Designers blend bacteria and organic technology into conceptual ‘grow to wear’ space suit line
BACTERIAL bodices and digestive dacks? It’s life, but not as we know it. A designer’s quest to build a better space suit has inspired a new line of living spacewear.
BACTERIAL bodices and digestive dacks? It’s life, but not as we know it.
A designer’s quest to build a better space suit has inspired a new line of bacterial spacewear: Second skins intended to shock, impress — and survive.
Massachusetts Institute of Technology Professor Neri Oxman, who specialises in design, technology and biology, sparked the thought experiment through her quest to find ways to make the ultimate recyclable clothing for space travellers living out of less than a suitcase.
Her solution: A series of synthetic “wearable skins” that can be tailored for any size or style — and 3D printed from recyclable materials. Part of her concept was for the suits to support biological processes capable of converting various gases and wastes into useful products — such as food.
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“The future of wearables lies in designing augmented extensions to our own bodies that will blur the boundary between the environment and ourselves,” Professor Oxman said in a press release.
“Each piece intends to hold life sustaining elements contained within 3D printed vascular structures with internal cavities, made possible with ... 3D printing technology. “
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“Living matter within these structures will ultimately transform oxygen for breathing, photons for seeing, biomass for eating, biofuels for moving and calcium for building.”
Her organic designs featured in an art exhibition in Frankfurt late last month.
The idea got another pair of designers — Christopher Bader and Dominik Kolb — thinking.
Why not make the whole suit of bacteria?
It’d be the ultimate “grow to wear” line.
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It would also be an ideal answer for spacefarers struggling to justify every ounce of weight and struggling to recycle the byproducts of human life.
So why not start out with a single bacterial cell which can grow into a suit — feeding off waste and processing harmful gases, all while keeping an astronaut’s modesty intact?
“We designed a computational growth process which is capable of producing a wide variety of growing structures,” Kolb told art and technology blog The Creators Project. “Starting with a seed, the process simulates growth by continuously expanding and refining its shape.”
After working with Oxman, the team have published what they say are four ‘workwear’ designs for exploring the outer planets.
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