Next Generation: Launching the Eva Biodesign Lab with Carlos Silveira

This story is part of Next Generation, a series in which we give young makers a platform to showcase their work. Your work here? Get in touch and plot your coordinates as we navigate our future together.

Carlos Silveira is a biofuturist from Brazil who graduated in Design with an emphasis in Visual Communication. The graduation project Eva Biodesign Lab involves biomimicry, human experience, and speculative thinking explored through a sci-fi narrative.

The project approaches the launch of Eva Biodesign Lab, a company that aims to develop technological surfaces using biomimetics and biocomputational design in the Brazilian market. An experience was elaborated to present the company in a fictional story that speculates the possibility of technology and biodesign within today’s society and culture, and the current and future pandemics. In order to make this project a reality, the designer considered the use of technologies that would provide the visitors an immersive and multisensory experience through the concept of the metaverse, by mixing the physical and the digital.

The project is based on a fictional time travel story, when three potential customers are invited by a scientist in the year 2032 to participate in a mission to save humanity, where a deadly virus devastated almost the entire human race. The customers will be taken to a portal that will transport them to a laboratory in the future to retrieve a technology that can be applied into their present to stop the catastrophe. However, since they are not familiar with the field of biodesign, they must learn to choose elements inspired by nature to extract the technology before they get hit by the pathogens. When brought to the present, the participants will discover that the technology is a project idealized by the Eva Biodesign Lab company, inviting them to build a better future through the field of biodesign.

In the development process, a technological surface was speculated by the biomimicry methodology, present in the cicadas’ wings with the Voronoi pattern and the bioplastic made of algae to be applied in a pair of gloves, a car seat and a veil. The story introduces the speculated technology, the company and the field of biodesign, and within interactive space, developed to represent the laboratory of the future in which the visitors should extract the technology to complete their mission. As a result, we created a video simulation of the digital space that can be viewed through virtual reality glasses (VR).

The importance of the project reflects on how design can be used to speculate possible solutions for the future in order to promote a new area that aims to develop technologies that represent a new path for the evolution of humanity, inspired by nature. In this way, the idealized experiment represents how we can imagine another version of the pandemic scenario and how design is responsible for promoting innovation in society. However, it is important to emphasize that it is not about the technologies utilized to materialize the project, but how they were used to incorporate a perspective of our world that is not yet reality, but a possibility.