Building material futures

What if we could grow textiles? What if our waste could be considered a raw material, or even better, didn’t exist? Can we design for nature, rather than against her? At S-BIOTICA, our goal is to re-design people’s perspectives, to redesign our relationship with nature and to normalise approaches to working with waste and living systems. We turn to nature, reflecting upon existing systems and cycles, inspired by millions of years of evolution where nature knows no waste. We put our non-human counterparts first, where they have as much of an agency in the design and the final output as we do as designers. Through collaboration with artists, makers and designers we can envisage how to shift design thinking to understanding and accepting the transformation of materials, appreciating their unique narratives, rhythms and cycles. Through design and artistic exploration we can disrupt anthropocentric values and replace them with ideals of care and coexistence.

About Jessica Díaz

Jessica is a biomaterial researcher, designer and architect. She advocates accessibility, bringing bio-design and biological sciences to a broader audience through creating wearable technologies that incorporate living organisms and biological processes. Jessica forms part of the group Biobabes, a collective that was founded in 2015 who investigate and collaborate with living systems. She is currently working as an instructor and researcher in biomaterials, with an emphasis on myco-materials and has co-founded S-BIOTICA, a biodesign & material research hub in Barcelona.

About Lara Campos

Designer, researcher and multidisciplinary artist. Her practice blurs the boundaries between materials, technology and biology. Lara seeks to open a space for dialogue between humans and other living beings, while proposing the exploration of hybrid habitable spaces, as sensorial and interactive experiences to devise better solutions for coexistence. Her work is based on nature as cognitive matter and her research focuses on sustainable development and emotional response, merging biomaterials with digital fabrication. After graduating Fabricademy with the project “Be Grounded”, she established collaborations for the funded projects Future Wardrobe and Remix El Barrio. She is currently working as an instructor and co-founded a biodesign & material research hub in Barcelona called S-Biotica.