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I grew up at a time when the space race
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seemed to have influenced the design of everything around me.
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I was a child of the seventies,
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I was a massive science-fiction fan,
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I was transfixed by TV and movies like 2001, Star Trek and Star Wars.
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The design of the future seemed so exciting,
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it felt like
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we would all be living in houses that looked like this,
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even the name of this house was "Futuro".
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It was made from reinforced polyester plastic
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and it was designed so that it could be mass-produced and situated in any location.
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As a child I couldn't think
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of anywhere cooler that you might live.
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And what kind of car would you park outside this house?
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For me there was only one choice,
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the legendary Ferrari Modulo.
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It was designed by Pininfarina, the Italian styling house,
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forty-four years ago
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and for me it was a complete dream.
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The whole roof
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slid forward, so just climbing into it was an adventure.
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And what would you wear inside this car?
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This is not a car that you get into wearing jeans and t-shirts.
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No, no, no.
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Nothing less than one of Pierre Cardin's space people
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would look right sitting inside this car.
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Sixties fashion designers like Cardin, Andre Koresh, Paco Rabanne,
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they were really responsible for creating the future aesthetic look.
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They even suggested that people in the future might be wearing all-in-one jump suits;
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I mean, as if.
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(Laughter)
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Their vision, these futuristic fashions were made from materials
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like moulded plastics, synthetic fibres,
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all kinds of vinyl.
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But those space-age materials relied on a petrochemical industry
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which was creating new polymer science
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and those designs weren't in fact
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very sustainable or indeed practical.
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The Futuro house had to be taken off the market in the mid-1970s
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because of the oil crisis
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which made the production
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prohibitively expensive.
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The Modulo car,
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well, it was only ever a concept.
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It was far too low to be road legal
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and in fact it could only drive in a straight line.
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As for plastic clothes and synthetic fibres,
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well, if you've ever worn them, you know that they don't breath.
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they're not very comfortable,
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so,
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you know, they had limitations.
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As a child my future,
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plastic-fantastic future,
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really didn't include a world that looked like this.
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Several decades later
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we know that those so-called future materials
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really wasn't a sustainable pattern of behaviour
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and we know today that we need to radically rethink
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raw materials, manufacturing, consumption and so forth.
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I did follow my childhood dream
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to be a designer
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and I went into fashion
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but I continued being excited by science and technology.
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But what I was looking for was a vision for the future which
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was positive in some way
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and i started to research
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what that long-term future vision might be
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and I wrote a book
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about the future of fashion but not
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about what we might wear next season but what we might be wearing in fifty years time.
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One of the
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things I've discovered in researching that was that if you want to find out about the future,
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don't ask a designer, ask a scientist.
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One of the most interesting people I met
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was a biologist
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and when I put it to him that I was searching for the future vision of fashion,
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he replied,
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"You could grow it."
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He explained that micro-organisms
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like bacteria and yeast
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can also produce textile-like fibres.
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They don't need to grow in a field,
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this can happen in a liquid.
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Wow, here was a vision of the future that I had never seen or heard of before,
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a dress emerging from a vat of liquid.
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So I no longer work with this
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instead I work with this.
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My threads went from being visible to invisible,
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but essentially the material
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is the same, it's cellulose.
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I no longer think about cloth
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in terms of oil or fields,
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I think about it in terms of my microbes and recipes.
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So this is a recipe for a jacket.
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Sugary green tea,
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some microbes
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and a little time.
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So this is a fermentation solution,
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the dark shadow that you can see at the bottom
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is a living organism.
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It's a symbiotic mix of yeast and bacteria
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that when they feed on the sugar nutrient
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spin nanofibrils of cellulose.
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And these come together and form fibres.
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Over time that forms a thick mat on the surface.
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So these are growth baths set up in my design studio.
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On the left you can see it just set up, so there's the living culture just been put in
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and there's a sensor that that regulates the temperature.
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Two weeks later
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there's the material that's formed on the surface.
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When it's ready and I'm happy with the thickness, I just wash it out
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and lay it on
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a wooden board so that it can air dry.
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And something which is two centimetres in thickness when it's wet
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will once all the water has evaporated will dry down
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to be less than half a millimetre in thickness.
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And depending on the recipe and how it's made,
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it can feel anything like a paper
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to something which is more like a leather texture,
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which means that you can cut it and sew it
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like you might a conventional garment.
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So here is a garment which has been hand-sewn together just as it's
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emerging from a vat of indigo.
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And this is it finished.
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So this is a jacket which is just made from sugary tea and some microbes.
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That means it's completely compostable.
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So if you wanted to, you could throw it out with your vegetable peelings
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and it will naturally biodegrade.
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Or,
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you could think of it like this,
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instead of throwing it in the washing machine with some soap,
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what would happen if you put in some micro-organisms
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and some nutrient solution?
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What if instead of
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washing your clothes, you fed them?
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Some bugs would eat the dirt,
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so they would clean the garment,
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but others might start to actually grow onto the existing structure.
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So what would happen if you could actually regrow something?
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If you get bored of it, don't throw it away,
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grow into a different shape.
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As a designer I now
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am excited about the future
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around living materials.
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We're just at the start
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of biology and design coming together,
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creating all kinds of exciting new materials.
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And there are many people
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doing this kind of work.
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For example, people are actually looking at making silk into a liquid
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that you can put into a 3D printer,
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so that you could make something
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like a pair of spectacles.
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There are people
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taking the waste crops from something like carrots
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and turning it into an organic carbon fibre-like material,
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so that you could make something tough,
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like a skateboard.
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If you could harness organic materials from the natural world what would you choose to make with it?
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Personally,
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I would quite like a mother of pearl
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version of one of these.
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And how did you to come here today?
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Maybe you wore one of these.
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So creating
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consumer products from biomaterials
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has many advantages.
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Obviously we need to make products which can
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be easily and safely biodegraded.
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But what if we could actually harness the unique qualities of those materials?
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I'm not talking about mimicking nature;
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the future of design is going to be about
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working with and improving upon what's there already.
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So emerging science like
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synthetic biology is enabling us to think about how we might
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actually engineer
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new additional beneficial functions
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into organic matter.
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So returning to your cycle helmet,
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let's imagine a future where it's not based on an oil-based plastic,
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but instead was made by this guy.
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Thank you very much.
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(Applause)