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Accepted manuscript

From Optimisation to Care: Ambivalent Ethics in Contemporary Biomaterial Design

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  17 July 2026

K. Pfeiffer*
Affiliation:
Becoming Regenerative Lab, Loughborough University London, London, E203BS, UK
*
*Author for correspondence. Email: k.pfeiffer@lboro.ac.uk
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Abstract

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Biomaterial design is often celebrated as a sustainable alternative to industrial material production, promising to replace extractive processes. Yet, this vision sits uneasily beside critiques that see it reproducing extractive logics through the instrumentalisation of living systems. Drawing on ethnographic research among UK-based biomaterial designers, this paper examines how relationships between biomaterial designers and organisms are lived, negotiated, and ethically charged in practice. It argues that care, far from resolving tensions of exploitation, functions as a mechanism through which hierarchies of value are stabilised, justified, and sometimes unsettled. Through practices of growing, attuning to, and killing organisms, biomaterial designers cultivate what Donna Haraway (2008) calls non-innocent care: an engagement that acknowledges complicity in harm while sustaining responsiveness to more‑than‑human worlds. Attending to these ambivalent, affective, and creative entanglements reveals how care in biodesign operates simultaneously as an ethical aspiration, a condition of production, and a site where ecological promise and capitalist value production intertwine unevenly.

Information

Type
Full Paper: Biodesign Conference
Creative Commons
Creative Common License - CCCreative Common License - BYCreative Common License - NCCreative Common License - ND
This is an Open Access article, distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives licence (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/), which permits non-commercial re-use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is unaltered and is properly cited. The written permission of Cambridge University Press must be obtained for commercial re-use or in order to create a derivative work.
Copyright
© The Author(s), 2026. Published by Cambridge University Press