BioLace: an exploration of the potential of synthetic biology and living technology for future textiles

Could emergent ‘Living Technology’ such as synthetic biology lead to a more resilient future? This paper presents ‘BioLace’, a speculative design-led research project that investigates the intersection of synthetic biology and textile design to propose future fabrication processes for textile products and architecture. The motivation behind this research lies in the hypothesis that living technology can foster a new approach to address some of the key sustainable challenges of the 21st century. The BioLace project is designed to probe the potential of a biological manufacturing future by exploring the cellular programming of morphogenesis in plant systems. The project aims to translate synthetic biology into accessible design scenarios to expose and understand the societal implications of new emerging technologies. The BioLace project poses the following questions: Can synthetic biology become a potential sustainable technology for future textile manufacturing? Will crafting molecules become a new way to produce textiles? Could biology combined with nanotechnology enable us to engineer intelligence in materials to program smart and responsive biological textiles?

Freely downloadable from publisher's website at http://www.materialthinking.org/papers/71.