Where Shall We Meet On Fashion Science with Amanda Parkes
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Welcome to the Where Shall We Meet podcast. Our guest today is Dr Amanda Parkes. Amanda calls herself a fashion scientist - she has a PhD from the MIT Media Lab, where her research bridged computer science and material science, and dual Stanford degrees in mechanical engineering and art history. She has spent fifteen years trying to answer a deceptively simple question: what if we rebuilt the material world around nature's logic instead of against it?
That question has taken her from algae biofuels to 3D printed couture, from developing science exhibits at the Exploratorium in San Francisco and the Science Museum here in London to running R&D at Pangaia, the company she describes as a material science company masquerading as a fashion brand. There she turned wildflowers into jacket insulation, Himalayan nettle into denim, and carbon dioxide pulled from the air to make sunglasses.
She is now CTO at Mothership Materials, where she has gone even deeper - extracting the building blocks of biology from food waste to feed the next generation of bio-manufacturers.
We talk about:
- Fashion as a material science
- Designing clothing as part of a biological cycle
- High-tech Naturalism
- How algae can transform into clothing dye
- Bio fabrication
- Humans are good at building not at breaking down
- Using carbon air pollution to make ink
- How banana skin can become a dress
Let’s get dressed!
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