On 5 July 2024, the winners of the Redesign Everything Challenge shared the stories behind their creative innovations at What Design Can Do Live in Amsterdam.
About this winner: Electric Skin sees an electronic future is grown, not extracted. As the world increasingly adopts clean technologies and IoT solutions, the demand for critical minerals is skyrocketing. This leads to increased mining activities and environmental degradation. On top of this, the proliferation of electronic devices contributes significantly to mounting piles of e-waste. Electric Skin reimagines this paradigm by asking the question, “what if we could cultivate our electronics?” By pioneering the use of bacteria that naturally produce electrical proteins for use in electronics, Electric Skin has created a platform technology applicable to both energy production and electronics. These proteins are integrated into algae-based biomaterials, drawing inspiration from nature’s design principles. Through this process, compostable electronics can be crafted at scale, leveraging renewable resources. Electric Skin is currently developing growable and compostable sensors, imagining a future crafting entire phones or coating entire buildings with the material.