In biodesign, designers collaborate with organisms to create living solutions. Biotechnology allows designers to work at the cellular and molecular level, opening new possibilities. Biodesign tackles challenges such as reducing carbon footprints through creation of sustainable designs. Biodesign offers the possibility of positive sustainability impact through designs like self-healing concrete and compostable structures. At the same time, it is important to use it responsibly and avoid unintended consequences. Biodesign aims to navigate the intersection of environmental degradation and scientific progress to create a better future.
Design is changing.
Designers are bringing their skills to new domains, from interfaces to city planning to possible applications of emerging technology. Designers are often the bridge builders that help experts connect their ideas and inventions with real people and the real world. Design centers the experience and desires of discrete living beings in a whirlwind of technological evolution and urgent environmental, political, and social challenges.
In the fast evolving realm of biotechnology designers are collaborating with scientists in a new field of design called “Biodesign.”
Biodesigners design with life; they collaborate with organisms — microbes and plants — to grow, rather than manufacture.
Biotechnology opens a new scale of design to designers. Designers now can design not just at the infrastructural, city, building, or product level, it is now possible to design at the cellular and molecular level.
Design typically centers its inquiry not around the question of “can we?” but canonically on questions that start with “how might we?” For example:
“How might we reduce the carbon footprint of our manufacturing process while maintaining product quality and affordability?”
“How might we create a more efficient and sustainable transportation system for our city?”
These are design questions, and they center the challenge faced by real people while leaving space for inviting and inspiring creative solutions.
The question of how biotechnology will be applied in our day-to-day lives — and all of the ethical implications that entails — is ripe in the air. Biodesigners see both the opportunity and the responsibility of applying new technology to real challenges.
Biodesign’s opportunity to substantially impact the sustainability of our built environment is a particularly promising one.
A living system is able to perform incredibly minute chemical transformations and do it all at ambient temperatures and without producing toxic waste that would kill itself.
A living system produces structure and function from local resources and with minimal waste.
A living system runs on sunlight not on fossil fuels.
Biodesign is self-healing concrete and living oyster-ecosystem break waters to protect against storm surges. Biodesign is low-carbon compostable mycelium structures and leather without the cow.
Biodesign goes beyond biomimicry — design that is biology-inspired — to the incorporation of living organisms or ecosystems as essential components of the design. This integration of life blurs the boundary between the natural and the built environment. Blurring what we think we know about design.
The responsibilities of Biodesign are also multiple:
How do we use life as a material of design without exploiting it?
How do we manage human taboos and fears around things like microbes and fungi?
How do we work with a technology knowing the likelihood of unpredicted, unintended consequences in any new technology?