Barbara Pollini — researcher, biodesigner.
Sustainable designer and researcher Barbara Pollini discusses her background, experience, and even her “polar stars” which she follows along her professional career.
“We are in a scientific lab. Don’t worry about him. He is usually silent” — starts Barbara with a smile. Her words draw my attention to a maquette of the full-size human skeleton staying in the same room, right behind her. We both smile and the joke breaks the “ice of uncertainty”, that we usually have when meeting a person unknown to us for the first time.
Although Professor Barbara Pollini is a designer and working in research for many years now, she started her education in Fine Arts, having got her degree from the Academy of Fine Arts of Brera, in Italy in 2007. She was a designer at heart long before then, though, making DIY architectural structures out of bee products while looking at her father — a beekeeper — as a child. “The DIY practice was pretty much there since my childhood and formed my attitude as a designer.”- explains Barbara.
After graduating in Fine Arts, she lost herself for two years in Amsterdam, decorating cakes. But the original trigger for entering the world of design later on in her career, was trying to solve problems. And this she missed in Amsterdam that time. It was spinning in her mind until one day she said to herself: “No, I really want to be a designer.”
To indulge her passion, Barbara decided to take a special Master Degree in Ecodesign and Ecoinnovation from the Camerino University of Architecture and Design in 2009.
This master program boosted her skills in Sustainable Design. For applying their new-found knowledge in the professional market, she and her study colleagues decided to not apply for the usual jobs, but opted for keeping their independence by founding the NUUP — Sustainable Creativity Team.
Complementing her membership at NUUP, in 2012 Barbara became a professor at NABA Design University in Milan. There, until now she is teaching Sustainable Design in courses that focus on DIY-materials and biofabrication. We will learn soon why these materials are so interesting. “Next year will be my 10th year of teaching” she remarks. “I took teaching sustainability as an effective way to make people and designers more aware of the topic and empower them to make the right decisions for optimizing the impact of the objects or systems they are designing”.
The experience gained from all the occupations made her want to focus more on the role that materials can play in sustainable design. And so, in 2014 she started her independent research on sustainable materials. Shortly thereafter, circularity was becoming a topic. This answered a lot of questions, because to be circular, a product has to fulfill clear requirements. It brought her focus to organic materials. Nature created them for a circular loop. By being biodegradable, their resources are kept in endless use, spinning in infinity around the planet.
But to advance her research, Barbara felt she needed to also advance on an academic level. Yet, she had to circumvent a formality: her first master degree did not allow to start a PhD. As she did not have any technological background, she decided for a Master in Computation Design at SAAD, Camerino University, in 2017. And this gave Barbara the possibility to continue her career as a researcher by starting her PhD in Design at the Polytechnic University of Milan, researching biofabricated materials for sustainable design starting in 2019.
The possibility to imply living organisms into the building of materials and objects, also called biofabrication, has become the next step in her findings. She stuck with this topic for many years, logically making it the topic for her PhD research which ultimately should lead to her next degree in about a year.
From Fine Arts to a PhD in biofabrication, decorating cakes along the way, we may conclude: it was not a linear path, at all. “New research topics are always behind the corner in my life, so I usually change the path quite often, but I follow some polar stars, as you might notice from my profiles.”- says Barbara.
You can read the full version of the conversation here:
