The Innovation Hidden in What We Overlook | Amanda Parkes | TEDxUWMadison

Amanda Parkes has built a career at the intersection of the unexpected, wearable tech, fashion, bioengineering, and biomaterials, and the one thing that connects it all is a fascination with what gets left behind. In this talk, she takes us underground (literally) into a Siberian carbon nanotube factory, a Maldivian coral reef, and a landfill to show how the most overlooked spaces hold the most transformative ideas. From reinventing the high heel with SpaceX engineers, to turning sargassum blooms and agricultural waste into next-generation textiles, to building "breakfast cereal for microbes" through her company Mothership Materials, Parkes makes the case that the margins are where real innovation lives, and that shifting your perspective on waste, whether material or conceptual, is the most powerful design tool we have. Dr. Amanda Parkes is a material technologist and fashion scientist with over 25 years of experience in fashion innovation, sustainability, wearable technology, interaction design and smart materials spanning research, development, and product commercialization for start ups and major tech and fashion companies. She is currently the CTO of Mothership Materials, creating high value material streams from agriwaste streams using breakthrough molecular separation technology. She was previously the founding scientist and Chief Innovation Officer of Pangaia, a material science company and fashion brand launching first to market material innovations. Past career highlights include Chief of Technology and Research at Manufacture NY, founder of fashion tech studio Skinteractive, co-founder of Bodega Algae, a microalgae photobioreator company and teaching positions at Columbia, Harvard and NYU. She received a PhD & M.S. in Tangible Media from the MIT Media Lab and a B.S. in Mechanical Engineering and a B.A. in Art History from Stanford University. She is an international speaker & lecturer including TED, COP, CES, WEF, the Vogue Innovation Prize, the World Biomarkets Summit, and the New York Times International Luxury Conference. She has been named to the Business of Fashion 500 People Shaping the Global Fashion Industry, Vanity Fair’s 8 Wildest Women of Silicon Valley, The Glossy 50: Fashion’s Digital Front Runners, a Verizon Pioneer of Humanability and as one of Alleywatch’s 10 Most Influential People in Fashion Technology. This talk was given at a TEDx event using the TED conference format but independently organized by a local community. Learn more at https://www.ted.com/tedx