Nature—Cooper Hewitt Design Triennial

Nature—Cooper Hewitt Design Triennial in New York, in conjunction with the Cube Design Museum (Kerkrade, Netherlands), curated by teams from both museums (including Caitlin Condell, Andrea Lipps, Matilda McQuaid, Gene Bertrand and Hans Gubbels), showcases the work of over 60 international projects created in the result of multidisciplinary collaborations from across design, art and science. The exhibition is based on seven principles – to understand, remediate, simulate, salvage, nurture, augment, and facilitate collaboration with nature while presenting new materials, systems and disrupting technologies which aim to promote new ways of interacting with nature.

Our new projects, Assemblage 002 and Transversal (2019) in collaboration with Professor John Ward, Department of Biochemical Engineering, University College London, and were commissioned by the Cooper Hewitt Smithsonian Design Museum. Both pieces function as a deep exploration in facilitating biological interactions between human and non-human actors.

ASSEMBLAGE 002, 2019 is a reversible silk coat designed and pattern cut to showcase the unique range of dye protocols we have developed in the laboratory. Each pattern piece has been dyed by pigment-producing bacteria mediated by our experimental approach of calibrating the growth conditions of the microbes.

With Transversal 2019, from the microbe to the bias, to the fold, we’ve layered biofabrication protocols with methods of textile craft to design a 1.8m long 0.9m wide, breathable, adaptive architectural membrane. Learn more about the projects here.