Future Human Visionaries #4— Zoe Laughlin on emerging materials

Welcome to Visionaries, a podcast dedicated to futurological thinkers brought to you by Future Human and the V&A. We seek out people who are reimagining innovation in their field, and ask them to apply their intelligence to emerging trends. Zoe Laughlin is an artist and the co-founder of the Materials Library at University College London (UCL). She is also the co-founder of UCL’s ‘Institute of Making’, which researches emerging materials, and the manufacturing processes that employ these, such as 3D printing. She describes how the changing properties of artificial materials are seeing scientists create objects with improbable qualities: extreme elasticity, apparent indestructibility, refractive ‘invisibility’ and even an ability to self-repair damage. How rapidly will such developments in materials science transform the industrial sphere, consumer culture and our basic understanding of the physical objects that surround us? And might emerging materials with similar qualities be used to fortify the human body? Presented by Ben Beaumont-Thomas.