Natsai Audrey Chieza: Designing with the Living World

Faber Futures is not easy to categorise, which is partly the point. Founded in 2018 by designer and biotech innovator Natsai Audrey Chieza, it sits at the intersection of biotechnology, materials science and cultural strategy – a design-led R&D studio whose work ranges from bacterial textile dyeing to stakeholder engagement for the World Economic Forum’s Global Futures Council on Synthetic Biology. Chieza trained as an architect, then completed a Master’s in Material Futures at Central Saint Martins, and her practice has been asking the same question ever since: what happens when you apply design thinking not to objects, but to living systems? In 2023 she co-founded Normal Phenomena of Life, a consumer brand that brings biotech-enabled products to market, translating years of systemic research into something people can actually hold. We spoke to Chieza about her studio’s work, and what it really takes to build an independent, research-based practice in the UK.

Faber Futures sits across design, biotechnology and social impact. How do you describe what the studio does?

We are a design-led studio undertaking creative R&D at the intersection of biotechnology and society, and we think that design is a key ingredient in making these technologies legible — as well as beneficial to wider society and to the environment. A lot of our focus is on creating new materials derived from biological systems: materials that are elegant, having been designed by evolution over sometimes billions of years to do things that we try to do through engineering in a very inefficient way. We are interested in how those material systems are not simply drop-in replacements for existing ones, but are actually transformational in how they help us think about how, where, and for whom things are made.

What is the current state of the industry in terms of genuine adoption?

Since around 2022, the biotech space has met with a market correction, and has also been faced with the reality that if you seek to industrialise biology, you will fail. Instead, we should be looking to biologise industry — and out of that, new models can come that don’t simply replicate existing systems. A fast fashion house can adopt a microbial dyeing technology, but the fast fashion logic doesn’t change. The industry has been incentivised to find the drop-in replacement. It has not been incentivised to think systemically. And brands don’t yet know how to have that conversation, because fundamentally it asks them to change their business models. So everyone watches and waits to see how it works for someone else, and in the meantime the startups navigate the Valley of Death, and then everyone wonders why nothing has happened. Because no one was brave enough to do the hard work.

How challenging has it been to build a studio doing this kind of work in the UK?

Because my work exists at the edge, or in between established spaces, it has been particularly challenging to make the case for going beyond the celebratory. People say, well done, you’re doing great work — but our funding structures don’t know how to speak to this work. Investors don’t know how to think about systemic investment. We know how to fund the startup doing the drop-in replacement; we don’t know how to fund the cultural integration of a technology. And then we wonder why we have such bad outcomes with other technologies — digital, social media — and how poorly they were regulated, how they weren’t integrated with culture in any meaningful way. The cultural institution will commission you, but once the commission ends, it ends. What we are part of is a field-defining exercise, and when you are at the beginning of that, it is not always clear who is responsible for cultivating that ecosystem. Because of how undervalued design can be, people may not take it as seriously as they ought to — and I think that can be damaging. But it has also come with an enormous amount of freedom, which is why our work has ended up being so multi-sectoral.

And Normal Phenomena of Life — how does that extend the practice?

When we were given the opportunity to build Normal Phenomena of Life, our consumer-facing brand that brings products made with biology into the world through an e-commerce platform, it was a total no-brainer. Suddenly all of this systemic work and those stories can be channelled into a vision of the bioeconomy through the lens of product development. It is great work. It is just really hard work.