Part of what BespokeLab… does is contact designers, artist, scientist and engineers doing interesting work for collaborations. Near the end of working on the Natural Selection work, it became evident synthetic biology would offer some solutions to the material options for additive manufacturing. Suzanne Lee of BioCouture consults on bio materials for emerging technologies. Her consultancy has grown out of the years of research she has accumulated on wearable biological technologies. She works in her Atelier growing and manipulating bacteria cellulose, a low tech method of synthetic biology. In early 2013 we used this material to grow a shoe. We manipulated then material to vary densities and thus reducing components. Suzanne directed an animation produced by Aaron Lampert showing the manufacturing vision. Thomas Makrniotis rendered in CAD the shoe.
In April the shoe, animation, renderings were exhibited along with displays BioCouture jackets at This is Alive A pioneering exhibition of “alive” products. For more information please link http://thisisalive.com and the Biocouture ‘Grown Shoe’ http://thisisalive.com/biocouture/ and BioCouture http://biocouture.co.uk
