"A good story is both foreign and familiar"
A parking lot chat with bioartist Corinne Okada Takara
This week I’m back with someone slightly different! If this is your first read, I’ve been interviewing TikTokers to learn more about how the platform is revolutionizing science communication and science education, from the power of livestreaming to the virality of eco-rap music videos. You can read the previous interviews in this series here, here, and here. Our conversations have come back time and time again to issues of access and the development of critical thinking skills.
This week, I loop Corinne Okada Takara into the conversation. Her experience as a community activist, an artist, and an art-science educator brings wonderful depth to the themes we’ve been orbiting. Corinne works as an acclaimed independent biodesigner based in California’s Bay Area. Her work often centers on place and community, slow-making with nature, and empowering marginalized voices.
On top of running a makerspace out of her garage, Corinne mentors multiple teams of high school students for the international Biodesign Challenge. Alongside Dr. Rolando Cruz Perez, she founded BioJam Camp, a summer experience where highschoolers learn about science and technology within the themes of “climate change, sustainability, and environmental justice.” For the past year-and-a-half, she’s been deeply involved with the Salinas, CA community bio lab Xinampa. Corinne sat down with me over Zoom from the parking lot of her daughter’s track practice to reflect on biodesign, why teaching science differently is so important, and her dreams for the future of education.
**This conversation has been condensed and edited for length and clarity**
Matthew: Your bioquilts project is really fascinating! Why quilts? [for some background, Corinne leads a bioquilting initiative in San Jose, where local artists design mold forms. Community members then use those molds to grow biomaterials, like mycelium and alginate, that become components of the community bioquilt. Grown from feedstock provided by the community—discarded yard waste, tea leaves, even dried ramen noodles—the quilts are deeply entangled with the biological identities and cultural traditions of the community.]
Corinne: Yeah. Quilts because they’re familiar and they’re comfortable. It brings people together. And I wanted some sort of art vehicle to get people together talking about the future of sustainability design--people who aren’t really in the conversation right now. I thought quilts are homey and fun, and who doesn’t want to make a quilt square. And that can get you over the hump of playing with bacterial cellulose and fungus. Another reason is quilts often speak to place and culture and community, and I really feel biology and biomaterials do too. Everything’s about place.
M: And it’s very personal. That’s the power of [it]. When you see biotech companies [say], “Oh we’re making enzymes in the lab.” I can’t relate to that as an everyday person, but when people talk about the future of your clothing or things you eat, it’s very different.
C: That’s a really good point. Like the personal part. Clothing is intimate. You wear it, and by making biomaterials from things that might be great model organisms for the future of sustainability but currently people don’t know about them or are uncomfortable with them, that tension kind of creates conversation opportunities.
M: That leads into a question I just had. Your work with teens and young adults. You’re making biology and their surrounding environment personal for them. What are the impacts you’ve seen of doing that or of running these programs?
C: That’s a really good question. We just had our BioJam graduation this weekend. Some of them were saying they were very intimidated by biology and science before they started exploring creatively with biology. And now one girl’s saying, “I’m taking AP Bio. I’m really excited about it.” Another says, “I’m thinking about bioengineering as a future.” Another said, “I never thought I’d like science, but I like it.” It can be a very open point for engagement and personal voice--working with biomaterials creatively. I think especially for youth who come from communities where they don’t necessarily see a lot of people that are in science, and they don’t see that there is a lot of science knowledge already existing in their communities, it just hasn’t been elevated. So I think biomaterials are a really great way to elevate existing cultural and community knowledge and bioinnovation. It’s there. It’s just not elevated.
M: I like the idea of community and trying to root young adults in their communities and expand maybe the options they even thought were possible. You talk about storytelling [in your work]. I wanted to get your thoughts on what makes a good story?
C: I think a good story is both familiar and foreign. There’s elements of something that’s familiar to you but then elements that are very surprising and new and make you think about it more. And a good story is something that can be added to. So it’s not stand alone. It’s something that is to be carried and shared and then another link to be added to.
“A good story is both familiar and foreign. And a good story is something that can be added to. So it’s not stand alone. It’s something that is to be carried and shared and then another link to be added to.”
M: Yeah. That’s great! This idea of continuing play in storytelling I really like. Getting people to play, to have fun, to explore surprising things, to push themselves maybe to things they wouldn’t do otherwise. How do we get people to play? How do you--maybe for your BioJam camp, it’s the first day. These kids might be intimidated. It might not be the place they want to be at the moment. So how do you get them to take that first step?
C: You’re right. You’re with all these new people. We asked them each to bring a mason jar or a baggie of stuff. Like waste material from home. It was really fun because someone said, “Oh, I was just eating ramen right now so this jar is full of ramen.” And someone else brought Indian tea leaves--used leaves. One girl brought dried plant material from her yard. We autoclaved it all, and we used it as food substrate for mycelium in designs that they had created. Having them tell the stories themselves was something kind of playful.
Invite them to bring something. You’re going to feed it to mushrooms. It can be any waste material from your home, neighbor, community. Just bring something. We don’t know if it will grow or not. Because we got a lot of questions ahead of time like, Can I bring this? Can I bring that? Will this work?” And we’re like, “I don’t know. Just bring it.” If you’re playful, you can get other people to be playful.
M: The contagious energy. Making it whimsical. There’s a lot of things in science that are very magical. People usually think science isn’t that fun. How can we get those little blips of magic into people’s imaginations?
C: I think we need to have science play, science journeys for the general public, for everyone. Why don’t we start with how we describe it from our own cultures, or how would your grandparent describe this? And then why? Then kind of have this generative, additive definition of things. Kind of shape the vocabulary together. I think we have so much success with that in BioJam Camp. Because it’s really a generative, additive thing.
We let them know when we’re exploring content that we’re not teaching it to them. We’re kind of shaping it together. We invite them: “How would you do this better? How would you design this for your community?” Because half of the project is for them to during the school year go back into the community and deploy projects they design in a way that works for their communities. Saying, “how do we get people more involved?” is elevating to them that they are the experts in their community. How do you share it in a way that can be received and shaped further by the expert community voices in your community? That’s a really interesting challenge. How do you bring the questions of science to community spaces? Because whoever asks the questions has the power. Who is driving the questions, right?
For example, your average field worker is 43 right now, if they are a guest worker. And that age is going up. They have the highest knee injuries out of any demographic, and yet data is just not being collected properly. So it’s been estimated that among agricultural workers, 78% of the injuries are not being collected and 74% of the deaths are not being collected. So basically there’s no data.
M: We can only answer the stories the data tells us.
C: There’s a huge opportunity space to grow in our knowledge--the science knowledge and the plant knowledge--how can we do this better? Not just sustainability for plants but the people who are in this system. There are many field workers who die so you get this generational loss of stories from those people.
M: Right. A loss of cultural knowledge and community. It’s all kind of this pipeline of equity, you could call it. I think biodesign and this field of community bio is really importantly engaged in equity and in creating equity in a lot of different facets. Equity for communities. Equity for the organisms we work with, for the planet. I think that’s a lovely thread that is emerging with the community.
“Another really important thing is for people to be more expansive in thinking about who they are and what the boundaries of themselves are. We are a really wonderful scaffold for more cells of so many other organisms--like bacteria and other things--than human cells. There’s not a hard boundary on ourselves.”
C: Yeah, that’s a really good point. I agree with you. What are the right ways to work with and use organisms? What are the boundaries? How do we have those conversations in a thoughtful way?
M: So the work I do in the lab is with mesenchymal stem cells, so the stem cells that come from your bone marrow. They give rise to your cartilage, your bones, your red blood cells, your white blood cells, and your fat tissue.
I was writing about trying to explain what tissue engineering is, and I kept referring to YOUR cells. YOUR cells. Do you refer to them as part of you? Do you refer to them as something different? Are they something different when they’re in culture in the lab, and then do they transform when they go inside you? It’s a very interesting thing I didn’t have the words for.
C: That’s hard. And then also add to that our white blood cells, our macrophages, probably evolved from organisms outside of us. So we have absorbed other organisms who are now part of our system. And people don’t know it, so bringing that in too-- just this whole idea of self is such a good question. Another really important thing is for people to be more expansive in thinking about who they are and what the boundaries of themselves are. We are a really wonderful scaffold for more cells of so many other organisms--like bacteria and other things--than human cells. There’s not a hard boundary on ourselves. What is self?
M: The idea of quilting to find that self in your community. It all brings it back together.
C: We’re just a collection of parts from different places. We evolved in different ways. Together telling different stories.
M: As a final question, what are some of your wildest dreams for the future of biodesign, bioeducation?
“Work on a small component of a big systems design. I think one of the biggest challenges is the questions we have are huge problems, and they’re big systems problems.”
C: I would love it if every community had its own bio making makerspace attached to the community garden. I think biomaking needs to be in the realm of community, and community spaces are already trusted. It's not that research is all happening in the lab. My biggest dream is actually to have R&D roll out into the fields so the field workers get to R&D prototype out their own gear and see what works and reimagine the system.
Work on a small component of a big systems design. I think one of the biggest challenges is that the questions we have are huge problems, and they’re big systems problems. I would love to see it grow in the community rather than within school. The reason I say that is because in school you have like, “We're gonna spend 45 minutes on this. Okay, we're gonna do something else.” You’re never going to touch that again. So more opportunities for iteration and community connection. I see a lot in schools where they ask middle school students: “Solve the climate crisis!” and it's such a big question. No. Focus on a small part of that in your community and see if you can make change there. That is so incredibly empowering. Then move from there and make the networks of connections that need to happen.
My wildest dream is that biodesign, bioengineering, bioconversations really find a way to take root with community labs--that it becomes the norm that community labs intersect with community gardens. And community colleges. And universities. For that ecosystem to happen and be seen as normal for community members and academia. That is the vision we are pursuing at Xinampa [Salinas’s community bio lab]. I think that is my biggest dream, for that ecosystem to happen.
You can hear more from Corinne Okada Takara and the BioJam Camp by following her delightful Twitter!
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