Hi, this is Imran Ahmed, founder and CEO of the Business of Fashion, and this week we're sharing another inspiring talk from Voices 2018.

Natzai Audrey Chiesa is a founder of Faber Futures, a bio-design consultancy and creative research lab, working with living systems to build sustainable futures.

With a background in architecture and material futures,

Natzai has been an early pioneer in the application of critical design thinking to biodesign,

spending the past eight years developing novel methods to biofabricate materials.

At Voices 2017, Andres Forgax from the pioneering company Modern Meadow

talked to us about manufacturing with biology.

But what about designing with biology?

Here's Natsai Audrey Chiesa on Making with Life,

design-driven biology at Voices 2018.

So today I'm really excited to talk to you about how the confluence of computational science and biology is ushering in a new revolution, a biotechnology revolution, that is going to have an

impact on the fashion industry and beyond. And I'd just like to read this out, because I think it's a really

important lens through which to understand what's emerging around us. It's a quote from

Yuval Noah Harari in his 2015 book book Homer Deiis, and he says,

you may not agree with the idea that organisms are algorithms and that giraffes,

tomatoes, and human beings are just different methods of processing data, but you should know that this is current

scientific dogma and that it is changing the world beyond recognition.

Now, the discipline of synthetic biology, which is an emerging scientific discipline, is really

driven by this idea that you can start to program at a DNA level

novel functionalities in living systems and it really takes engineering principles and applies

them to biologies. How do you standardize parts so that you can assemble them to make things that

nature would otherwise not be able to make.

...