Bat Brunch Lab: Sheffield

Robert Johnson is a British designer with an MA in Social Design from the Design Academy Eindhoven and the founder of Studio Ficta, a creative start-up that fuses film, interactive design, and design research across anthropological, ecological, and social contexts. Working with film and interactive design, Johnson’s projects create alternative narratives using fictional writing as a design research tool, creating characters and dialogues that highlight issues surrounding social attitudes towards labour, materials, and waste streams within the circular economy.

In 2020, Johnson completed his residency at the Design Museum, London, where his project titled Fatconomy, presented fat as a valuable resource in urban society, illustrating the potential of discarded fats for the economy, material innovation and urban planning. His work on ‘fat as a new material’ was exhibited at the Tallin Architecture Biennale in 2022 and has given several key lectures at the Cooper Union in New York. the Design Museum, London and the Industrial design academy of Taiwan.

In 2022, he was awarded the design fellowship by the Royal Commission of 1851 in which he will be bringing his speculative design methods to the biofuel sectors within the U.K. focusing on the development of a future factory and cross-collaborative methods on new innovation labours from oil waste streams. His works has been exhibited at TAB 2022, Dezeen, Droog gallery, Design Week, and the Design Museum, London.

Kuang-Yi Ku lives and works both in Taiwan and the Netherlands. He is doing his Ph.D. research at Sheffield Hallam University, UK and the research topic is the interdisciplinary practice between art, design, and bioscience. He has graduated with triple master degrees with social design from Design Academy Eindhoven, dentistry from National Yang-Ming University, and communication design from Shih Chien University. He is a former dentist, bio-artist, and speculative designer. He also co-founded TW BioArt (Taiwan bioart community) to stimulate the fields of BioArt and Science+Art in Taiwan. His works often deal with human body, sexuality, interspecies interaction, and medical technology, aiming to investigate the relationships among technology, individual and environment.

Kuang-Yi Ku won Bio Art & Design Award in 2022 for the project “Atlas of Queer Anatomy”. His “Tiger Penis Project” has been awarded Gijs Bakker Award 2018, the annual prize for the best project by a graduating master’s student in Design Academy Eindhoven. He has also won the 1st prize of Taipei Digital Art Awards in 2015 with “The Fellatio Modification Project”, where he involves body modification, gender studies, queer theories, and dentistry all together. His works were featured in international medias such as New Scientist, The Huffington Post, Elephant Magazine, DAMN° Magazine, Dezeen, Designboom, VICE, Dazed Digital, Daily Mail, New York Post, and so on.