I would like you to picture two ways of imagining futures. One is a future that is singular,
static, controlled, and linear. The other is a compound of many futures born from the
entanglement of diverse, unexpected voices, and these emerge not from top-down
design, but from the organic, intertwined, and dynamic collisions of different
perspectives. The second scenario is what I refer to as polyphonic features here.
Futures are not imposed, but gradually co developed, much like a responsive
conversation that evolves, shifts, and surprises you with its direction, a future where
design, science, biology, and technology don't merely coexist, but actively shape each
other through a transversal process of radical collaboration as an artist and designer,
this presents an interesting challenge to me. How can we approach designing not only
as a linear problem, solution narrative, but to explore what else it might hold for us? In
this model, futures are not single events. With a predetermined endpoint, a collection
of moments, interactions, utterances, and choices that cripple outward shaping
outcomes in ways we might not immediately grasp, if at all, such a way of approaching
strategy is more aligned with life as it happens. Each conversation, each thought
experiment, each unexpected collaboration, creates a ripple that expands far beyond
its own origin. The choices we make today, however small, and insignificant that is
seen, they can set off waves that reverberate into the future, influencing systems and
relationships we cannot yet foresee. I want to give you an example of what that might
look like in action by sharing the story behind one of my projects in greater detail.
Now let me ask you a question. How do you think human heart disease tissue
engineering and silkworms interconnect? At the first dance, they seem unrelated, but
they have a few things in common, actually.
Firstly, of course, the biological roots, and secondly, the arts of human centricity. You
might wonder how silkworms are human centric, but I'll come to that later. But what
you see here is the concept of a human heart replacement woven by genetically
engineered silk ones. So why silk? You might ask. Well, does it happen with human
organ
donor
hearts?
Human
donor
hearts
usually
require
lifelong
immunosuppressants so that the body doesn't reject the new organ. Silk, on the other
hand, is biocompatible. That means it can be seated with a patient's own cells, and it
can be fully absorbed by the human body and makes it ultimately their own new organ.
Imagine an insect biome of a product, a silken cocoon, can be turned into a lifesaving
human heart. At the same time, this could gradually lead to human beings being turned
into bio digital hybrids. This is an essence what the Biophilia organ crafting project is
about. My research into heart disease, the leading cause of deaths worldwide, has led
me to explore tissue engineering and the currently dominant narrative of 3d printing
organs. However, although 3d printing is one way of addressing the issue of organ
shortage, I realized that this method currently overlooks important factors such as the
emotional side of transplantation, patients are often plagued by a range of things, such
as guilt or they show personality changes after the surgery, but unfortunately, they
receive little to no care for that, I began to question the psychological impact of hearts
created by machines and wondered if this could even lead to a perceived loss of
emotions. During a trip to Japan, I learned about Syria culture, the ancient art of rearing
silkman, which has astonishingly remained largely unchanged for about 5000 years, I
started raising silkworms myself and learned about the fantastical properties in the
medical field. I found out that silk is not rejected by the human body, and so I began
connecting the dots. What I saw was that it's the key material for not only offering
practical properties but also addressing the emotional qualities. Imagine what a
silkworm factory for human organs might look like at this stage, I still assumed that a
factory setting was the most appropriate. However, I quickly realized in the exchanges
with doctors with scientists, that what's most important is a positive outlook on the
transportation surgery actually, and that significantly improves the medical outcomes
post-surgery. So that changed my focus very much on the interactions before the
surgery and the fabrication methods that would enable such an interaction, rather than
the factory setting sterile and clean, I now envision the highly personalized approach,
a patient would be able to visit the organ craftsman and would be able to create a
custom part from silk with the help of genetically modified silkworms.
This process integrates not only technical delivery, but at the core human care,
traditional craftsmanship and the latest biotechnology, saying that, as with every
subject, I guess it depends on how you look at and how you approach it. As with most
products of design, there's a flip side to the coin. Let's consider the role and the
perspective of the bomb mixed Mori Silkworm in this scenario. Silkworms have been
bred for 1000s of years and to really to a point of no return. Now, they can no longer
survive in the wild. They can't fly, they can't eat, they can't reproduce, and are fully
dependent on human care. By genetically modifying them for human benefit, even
further, we highlight a moral dilemma. What's a good enough reason for you to justify
the radical reshaping of nature because such a heart, let's face it, turn silkworms into
mere biological 3d printers.
This demonstrates another ripple effect in action, the unintended consequences of a
design decision that isn't even visible to the naked eye.
Much ambiguity and contradictions reside in lots of designs, even when there were
best intentions, resolving one problem often creates new ones as a side effect, the
convex Morris silkworm teaches us an important lesson about our role in shaping
futures.
Even the smallest decisions that we make in design, science and technology can have
unintended, far-reaching consequences. The ripples we create now will not just touch
our own lives, but the lives of those in the future. This made me aware of the ethical
mandate involved in designing. You must consider responsibility just as much as
consumption and delivery. It requires wider conversations, time, and space to think
critique and voice such considerations across disciplinary interactions. With this in
mind, I founded the polyphonic futures lab, where I actively create these kinds of
encounters, not just among scientists and artists, but also with other experts and
citizens across fields and worldviews. You can consider this some sort of matchmaking,
the laboratory of ideas that brings together people that otherwise would probably never
meet or interact with each other. This isn't just interdisciplinary work, it's transversal,
where fields don't just overlap, but they cut across. They create new transversal notes
of designing, thinking, and making together. The results from these notes are turned
into material translations that help people to speculate and envision collectively, I
began to translate laboratory processes into very simple protocols and material
experiences for workshops that people could engage in. Hands-on activities widen the
understanding of silicon potential and stimulate a personal interpretation. The task was
to find ways for physicists to talk to poets, for designers to talk to biologists and for
chemists to talk to homemakers.
This is where polyphony begins, and it's not just about talking.
Through tangible material experiences and narrative writing, these temporary core
research groups gradually make futures real. They create an interactive loop of
exchanging, resulting in manifestations you can discuss critique and further develop.
This is not supposed to be about futures that are far away in the distance, but to
challenge human centricity in the here and now and where it heads. Silkworm gives its
life to provide humans with its precious material, this brings the ethics of sacrifice and
convenience to the floor.
When we create artificial human organs, we aren't just making neutral objects when
we're building futures that force us to confront really uncomfortable questions about
life itself, technology, control and power, more nuanced stories and ideas that surround
silk are desperately needed, but different views of the future already exist, and we can
learn from them.
Take the folk of the Amara people who live in the Bolivian islands, they have a
profoundly different way of understanding time. for them, the future lies behind them,
because they can't see it and they can't know it there, and the only truth they actually
know is their past, which lies in front of them, clear and visible. Imagine for a moment
living in a world where the future is always behind you, just out of sight. I find this idea
resonates, actually very much with today.
The pace of change feels often so fast that it blinds us to what lies ahead of us. Our
modern world pushes us towards directing forwards into linear futures, and often
leaving us unprepared to confront and address the side effects of the realities we are
creating along the way. But this is going to talk about resignation. It's a call to action,
a call to collectively speculate and to engage in future making. we need to be more
deliberate about the futures we craft. It's not enough to just imagine. We must
materialize and engage in future making of tomorrow, so it can be experienced and
influenced in the present. Such a model of action allows a range of things to happen
actually. Firstly, you acknowledge the interconnectedness of everything, to think
beyond your own perspective and consider the broader ecosystem of ideas, actions
and consequences. And it calls on us to recognize that future making is actually a
shared responsibility, one that requires us to engage with diverse voices, disciplines
and communities in meaningful, collaborative ways. You can see from the example
with silk that technology doesn't always follow a straight path. Technological past often
have unintended side effects that result from a lack of foresight. The technologies that
will shape our future often come with the consequences that were never designed.
These consequences are not just accidents. They are actually missed opportunities,
risks that were not considered.
We need to create basis for constructive criticality and deliberate scrutiny to allow
these unintended consequences to surface and be shaped before they shape us.
We're also standing on the edge of a new era, the era of bio digital convergence, an
era where our bodies and technologies will become intertwined in ways we can only
begin to grasp. The potential benefits are immense, but so are the dangers. Algorithms
will monitor us. Biomaterials will become part of our skin and bodies. It must resist the
persistent drives towards ubiquitous control and turning even more living beings into
digitized units. In the polyphonic futures lab, we experiment with the concept of
biomaterial induced computing, exploring how to derive benefit from these
technologies while keeping autonomy and egocentricity at the forefront. The key is not
to feel those futures, but to curiously explore and scrutinize them and to shape them
elegantly and with intent.
So how do we move intelligently forward?
The answer lies in transversality and polyphony through transversal intersections
between seemingly unrelated fields, we can create polyphonic futures that are rich,
diverse, appropriately complex, and resilient. Also, the future should not continue to
surprise us.
It should be something we actively shape and let ourselves be shaped by.
As the artist Jenny Holzer once stated, we live in the surprise results of old plans, yet
we need to move away from those surprise results and towards futures that are more
than humanly designed, and that begins today with each of us embracing the
complexity and the uncertainty of our times. I'd like us to celebrate those collisions and
the unknowing known and make uncertainty our friendly yet strange bedfellow and let
us design futures that are not only unexpected but also equitable, thoughtful, and alive
with possibility. Thank you.