Bat Brunch Lab

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.

Angela Hui is an award-winning journalist, editor and author of Takeaway: Stories from a Childhood Behind the Counter (2022). Her work has been published in BBC, Guardian, Financial Times, HuffPost, Independent, Lonely Planet, Refinery29, Vice, and more. Currently, she is freelance and was the former food and drink editor at Time Out.

Dr Gemma Bowsher is a health security researcher based at the Department of War Studies, King’s College London. Her research interests lie at the intersections of health security intelligence, bio-disinformation and cyber-biological risks. She is a social scientist with a background in medical anthropology. In 2020, she was appointed as co-lead investigator for Health Security Intelligence and Biosecurity at the KCL Conflict and Health Research Group, She is also a member of the KCL Centre for Science and Security Studies. She holds medical and postgraduate degrees from King’s College London and Harvard University.

Gemma works on a range of programmes where she engages with governments, security and health sector organisations to develop approaches to anticipate and prepare for emerging threats across health and biological fields. She has experience working internationally on a range of projects in conflict and other complex settings. Dr Bowsher has been awarded a number of fellowships and external appointments, including a Fellowship of the Royal Society of Public Health, the Soulsby Foundation Fellowship for One Health, and the Johns Hopkins Emerging Leaders in Biosecurity Fellowship. She holds an appointment as a Senior Research Associate at the Intellectual Forum of Jesus College, Cambridge University.

Gemma is also a practising doctor in the National Health Service.

Professor Lucy Di Silvio is the lead PI for Tissue Engineering in the Centre for Oral, Clinical and Translational Sciences, KCL. Her groups research focuses on producing innovative tissue engineered systems based on 3D bioprinted cellular and acellular scaffolds for both hard and soft tissues for clinical application. Her research aims to understand the fundamental concepts of cell-material interactions how instructive cues such as stimulatory factors, functionalization of materials or micropatterning of material surfaces can be used to induce and enhance cell response. Using this approach, the group is combining several novel strategies to develop biomimetic viable scaffolds, including vascularized 3D biomaterial scaffolds for use in clinically challenging craniomaxillofacial, dental and orthopaedic applications. Adopting this approach, and in collaboration with oral surgery, maxillofacial and the Reconstructive Science group they are exploiting novel 3D printing technologies and computer assisted design/manufacturing (CAD/CAM) to provide innovative platforms and opportunities for basic and applied research for reconstructing tissues.

She has published extensively in peer-reviewed journals (>150), book chapters and is Editor of “Cell Materials Interactions”. Successfully mentored >30 PhD students. She is currently Guest Professor at Zhejiang University, Fellow of Biomaterials Science and Engineering (FBSE) and a Fellow of the Institute of Materials, Mining and Minerals (FIMMM).
Professor Di Silvio was Awarded the Italian Civil Honour ‘‘Order of the Star of Italy’ 2012 ‘to recognize those expatriates who have made an outstanding contribution to the preservation and promotion of national prestige abroad’