Biodesign as System-Making
In this lecture, Natsai Audrey Chieza presents the work of Faber Futures, a practice working across biology, technology, design, and culture as intertwined conditions shaping how we live with, and as part of, the living world. Centred on the studio's R&D-led approach, the talk explores how new systems of production are developed through close interdisciplinary and multi-sector collaboration: from microbial processes to the infrastructures required for new materials, practices and futures to take hold.
The lecture reflects on how Faber Futures' project space rehearses alternative models of production, participation, and value, while attending to the relationships and trajectories they set in motion. In doing so, it considers how regenerative systems emerge through the interplay of techno-scientific work with cultural, institutional, and imaginative infrastructures.
Natsai Audrey Chieza is a designer working at the intersection of biotechnology, design, and systems change. She is the founder and CEO of Faber Futures, an R&D-led design practice developing new approaches to materials, production systems, and infrastructure through collaboration across science, industry, and culture. She is also a co-founder of Normal Phenomena of Life (NPOL), a consumer brand translating biotechnology into material products and value chains that explore more regenerative models of production.
Her work focuses on how biotechnology is unlocking new materials, and with this, wider systems of production, distribution, and use for a regenerative bioeconomy. This approach has seen Natsai collaborate with organisations across biotechnology, consumer industries, and cultural institutions, where design operates as a method for connecting research, application, and public engagement.
Chieza has worked with partners including Ginkgo Bioworks, adidas, the Design Museum, MIT Media Lab, Fondation USM, and the World Economic Forum. She has contributed to advisory and policy-facing work on biotechnology and bioeconomy development, including at Chatham House and the World Economic Forum's Global Futures Council on Synthetic Biology.
Her work has been recognised with the London Design Innovation Medal (2024) and the INDEX Award (2019), and she has been nominated for the Dezeen Awards Bentley Lighthouse Award. She speaks internationally at institutions and platforms including TED, SXSW, and World Design Congress.
