Natsai Audrey Chieza rethinks how designers and scientists can solve the world’s toughest problems

For Natsai, it’s really important that she and her collaborators “don’t create monsters” with any of these new biotech models. She has been working with Alexandra Daisy Ginsberg on the fourth issue of MIT Media Lab and MIT Press’ Journal of Design and Science, which is all about “Other Biological Futures”. “Over the past six months, we’ve been publishing ten essays that are, in effect, our manifesto for biological futures, and they explore the difficulties for this new space,” she says. “It’s kind of framing our ethical understanding of what innovation needs to be in future.”

Education is also a huge part of the challenge. Natsai spends a lot of her time bringing the scientific and design communities together. For instance, she co-founded and curates a “creative residency” at a biotech company in Boston called Ginkgo Bioworks , one of Faber Futures’ clients. This year’s applicants for the residency – designers from various backgrounds and disciplines – are invited to submit proposals that explore the notion of “waste” through the lens of biology. “Language can be an issue,” she admits, “but designers can be very good communicators and we can find a way to talk to anybody.”

Exhibiting work is another way she will be taking the message out to the masses in 2019. “We’ve been good at always finding different channels to talk about this work, through cultural institutions and within the technology and science communities,” she says. Faber Futures is going to be taking part in about half a dozen exhibitions and shows this year, from a Triennale at the Cooper Hewitt in New York, where the studio will be exhibiting two new projects titled Terroir 001 and Assemblage 002, to the St Etienne Biennale in France, where it will show Colour Coded, a recent project in collaboration with Ginkgo Bioworks for the Forbes Pigment Collection at Harvard Art Museums. She is also part of the group show La Fabrique Du Vivant, which opened to the public on 20 February at the Pompidou Centre in Paris. All in all, it’s clear 2019 is set to be a very busy year.

What’s reassuring is that Natsai doesn’t give off any of that sense of hubris that can occasionally accompany scientists trying to achieve nothing short of “changing the world”. She admits that she and her colleagues don’t, in fact, know everything. “We don’t pretend to be experts,” she says, “but I think we know how to ask the right questions; we have the prerequisite knowledge to ask the right questions.”

But what are the “right” questions? She immediately rattles off a quick list. “How do we build new materials that aren’t extracted, that aren’t linear in the way that petroleum-based materials are? How do we make them cost-competitive with petroleum-based materials? And if they aren’t, what’s the value proposition? What’s going to make people want to use them?” Not for the first time, we feel a sense of relief that it’s not us being asked to come up with the answers – and relief, too, that it’s Natsai who is.