One of my favorite cartoon characters is Snoopy.
I love the way he sits and lies on his kennel and contemplates the great things of life.
So when I thought about compassion, my mind immediately went to one of the cartoon strips, where he's lying there and he says, "I really understand, and I really appreciate how one should love one's neighbor as one love's oneself.
The only trouble is the people next door; I can't stand them."
This, in a way, is one of the challenges of how to interpret a really good idea.
We all, I think, believe in compassion.
If you look at all the world religions, all the main world religions, you'll find within them some teaching concerning compassion.
So in Judaism, we have, from our Torah, that you should love your neighbor as you love yourself.
And within Jewish teachings, the rabbinic teachings, we have Hillel, who taught that you shouldn't do to others what you don't like being done to yourself.
And all the main religions have similar teachings.
And again, within Judaism, we have a teaching about God, who is called the compassionate one, Ha-rachaman.
After all, how could the world exist without God being compassionate?
And we, as taught within the Torah that we are made in the image of God, so we too have to be compassionate.
But what does it mean?
How does it impact on our everyday life?
Sometimes, of course, being compassionate can produce feelings within us that are very difficult to control.
I know there are many times when I've gone and conducted a funeral, or when I have been sitting with the bereaved, or with people who are dying, and I am overwhelmed by the sadness, by the difficulty, the challenge that is there for the family, for the person.
And I'm touched, so that tears come to my eyes.
And yet, if I just allowed myself to be overwhelmed by these feelings, I wouldn't be doing my job -- because I have to actually be there for them and make sure that rituals happen, that practicalities are seen to.
And yet, on the other hand, if I didn't feel this compassion, then I feel that it would be time for me to hang up my robe and give up being a rabbi.
And these same feelings are there for all of us as we face the world.
Who cannot be touched by compassion when we see the terrible horrors of the results of war, or famine, or earthquakes, or tsunamis?
I know some people who say "Well, you know there's just so much out there -- I can't do anything, I'm not going to even begin to try."
And there are some charity workers who call this compassion fatigue.
There are others who feel they can't confront compassion anymore, and so they turn off the television and don't watch.
In Judaism, though, we tend to always say, there has to be a middle way.
You have to, of course, be aware of the needs of others, but you have to be aware in such a way that you can carry on with your life and be of help to people.
So part of compassion has to be an understanding of what makes people tick.
And, of course, you can't do that unless you understand yourself a bit more.
And there's a lovely rabbinic interpretation of the beginnings of creation, which says that when God created the world, God thought that it would be best to create the world only with the divine attribute of justice.
Because, after all, God is just.
Therefore, there should be justice throughout the world.
And then God looked to the future and realized, if the world was created just with justice, the world couldn't exist.
So, God thought, "Nope, I'm going to create the world just with compassion."
And then God looked to the future and realized that, in fact, if the world were just filled with compassion, there would be anarchy and chaos.
There had to be limits to all things.
The rabbis describe this as being like a king who has a beautiful, fragile glass bowl.
If you put too much cold water in, it will shatter.
If you put boiling water in, it will shatter.
What do you have to do?
Put in a mixture of the two.
And so God put both of these possibilities into the world.
There is something more though that has to be there.
And that is the translation of the feelings that we may have about compassion into the wider world, into action.
So, like Snoopy, we can't just lie there and think great thoughts about our neighbors.
We actually have to do something about it.
And so there is also, within Judaism, this notion of love and kindness that becomes very important: "chesed."
All these three things, then, have to be melded together.
The idea of justice, which gives boundaries to our lives and gives us a feeling of what's right about life, what's right about living, what should we be doing, social justice.
There has to be a willingness to do good deeds, but not, of course, at the expense of our own sanity.
You know, there's no way that you can do anything for anyone if you overdo things.
And balancing them all in the middle is this notion of compassion, which has to be there, if you like, at our very roots.
This idea of compassion comes to us because we're made in the image of God, who is ultimately the compassionate one.
What does this compassion entail?
It entails understanding the pain of the other.
But even more than that, it means understanding one's connection to the whole of creation: understanding that one is part of that creation, that there is a unity that underlies all that we see, all that we hear, all that we feel.
I call that unity God.
And that unity is something that connects all of creation.
And, of course, in the modern world, with the environmental movement, we're becoming even more aware of the connectivity of things, that something I do here actually does matter in Africa, that if I use too much of my carbon allowance, it seems to be that we are causing a great lack of rain in central and eastern Africa.
So there is a connectivity, and I have to understand that -- as part of the creation, as part of me being made in the image of God.
And I have to understand that my needs sometimes have to be sublimated to other needs.
This "18 minutes" business, I find quite fascinating.
Because in Judaism, the number 18, in Hebrew letters, stands for life -- the word "life."
So, in a sense, the 18 minutes is challenging me to say, "In life, this is what's important in terms of compassion."
But, something else as well: actually, 18 minutes is important.
Because at Passover, when we have to eat unleavened bread, the rabbis say, what is the difference between dough that is made into bread, and dough that is made into unleavened bread, or "matzah"?
And they say "It's 18 minutes."
Because that's how long they say it takes for this dough to become leaven.
What does it mean, "dough becomes leaven"?
It means it gets filled with hot air.
What's matzah?
What's unleavened bread?
You don't get it.
Symbolically, what the rabbis say is that at Passover, what we have to do is try to get rid of our hot air -- our pride, our feeling that we are the most important people in the whole entire world, and that everything should revolve round us.
So we try and get rid of those, and so doing, try to get rid of the habits, the emotions, the ideas that enslave us, that make our eyes closed, give us tunnel vision so we don't see the needs of others -- and free ourselves and free ourselves from that.
And that too is a basis for having compassion, for understanding our place in the world.
Now there is, in Judaism, a gorgeous story of a rich man who sat in synagogue one day.
And, as many people do, he was dozing off during the sermon.
And as he was dozing off, they were reading from the book of Leviticus in the Torah.
And they were saying that in the ancient times in the temple in Jerusalem, the priests used to have bread, which they used to place into a special table in the temple in Jerusalem.
The man was asleep, but he heard the words bread, temple, God, and he woke up.
He said, "God wants bread.
That's it.
God wants bread.
I know what God wants."
And he rushed home.
And after the Sabbath, he made 12 loaves of bread, took them to the synagogue, went into the synagogue, opened the ark and said, "God, I don't know why you want this bread, but here you are."
And he put it in the ark with the scrolls of the Torah.
Then he went home.
The cleaner came into the synagogue.
"Oh God, I'm in such trouble.
I've got children to feed.
My wife's ill.
I've got no money.
What can I do?"
He goes into the synagogue.
"God, will you please help me?
Ah, what a wonderful smell."
He goes to the ark.
He opens the ark.
"There's bread!
God, you've answered my plea.
You've answered my question."
Takes the bread and goes home.
Meanwhile, the rich man thinks to himself, "I'm an idiot.
God wants bread?
God, the one who rules the entire universe, wants my bread?"
He rushes to the synagogue.
"I'll get it out of the ark before anybody finds it."
He goes in there, and it's not there.
And he says, "God, you really did want it.
You wanted my bread.
Next week, with raisins."
This went on for years.
Every week, the man would bring bread with raisins, with all sorts of good things, put it into the ark.
Every week, the cleaner would come.
"God you've answered my plea again."
Take the bread.
Take it home.
Went on until a new rabbi came.
Rabbis always spoil things.
The rabbi came in and saw what was going on.
And he called the two of them to his office.
And he said, you know, "This is what's happening."
And the rich man -- oh, dear -- crestfallen.
"You mean God didn't want my bread?"
And the poor man said, "And you mean God didn't answer my pleas?"
And the rabbi said, "You've misunderstood me.
You've misunderstood totally," he said.
"Of course, what you are doing," he said to the rich man, "is answering God's plea that we should be compassionate.
And God," he said to the poor man, "is answering your plea that people should be compassionate and give."
He looked at the rich man.
He held the rich man's hands and said, "Don't you understand?"
He said, "These are the hands of God."
So that is the way I feel: that I can only try to approach this notion of being compassionate, of understanding that there is a connectivity, that there is a unity in this world; that I want to try and serve that unity, and that I can try and do that by understanding, I hope, trying to understand something of the pain of others; but understanding that there are limits, that people have to bear responsibility for some of the problems that come upon them; and that I have to understand that there are limits to my energy, to the giving I can give.
I have to reevaluate them, try and separate out the material things and my emotions that may be enslaving me, so that I can see the world clearly.
And then I have to try to see in what ways I can make these the hands of God.
And so try to bring compassion to life in this world.
Two twin domes, two radically opposed design cultures.
One is made of thousands of steel parts, the other of a single silk thread.
One is synthetic, the other organic.
One is imposed on the environment, the other creates it.
One is designed for nature, the other is designed by her.
Michelangelo said that when he looked at raw marble, he saw a figure struggling to be free.
The chisel was Michelangelo's only tool.
But living things are not chiseled.
They grow.
And in our smallest units of life, our cells, we carry all the information that's required for every other cell to function and to replicate.
Tools also have consequences.
At least since the Industrial Revolution, the world of design has been dominated by the rigors of manufacturing and mass production.
Assembly lines have dictated a world made of parts, framing the imagination of designers and architects who have been trained to think about their objects as assemblies of discrete parts with distinct functions.
But you don't find homogenous material assemblies in nature.
Take human skin, for example.
Our facial skins are thin with large pores.
Our back skins are thicker, with small pores.
One acts mainly as filter, the other mainly as barrier, and yet it's the same skin: no parts, no assemblies.
It's a system that gradually varies its functionality by varying elasticity.
So here this is a split screen to represent my split world view, the split personality of every designer and architect operating today between the chisel and the gene, between machine and organism, between assembly and growth, between Henry Ford and Charles Darwin.
These two worldviews, my left brain and right brain, analysis and synthesis, will play out on the two screens behind me.
My work, at its simplest level, is about uniting these two worldviews, moving away from assembly and closer into growth.
You're probably asking yourselves: Why now?
Why was this not possible 10 or even five years ago?
We live in a very special time in history, a rare time, a time when the confluence of four fields is giving designers access to tools we've never had access to before.
These fields are computational design, allowing us to design complex forms with simple code; additive manufacturing, letting us produce parts by adding material rather than carving it out; materials engineering, which lets us design the behavior of materials in high resolution; and synthetic biology, enabling us to design new biological functionality by editing DNA.
And at the intersection of these four fields, my team and I create.
Please meet the minds and hands of my students.
We design objects and products and structures and tools across scales, from the large-scale, like this robotic arm with an 80-foot diameter reach with a vehicular base that will one day soon print entire buildings, to nanoscale graphics made entirely of genetically engineered microorganisms that glow in the dark.
Here we've reimagined the mashrabiya, an archetype of ancient Arabic architecture, and created a screen where every aperture is uniquely sized to shape the form of light and heat moving through it.
In our next project, we explore the possibility of creating a cape and skirt -- this was for a Paris fashion show with Iris van Herpen -- like a second skin that are made of a single part, stiff at the contours, flexible around the waist.
Together with my long-term 3D printing collaborator Stratasys, we 3D-printed this cape and skirt with no seams between the cells, and I'll show more objects like it.
This helmet combines stiff and soft materials in 20-micron resolution.
This is the resolution of a human hair.
It's also the resolution of a CT scanner.
That designers have access to such high-resolution analytic and synthetic tools, enables to design products that fit not only the shape of our bodies, but also the physiological makeup of our tissues.
Next, we designed an acoustic chair, a chair that would be at once structural, comfortable and would also absorb sound.
Professor Carter, my collaborator, and I turned to nature for inspiration, and by designing this irregular surface pattern, it becomes sound-absorbent.
We printed its surface out of 44 different properties, varying in rigidity, opacity and color, corresponding to pressure points on the human body.
Its surface, as in nature, varies its functionality not by adding another material or another assembly, but by continuously and delicately varying material property.
But is nature ideal?
Are there no parts in nature?
I wasn't raised in a religious Jewish home, but when I was young, my grandmother used to tell me stories from the Hebrew Bible, and one of them stuck with me and came to define much of what I care about.
As she recounts: "On the third day of Creation, God commands the Earth to grow a fruit-bearing fruit tree."
For this first fruit tree, there was to be no differentiation between trunk, branches, leaves and fruit.
The whole tree was a fruit.
Instead, the land grew trees that have bark and stems and flowers.
The land created a world made of parts.
I often ask myself, "What would design be like if objects were made of a single part?
Would we return to a better state of creation?"
So we looked for that biblical material, that fruit-bearing fruit tree kind of material, and we found it.
The second-most abundant biopolymer on the planet is called chitin, and some 100 million tons of it are produced every year by organisms such as shrimps, crabs, scorpions and butterflies.
We thought if we could tune its properties, we could generate structures that are multifunctional out of a single part.
So that's what we did.
We called Legal Seafood -- (Laughter) we ordered a bunch of shrimp shells, we grinded them and we produced chitosan paste.
By varying chemical concentrations, we were able to achieve a wide array of properties -- from dark, stiff and opaque, to light, soft and transparent.
In order to print the structures in large scale, we built a robotically controlled extrusion system with multiple nozzles.
The robot would vary material properties on the fly and create these 12-foot-long structures made of a single material, 100 percent recyclable.
When the parts are ready, they're left to dry and find a form naturally upon contact with air.
So why are we still designing with plastics?
The air bubbles that were a byproduct of the printing process were used to contain photosynthetic microorganisms that first appeared on our planet 3.5 billion year ago, as we learned yesterday.
Together with our collaborators at Harvard and MIT, we embedded bacteria that were genetically engineered to rapidly capture carbon from the atmosphere and convert it into sugar.
For the first time, we were able to generate structures that would seamlessly transition from beam to mesh, and if scaled even larger, to windows.
A fruit-bearing fruit tree.
Working with an ancient material, one of the first lifeforms on the planet, plenty of water and a little bit of synthetic biology, we were able to transform a structure made of shrimp shells into an architecture that behaves like a tree.
And here's the best part: for objects designed to biodegrade, put them in the sea, and they will nourish marine life; place them in soil, and they will help grow a tree.
The setting for our next exploration using the same design principles was the solar system.
We looked for the possibility of creating life-sustaining clothing for interplanetary voyages.
To do that, we needed to contain bacteria and be able to control their flow.
So like the periodic table, we came up with our own table of the elements: new lifeforms that were computationally grown, additively manufactured and biologically augmented.
I like to think of synthetic biology as liquid alchemy, only instead of transmuting precious metals, you're synthesizing new biological functionality inside very small channels.
It's called microfluidics.
We 3D-printed our own channels in order to control the flow of these liquid bacterial cultures.
In our first piece of clothing, we combined two microorganisms.
The first is cyanobacteria.
It lives in our oceans and in freshwater ponds.
And the second, E. coli, the bacterium that inhabits the human gut.
One converts light into sugar, the other consumes that sugar and produces biofuels useful for the built environment.
Now, these two microorganisms never interact in nature.
In fact, they never met each other.
They've been here, engineered for the first time, to have a relationship inside a piece of clothing.
Think of it as evolution not by natural selection, but evolution by design.
In order to contain these relationships, we've created a single channel that resembles the digestive tract, that will help flow these bacteria and alter their function along the way.
We then started growing these channels on the human body, varying material properties according to the desired functionality.
Where we wanted more photosynthesis, we would design more transparent channels.
This wearable digestive system, when it's stretched end to end, spans 60 meters.
This is half the length of a football field, and 10 times as long as our small intestines.
And here it is for the first time unveiled at TED -- our first photosynthetic wearable, liquid channels glowing with life inside a wearable clothing.
(Applause) Thank you.
Mary Shelley said, "We are unfashioned creatures, but only half made up."
What if design could provide that other half?
What if we could create structures that would augment living matter?
What if we could create personal microbiomes that would scan our skins, repair damaged tissue and sustain our bodies?
Think of this as a form of edited biology.
This entire collection, Wanderers, that was named after planets, was not to me really about fashion per se, but it provided an opportunity to speculate about the future of our race on our planet and beyond, to combine scientific insight with lots of mystery and to move away from the age of the machine to a new age of symbiosis between our bodies, the microorganisms that we inhabit, our products and even our buildings.
I call this material ecology.
To do this, we always need to return back to nature.
By now, you know that a 3D printer prints material in layers.
You also know that nature doesn't.
It grows.
It adds with sophistication.
This silkworm cocoon, for example, creates a highly sophisticated architecture, a home inside which to metamorphisize.
No additive manufacturing today gets even close to this level of sophistication.
It does so by combining not two materials, but two proteins in different concentrations.
One acts as the structure, the other is the glue, or the matrix, holding those fibers together.
And this happens across scales.
The silkworm first attaches itself to the environment -- it creates a tensile structure -- and it then starts spinning a compressive cocoon.
Tension and compression, the two forces of life, manifested in a single material.
In order to better understand how this complex process works, we glued a tiny earth magnet to the head of a silkworm, to the spinneret.
We placed it inside a box with magnetic sensors, and that allowed us to create this 3-dimensional point cloud and visualize the complex architecture of the silkworm cocoon.
However, when we placed the silkworm on a flat patch, not inside a box, we realized it would spin a flat cocoon and it would still healthily metamorphisize.
So we started designing different environments, different scaffolds, and we discovered that the shape, the composition, the structure of the cocoon, was directly informed by the environment.
Silkworms are often boiled to death inside their cocoons, their silk unraveled and used in the textile industry.
We realized that designing these templates allowed us to give shape to raw silk without boiling a single cocoon.
(Applause) They would healthily metamorphisize, and we would be able to create these things.
So we scaled this process up to architectural scale.
We had a robot spin the template out of silk, and we placed it on our site.
We knew silkworms migrated toward darker and colder areas, so we used a sun path diagram to reveal the distribution of light and heat on our structure.
We then created holes, or apertures, that would lock in the rays of light and heat, distributing those silkworms on the structure.
We were ready to receive the caterpillars.
We ordered 6,500 silkworms from an online silk farm.
And after four weeks of feeding, they were ready to spin with us.
We placed them carefully at the bottom rim of the scaffold, and as they spin they pupate, they mate, they lay eggs, and life begins all over again -- just like us but much, much shorter.
Bucky Fuller said that tension is the great integrity, and he was right.
As they spin biological silk over robotically spun silk, they give this entire pavilion its integrity.
And over two to three weeks, 6,500 silkworms spin 6,500 kilometers.
In a curious symmetry, this is also the length of the Silk Road.
The moths, after they hatch, produce 1.5 million eggs.
This could be used for 250 additional pavilions for the future.
So here they are, the two worldviews.
One spins silk out of a robotic arm, the other fills in the gaps.
If the final frontier of design is to breathe life into the products and the buildings around us, to form a two-material ecology, then designers must unite these two worldviews.
Which brings us back, of course, to the beginning.
Here's to a new age of design, a new age of creation, that takes us from a nature-inspired design to a design-inspired nature, and that demands of us for the first time that we mother nature.
Thank you.
(Applause) Thank you very much.
Thank you.
(Applause)