Individual Final Project Report

Climate change is all around us. Pollution in water, changes in soil acidity, or heavy metals like zinc can be dangerous, but we usually don’t notice them. Our clothes stay silent. Our materials don't respond. But what if they could?

In simplier terms: I am creating a fabric that changes color when it touches things like high levels of zinc or unsafe pH. It works by using freeze-dried biological parts that are not alive but can still react when water is added. This means the fabric can "wake up" and respond without needing electricity or lab tools.

The slightly longer version is: I am developing a fabric-based biosensor that uses freeze-dried, cell-free systems to detect environmental signals such as zinc levels and pH changes. By embedding biosensing reactions into textiles, I aim to create a wearable or textile art installation that activates outside of laboratory settings, making synthetic biology more accessible and visible in everyday life. I hypothesize that cell-free gene circuits, when freeze-dried and rehydrated on fabric, can reliably produce a visible signal in response to environmental triggers. My specific goals are to design and optimize the genetic circuits for clarity and responsiveness, identify suitable textile substrates, and test the biosensor’s function across real-world conditions.

This project’s title, Sympoietic Sensing is inspired by Donna Haraway’s idea of sympoiesis, (comes from the Greek ποίησις / poíēsis, ‘creation, production’ and the prefix σύν / sún ‘with, together’) which emphasizes that nothing exists independently, and that all things, humans and nonhumans, are interconnected and co-created. The fabric does not just sense for us, it senses with us. By turning ecological change into something we can see and feel, this work asks us to recognize our shared becoming with the world around us.

1. ABSTRACT

2. BACKGROUND