Tec de Monterrey Students Explore Celium™

At Polybion, we work with global brands, international designers, and leading design platforms to bring cultivated materials into real-world applications. But building a new material future also requires creating opportunities for the next generation of designers to work directly with these materials—to understand them not only as concepts, but as tools for making.

Fourth-semester Design students from Tecnológico de Monterrey, Campus Sonora Norte, recently worked with Celium™, Polybion’s Premium Cultivated Cellulose, as part of an applied material exploration project.

Through direct experimentation, the students studied the material’s texture, flexibility, resistance, color, assembly possibilities, and relationship with the body. They cut, folded, combined, tested, and adjusted Celium™ to understand how its properties could inform both form and function.

Their regional context in Sonora also provided a relevant lens for the exercise. In a territory where resource scarcity, adaptation, and resilience are part of the broader environmental reality, the project invited students to reconsider how materials are selected, transformed, and used—and how biologically produced materials can expand the possibilities available to contemporary design.

The resulting collection includes bags, wallets, visors, belts, fasteners, wearable pieces, and accessories developed for different forms of use. Some projects highlight the visual and tactile qualities of Celium™, while others combine it with textiles, hardware, and complementary materials to create new structures and functions.

More than a presentation of finished objects, the collection reflects a process of material discovery: observing, testing, making mistakes, refining, and making again.

As the Tecnológico de Monterrey team reflected:

“The exercise allowed students to understand that material innovation also requires sensitivity and environmental awareness. For this new generation of designers, working with biomaterials opens the possibility of imagining objects that respond to contemporary needs while reducing our dependence on animal-derived materials and higher-impact processes.”

For Polybion, collaborations like this are part of making material innovation accessible beyond the laboratory and the industry floor. They give emerging designers the opportunity to develop their own understanding of cultivated materials and begin imagining applications that have not yet been defined.

The future of materials will not be shaped by technology alone. It will also be shaped by the people who learn how to question, interpret, and transform them.