Friday night at the Next Nature Museum
Last Friday's Next Nature's Biodesign Festival was an entangled blur of ideas, concepts, prototypes and above all: a menagerie of people of all sorts of backgrounds. If you missed, it, don't worry, I'll give you the highlights.
I got to meet Ira van Eelen, who jokingly lamented she is always referred to as "the daughter of" (Willem van Eelen, the 'godfather of cultured meat') but is a powerhouse in her own right. I guess that's what cathedral building is all about: starting real life projects (like RespectFarms) to improve society for all species, an endeavour that you may not see finished yourself.
Dr. Amy Langdon
Professor Kit Braybrooke’s 'feral hacking' inspired my own community projects, in (re)framing hacking away from digital mischief toward a more open, playful, and regenerative approach as playful (mis)use and (re)making of systems. It’s about dancing with systems, not trying to control them, free after Donella Meadows.
Raphael Kim, founder of Biodesign Academy compared AI to a 'rather brilliant, but sometimes too literal, intern' who never sleeps and works hard but needs humans for context and judgment, which felt spot on. Dr. Amy Congdon prints fashion products with living bacteria that value uniqueness over perfect copies.
Maurizio Montalti spoke as the Chief Mycelium Officer at SQIM srl where they combine science, art, and mycelium to create living materials, in an approach that is as much about multi-species collaboration as it is about technology. Ermi van Oers also enlists bacteria to create floating lights that enable us to understand the chemical (in)balance in water and relate more deeply to water bodies.
Mark Post, the scientist who created the first cultivated meat burger, joked about his 'undesigned' Powerpoint slides but drove home a powerful message about how getting a prototype to the public is real hard work.
Eric Klarenbeek and Maartje Dros showed how mycelium can become materials that grow, last, and eventually return to the earth - something that was made explicit when someone from the audience wanted to learn about biodegradable burial materials.
At the end of the day, what stood out most was that biodesign is less about design and more about creating spaces where species, materials, and ideas grow together. Much appreciation for the Next Nature team, most notably Emma van der Leest, Mieke Gerritzen and Koert van Mensvoort for putting together this wonderful program and offering exactly such as space.