Pangaia: pioneering a high-tech naturalism
This article is part of our special series on Flesh
Dr. Amanda Parkes is a fashion scientist with over 15 years of experience in fashion innovation, sustainability, wearable technology, interaction design and smart materials spanning research, development, and product commercialization for start ups and major tech and fashion companies. She is currently the Chief Innovation Officer of Pangaia, a material science brand building a sustainable future in fashion and lifestyle products. Here, she speaks to ReD partner Sandra Cariglio about revolutionising the traditional fashion business model, pioneering a new language around materials and the future opportunities in high-tech naturalism.
Sandra Cariglio: You have a very interesting background, having studied both art history and mechanical engineering – you also hold a PHD from the M.I.T. Media Lab. It seems like your work even before Pangaia has always been interdisciplinary in nature.
Amanda Parkes: My career path has been kind of non-linear. After studying mechanical engineering and art history I ended up at the Exploratorium in San Francisco, which is a museum of art, science and human perception. And while I was there, I was introduced to Hirosh Ishii, who became my advisor at MIT, and who was working on a research lab called Tantle Media. This was about the interactivity between the digital and physical world. All of that led me to understanding a lot about things like textiles, wearable tech – how do we have technology on the body? It was the early days of biotech and I was approached to join a fund called Future Tech Lab, where we worked together on investing in new sustainable material innovations, really mapping out the space globally. The founding team there is also the founding team at Pangaia. Pangaia was really born from a desire to show that we could design and create beautiful, responsible garments. It was also about switching up the traditional fashion business model. Coming from tech, you really see these big companies like Google and Apple designing the future of their industry. They are creating the IP, they’re acquiring the IP, they’re really trying to set the course. And I was very surprised going into fashion through the back door to see that big fashion companies weren’t doing that with their textile innovation. So that seemed like an open space – how do we create a company that feels more like a leader, like a Google or Apple?
Sandra: Outside of what you’re doing, there isn’t a big push towards changing the fashion business model. Why do you think that there is so little innovation in that space? And what new thinking are you hoping to drive?
Amanda: There’s a couple of different things coming into play, one of them being the history of artisanship and craftsmanship. This is a really amazing thing about the fashion industry. It’s held on to its practices and I see a lot of validity in that. But sometimes this can be at odds with the mindset of using new innovative materials. So it’s about changing the mindset around what artisanal craftsmanship really means in a lot of these spaces. And then, the other angle is that because the fashion industry works really fast, the margins are low, especially in raw materials and manufacturing. So there’s not a lot of money to play with in that scoping.
“Instead of trying to have control over nature, we’re trying to work with it as a medium.”
Sandra: Your work for Pangaia has involved experimenting with biofeedback algorithms and with robots, too, as a way to better understand sensuality in the fashion world. Where do you see the potential for that?
Amanda: A lot of the work I was doing around robotics was looking at how people have human responses. This is about the sensorial nature of how we perceive things. I’m not a cognitive scientist, but I was working on robotics to see how we responded to different kinds of motion in relationship to materials. There’s something incredibly visceral about textiles that we relate to better than, say, just certainly wood or metal or other hard materials. And one of the things that was most special about what we were doing at Pangaia – we had worked really hard on our textiles, even though the first things were just organic cotton or seaweed – was how incredibly soft our materials were. We would have people who bought one sweatshirt and then came back and bought six tracksuits and say: “I can’t take this off, you’ve ruined the rest of my wardrobe. What is this?!” There was something that couldn’t really be expressed. I call it the science of the feel – how does this feel on your body? So that's really important for a brand that is 100% online selling. But I think what it has opened up is the conversation around how to talk about these new fibers that don’t come with context. We’re creating from things like plant fibre and fruit fibre, which are made from the waste of banana, pineapple, hemp nettle, seaweed. And we don’t have the right vocabulary yet to get across that this is a really soft and drapey fabric that is incredibly smooth and actually feels almost cooling. And even if we do get a bit poetic about the whole thing, it’s not a clarity that goes through the entire fashion industry. I think a lot about the new parameters of language that we need to describe textiles.
Sandra: High-tech naturalism – a term you coined – breaks that paradigm that what’s natural and what’s technical is separate. I’d love for you to talk a little bit about that philosophy and how you’ve worked to resolve – or dissolve – some of those tradeoffs.
Amanda: I was trying to make it useful as a way to describe our material philosophy – and it's funny, it’s sort of taken on a life of its own. Instead of trying to have control over nature, we’re trying to work with it as a medium. So the idea of high-tech naturalism was to say, let’s look for places where from a material perspective there’s an abundance in nature. What can we make with the abundance? One of our first patents, which is called Flowerdown, is a great example of this, where it’s made with a specific kind of waste wildflower – it’s the inside of a particular plant. Combining the thermal properties of that with cellulosic aerogel and biopolymer gives it structural integrity and durability and it can be an alternative to down. You’re using something that is incredibly low-tech, a weed, and something that’s incredibly high-tech, aerogel, but it all has a similar biological end of life profile where it’s compostable.
Sandra: Is it always clear where the line is between working with or tampering with nature?
Amanda: It’s very much an open question. The area of science is called synthetic biology. This idea of being able to mess with life is incredibly powerful. When you become a doctor, you have to take the Hippocratic Oath to do no harm. I sometimes can’t believe that scientists don’t have the same thing. We absolutely should. If you were given the tools to manipulate DNA you should take some kind of ethical practice that goes along with it. The biology community is very careful about that. I think in some ways we’ve now moved to the next realm of human intelligence, where we understand that we are not standing above nature. It doesn’t make us weaker or less intelligent. It’s actually a full circle. I think we had to go through those phases to get here; we needed the industrial tools to be able to have the biological tools.
Sandra: You’ve been talking about a fourth industrial revolution – moving from a physics-based to a biology-based way of looking at the world. Do you think that comes with an evolution in what people find beautiful?
Amanda: I think we’re breaking down categories. I think one of the things that will be interesting is around categories of materials. Right now we have leather that is basically categorised as something that comes from an animal. Or woven cotton, knit – we have those associations based on qualities that are coming from how they appear in nature. But when you start having plant leathers and mycelium leathers – we don’t necessarily even need to call them leathers – why is the quality of an animal the thing you’re actually looking for? Maybe you want something that’s more like foam – durable but lighter. So I think that we’re going to start to have cross categorisations, and this is where we need to start developing nomenclature that it’s not necessarily better or worse. The idea that a material lasts a really long time, that somehow evokes quality. But what about material appropriateness? If you want to have a product that only lasts one season, you could potentially make it responsibly if the item breaks down. We have these terms now like bio synthetics, which I think in 20 years or at least 50 years, will be like referring to a car as a horseless carriage. The lines between material classes are starting to blur as both biology and chemistry advance. And that’s where it’s going to get interesting, both from a nomenclature perspective and then going into a fashion perspective. Is this more valuable than this? And for what reason? This is about a value system inside of things, and I’m excited to see where things fall.
Sandra: Pangaia is at the forefront of thinking about sustainability in a different way. What do you think will be the next topics that capture the public discourse? We’ve been very focused on global warming – now it seems like biodiversity is capturing more and more attention. How do you think our awareness around nature will develop in the coming years?
Amanda: You took the words out of my mouth – we need to shift from just thinking purely about carbon. Biodiversity is about the balance of the whole planet. And if you just measure carbon, you’re measuring one indicator of thousands, right? So carbon becomes just a symbolic measurement. But what we really need is more complexity in the systems understanding and also not to get overwhelmed. I think if we can understand microcosmic systems, if you have a deep understanding of your local environment – and this is true of community politics as well – if you’re taking care of their local environment, then we will have a global outcome.
This interview is part of our special series on Flesh