[Neri] Humans have been making buildings
for thousands and thousands of years
with bricks and mortar,
and steel and glass.
But along with those materials, we've also been developing
carbon fiber and plastics.
And these materials have left a mark on the planet.
Can we design our way out of this?
If we are to survive,
we must design our way out of this.
It's now on us
to decide where we're going from here.
The story begins with a Big Bang,
with the first tree,
with the first human.
It's a story about what happens when nature and culture unite.
[woman] She's got huge ideas for big change on a massive scale.
[multiple voices] Neri Oxman.
[man] Neri's work redefines the relationship
between matter and environment.
[man 2] Neri is the embodiment
of art, design, science, and engineering
in one person.
[man 3] She does design that involves new kinds of materials.
[man 4] Doing what nature did, but perhaps doing a better job.
[man 5] And she's now at the threshold of trying to show a new way.
[man] What question do you get the most?
Oh, what the hell do I do?
[Neri] My name is Neri...
and I am many things.
[laughs]
I grew up in Haifa, Israel.
I was trained as an architect,
educated as a medical doctor,
and I am now a professor at MIT.
We live in the most exciting time,
but also the scariest time for designers,
where everything material, everything artificial,
can be designed at the scale and sophistication of a cell.
My focus is designing new materials
for, with, and by nature.
Today, we can look at the world in the resolution
almost of human consciousness.
From the very, very small scale,
the scale of particles and the sub-atomic particles,
to atoms, nucleotides in the genome,
to cells, to the human mind, to the Earth, to the solar system,
to the Milky Way, to the visible universe, to maybe parallel universes.
Suddenly, the design and engineering
is happening with constituent parts
that are down at the atomic and sub-atomic level.
Start to be able to do things that only nature could do before.
That's pretty incredible.
[Neri] This is really where the future of design is going.
Good designers will act as alchemists
that mix and match atoms to bits, to genes,
and scale up these techniques and technologies.
But in order to build big,
we had to think small.
[man] Machines, inventions, power blackout the past.
Forget the quiet cities, bring in the steam and steel,
the iron men, the giants.
Pillars of smoke by day, pillars of fire by night, pillars of progress.
[Neri] The Industrial Age brought about a kind of design thinking whereby,
because of the assembly line,
we tend to design products and buildings and wearables
and even cities out of parts.
For thousands of years, we have been making
and building things with single purpose materials.
Glass for a window,
brick for load bearing,
wood for spanning.
But now comes an age where new possibilities open up.
Neri has her model, and the model is nature.
Nature is full of organisms
in which materials do these complex things
in a most efficient way.
[Neri] Can we design robots that spin silk?
These are the kinds of questions we ask.
Drawing, I think, is an act of meditation.
Because as you give it form and you draw its lines
and its textures,
and then its colors,
it sort of tells you what it wants to become.
[man] I didn't realize you were left-handed.
[Neri] Yeah.
[man] Does that mean anything?
They say they're more creative.
[laughs]
I'm drawing the next version of Aguahoja
for the Smithsonian in New York.
We will be designing a bio-compatible structure
made entirely of materials that are natural.
Like chitin, which can be found in crustaceans like shrimp shells,
or pectin, which you can find in lemons and the skin of apples.
The vision behind the project is to completely omit
the use of plastics on planet Earth.
There is little structure in the beginning when we start a project.
We sort of look in all directions.
And so, we would often, for a single project,
have what we like to call a library of experiments
where there would be dozens and maybe hundreds of iterations
until we reach the right one for a particular structure.
There is a beautiful saying in Hebrew.
[speaking Hebrew]
[in English] Meaning "all is expected, all is known."
And permission is given to change
everything at any moment in time.
It's also how I work.
We have an idea, we follow it until we change it.
And at any moment in time, there is this permission
I give myself, but also to any other member on the team,
to change the ideas and change the project as they go.
The Mediated Matter group, which I lead, is a lab within the MIT Media Lab.
For Neri to come to the Media Lab,
quite frankly, was destiny.
[male computerized voice] MIT Media Lab.
[Nicholas] I had built a lab
that had to do with the human-computer interface.
So, we did all these things that were considered crazy at the time.
We had the first flat panel displays.
They were dismissed.
Working on touch, that you would actually touch a display.
People thought that was very stupid.
We were in the School of Design,
so we had a certain license.
License to be weird.
The president of MIT at that time
was very interested in the arts.
He identified that MIT was a very, very special place.
All of the technologies were all being developed here.
I mean, heck, the coolest place in the universe is at MIT.
Everything was being developed here. And yet, there was...
there was this void. [echoes]
[Nicholas] The MIT president was bemoaning the fact there was no lab
that mixed art and science and engineering in some deep way.
And I said, "Jerry, I'll build you one."
[male computerized voice] MIT Media Lab.
[woman] The Media Lab is a place
where you have to think about things
50 years out, at least, or 100 years out.
If you're making something
that's applicable to the world today, here, you're too late.
[Nicholas] I was involved with a lot of the last faculty hires
where we have to advertise.
And I put the word "misfit" in the first sentence.
And even went further to say, "If you can get a faculty position
in some other department at some other university, go.
But if you can't, come see us."
I think we all live well in the weird.
[Neri] This was the place.
This was the one and only place
to create what we've created.
Neri is perhaps the best example
of somebody who came
and then integrated herself
in the perfect intersection
of design, science, and engineering.
[Neri] The way I think about the group is a kind of Noah's Ark.
The ideal situation would be to have two of both.
Two material scientists, two biologists.
-I'm a computer scientist by training. -Graphic design.
Biomedical engineer.
[Neri] Two product designers, two computational scientists.
-Artificial life. -Neuroscience.
-[Neri] Two architects. -Architecture.
Mechanical engineer.
But right now, we have to do just about everything.
[woman] I came from a pretty hardcore neurotechnology group.
But meeting Neri pretty much once
was enough to kind of change my mind and my life course.
[man] There's a feeling when you interact with Neri
that you could wake up tomorrow
and come up with the craziest idea that you could possibly think of
and it wouldn't be out of the realm of possibility.
[Nicholas] Her lab is populated in the middle of the night, on weekends.
And guess what? She's there, too.
[Neri] I design everything.
The team, their interactions.
They would hate hearing it,
but there is a big brother,
or a small mother.
We have this running joke where the choice of font
is no less important than the choice of a cell
whose genes are being hacked.
And, in the end,
great fonts will help create great genomes and vice versa.
I truly believe in that.
In the beginning when I started the research group,
there was great confusion, and... [chuckles]
I think there still is.
I mean, it's all pretty weird.
[Neri] But technology catches up with the imagination,
and so, therefore, imagination has responsibility.
I mean, we can learn to grow buildings.
[Sunanda] Before I joined this group, the main thing that we knew about Neri
was that her group had unleashed 6,500 silkworms in the lobby.
[Neri] Silk Pavilion was a three-meter diameter dome
that was built using 6,500 silkworms that were Fed-Ex ordered
from an online silk farm,
and were, uh, placed on a robotically-spun fiber silk dome.
[Nicholas] She is very much a source of,
you know, consternation in our purchasing department.
MIT gets a little puzzled when you order a few thousand silkworms.
We explored alternative ways
with which to build and manufacture
that are aligned with nature's way.
That is, growth as opposed to assembly.
[Nicholas] I remember seeing it being built by the worms.
And sort of, uh... There was scaffolding,
and it was quite a... quite an accomplishment.
[Neri] In the silk industry, we are very accustomed
to boiling the silk cocoons
in order to unravel the silk.
And in that process, we kill all those silkworms.
And with Silk Pavilion, we came up with this approach
of cohabiting and co-fabricating at the same time.
And so, the cycle of life we capitulated on this project
as the product was being created.
[man] I have rarely had Neri talk to me about anything
and seen it coming.
And a lot of her sensibility is... is that,
how do you bring the unexpected in,
but then get it to surprise you in a... in a wonderful way?
[horn blares]
[Neri speaking indistinctly in Hebrew]
[siren wails in the distance]
[in Hebrew] We're doing another Silk Pavilion installation.
Do you remember that?
And so, we're working on a lot of exhibitions.
And I'm thinking about how to bring the work to the next level
that would be more practice-oriented.
Less research-oriented, more practice-oriented
and more real world deployment.
[Neri, in English] I miss Israel mostly when I'm there,
because I'm so nostalgic about that country
and what it was, what it symbolized.
I always tell my team,
"You have to go away to come back home.
You'll never really truly have a sense of home until you leave home."
But when you come back and smell the air,
you go back all the way to childhood.
I have so many friends who would never go back to childhood.
I would in a second. [snaps fingers]
Like now, I'm ready to be three again.
I remember as a kid growing up,
waking up in the middle of the stormy night.
I could hear the wind blowing against this very old terrace
that... that I had in my bedroom.
And I remember opening it and seeing all this white stuff.
And it all felt so incredibly magical.
And I remember grabbing a piece of that substance, that matter,
and putting it into a plastic bag,
and putting it under my pillow,
and waiting to show my parents
this magical material that fell from the sky.
And I remember waking up in this wet bed,
and being so extremely disappointed and trying to make sense of it all.
And I think that sense of awe and wonder that I had as a three-year-old
that never saw or experienced snow stayed with me.
And that innocence is still there.
I hope it's still there.
Oh, what's that?
-Is this yours? -[man] What?
-What's on the screen. -Yeah.
[Neri] That's cool. This is for Aguahoja?
[man] This is a process that starts with nothing
-and it grows across it. -[Neri] Mm-hmm.
The idea being that we're kind of used to working with things that grow.
Like, that's what we do as a group, is we direct the growth.
[Neri] That looks great.
[Josh] What's nice about this organism is you can stop its growth,
and then start it again if you just add some moisture.
-Pick that up and hold it for a second. -That would be-- Okay.
-[Josh] So, that's pectin. -Then move your finger out of the way.
[Josh] Yeah.
-[Neri] Yeah. -[Josh] So, it's a thermochromic compound
that I mixed in with the pectin.
That's awesome, because it looks like paper, Josh.
[Josh] Yeah. And so, you can touch it, and it will also respond to heat.
So, it'll change color back to the regular pectin color
at, um, 86 degrees Fahrenheit.
-And it is translucent? -Yep.
-Yeah, exactly. -[Neri] Yeah.
-Yeah. -[Neri] Okay.
That's incredible progress.
I love a good verb.
In fact, I think all nouns should be verbs,
including "naturing" as opposed to "nature."
I often ask, "How can we nature this building into being?"
Also, Mother Nature, we have the responsibility to mother nature.
Not consider it as boundless,
but rather as an entity that is now crying for love.
We are in Haifa,
the third largest city in Israel.
To me, if Jerusalem is about religion
and Tel Aviv is about the street culture,
Haifa is about nature.
[Moshe] I knew her in Haifa, growing up.
I think of my childhood, and I think Neri does too,
of having had the privilege to grow up in something magical.
In Haifa, the mountains rise right out of the sea,
and they have a...
a very rich plant life.
And so, we always lived right next to nature.
[Neri] My grandmother had a ginormous garden.
It was on the top of a beautiful mountain called Mount Carmel,
where we could see the sea.
The garden had fig trees, apple trees,
poppy seeds, various types of birds.
The quality of the sun, the outdoors,
the smell of the pine nuts.
It was my Garden of Eden.
And then at 18, the army, boom.
[Joi] She was a lieutenant in the Israeli Air Force.
[Neri] You enter the army,
and you're faced with death
at a very, very early age.
I saw everything when I was in the military.
Everything.
I saw the extremes of the human spirit.
Many things that I'll never, ever share.
And that had a great effect on me.
You're faced with an internal conflict.
The duality of wanting to protect...
your identity,
but also wanting
to embrace other identities.
The discovery of innocence is its loss.
And...
that is perhaps the ultimate Israeli experience.
[Joi] From the gutsy Israeli thing,
she has a kind of gutsy confidence
that allows her to be very adventurous with her thoughts.
[Neri] There is the myth that Einstein and Picasso
met in 1904 in Paris.
Picasso started the Cubist movement.
Einstein, the General Theory of Relativity.
Both were asking questions about space and time.
And one expressed himself through painting and sculpture,
the other through a mathematical theorem.
But they were both questioning the world around us.
Usually, art is for expression,
science is for exploration,
engineering is for invention,
and design is for communication.
And I thought, "Why can't we take these four squares
and create a circle out of them, a clock...
...where you're constantly moving or shifting
from one domain to another?"
And the input for one domain becomes the output for another.
So, if you think of science,
science converts information into knowledge.
And engineering converts knowledge into utility.
And design converts utility into cultural behavior and context.
And then art is taking that cultural behavior
and questions our perception of the world.
[Sunanda] It shows that there is sort of a flow of information,
a flow of creativity that happens across all disciplines.
And I do think the more I spend time in this lab,
the more I venture into the different areas.
[Neri] And if you believe in the Cinderella moment,
in the twelve o'clock,
in that place, in the midnight hour,
you know, it's where Picasso meets Einstein.
Art meets science.
Changes in our perception affect the way we capture data,
and can only happen
if you believe in magic.
It can only happen if you can suspend your disbelief.
I tell the team members, "You have to be ready for your project
to appear in the atrium of the Museum of Modern Art,
and at the same time, on the cover of Nature and Science.
We don't do either. It's always both.
I like the art side because that's when things get totally out of hand.
You don't know if people are gonna try to touch your structure
or if they're gonna say that it smells funny.
That's kind of the magical moment because that's when everyone gets to understand
how they feel about the thing that you've made.
[Nicholas] We have used artistic venues
to promote some of the riskiest science ideas we've ever had,
where they get the cover of, "Oh, that's art."
[Sunanda] Some of the greatest first scientists
would have been considered artists today.
When Darwin went in 1831 on the HMS Beagle,
he brought with him a book of color nomenclatures.
[Neri] All great designs were myths, right?
Da Vinci's flying machine is an expression of the myth of Icarus.
Prometheus and the liver being devoured
was this myth of organ regeneration.
So, in a way, through their mythologies,
they were also expressing scientific knowledge.
So, these look like anatomical drawings,
scientific, anatomical drawings,
that are entirely made of glass,
created in the late 1880s
by a father and son that have dedicated their life
to the art of glass.
They produced 4,000 glass models
depicting 780 species.
It's... it's still unclear,
to artists and scientists alike,
how they managed to arrive at that granularity.
And many have tried to replicate this art form and have failed.
It's a mystery.
So, we came here to study the glass
and to better understand how this...
how this resolution was achieved.
I don't know that we've ever taken on a project
that did not involve the creation of a new technology.
Glass, that's an ancient material.
It's been formed, it's been blown, it's been pressed,
but it hasn't been printed.
So, we wanted to create the first optically transparent glass printer.
[man 1] Wow.
-[man 2] Stop here. -[man 1] Okay.
[man 3] It's a shock, 'cause you can't get...
-It's sort of in a runaway mode right now. -[woman] Yeah.
[Nicholas] Printing glass sounds simple,
but to do it, you have to do lots of things that are very complicated.
[Joi] She'll design a new mathematics
for the flow of glass coming out of the nozzle,
and then she'll work with them
on exactly how they need to organize this thing
to make this beautiful, but also structurally stable.
[man 1] Oh, it's moving in an unexpected way.
[man 2] Quickly dropping the temperature. Not sure that's gonna do it.
[Neri] The first printer was rather primitive.
Glass II allowed us to incorporate a rotary unit
to orient the nozzle according to the force-feed direction,
a little bit like a calligraphy pen.
It's a much more sophisticated system
that allowed us to print three three-meter columns for Milan Design Week.
[Joi] There are probably some skeptics about...
"And how does this help me feed my family?
How does this help my company produce better products?"
You don't get to the idea of having a smartphone with no buttons
by A/B testing.
You get that through being inspired
and... and coming up with something completely different.
[Nicholas] Imagine...
a world that is not composed of parts.
Something very complex,
something like your camera could grow from a seed.
That's preposterous.
But even if it's so preposterous that it doesn't happen that way
that you plant a seed and a camera comes out,
it almost doesn't matter
if there's this enormous richness of ideas and projects
and discoveries along the way.
[Neri] We often find ourselves
creating solutions for problems we don't yet know exist.
Rather than problem solve, we problem seek.
[Moshe] The payoff is
things that affect our lives day to day.
[Neri] The advantage of printing glass is that you can create optical lenses
and control how solar energy
is processed through the skin of the building.
And that's the one technology that takes us now, finally,
to the architectural scale, for real.
We can get to build a glass-printed skyscraper.
We work on technology
that is so intimately connected with the natural environment,
but we end up spending most of our time at the lab.
And so, I often find myself
torn between my life as a lab rat
and being out there in nature and just breathing it all in.
This is Walden Pond, the very same place that Thoreau lived
and wrote about.
There was a time when I used to come here every morning.
You think design is the practice of letting go...
in a similar way in which Thoreau and the Transcendentalists
let go of all that is unnecessary.
Here,
it's a pocket of nature surrounded by the city.
When you close your eyes...
-[distant plane engine rumbling] -[train chugging]
...you can hear the plane, you can hear the cars, you can hear the train,
you're literally in the city.
It's almost like an inverted lab.
There's something that reminds me of Haifa, that reminds me of home.
There are different ways of communicating with nature.
There's a connection that happens in Walden Pond,
and there's a connection that happens in our wet lab.
Here, it's just like being in the garden.
It is a garden. It's just a different kind of garden.
I love it.
Our next Aguahoja deadline is coming up
when we're installing the next structure
at the Cooper Hewitt Museum in New York City.
-[man] What is that? -[Josh] It's, uh, casein,
a kind of milk protein.
This is casein?
-Yeah. -[Neri] Milkshake.
That's crazy. Did you test it? Did you load test it?
-[Josh] Yeah. -How does it be--
[Josh] Really well. It's... it's, uh...
a few times stronger than the photopolymer we use.
[Neri] In the current research around Aguahoja,
we're looking into the design of decay.
Casein is a milk protein and is biodegradable,
and yet as hard as concrete.
I think we're really, like, into the idea
that the whole thing can decay and go back to nature.
Maybe this combination would work
for something that's structurally sound.
Everyone who picked it up thought this was plastic. No, it's not.
Anything made of plastic today can be replaced with those biopolymers.
We should think about the bigger narrative
and how to think about the decay in... in... in... in a meaningful way.
I loved the biological sciences,
and I was certain I was going to become a surgeon.
It just made sense.
I remember the first dissection session we had in anatomy.
I remember always...
doing something I was never allowed to do. That is...
going behind the body and taking a look at the face
of this incredible and wonderful creature that gave their body to science.
And saying a little prayer for that person and for science.
Then, my grandmother passed away,
and that day, I decided to switch to architecture.
It just felt meaningless
to keep on going at that point without her.
I felt I... I... I needed to keep that legacy of the garden going.
At architecture school, there were rules and guidelines
that every architect is taught.
But these are all interpretations of...
our levels of controlling nature and controlling the natural environment.
Design, whose purpose is to beautify and prettify the world, will not survive.
It is a delusion that we're alone in this world.
That the design practice of the future should have zero clients.
Nature should be the single client.
I mean, Neri's ambitious, no question about it.
[man] You don't win awards if you do what people tell you to do.
You win by questioning authority and thinking for yourself.
[Neri] An engineer said to me,
"You want to build, no?
Biology will take you nowhere."
[beeps]
[speaking indistinctly in Hebrew]
-[in English] Hi! how are you? -[Neri responds in Hebrew]
Come and sit down.
[Neri] My parents were and are both great architects.
There was always a supply of inspiration.
[Robert] This was a fish made of a shoe,
which I think kind of says
everything about Neri's... Neri herself.
This is a reprint of the New York Times article,
and what they did was they...
put Neri on the cover of the Art and Culture magazine,
and then, on the inside,
they used that quotation, “The Leonardo da Vinci of today.”
So embarrassing.
Self-confidence provided her with the ability to fly, you know?
She flew. She's flying now.
[speaking Hebrew]
[Neri] I left Israel to grow
and seek my identity.
[Neri squeals excitedly]
[laughs]
[speaking Hebrew]
I've always wanted to have children, never had the opportunity.
I hope I will someday.
Many of my friends have told me that it's impossible,
that I can't do it all.
I still think it's possible.
As I've grown,
and I move forward into more recent work,
we're getting closer to nature.
The arc begins with nature-inspired design
and ends with design-inspired nature.
-[classical music plays] -[bees buzzing]
I.. I love bees.
Yeah, I like bees. I raised bees in my youth.
She's... she's into this, the bees.
They are nature's architects.
[Sunanda] Initially, we were looking at swarm construction because...
we can either build really big robots to make really big things,
or you can have multiple small robots that are working together.
[Neri] You can't print a structure on Mars with a single robot.
You have to have a bunch of robots that interact.
[Sunanda] So, that's when we started to get interested in bees.
From bees, we can learn so much about social interaction.
But in Massachusetts, they're pretty active during the summer.
And then, afterwards, it really goes downhill,
because then it gets cold,
and when the frost starts to appear, that's it.
[Neri] One experiment often leads to another.
[Sunanda] And it ended up trying to figure out can we make an indoor space
where we trick them into thinking that it's spring all year round,
so we have a perpetual spring environment.
[Neri] We rented a space outside of the Media Lab.
[Sunanda] We started with a warehouse, and then we built it up.
[Neri] The magical formula is knowing
when to say why,
and with the same breath, ask why not.
So, the space requires
knowing exactly what kind of thermal control you need, and air,
and how can you mimic artificial light
to trick the bees into thinking that it's spring.
The place that we built was really nice because it was always, like, 70 degrees
and very humid.
But the sound of about a million bees
over a winter was eerie.
[loud buzzing]
The next step is a robotic queen
that can spit pheromones
and inform a highly social community
how to place their comb
and what quality of honey to produce,
but keep them alive, keep them healthy, keep them replenished or planted.
I'm still looking for the queen.
The queen is bigger,
slightly lighter...
and different odor.
So, she...
If we could smell,
spits out those pheromones, controlling the entire hive.
You have to question yourself in order to create.
And, actually, when you say, "I wonder," the source of the word is doubt.
I can't design without doubt.
My father said, "When you create,
you must always feel a little bit uncomfortable.
And if you're feeling uncomfortable...
and alone,
you know you're doing something right."
That stayed with me.
I can't tell you, in the beginning, how much criticism
and how much mocking, even, we had to sustain to...
to be where we are.
[Sunanda] Why is this practical? Why is this useful?
Why does it deserve funding?
Why is design worth it? Why is art worth it?
[Neri] I know that from the outside, it looks so precious and so elegant,
and it's none of these things.
It's dirty, and it's hard, and it's messy,
and it takes a whole lot of confidence to push against the grain.
It's always very quiet inside the eye of the storm.
But along with the loneliness, there's also serenity.
And one of my big goals is to protect the group
and to keep them inside the eye of the storm.
[Nic] The issue is that it... it often does not adhere to the pectin,
so it'll... it'll peel away.
And you can see that, in some of the pieces that are on my desk,
there are areas that just tear away eventually.
[Neri] Mm-hmm. Yeah.
[Nic] Right now, this feels like a pattern.
[Neri] Yeah. This is perfect, though.
-This is so perfect. Yeah. -[Nic] This is what we need to shoot for.
[Neri] That's very, very cool.
I'm excited. I'm so, so excited.
We started Aguahoja around 2012
with samples that were as large as a sand grain.
And we grew the platform
until we generated this five-meter structure.
And now, we're moving to an even more sophisticated expression
that enters the... the molecular scale.
I mean, I grew up with this vision of nature
as the untouched mother.
But now,
it has become our...
our child.
And so, it is our job and our responsibility
to mother the natural world.
It's interesting because the word "nature" is to give birth.
I've been doing a lot of mothering, too.
The projects, the organisms,
the students, the team.
My...
family.
And now, uh...
my belly.
[laughs]
I am pregnant.
[Nicholas] I think there's another several rounds
of metamorphosis that she'll go through.
She's doing her own work, and showing it, and getting it out into the world.
I think she'll start to get a lot of people
who can bring her sensibility into their disciplines.
There's much more to come.
[Moshe] I think in 20 years,
we'll be doing things, or wearing things, or using things
that have affected our lives because of that thinking.
That we will see the tangible payoff.
I love showing this is possible.
Imagine someone with an early training in medicine,
with a passion for architecture,
who brings together the world of design...
and the world of nature
to international acclaim.
Imagine a leader
in education and research in MIT,
who inspires future generations still to come.
Imagine somebody whose style and professionalism
is a role model.
All of those qualities,
and more between,
is Neri Oxman.
[applause]
[Neri] The famous Einstein saying, which I love,
"There are two ways to live your life.
One as if nothing is a miracle.
And the other is as if everything is a miracle."
And that's who I am.