The Beirut workshops will be held on Thursday and Friday, the 27th and 28th of June from 9am to 12pm at the Tawlet Souk El Tayeb in Mark Mikhael.
Interested? Sign up here.
Author: Tafline Laylin
As a tour leader who led “eco-friendly” camping trips throughout North America, Tafline soon realized that she was instead leaving behind a trail of gas fumes, plastic bottles and Pringles. In fact, wherever she traveled – whether it was Viet Nam or South Africa or England – it became clear how inefficiently the mandate to re-think our consumer culture is reaching the general public. Born in Iran, raised in South Africa and the United States, she currently splits her time between Africa and the Middle East. Tafline can be reached at tafline (at) greenprophet (dot) com.
This is very cool, not just a bit…it make us all aware of the power of nature to supply us with all that we need, as long as we aren’t greedy!