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 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.

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.

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.

Current funeral materials prioritise preservation over ecological integration, perpetuating extractive practices that damage environments while reinforcing cultural death denial. Extending the emerging trajectory of regenerative death care, this paper proposes regenerative biomaterials using post-mortem resource recovery via alkaline hydrolysis (water cremation). Effluent burial vessels and bone-ash tree guards demonstrate life-centred design methodologies, positioning soil ecosystems and native vegetation as design stakeholders. The research reveals how biomaterials designed for ecological wellbeing create regenerative infrastructure addressing both human grief and landscape healing needs. Biodesign materials are designed to nurture soil microbiomes and support native plant establishment over 24-month decomposition cycles to challenge industrial death care’s resistance to natural cycles. This work contributes a methodological deepening of regenerative death care beyond harm reduction, establishing methodologies for designing with more-than-human agencies through speculative material experimentation. The project reimagines death not as waste requiring disposal, but as a resource that contributes to ecosystem regeneration.

This research explores how bio-based materials might support everyday intimate care in non-medicalized ways. During the transition to motherhood, reproductive bodies undergo profound changes that disrupt bodily environments including the vaginal microbiome, skin barrier, and urinary tract. To surface these fluctuations, we explored pH-sensing materials from agar, carboxymethyl cellulose, and anthocyanin that indicate the pH of vaginal discharge, sweat, and urine via color change. Through co-creation with design researchers, we identified three dimensions for designing maternal care artefacts: ambiguity, visibility, and lenience. Combining material qualities, microbiology and feminist design approaches, we created three design provocations that integrate these materials into everyday care scenarios. Our work contributes to the social dimension of biodesign by nuancing bio-based material exploration for diverse human experiences and foregrounding bodily materials as integral to biodesign processes and outcomes, and further highlighting human–microbiome sensibilities, resisting medicalization of bodies, and materializing feminist critiques of self-tracking.

Biofabrication practices in Biodesign commonly rely on preformed cultures, standardized strains, and established protocols, often without critically addressing their provenance and ecological implications. This tension is particularly evident in SCOBY cultivation, where microbial cultures are frequently exchanged as fragments with uncertain origin. In response, and informed by Regenerative Ecologies frameworks, that advocate for ecological literacy and situated engagement with living systems, this contribution addresses how SCOBY can be grown ‘from scratch’. The investigation draws on a doctoral study engaging with acetic fermentation practices in Thailand and Germany, including apprenticeships, foraging, and solo experimentation with vernacular techniques. These experiences demonstrated that SCOBY can emerge from situated ecologies, highlighting the adaptive and relational nature of this microbial process. Building on these insights, this paper introduces an open-source method enabling practitioners to grow SCOBYs through engagement with situated plants and microbes. From these insights, Situated Growing Design is proposed as an emerging trajectory and practical approach for translating regenerative aspirations into growing material practices that foster closer engagements with bioregional configurations.

While tea is a central substrate in SCOBY cultivation, its status as an imported plant material in Europe raises ecological and procedural implications that may conflict with Biodesign’s aims of fostering regeneration and biodiversity. This paper frames medium design as a foundational yet underexplored site for integrating alternative substrates into growing design practices. Building on systematic laboratory experimentation, this contribution presents two open-source protocols that support parallel testing of alternative plants into SCOBY nourishing media, enabling both quantitative assessment of biomass production and qualitative evaluation of material expressions. One protocol is grounded in controlled laboratory procedures, while the second is adapted for non-sterile, resource-diverse environments, increasing accessibility across practitioners with varying expertise and infrastructure. The present exploratory research demonstrates how this methodology integrates quantitative and qualitative insights, enabling the evaluation of customised medium protocols and the emergence of novel SCOBY material expressions. In doing so, it supports the integration of biological and epistemological diversity into growing design practices and opens up new research trajectories in plant-based Biodesign and regenerative material cultivation.

We present Opto-chromogenesis, a projection-mapping framework for spatiotemporal design of growth, photosynthesis, and pigmentation in bioprinted photosynthetic living materials. Extrusion-printed hydrogels containing the cyanobacterium Fremyella diplosiphon are illuminated with calibrated patterns of light that allow us to design and regulate macroscale biomass distribution and the Complementary Chromatic Acclimation of the bacteria. The platform combines projector-based, spectrally tunable light delivery with 3Dscan guided geometric registration to impose defined photon irradiance on complex constructs. Experiments show that self-shading drives pigment shifts, lateral light intensity gradients produce differentiated growth, and targeted UV laser exposure can suppress growth, and projection mapping provides a novel method for modulating growth and color change. By outlining projector selection criteria, analysis of lab-scale growth studies and non-invasive monitoring techniques that demonstrate parallel screening of illumination conditions, the paper establishes a basis for creating a photosynthetic architectural material that can adapt its color to changing lighting condition and capture CO2.

The concept of protopia, coined by Kevin Kelly, was introduced as an alternative to utopian and dystopian thinking, framing progress as incremental improvement rather than an idealized end state (Kelly 2016). In The Inevitable, Kelly describes protopia as a condition of continual becoming—futures that are “better today than yesterday”— emerging largely through cumulative technological development. More recent reinterpretations, including those advanced by Monika Bielskyte and the Protopian Futures collective, have expanded protopia beyond technological emergence toward pluralistic, ethical, and culturally grounded imaginaries (Bielskyte 2021). This work productively recenters values, inclusion, and alternative worldviews, while often operating upstream of technical specification, leaving open questions about how such imaginaries interface with concrete scientific research trajectories, deployment constraints, and governance mechanisms.

Bradbaori is a speculative architectural intervention and a thought experiment that attempts to repair the watershed in Los Angeles by reimagining the city’s famed landmark - the Bradbury Building – as a stepwell or baori. As climate change accelerates, Los Angeles is increasingly experiencing extreme swings between drought and heavy rainfall, a phenomenon scientists describe as hydroclimate whiplash (Lin II 2025). Intense storms follow periods of prolonged dryness, causing flood warnings and wildfire seasons. Yet much of this sudden influx of rainwater is lost as runoff, rushing through urban channels and out into the Pacific without being captured. The future of water access in Los Angeles is therefore directly tied to reconciling this drought-and-deluge cycle. Building resilience against hydroclimate whiplash requires rethinking how large-scale engineering and infrastructure projects engage the city’s watershed, shifting from reactive flood control measures like the concretization of the LA River, toward systems that can absorb, store, and steward water during moments of excess. Represented through a short film, Bradbaori is a worldbuilding research project that explores ways to build resilience.