This research presents a transdisciplinary exploration of jagua (Genipa americana) as a natural chromatic agent in biobased materials. Bridging design, materials science, and bioengineering, the study evaluates how jagua extract and powder influence color formation and perceptual variation under different light conditions. Large-format films were fabricated incorporating varying concentrations of liquid dye and particulate jagua. The resulting materials were analyzed for chromatic behavior under warm, neutral, and cool light spectra. Laser-cut morphological interventions further examined how structural modification mediates light transmission and viewer interaction. Results demonstrate that jagua generates dynamic chromatic responses rather than a fixed color system, revealing a condition of “color inconstancy” in which perception shifts according to environmental and morphological variables. This research contributes to emerging biobased color systems and proposes a methodological framework for integrating plant-derived knowledge into experimental material design.

Modern construction is a major driver of environmental harm and global carbon emissions. ExoGarden is an architectural prototype that reframes cultivation as infrastructure: a modular system for rapid, local growth of edible plants under strict resource constraints. Drawing on space-farming research and bioregenerative life-support principles, it explores closed-loopinspired cultivation in which nutrients and organic “waste” become inputs—supporting food production while reducing dependency on external supply chains. ExoGarden is designed for remote, resource-deprived, or climate-stressed contexts on Earth and in space, and proposes environmental remediation as an architectural function rather than an added feature. This pictorial communicates the project’s formal language, system logic, and exhibition-based prototyping through speculative scenarios, renders, and installation elements, outlining a life-promoting strategy where shelter, food, and ecology are co-designed. Originating as a master’s dissertation, ExoGarden received the Bio Art and Design Award in 2023 and was developed into an installation at MU Hybrid Art House.

This paper presents Ambassador Trees, a biodesign research project that explores how plant sensing, environmental monitoring, and artificial intelligence can be reconfigured to support new forms of human-nature communication. Rather than treating plants and ecosystems as passive objects of measurement or optimization, the project reframes trees as localized ecological representatives whose physiological and environmental signals can be translated into interpretable, dialogic forms. Drawing on recent advances in plant sensors, environmental sensing networks, and Artificial Intelligence, this paper synthesizes existing technical research through a non-human-centered and speculative design lens. The work grounds this framework in a series of exploratory physical prototypes, Treeborgs, that embody ideas of interspecies interaction, distributed sensing, and AI-mediated interpretation. Together, these contributions demonstrate how sensing and AI might function not as extractive instruments, but as interpretive media that foster attentiveness, empathy, and ecological responsibility, offering a pathway toward more relational technological engagements with the living world.

Microbially induced carbonate precipitation (MICP) offers a low-energy, carbon-efficient alternative to traditional mineral material production, yet its integration into digital fabrication for architectural applications remains limited. This research presents a design-to-biofabrication workflow that combines computational geometry, robotic extrusion-based 3D printing, and MICP. The study introduces a methodology that uses porosity, surface-area-to-volume (SA/V) ratio, interlayer connectivity, and overhang capacity as coupled design parameters that balance biocementation requirements and fabrication constraints. Through iterative testing of Triply Periodic Minimal Surfaces (TPMS) geometries, an “Optimized Unit” was developed and refined to improve printability and biomineralization efficiency. The workflow is validated through a 1 m2 architectural partition wall demonstrator that illustrates the potential for modular biomineralized architectural components. The results show that calibrated geometric control enables stable extrusion while enhancing mineral distribution, demonstrating a pathway toward architecturally scaled bio-fabricated mineral components.

This pictorial presents an accessible workshop format titled “Living Collage”, which explores “livingness” in biodesign with non-specialists. As a research through design approach, grounded in embodied making, 8 participants collaboratively create living artefacts and discuss their implications for the field of biodesign, by using enlarged Petri dishes with an agar base, local natural materials, and printed images. Through the use of atmosphere and multi-sensory cues, a regular classroom is transformed to carry the feeling of working with something living, and a speculative narrative, along with related verbal semantic stimuli, guides the making process. The workshop was documented through photography and observation, which display curiosity, dialogical making, and reflection. The collective discussion was audio-recorded, transcribed, and manually coded by clustering emergent terms into a vocabulary map. Among others, the findings bring up themes around locality, crafts, and relation, but also show tension in themes of discomfort, control, and questions around safety.

Living artefacts situated in real-world contexts hold potential to support regenerative ecologies, for instance by enabling multispecies interactions and promoting biodiversity. However, a gap between theory and practice remains in demonstrating this potential, partly due to absent methodological frameworks that enable biodesigners to systematically engage with ecosystems and the unpredictable biotic and abiotic factors they entail. In response, we present an approach that integrates field studies and laboratory experiments, demonstrated through studies across four seasons in which living artefacts were situated in urban garden contexts. By harnessing the habitabilities of bacterial cellulose, these artefacts were designed to attract, host and surface local biodiversity. Through photography and DNA analysis, the study reveals a rich diversity of multispecies interactions, varying across artefacts, gardens and seasons. Our findings highlight prospects for biodesigners to thoughtfully tune ecological habitabilities and interactions through living artefacts and offer guidance on navigating tensions between intentionality and openness.

Bacterial cellulose (BC) is an emergent living-derived material that sits at the intersection of biotechnology, materials science, and biodesign. Produced through microbial synthesis at the air–liquid interfaces, BC exhibits unique properties—high purity, mechanical robustness, and programmable growth—that make it particularly attractive for growth-driven fabrication approaches. This demo presents a biodesign-oriented micromolding strategy, referred to as biolithography, that leverages the intrinsic growth pathway of bacterial cellulose to fabricate complex microstructured architectures in a single-step, low-energy process.

Biolithography exploits the ease of patterning and oxygen permeability of polydimethylsiloxane (PDMS) molds, placed atop a liquid culture medium. Those molds allow oxygen diffusion and act as physical barriers with predefined geometries, enabling bacteria to synthesize and self-assemble BC pellicles at the mold–medium interface, faithfully replicating microscale features without post-processing or subtractive manufacturing. Using this approach, we demonstrate the one-pot fabrication of BC-based microneedles—an emerging class of minimally invasive transdermal delivery systems—produced entirely through guided biological growth.

Multiple microneedle geometries were designed and evaluated, including pyramidal and conical structures of 1000 μm and 500 μm, highlighting the method’s geometric versatility and replicability. In addition to native BC microneedles, a biomineralized variant was created via a design-integrated mineralization strategy that combines a modified growth medium with post-synthesis mineralization baths. This process yielded needles with a uniform mineral layer, enhancing mechanical robustness and penetration potential.

The demo is structured as a multi-station exploration for biodesign by a dialogue with living materials rather than a purely top-down fabrication paradigm. Stations will guide attendees sequentially from a digital design display (TinkerCad parametric models) through 3D-printed master molds, PDMS replicas, live one-pot BC microneedle growth systems, and a comparative sample station featuring wet and dried microneedles (native, in situ biomineralized, and ex situ mineralized). Functional testing stations will allow participants to observe penetration into Parafilm M layers, rehydration kinetics, and model drug delivery (rhodamine B diffusion into agarose gel) in real time. Together, this work positions bacterial cellulose biolithography as a scalable, sustainable, and materially expressive platform for future biofabrication and biodesign applications.

On-body biodesign involves designing with living organisms in direct relation to human bodies and their surrounding ecosystems. Operating within this intimate and dynamic space, the practice creates opportunities by developing novel biotechnologies, cultivating new sensibilities, strengthening ecological literacy, and enabling more attentive and reciprocal coexistence with other living organisms. Yet, given the emerging and cross-disciplinary nature of the field, existing work remains fragmented. How are designers currently biodesigning with, for, and through human bodies, and what design opportunities could emerge for future on-body biodesign? To address these questions, we present a review of 40 artefacts spanning design, art, HCI, and materials science, mapping the design space across three dimensions: the key biological phenomena that enable interactions, the unique experiences these interactions offer, and the ecological configurations through which human bodies, living organisms, and digital technologies interface with one another. With this work, we aim to introduce on-body biodesign as a design research program and offer a structured overview of its current landscape. We further outline potential design pathways, inviting designers to engage with on-body biodesign as a generative space for relational thinking and regenerative practice.

Using the Biodesign Challenge as a representative corpus of early-stage exploratory work in biodesign, this paper analyzes 843 student-led projects presented between 2016 and 2025 to identify correlations between waste engagement, technological strategies, and project outcomes. The study proposes a Map of Practices at the intersection of waste, biotechnology, and materials design, grouping projects according to their level of involvement with waste, living systems, and material production. Results reveal the relevance of waste as both a driver and a material input in waste-driven biodesign, identifying recurring strategic approaches to waste, innovative biological strategies that merge materials design with waste management, and critical tensions, such as the predominance of degradable waste streams over more recalcitrant forms. Based on these findings, a decision-making tool is proposed to support problem definition, technology integration, and outcome positioning in waste-driven biodesign practices. In response to the growing urgency of waste as a pervasive socio-ecological challenge, this research addresses conceptual and methodological gaps concerning the integration of waste into biodesign and contributes analytical and practical tools for supporting more circular and regenerative material futures.

Bacterial cellulose (BC) is increasingly explored in biodesign as a wearable material at the skin interface. Produced by acetic acid bacteria such as Komagataeibacter xylinus, BC has a hydrated nanofibrillar structure and conformability that support direct skin-contact applications. Yet its articulation as a skin-interface wearable remains unsettled. Similar terms carry different evidentiary weight across design research, textile engineering, and biomedicine. This study uses cross-disciplinary qualitative comparative case mapping across 20 cases, organised into two sets. Set A provides a comparative reference set of textile-situated biobased wearable materials; Set B examines BC at the skin interface in biodesign. The comparison is discursive: stabilised textile-comfort vocabulary shifts within emerging BC skin-interface articulation. The paper offers a three-pillar analytical scaffold of comfort, care, and skin wellness, with skin health treated as a boundary term. Supported by a working glossary, the analysis clarifies how BC moves across these claims without treating them as equivalent.

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

This demonstration presents a biodesign toolset developed through three years of situated research in a BSL-1 biological laboratory. The project investigates how more-than-human sensibilities can be articulated within conventional lab environments typically structured around human-centred biological experimentation. Adopting a “Becoming cyanobacteria” stance informed by the philosophy of becoming, the author positions the laboratory as a shared field observed from a microbial scale, with particular attention to cyanobacteria’s phototactic behaviours and optical sensing. The toolset includes a redesigned biodesign lab notebook, a DIY phototaxis toolbox built with physical computing and 3D printing, mixed-reality systems using HoloLens 2, and a custom VR application, Cyano Vision, which visualises cyanobacteria’s sensorial relations to light from a non-human perspective. Rather than proposing a universal methodology, these tools function as situated artefacts that materialise one possible configuration of more-than-human biodesign practice. Through hands-on engagement and documented use cases, attendees are invited to reflect on how biodesign infrastructures, tools, and experimental protocols might be reoriented to better accommodate non-anthropocentric ways of knowing and designing within laboratory settings.

As biodesigners increasingly engage with designing for nature, collaboration with field-based scientists becomes necessary. While collaborations in the laboratory have been widely examined, the formation phase of design–science collaboration remains mostly underexplored. Domains such as marine zoology produce knowledge primarily in situ, under environmental constraints that limit designers’ access to the research site and prevent the kind of embedded, informal knowledge-sharing that often grounds laboratory collaboration. As a case study, an exploratory diagnostic workshop with nine early-career marine zoologists examined these conditions. Structured activities surfaced cognitive capacities, work ecologies, role expectations and structural constraints shaping collaboration. Scientists showed strong integrative thinking but framed design mainly as technical service, while mutual stereotyping obscured shared capacities. The study provides empirical insight into rarely examined field-based research ecologies and suggests that a structured diagnostic workshop during team formation can reveal methodological and epistemic compatibility factors that informal conversations often leave implicit, positioning this phase as a critical site of interdisciplinary practice.

Microbially Induced Calcium Carbonate Precipitation (MICP) provides a biologically driven alternative to conventional cementitious processes, requiring fabrication methods responsive to the dynamics of living systems. This study introduces a submerged soft-casting approach, employing fabric mesh moulds to biocement sand aggregates through the biomineralisation activity of Sporosarcina pasteurii. Developed in ‘Water Kiln’ bioreactors, the process replaces high-temperature curing with controlled liquid-phase mineralisation, generating cemented components assembled into the prototype column EmbryOme 1.

Rather than targeting structural material outputs, the research emphasises exploratory, process-oriented ‘formation finding’, where microbial activity, substrates, media and moulds together shape macro form and microstructure. Fabric casts filled with sand and nutrient-rich bacterial suspensions were submerged in cementation solutions to induce calcium carbonate precipitation. Key variables, including mould design, calcium and nutrient concentrations and media replacement frequency, were systematically adjusted to assess their effect on formation quality.

Optimal outcomes occurred at 0.3 M calcium chloride and urea with daily medium replacement, and smaller mesh sizes produced denser, more uniform crusts. Cementation remained primarily superficial, though glazing treatments enhanced surface hardness. These results underscore the role of design in tuning biological–material interactions, framing biofabrication as a process of negotiation with material agency, variability and future architectural potential.

Biodesign is an emerging field integrating design and science; its rise necessitates a reassessment of educational paths and working spaces for cross-disciplinary explorations, such as working with living materials and adhering to safety standards. The article examines laboratory environments dedicated to biodesign practice and education, varying from low-tech to high-tech setups and from university to community spaces, aiming to clarify the role of workspaces and infrastructures in supporting transdisciplinary research between design and science.

We surveyed Biodesign Laboratories worldwide, addressing the current status quo of various lab configurations and their unique spatial typologies to accommodate biodesign’s hybrid nature.

The result is an overview of the socio-technical topos of the laboratory as a literal breeding ground for (future) biodesigners. The qualitative data reported in this article aim to enhance the understanding of Biodesign Labs by analysing the potential of various laboratory configurations to accommodate biodesign’s hybrid nature, potentially developing unique spatial typologies.