Growing Materials, Growing Ideas: Inside the BioMaker Studio

When you first enter the Biomaker Studio, you are entering a space in which you are allowed to experiment: there are biomaterial tests by students drying in petri dishes on the shelves; an aquarium is hosting Cladophora, a green algae also commonly known as Mermaid’s beard. If you follow a slight smell of vinegar you will find a growing SCOBY, an acronym for “symbiotic culture of bateria and yeasts” with which you could make kombucha or sheets of leather-like material. Inside sealed boxes, there are blocks of mushroom material, while bright green spirulina bubbles in small transparent tanks. The tools around the room could be found in kitchens or laboratories: an old microscope, a kettle, a dehydrator, a fridge, pipettes, mittens, a blender… Many have been donated by other workshops, bought second-hand, or brought in by students themselves in order to start creating. There are big tables in the centre, chairs for people to gather around, and books on biodesign, mycelium, and more-than-human collaboration.

The founder of this place, Ena Naito, spent months researching and visiting biodesign labs and studios around Europe in order to create something very special: a place that would be open to all kinds of students, with fewer restrictions than other workshops, allowing students to independently as well as collaborativey explore the possibilities of working with new materials that could help us address climate change, engage in more ethical production, or simply inspire new ideas. If they are safe, students are even welcome to bring their own foraged materials to experiment with, such as algae from the Baltic Sea shore or mushrooms to dye natural fibres.

Thanks to funding from the EU’s CoCoon program as well as the Sustainability Action Booster, the studio continues operating, also opening its doors to the public and allowing anyone to join  for free workshops and lectures given by fellow students, faculty, or guest lecturers. Today, Juni Sun Neyenhuys is giving her second workshop in this space, in which participants can create their own seaweed-based yarn. Juni is a second-year student in the MA in Contemporary Design at Aalto and has developed much of her practice around ways of working with algae to create new materials that could help address problems related to single-use packaging or textiles. As part of the workshop, she gives a short introductory lecture on kinds of seaweed and the wet fibre spinning process and then proceeds to show the interdisciplinary mix of participants (who range from engineering to business and costume design students, as well as professionals) how to start preparing the base mixture for wet-spinning fibres.