What is biodesign?

Biodesign is the practice of designing with living systems: using organisms, biological materials and biological processes as the medium of design, and using design methods to ask what biotechnology should become. A chair grown from mycelium is biodesign. So is a speculative proposal for a city that treats its wastewater with engineered algae, and so is a garment made from bacterial cellulose that is meant to be composted rather than thrown away.

The field sits at an unusual intersection. It borrows rigour from biology, method from design, and a willingness to provoke from art. Its practitioners include architects, fashion designers, product designers, biologists and artists, and most of its interesting work is done by teams in which no one person understands everything.

Why it matters now

Much of what we make is made from petroleum, and much of what we make is thrown away. Biology offers a different set of materials: grown rather than extracted, often compostable, sometimes self-repairing. It also offers a different set of risks, which is why biodesign is as much a critical practice as a productive one. The question is never only "can we grow this" but "should we, who decides, and what happens at the end of its life."

The Biodesign Challenge

Biodesign Challenge (BDC) is the education program and competition that has done the most to define the field. Run by Biodesign Challenge Inc., a non-profit, and holding its first Summit at the Museum of Modern Art in New York in 2016, it pairs student teams with scientists, artists and designers over an academic term, and brings them together at an annual Summit to present proposals. Projects have ranged from new biomaterials and medical devices to speculative futures and critiques of the biotechnology industry itself.

BDC participation runs through enrolled schools and institutions, and eligibility has centred on university and college teams, with other formats in some years. CompetiLab is not affiliated with Biodesign Challenge Inc.; our Biodesign Challenge (BDC) program teaches the way of working the field requires, and we point students to biodesignchallenge.org for the official rules.

The process

Biodesign proposals tend to move through five phases, and we teach them in this order:

1. 01

   Observe

   Spend time with a living system, a material or a place. Draw it, photograph it, measure it. Notice what surprises you.
2. 02

   Investigate

   Learn the science. Read the research, talk to biologists, and understand the mechanism well enough to know what is possible and what is wishful.
3. 03

   Imagine

   Propose futures. Use speculative design to ask what this could become, for whom, and at what cost. Sketch many ideas before choosing.
4. 04

   Prototype

   Make it tangible. Grow a material, build a model, stage an experience. Document every attempt, including failures.
5. 05

   Communicate

   Tell the story. Design the presentation, exhibition or film that lets an audience understand the proposal and argue with it.

For the sceptical scientist

Scientists sometimes dismiss biodesign as biology without the rigour. The best work in the field answers that charge directly: it cites its sources, measures its materials, and is honest about what is prototype and what is proposal. What design adds is not looseness but a different set of questions, about use, meaning and consequence, that a laboratory is not set up to ask. The combination is stronger than either alone.