This TED Talk features designer and biofabrication pioneer Suzanne Lee, recorded live at TED Summit 2019.

I started life as a fashion designer, working closely with textile designers and fabric suppliers.

But today I can no longer see or talk to my new collaborators

because they're in the soil beneath our feet,

on the shelves of our supermarkets,

and in the beer I'm going to drink when I finish this talk.

I'm talking about microbes and designing with life.

Fifteen years ago, I completely changed both what I worked with and how I worked after a revelatory collaboration with a biologist.

Our project gave me a different perspective on life, introducing a whole new world

of possibility around how we can design and make things. I discovered a radical manufacturing

proposition, biofabrication, literally fabricating with biology. What does that mean? Well, instead of processing

plants, animals, or oil to make consumer materials, we might grow materials directly with living organisms.

In what many are terming the fourth industrial revolution,

we're thinking about the new factories as being living cells.

Bacteria, algae, fungi, yeast.

Our latest design tools include those of biotechnology. My own journey in

biofabrication started with a project called biocature. The provocation was that instead of growing a

plant like cotton in a field over several months,

we could use microbes to grow a similar cellulose material in a lab in a few days.

Using a certain species of bacteria in a nutrient-rich liquid,

we fermented threads of cellulose that self-organized into a sheet of fabric.

I dried the fabric I'd grown and cut and sewed it into a range of garments, shoes, and bags.

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