It's Elise Hugh. This is TED Talks Daily. Today, how to better design the future all the way down to the molecular level.

Designer NatSai Audrey Kieza's talk from Ted Salon 2021 describes how she is helping find solutions to address our biggest global challenges that can work in local contexts.

In 1998, my friends and I won a national art competition. The prize was a week in Disneyland, Paris,

with hundreds of other children from across the world as delegates to UNESCO's International Children's Summit.

Now, this was no ordinary trip to Disneyland. Between running riots in the park and making friends, we workshop the future of

this planet. How could we overcome the problems of pollution and their threats to human and

environmental health? How could we guarantee universal human rights of equality, justice and dignity? Towards the end of the

summit, we created a 20-year-time capsule with each country planting a vision of the future they're

hopeful. But as I look around today, it's clear to me that those visions have not come true yet.

We're confronted by the same crises made infinitely worse through decades of geopolitical

inaction. We now face global existential risks as a result of the climate emergency, with the world's

least resourced and most disenfranchised, made more vulnerable despite having contributed least to the

problem. That trip to Disneyland taught me that

art and design had the power to imagine other possible futures. The question is, how do we actually

build them? Today, I lead a design agency called Faber Futures, and my team and I design at the

intersection of biology, technology and society. Through research and

development, collaborations, partnerships and other strategies, we model a future in which both people

and planet can thrive and where the role that biotechnology plays is shaped through plural visions.

Our design work prototypes the future. We've developed toxin-free, water-efficient textile dye processes with pigment-producing bacterium,

pioneering new ways of thinking about circular design for the textile and fashion industries.

You've probably already heard of data surveillance, but what if it was biological?

Using open-source data on the human microbiome, we've created experiential artworks that engage with the ethics of DNA mining. How can we

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