This paper investigates the feasibility of using mycelium colonization to upcycle household waste, specifically cat litter and spent coffee grounds, into large-scale screening elements through 3D printing and toolpath-informed design. The study introduces a composite that repurposes cat litter, a household waste that is typically sent directly to landfill, as a substrate for fungal growth within additively manufactured forms. By eliminating casting molds and employing continuous fractal toolpaths, the fabrication approach reduces secondary material waste while enabling space-filling, intricate geometries with parametrically controlled spacing that supports mycelium growth. This process extends existing biofabrication precedents through increasing geometric complexity. The research develops a repeatable workflow integrating material circularity, mycelium colonization, 3D printing, and computational fractal design to support scalable biofabrication. Prototypes were produced and evaluated at three incremental scales: 9 cm, 15.24 cm, and 22.86 cm. This work contributes to the biodesign community by demonstrating a resource-efficient method for transforming cat litter into biodegradable screening panels within a circular material system.

BIOARC (Bioregional Mineralisation with Agricultural Resources for Construction) explores how agricultural residues and regional microbial resources can be combined to create low-impact construction materials rooted in local ecological contexts. Working across four European bioregions, the project investigates wheat in Poland, sunflower in France, hops in Germany, and rice in Italy as feedstocks for the development of construction boards, insulation materials, acoustic panels and partition wall systems.

The project combines agricultural by-products with biomineralisation processes, in which microorganisms induce the formation of calcium carbonate minerals that act as natural binders within plant-based composites. Alongside biomass resources, BIOARC has isolated mineralising bacterial strains from limestone-rich and calcium-rich environments within each participating region, establishing a bioregional approach in which both material feedstocks and microbial agents originate from the same local context.

The demonstration presents a biomineralised construction prototypes alongside the agricultural residues, bacterial cultures and microscopy imagery that underpin its development. Together, these artefacts communicate the transformation from regional agricultural by-products and environmental microbial communities into construction-oriented materials. By linking agriculture, biotechnology and construction, BIOARC demonstrates how place-based material systems can support circular value chains, reduce reliance on conventional mineral-intensive products, and contribute to more resilient and regenerative approaches to the built environment.

Chitosan, derived from chitin-rich biological waste streams, offers a compelling basis for bio-based textile materials but remains underexplored as a primary fibre. This paper presents a material-driven investigation into the wet-spinning of chitosan filaments and their translation into textile and design contexts. A modular wet-spinning system was developed to bridge laboratory-scale polymer processing and textile-scale experimentation. Process parameters were tuned to achieve continuous filament formation, and mechanical characterisation indicates properties suitable for weaving and knitting under adapted conditions. Embedded within a biodesign framework, the study positions mechanical limitations not as deficits but as active parameters shaping textile construction and formfinding. By translating fibre-level material behaviour into woven structures and speculative prototypes, the work demonstrates how wet-spun chitosan can operate as a design material at the interface of chemistry, engineering and fashion, contributing to emerging practices in bio-based and regenerative textile design.

Biodesign education increasingly engages with living and bio-based materials whose temporal, relational, and ecological properties challenge established modes of material archiving and teaching. Conventional material libraries, oriented toward stabilisation and preservation, are poorly equipped to address growth, contamination, and decay as constitutive material processes. This paper proposes a reconceptualisation of material libraries as living material archives: dynamic epistemic infrastructures that foreground transformation, care, and finitude rather than control. Drawing on feminist technoscience and material culture studies, the paper develops three conceptual lenses – cross-contamination, sympoiesis, and the website as garden – to examine how material and digital archives can support situated knowledge production in biodesign education. These perspectives are grounded in a detailed case study of the Living Library, a hybrid analogue–digital teaching project developed at the Karlsruhe University of Arts and Design. The paper demonstrates how temporary, process-oriented archives can operationalise ecological responsibility, disciplinary openness, and regenerative learning practices.

This work investigates how ecological literacy and nature connectedness can be fostered in children aged 8–12 through engagement with a toolkit for place-based nature education. Children growing up in urban environments often lack access to nature, leading to lower ecological literacy and feeling less connected to the natural world. To help children reconnect with nature, we propose situating nature education in local environments, facilitated by a toolkit developed through a research-through-design approach that combines methods and perspectives from material-driven, participatory, and more-than-human design. Material explorations and a workshop with primary school children informed the conceptualisation of the toolkit, which invites children to shape mycelium-receptive artefacts, place them in local environments, and observe their transformation over time. Using clay as a substitute material, the shaping and placing activities were tested with 71 primary school children across four classes, alongside imaginative and reflective activities to encourage empathy and sensitivity toward fungi. Findings suggest that the shaping, placing, and reflecting activities can support ecological literacy and caring relationships with non-human organisms, indicating the potential of place-based, more-than-human learning tools to enrich nature education and reconnect children with nature.

Mycelium-based composites are part of an emerging group of biofabricated materials with potential for sustainable construction and interior applications. Their properties depend on fungal species, substrate composition, incubation conditions, and post-processing strategies, yet the relative influence and controllability of these parameters remain fragmented across the literature. This review systematically analyses 46 peer-reviewed studies to evaluate how externally controllable fabrication parameters affect mechanical, thermal, acoustic, and hygroscopic performance. The biofabrication workflow is structured into pre-processing, incubation, and post-processing stages, with particular emphasis on incubation as an underexplored design domain. While species and substrate strongly determine baseline performance, environmental and physical parameters applied during growth, such as moisture, temperature, aeration, and mechanical confinement, suggest potential opportunities for dynamic property tuning. By proposing incubation as an emerging opportunity for material programming, this review outlines pathways toward digitally controlled, functionally graded mycelium composites, contributing a structured framework for integrating biological growth into biodesign workflows.

Most research on mycelium-based composites (MBC) focuses on the growth and properties of pure mycelium materials (PMM), engineered living materials (ELM), and biofoams. Using the basic method patented by Chris Maurer and team for MycoHAB, which we call high-compression mycofabrication (HCM), we turn spent mushroom substrate into mycobricks to understand and improve their material properties towards structural building. Compressive tests of HCM coupons of Ganoderma lucidum (reishi) fabricated at 20-tons and Pleurotus ostreatus (oyster) fabricated at 20-tons and 30-tons of force reveal that oyster outperforms reishi in compressive stress, reversing what is commonly known about these species when tested as biofoams or PMMs. Whereas Maurer has achieved 26 MPa with reishi, our median for oyster at 20-tons is 34.95 MPa and at 30-tons is 46.1 MPa measured at ∼70% deformation levels, comparable to values accepted for medium and high strength concrete (but at much lower deformations). Furthermore, for oyster HCM it appears that higher compression during fabrication produces higher compressive stress results during testing, even possibly strain hardening behavior.

While Engineered Living Materials (ELMs) are increasingly investigated for technical viability, discussion of their broader societal implications remains limited. To address this gap, we conducted a multidisciplinary co-design workshop centred on a self-healing biomineralised bacterial cellulose (BMBC). Twenty participants from biodesign, bio-nanoscience, materials science, and engineering worked in six groups through a three-phase process: 1) generating application concepts, 2) designing how self-healing would unfold and be experienced, and 3) reflecting on ecological, social, economic, and future implications. Workshop outcomes and discussions were analysed using thematic analysis. Participants framed self-healing not merely as functional repair but as temporal, expressive, and relational transformation, emphasizing personalisation, regeneration, trust, and systemic embedding. The study demonstrates how early, material-led design exploration can surface societal dimensions before technical pathways stabilise. We argue that multidisciplinary co-design supports more responsible ELM development by revealing how such materials may function, be interpreted, and acquire meaning in everyday contexts.

Biodesign projects often stall between promising material prototypes—bacterial cellulose textiles, mycelium composites, algae-derived materials—and scalable, economically viable production systems. This gap emerges from fragmented decision-making across material design, cultivation processes, and techno-economic evaluation, since each domain operates with distinct metrics, vocabularies, and decision thresholds—making cross-domain reasoning difficult to formalize and transfer. We present agents.design.bio, a decision-support framework that enables students, designers, educators, and founders to engage interdisciplinary expertise through structured reasoning. The platform offers a unified conversational interface in which users interact with domainspecific agents: Designer (@designer), Farmer (@farmer), and CFO (@cfo). Together, they operate on a shared knowledge base, manufacturing datasets, and techno-economic models. Rather than generating speculative ideas, the agents evaluate user-defined scenarios and highlight trade-offs, sensitivities, and risks—making cross-domain dependencies explicit and testable. The demonstration walks through four phases— material evaluation, process optimization, scale-up stress testing, and trade-off analysis—reframing scale-up as a structured learning process rather than a late-stage financial constraint.

Bacterial Cellulose (BC) offers significant potential in biodesign, yet its sensitivity to water and aging phenomena critically condition its reliability over time. This study investigates the interconnection between hydrophobic stabilization strategies and long-term durability through the comparative analysis of two case studies in the upholstery furniture sector, both of them previously developed using Material Driven Design (MDD) methodology and Do-It-Yourself (DIY) approach: 1) a surface stabilization treatment of BC with beeswax and 2) a bio-hybrid integration with fungal mycelium. Through phenomenological observation conducted 18 months after production, the paper analyzes how these different technical responses influence the trajectory of aesthetic and mechanical degradation of BC, identifying promising conditions and relevant criteria that hydrophobicity optimization may need to address for effective aging management and future industrial validation. The findings contribute to understanding the relationship between stabilization strategies and long-term material behavior, fostering the transition from designing for ephemerality to a vision based on the permanence and durability of grown biomaterials.

Biodesign education increasingly incorporates living materials into studio teaching, yet biomineralisation processes such as Microbially Induced Calcium Carbonate Precipitation (MICP) remain largely confined to laboratory contexts. Typically framed as a protocol requiring sterility, specialised equipment, and microbiological expertise, MICP is rarely positioned as a design-operable material system. This paper argues that the gap lies not in feasibility, but in how biological complexity is structured for studio engagement.

Drawing on workshops conducted at Elisava Barcelona School of Design and Engineering, the study adapts MICP to unsterile studio conditions and develops a Boundary Conditions Framework through analysis of student fabrication decisions and material outcomes. The framework identifies outer, permeability, and material boundary conditions as spatial and material variables that regulate mineral formation. Rather than reproducing laboratory optimisation, students engaged microbial processes through mould design, interface permeability, and aggregate configuration, demonstrating a transferable strategy for studio-based biodesign education

Biodesign has gained prominence over the past two decades yet remains conceptually hazy and institutionally unsettled, positioned between biology, material science, and design, with no shared vocabulary, clear entry routes, or agreement on who a biodesigner is. As biodesign enters universities, there is a risk that standardisation may erase the experimental, subversive cultures through which the field emerged. This paper combines a focused literature review with an online survey of selfidentified biodesigners and autoethnographic accounts of teaching in improvised studios, kitchensaslabs, and hybrid digitalfabrication spaces. The analysis profiles biodesigners as highly educated yet largely self-taught practitioners who rely on tinkering, informal infrastructures, and collaborations rather than standard bioscience curricula, revealing tensions between institutional demands for safety, learning outcomes, employability, and students’ experiences of open-ended, engagement with living systems. The paper proposes biodesign literacy as a framework that supports standardisation while recognising risk and uncertainty as legitimate sites of biological learning.

This study investigates Grow-It-Yourself (GIY) biomaterial kits as tools for supporting material experience in design education. A GIY kit incorporating algae-, bacteria-, and fungi-based materials was developed through iterative material tinkering. The GIY kit was investigated for its potential in a workshop with 18 senior industrial design students, whose interactions were captured through surveys and a design concept assignment. Findings reveal that the biomaterials derived from three organisms produced distinct and contrasting sensory profiles: algae derived materials were the most positively received, bacterial cellulose elicited the most complex response, pairing tactile interest with strong sensory discomfort, and mycelium materials were predominantly described as organic. Behavioral attributions reflected participants’ awareness of material characteristics and prompted relational modes of thinking. The study demonstrates that GIY kits can function as a mediator for material experience, capable of activating sensory perception, meaning attribution, and design ideation simultaneously in educational settings.

Biodesign is an emerging field that brings together a wide range of practices, connecting fundamental research, applied sciences, and creative approaches. Within this spectrum, a tension exists between instrumental uses of biological processes and a growing sensibility that acknowledges the agency of living materials and organisms. This study proposes Reconciliation as a guiding concept for biodesign, understood not as a metaphorical gesture but as a concrete and plural perspective that promotes species coexistence and conservation. We contextualise Reconciliation through Restoration, Reciprocity, and Relationality as distinctive yet interconnected design and ecological principles that extend beyond normative human exchange, promoting multispecies coexistence. Through a mix of reflexive thematic synthesis and the analysis of selected case studies derived from the authors’ own projects, employed as a practice-based methodological inquiry and primary source of empirical and reflective insight, we explore how Reconciliation is enacted and experienced in practice. Finally, we propose a conceptual framework to address Reconciliation in biodesign, offering guiding concepts and key questions to discuss and support ecological flourishing in multispecies collaborations.

This study explores the potential of mycelium as a biofabricated coating for textiles through an interdisciplinary collaboration between designers and scientists. The research begins with exploratory biotinkering, investigating mycelium as a textile coating to understand how textile substrates can function as bioreceptive surfaces for living organisms. Building on these initial observations, interdisciplinary collaborations were activated to further refine the experimental process and to test selected properties of the mycelium-based bio-coating, including abrasion resistance and wetting behaviour. The results demonstrate that mycelium can act as a transformative agent as textile coating, influencing both material performance and enabling new aesthetic expressions grounded in biological growth processes, opening

Indoor mould growth remains a persistent challenge in UK housing, affecting occupant health and building performance. Current mitigation strategies are largely reactive or dependent on energy-intensive HVAC systems, underscoring the need for low-energy, materially driven design approaches. This paper presents Searamica, a biodesign-led retrofit framework integrating biomaterial development, environmental simulation, computational modelling, and robotic fabrication to address mould growth as an architectural and material systems problem. Computational Fluid Dynamics (CFD) and a modified Valtion teknillinen tutkimuskeskus (VTT) mould growth model generate spatial environmental fields representing mould risk conditions, which, integrated with material properties, inform morphological generation and material distribution rules. These rules guide the deployment of a hygroscopic, antifungal seaweed-based biomaterial (SBM) within a functionally graded wall system. Material testing indicates a Moisture Buffering Value (MBV) of 2.14 g·m⁻2·%RH⁻¹. NORDTEST room scale simulations show relative humidity (RH) increases limited to 3.75% compared to gypsum assemblies. The project establishes a transferable and transdisciplinary framework for designing site-specific, fabricable retrofit interventions using biomaterials to mitigate mould growth and support passive indoor moisture regulation.

Biodesign education increasingly seeks to integrate design practice with the life sciences through interdisciplinary, hands-on approaches. However, few teaching models show how living-material prototyping can be embedded across studio-based design education and biosafety-level laboratory environments. This paper presents Living Pigments, a pedagogical framework developed in the first year of a two-year biodesign master programme. The unit introduces algae-based prototyping through a design-led approach that emphasises experimentation, collaboration, and ethical engagement. Through lectures, laboratory workshops, biofabrication sessions, and studio tutorials, students learn to cultivate and design with pigment-producing algae as active collaborators rather than inert materials. Informed by Ron Wakkary’s concept of designing-with, the framework foregrounds non-human agency, care, maintenance, and uncertainty. Drawing on selected student case studies, the paper demonstrates how algae-based prototyping supports interdisciplinary thinking, technical confidence, and reflective practice, offering a practice-based model that bridges studio and laboratory learning in biodesign education.

As the field of biodesign has grown, so has the number of spaces dedicated to biodesign practice. However, little attention has been paid to the ongoing efforts of those who keep these spaces functioning on a day-to-day basis. Based on tour-and-interviews with 19 biodesign lab managers (LMs) across European biodesign laboratories (BioLabs), this paper aims to develop an initial understanding of what biodesign LMs’ everyday work entails. The findings highlight three key dimensions of biodesign LMs’ work and surface how they hold together the interdisciplinary and emergent nature of the biodesign field. In this respect, keeping BioLabs ‘alive’ also entails maintaining conditions under which biodesign LMs themselves can effectively perform their roles. This study contributes to better supporting, communicating, acknowledging, and making resilient the current, emerging and future BioLabs and professionals in similar roles, as well as to open up new opportunities for biodesign research.

This paper presents the pedagogical frame of the Master’s Programme Design Ecologies, a design-driven higher education initiative that integrates ecoliteracy principles and relational approaches to material cultures, striving to create a design practice that is life-affirming. Responding to the ecological crises shaped by extractive, anthropocentric design paradigms, the programme cultivates an ecocentric orientation grounded in our interdependence with other-than-human beings, systems thinking, and political awareness. Drawing on ecoliteracy principles, design is explored as a practice that shapes and is shaped by multispecies relations, material flows, and planetary boundaries. This is examined through two student projects and the conceptual work guiding the programme.

The paper argues that reorienting design education toward ecological relationality contributes critically to the field of Biodesign by proposing situated responses that acknowledge not only the biological aspects of design, but also issues of power, cohabitation, and the ethical responsibilities of intervening in complex ecological systems.

Climate instability and socio-ecological inequality demand design methodologies that integrate material, biological, and cultural systems. While Regenerative, Participatory, and biodesign have expanded the scope of design practice, they often lack approaches for integrating material development within culturally situated contexts. This paper introduces Material Re-Mixing, a novel biodesign methodology grounded in place- and culture-based material investigation, biological integration, and participatory co-creation.

The methodology is developed through a case study in Ulaanbaatar, Mongolia, focusing on bio-composite innovation for traditional wool felt gers. Combining textile testing, biomaterial experimentation, ethnographic research, and stakeholder workshops, the case study demonstrates how mycelium-based composites can enhance performance while maintaining cultural continuity, and how culturally grounded material investigation and innovation can catalyse systemic healing at the community level.

Material Re-Mixing contributes a transferable system that foregrounds material agency, cultural knowledge, and circular biological processes, offering a pathway toward more situated approaches to ‘wicked’ socio-ecological challenges (Rittel and Webber, 1973).