Source: Make: DIY Projects and Ideas for Makers
There are a handful of twitter profiles I rely on to open my mind every day. One of them is @CorinneTakara, an artist and teacher based in San Jose, CA where she does her studio work and runs a makerspace out of her garage called, aptly, The Nest, focused on design, biology, and engineering.
Currently, she’s supporting a group of teens in the annual Biodesign Challenge showcasing future applications of biotechnology.
The Nest team explores expressive, sustainable design with cellular materials such as mycelium (the lacy, white vegetative root structure that supports the growth of mushrooms) and bioplastics using agar, derived from seaweed, and chitin, a material used in dissolvable surgical thread that’s found in the exoskeletons of crustaceans and insects, and in outer sheaths of the mycelium fungus.
The team conducts many of its projects as a set “recipes.” They grow and cure a substrate compound using “mycelium seeded bark” to fashion objects such as lampshades, containers, and other forms; they create unique castings and press-molded projects with bio plastics; they culture kombucha, the fermented tea drink, to develop a “scoby,” the rubbery layer of yeast and bacteria that can be dried, then crafted as a project material.
Part science lab, part artistic experiment, part eye-opening experience with the natural world, these GIY (grow-it-yourself) projects focus deeply on nature, its processes and characteristics, and our ability to construct things with organic materials.
For more context, I reached out to Tito Jankowski, one of the co-founders of the original biohacking space, BioCurious; he runs Impossible Labs, a consultancy focused on climate, and serves as an advisor for Corinne’s high school students and their work on the Biodesign Challenge.
Tito described the backdrop for these explorations of natural material as an emergent offshoot of the revolutionary research done on the human genome project, which, in addition to launching the genomics revolution, introduced the transformative discipline known as Synthetic Biology, or SynBio, combining biology, chemistry, and computation.
He talked about companies such as Materiom, Ecovative, Bolt Threads, and Memphis Meats, commenting that projects like these are going to re-shape industrial materials, grow renewable sourcing for clothing, and provide new food sources and cellular protein.
“What’s common across these projects,” Tito said, “and what ties in directly with the Nest team, is the focus on sustainability and an ambition to use biological material to reduce our carbon footprint and support better ways to live, work, and collaborate.”
Corinne is developing the work at the Nest makerspace iteratively, through small group work and applied, artistic experimentation, showing us how to use natural materials to create organic (no pun intended) and evocative projects that have specific and personal applications.
Makerspace coordinators and curious hands-on learners everywhere who want get some dirt, maybe some mycelium, under your fingernails, please take notice.
You are just getting back from the Fablearn conference at Teachers College and Columbia University in NYC where you and a student team you’re working with presented their “Living Leather Project” — can you share some details on this work?
Yes! I am working with a small team of teen girls who are exploring creating a toy kit that others can grow and share. The team envisions a kit experience that introduces bacterial cellulose and mycelium as sustainable materials to grow and build play experiences from. For example, they designed small 3D printed wings (shared on Tinkercad) that can be skinned with bacterial cellulose and snapped to Legos. They are also designing vacuum formed flower pot creature molds to grow mycelium in. A waste stream substrate such as coffee grounds or plant cuttings is incubated with mycelium and pressed into these molds to grow the forms. They are also thinking about process and how to build culture fails into the play experience. For example, they have designed a petri dish kaleidoscope that one can put scraps of substrate and failed culture growths into. They are also imagining an “open when fails” envelope with fun ideas for extended play with failed material growths. Here is their project website that they are slowly fleshing out.
If we can learn about a maker from the materials and tools she chooses, what can we learn about you from this palette: mycelium, silkworms, mealworms, algae, chitin and kombucha?
Maybe it highlights my curiosity for a slower approach to making and my love of nature in all its forms. It also highlights my desire to find accessible entry points to engaging people in conversations centered on biomaterials and sustainability design. I wanted to explore materials that are low cost, relatively easy to grown, easy to dispose of, and break down the fear factor. Humble organisms in often overlooked corners of nature may be key to deep innovation in sustainable design, but the general public has a fear of many of these organisms. I think it is important to break down these fears with creative craft activities that give the public hands on experience with grown biomaterials so that they, too, can start imagining applications for these materials in their world.
“Grow It Yourself” projects introduce an implicit focus on materials that have a relationship to the natural world. A clear extension of this idea comes in the ways that local communities and cultures put these materials to use. Can you talk about this aspect of the work and your interest in this approach to materials?
In my youth workshops in various communities, I see a pretty profound student illiteracy in the natural world around them. Students don’t know the names of the plants in front of their schools, or the names of the veins of water that lace their communities under or above ground. A great way to connect youth to nature is through culture, their own and others. My dad spent his early childhood on a Maui plantation and the community creatively repurposed both manmade materials and natural materials consumed from their environment. Their creative thriftiness blended rural traditional Japanese practices with the innovative practices of other cultures on the plantations. This thoughtful use of materials has inspired both my workshops and my fine art, which is often a patchwork of artifact from plantation era Hawaii blended with modern day artifacts.
As we bring in locally sourced materials into our maker experiences…
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