»Biology is an endless well from which we designers can learn«

The Visual Arts department at the University of San Diego seems pretty gray overall. Bare walls and lots of concrete. But when you get to the studio of Dr. Pinar Yoldaş, Professor of Robotics in Art, neuro­scientist, artist, and visionary thinker, a spark­ling gol­den chair and freshly painted stools in Yves Klein Blue are spread out in front of her door on which you can read “Yoldaş Lab. Dangerous Ideas”. And those are exactly what makes her work tick: her extraordinary ideas of liberated sex organs, of enormous stom­achs that clean the oceans, or of black plants that push photosynthesis to heights never before imagined. We talked about her very own fight against plastic pollution and climate change – and about her hope that many designers will join in.

You hold so many different degrees, ranging from architecture and communication design to computer science and neuroscience.
Pinar Yoldaş: Oh yes, I have a very long educational background (laughs). I was born and raised in a small town in Turkey, and the education system back then was very strict. It was all about your score and as I scored high, I ended up in science college and even qualified for the national Chemistry Olympiad team. I loved chemistry, but I also loved art. My father is an architect, and I grew up in his office drawing all the time. I really missed that as a chemist, and I didn’t realize back then that I could use artistic skills in ­science as well. So I quit and studied architecture. When coding became very important, I studied com­puter science and also visual communication design and did UX for many years. But then I missed science (laughs). So I started studying neuroscience at UCLA and did my PhD.

And now you are a Professor of Robotics in Art here at UC San Diego. What are you teaching?
At one point I just thought that I should stop studying and get a job (laughs). And here I am teaching 3D and speculative design and how you can use it as a practice to find our way through climate change and everything else that’s happening. I also teach “Art, Design, and Brain” where we look at how we perceive things and why emotions are important for that. Why our memories are more prominent when we’re angry, sad or joyful, or how mate­rials or forms influence our emotions. It’s really a passion project for me because it’s about how you can engineer the human experience to put people on a pathway towards a desired goal. This could be healthy environments that make people happier but also the trees around us, raccoons, whales, and all the other animals.

You call your practice “Speculative Biology”. Can you explain what that is exactly?
Being a girl in a Muslim country is not a cool thing. Especially in the religious community where it’s all about strict roles and beliefs. But my mother is a physicist, I grew up surrounded by books and with the experience that science could explain a lot. So, I chose the scientific understanding of the world and my Speculative Biology concept is really rooted in how nature works, its complexity and growth. But nature also speaks to my aesthetic sensibilities. I always thought that even if I design the coolest, nicest looking thing, it will never look as good as a plant or a microbial form. For me, biology is an endless well from which we designers can learn. Nature is not only appealing, but also keeps itself alive. That’s a complexity we need as designers and that’s the soil in which my ideas grow.

So, science, nature, and design have to converge?
Absolutely. With the advancements in gene editing and the pressures of climate change, we will have to engineer life around us. We experienced this very well with Covid-19. Remember how anxious we were before the vaccine came? And look how our lives have changed since then. The vaccine was a major biologi­cal triumph in understanding life and engineering it. That‘s where I see design going. And that’s why the designers of the future will need an understanding of ecology and have a basic intellectual knowledge of how it works in order to modify life. And I mean all kinds of designers. We need new materials, we need innovative and sustainable ways of fabrication, and we need people to communicate this new path. We’re facing our own death as a species, and I don’t think we can outsmart that with technology any­more. We have to look at reproduction, growth, and we need a more feminist perspective. I can go on and on about this (laughs).

Why more feminist?
I live in the United States where abortion was just banned. What a disaster. A vaccine was invented. But unlike for women, there is still no birth control pill for men. There could also be abortions where you can keep the embryo alive. That could not only make the women but also the Christians happy. When both parties agree, someone else could raise the embryo. I see Speculative Biology as a field that is very thought­ful in how it approaches life and living systems, that is curious about understanding its beauty and very feminist in that it’s really focused on growth and reproduction. Speculative Biology is imaginative and creative and only the sky is the limit.

You made some works about that, but lately switched to topics like sustainability and climate change. A very interesting organ you designed is the Stomaximus.
The Stomaximus is a project that I’m looking for­ward to realizing. It’s doable if a skin tissue or biopolymer is created in which genetically modified algae or bacteria can live. You build a huge stomach out of it and then you let run microplastic polluted water through it and the algae or bacteria will digest the plastic until it’s gone. But beyond that, we’ll also need waste design, waste management or waste removal designers. We’ll need a lot of people who find creative ways to get rid of the trash or how not to produce it in the first place.

Next to organs you also design organisms like the beautiful yet tragic Pantone Birds that make pollution visible in their own style.
It always cracked me up that there are all these strict color codes in the world of branding and design. To be recognizable, Coca-Cola always has the exact same red. If you zoomed into Midway, an island that is the most plastic polluted ecosystem in all the oceans, you would find thousands of millions of Coca-Cola caps in that particular red. Unfortunately, the albatross lives there, this mystical and romantic bird that bonds with its partner for life. These birds are so awesome in so many ways, but they end up there, dying from digesting all those plastic bottle caps and feeding them to their chicks. That’s the corporate apoca­lypse I wanted to visualize, and I started to speculate that they would begin to show corporate colors like Coca-Cola red.

And you even have Pantone Birds in different colors.
Next to the red Coca-Cola ones, I have – because of the popular water brands – blue Dasani and rose Evian birds. I think it’s very important to make the connection between the plastic caps you use and what they do to nature. When you visualize something, it’s not just abstract knowledge anymore. That’s were I see the future for all kinds of design. To use it in the service of creating new narratives and different behavioral patterns. That’s also where my PhD in neuroscience comes in. You have to speak to emotions as a designer to change things. Or through sensations like the beautiful colors of the Pantone Birds. When you cut open dead birds of the Midway, you find more than 30 percent bottle caps in their stom­achs. So, hey designers, maybe it’s time to rethink colorful bottle caps that look like food to animals.

And you don’t shy away from these horrible images. In a lecture you showed that picture as well as a video of a starving polar bear.
I think part of me is not afraid of walking into darkness. It’s not that I seek it consciously. I’m just not closing my eyes and I think we all should open them to this reality. Otherwise, we’re just going to live in a world built by advertising agencies telling us that everything is great.

Then you switched from organs and organisms to plants. To “Dark Botany” as you call it.
Besides organs and organisms, I also work on ecosystems. Dark Botany is a new one and it is about push­ing photosynthesis further. When we talk about ­climate change, a lot of people are suggesting that we should just plant more trees. But that is not e­nough and brought me to the physicist and mathematician Freeman Dyson who recently died at the age of 96. He not only had the vision that in the near future everyone will do gene editing in their kitchen, but also that we should grow dark forests where more sunlight can be harvested. I picked up this idea of black plants and thought about the consequences it could have when they are able to absorb the entire spectrum of sunlight and not just a segment as green ones do.

But why are leaves green then?
Green has a very high energy bandwidth, but keeps the metabolism slow at the same time. That’s a perfect combination for plants, because they prefer survival over efficiency and are not worried about climate change. They would probably even be happy if humans became extinct (laughs). Black plants would grow much faster and would capture a lot more carbon. But because of their high metabolism, they would also die faster. Live fast, die young (laughs).

How would the dark plants look like besides being black?
I don’t know if you’re fascinated by paleo too. But I am. If you go to a national history museum, there are these gigantic dinosaurs, and when you go to the Redwood Forest, there are the biggest trees I‘ve ever seen. So why not have dark plants that big? We could grow black parks in highly polluting urban environments. They would not only clean the air but also create a zone of less carbon dioxide and cool temperatures down a lot. And we could also cultivate dark algae to clean polluted rivers. I’m still thinking about how all of that would look like. I’m drawing them right now and I really want to put them into our zeitgeist so that they make us think about the possibility of creating stranger than fiction ecosystems.

In a way we’re doing that already.
Of course. We probably don’t notice it, but we’re creating a lot of alien ecosystems already. Plant life is modified, seeds are. I want to take this to another extreme and see what we can come up with.

Do you think that designers have a special responsibility in a time like this?
I think all of us are responsible. But the one thing that makes designers probably a more interesting demographic, is that their analytical mind is coupled with aesthetic sensibilities and that likely makes them come up with convincing solutions. And I mean all kinds of designers. We all belong to the same club here. And we all can take an emotional input and turn it into a solution. But where are the communication designers right now? Where are the product designers? Or the graphic designers and the UI/UX designers? We are all experiencing this hot summer here in California right now. And then think of the summer in 2026. Climate change is going to happen faster, bolder, and louder. And I think all those de­signers who are hiding behind their computers right now will crawl out and work on solutions. Yeah, I’m full of hope.

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