Pirjo Kääriäinen on the future of (bio)materials

Climate crisis is the main reason for our current designer-in-residence Pirjo Kääriäinen’s practice. She has dedicated her career to materials, and more specifically creating better and more sustainable ones for the future. During her residency in New York, she was invited to speak at Healthy Materials Lab’s symposium Material Health: Design Frontiers. In conjunction with the symposium, the FCINY hosted a workshop on nanocellulose and circular economies. 

Much of Kääriäinen’s work as a facilitator revolves around biomaterials, which she considers to be the best option for our material future. At this rate our material usage is exceeding the limit of sustainable consumption to a point where resource scarcity and even more severe environmental problems than our current ones will become a reality, she explains. Most of the UN’s Sustainable Development Goals are somehow linked to materials and the realization of these requires hard work.

Most of the materials we have today are derived from fossil fuels and are often hard to recycle. As we cannot fully stop material usage, there is a need to develop more sustainable materials for the future. Bio-based materials seem to be the best option, as biomass is renewable. In addition to transforming biomass into new materials, plenty of experiments relating to biofabrication, the growing of materials with microbes, yeasts or fungi, are happening around the world. In their talk at the Healthy Materials Lab’s symposium Material Health: Design Frontiers Kääriäinen and her colleague Tapani Vuorinen, Professor of Wood Chemistry at Aalto University, argued that it is fully possible to replace synthetic polymers with biomass. 

Kääriäinen and Vuorinen both work with CHEMARTS, an interdisciplinary student program at the Aalto University in Finland, focused on the development of new bio-based materials. Kääriäinen is also a facilitator at Ioncell, a technology that turns cellulose into fiber. Both these projects relate to creating new materials from the forest, which is Finland’s main natural resource. Much of the work is focused on nano- or microcellulose, a challenging material that consists of 97–98 % water but is very versatile. Much of biomaterial research focuses on reinventing and rethinking traditional, natural materials into new ways of using them. 

Another key challenge for the future, alongside developing new materials, is the creation of sustainable production processes that – as in nature – do not create waste. In a workshop hosted by the FCINY, Kääriäinen and Vuorinen demonstrated the different stages of deriving cellulose from wood, manipulating cellulose into fibers for making fabric, all done in a closed-loop system.

Kääriäinen stresses that creating new materials can be a solution to multiple issues, but it is key to prevent causing new problems in the process. It takes a holistic approach and cross-disciplinary collaboration to make change happen.


Kääriäinen’s key message is hope for the future of biomaterials. In the coming years, she thinks we will see plenty of innovation related to bio-based materials, their production methods and waste management. In Finland alone, there are five new technologies being developed on how to produce textiles out of biomass. “It is time for everyone to get interested in materials and material flows,” Kääriäinen concludes.

All photographs by Kate Ryan.

SUBSCRIBE TO OUR NEWSLETTER TO STAY UP TO DATE ON OUR LATEST PROJECTS AND EVENTS.