FUTURITY SYSTEMS

The Chimera Garden Greenhouse is where regenerative medicine and design thinking meet. It is a speculative design project that could be set in the near future, the year 2035 for example. Inspired by scientific findings, we push the envelope one step further : if a spinach leaf can be turned into a layer of heart tissue*, then maybe in the near future a whole artichoke can be engineered to form a fully functioning heart. From there we come up with a series of neo-plants, which merge the qualities of existing plants with potential needs and uses of the future: Some will grow custom organs that are perfectly compatible with the human host, others will enhance our abilities in a symbiotic partnership. The goal is to simply and artistically communicate a complex reality to laypeople - that plant-based scaffolds can be used to regrow human organs, eliminating the need for donors and leading to long-term cures for organ-specific diseases. *See for example a March 2017 study by scientists from the WPI (Worcester Polytechnic Institute), who have turned a spinach leaf into a beating heart tissue. https://www.wpi.edu/news/wpi-team-grows-heart-tissue-spinach-leaves **See for example "Plant Tissues as 3D Natural Scaffolds for Adipose, Bone and Tendon Tissue Regeneration" https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fbioe.2020.00723/full