I'm Senior Research Fellow in the School of Fashion/Textiles, Central Saint Martins, London and this is my journey in the weird and wonderful world of growing clothes...
This is the new home for the BioCouture project. The website (www.biocouture.co.uk) has some background info and images for download but here is where you'll find the live stuff!
I'm Senior Research Fellow in the School of Fashion/Textiles, Central Saint Martins, London and this is my journey in the weird and wonderful world of growing clothes...
Watch Suzanne Lee: TED fellow GROW your own Fabric for clothes...
http://www.ted.com/talks/suzanne_lee_grow_your_own_clothes.html
Fashion designer Suzanne Lee directs the BioCouture research project, which sprang from an idea in her book Fashioning the Future: Tomorrow’s Wardrobe, a seminal text on fashion and future technologies. Her research harnesses nature to propose a radical future fashion vision: Can we grow a dress from a vat of liquid?
Using bacterial-cellulose, Lee aims to address pressing ecological and sustainability issues around fashion and beyond. A Senior Research Fellow at Central Saint Martins, University of the Arts London, she is working with scientists to investigate whether synthetic biology can engineer optimized organisms for growing future consumer products
"I’m also creating new bacterial-cellulose composite swatches looking at eco-substrates like hemp. This month I’m teaching an exciting project exploring systems and synthetic biology to postgraduate textile and industrial design students alongside eminent scientists from Cambridge University."Suzanne Lee in the TED2011 Fellows guide
Green Design 2.0 Learning From Nature
"BioCouture – harnessing biological processes to grow future products". I'm particularly looking forward to catching up with Veronika Kapsali and hearing Tomas Libertiny, of the wonderful Bee Vase, (pictured above) talk about his poetic work.
"This year's theme is 'Learning from Nature' focusing on biomimetics and on nature as a model or inspiration for sustainable design strategies. During the symposium we are interested in investigating to what extent strategies for sustainable design can be generated and adapted from nature. We are looking forward to a wide range of presentations by international speakers who will be addressing topics and concepts such as biomimetics, bioengineering, slow design, symbiosis with nature, cradle to cradle and more, in particular focusing on good green design practices and strategies inspired by nature. Like last year, this one-day symposium should serve as useful input for design and art students as well as other interested parties."
The environmental design initiative GREENLAB based at the Art College Weissensee Berlin connects higher education, practice-led research and the industry to support, inspire and create innovative approaches to sustainable and eco friendly products and services. Through research and collaboration, this practiceled design research institute aims to critically analyse and give a material form to concepts that balance ecology, society and culture by employing design methods and strategies.
Bacteria make the artificial blood vessels of the future
The cellulose is strong enough to cope with blood pressure and works well with the body's own tissue. Fink's thesis shows that the material also carries a lower risk of blood clots than the synthetic materials currently in use.
"There are hardly any blood clots at all with the bacterial cellulose, and the blood coagulates much more slowly than with the materials I used as a comparison," says Fink. "This means that the cellulose works very well in contact with the blood and is a very interesting alternative for artificial blood vessels."
Real blood vessels have an internal coating of cells that ensure that the blood does not clot. Helen Fink and her colleagues have modified the bacterial cellulose so that these cells adhere better.
"We've used a brand new method which allows us to increase the number of cells that grow in the bacterial cellulose without changing the material's structure," says Fink.
The biocompatibility of bacterial cellulose is already exploited commercially for wound dressings and it's exciting to see this material being explored by tissue engineers who harness scaffolds to build 3D biostructures.
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