Juan Pablo Guzman Alvarez

About

Juan Pablo (he/him) works through a curious practice of creative engineering, where bio-design, technology, and innovation intersect at the boundaries of art, design, science, chemical engineering, and materials engineering. He harvests opportunities from cross-scale dynamics—from molecules to ecosystems—to identify leverage points that could have a multidimensional impact on users and their experience of the surrounding environment. His body of work spans material, digital, and social realms, with an interest in materiality, manufacturing, aesthetics, co-design, systems thinking, design futures, and decolonial practices.

His latest venture, Suche (pronounced [su:ʧe], meaning orchid in Muysc cubun), introduces synthetic biology and microbiology for the sustainable bio-production of carotenoid and indole pigments, used historically as natural dyes for textiles. It adopts a place-based approach to leverage Colombia’s megadiversity and reactivate the country’s dormant textile economy. The project proposes a designer-informed toolset of four manufacturing methodologies: uniform dyeing, folded incubation, print paste formulations, and an original digital dye-weave process for bespoke pattern-making. These enable designers to access a streamlined set of bio-foundry-level methods that can be implemented anywhere to create textile products using bacterial dyes. A wild orchid is presented as the embodiment of Suche. To fabricate a single fabric orchid, all proposed manufacturing methods are required. When in bloom, a Suche symbolizes hope for the liberation of contested territories, which will be free and sovereign over the land they dwell upon and its resources.

Suche is the first-ever project to grow natural dyestuffs at the RCA Natural Matters Lab; its methods can be further developed by future students.