Thursday, May 5, 2011

TED Talk #8- Suzanne Lee: Grow your own clothes

Suzanne Lee wants to grow our world. This may sound humorous and ridiculous but it is actually very revolutionary as far as biology is concerned. Through microorganisms, sugar, tea and time we can create clothing. This is also completely natural clothing. No animals, no plants (other than sugar) and no trees. It is so clean and can be shaped in any way you want. It is pulling directly from Dan Pink’s A Whole New Mind chapter about design. These clothing items may be the start of a clothing revolution. They have utility because you can wear them and cloth yourself, a basic human necessity, and significance because you can add color, style and natural dyes to make them more appealing to the costumer. They are a perfect example of moving from left-brained for the past thousands of years, to the modern right-brained global community. Thousands of years ago, in the prehistoric stone-age, a caveman wore a loin-cloth, or so the historians say. Now the modern man wears a business suit tailored to their exact specifications. But now that white-collared jobs have been outsourced to Asia, this is no longer the appropriate attire. Now we need to grow clothes. We need to take meager ingredients and create the future.
The idea of growing clothes in itself is cool, but may not change the world, just what we wear. But as Lee finished presenting her small, fashionable idea, she moved onto the bigger picture. She started small and made that leap to the future. What if we could grow furniture? What cars? What about homes for people who have nothing? This is a step into the real application. If we could find a cure for poverty in sugar and tea, what else can we grow things from? If we can grow homes from tea, then can we not grow presidents from the slums? Can we build on something that seems meaningless and make it into something all the world will respect and use? This is exactly what we should do, and are challenged to do. It is up to us as humans to decide where to take this idea from. We could keep it only in the clothing business or expand as Lee suggested.
Without much thought, this TED Talk may have been dismissed by revolutionaries as a cool fashion trend. But someone somewhere somehow saw more to it than that. They saw the opportunity to build a new, clean, simple world. They uncovered the potential that lay within the sugar and tea. Who saw the beauty in a microchip? Or the telephone wire? Or Theodore Roosevelt? Or right-brained thinking? Or children in an inner city school system with not future ahead of them if they stayed on the path they were on? It took a scientist, an inventor, a political leader, an author and a teacher. All of these jobs seemingly unrelated are woven together by one aspect of their lives; vision. They all had the ability to see into the future, to change their fate, to reshape their world forever. Starting with something simple and taking higher, bigger, and stronger until all the world revels in the magnificence of it.
If a fashion designer and a biologist can come together to create fermentating clothing, then what else can be created when fields come together? What if an artist and a lawyer shared a cup of coffee and ideas? What if a doctor and an actor had lunch and ground-breaking thought? What if an educator and an architect went to movie and found a solution to world peace? In the TED Talk spirit I have a challenge for you; go outside your comfort zone and create a new world. Take something with utility and make it beautiful. Challenge what you know, what you think, and what you feel. Make something amazing. Create something inspiring. Form something revolutionary. Try something new. But most of all grow in body, mind, spirit, soul and sugar and tea.

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