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.

Bioregional Mineralisation with Agricultural Resources for Construction (BIOARC) 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.

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 artifacts: 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 critique of self-tracking.

Biodesign projects often stall between promising material prototypes – bacterial cellulose textiles, mycelium composites and 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 domain-specific 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.

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 and reflections were captured through pre- and post-workshop 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.

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.

Bacterial cellulose (BC) is an emergent living-derived material at the intersection of biotechnology, materials science, and biodesign. Produced through microbial synthesis at air–liquid interfaces, BC exhibits high purity, mechanical robustness, and programmable growth, making it attractive for growth-driven fabrication. This demo presents a biodesign-oriented micromolding strategy, biolithography, leveraging BC’s intrinsic growth pathway to fabricate complex microstructured architectures in a single-step, low-energy process. Biolithography exploits the patterning ease and oxygen permeability of polydimethylsiloxane (PDMS) molds placed atop a liquid culture medium. These molds allow oxygen diffusion while acting as physical barriers with predefined geometries, enabling bacteria to self-assemble BC pellicles at the mold–medium interface, faithfully replicating microscale features without post-processing or subtractive manufacturing. Using this approach, we demonstrate 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, highlighting the method’s versatility and replicability. A biomineralized variant was also created, combining a modified growth medium with post-synthesis mineralization baths, yielding needles with a uniform mineral layer that enhances robustness and penetration potential. The demo unfolds as a multi-station dialogue with living materials rather than a top-down fabrication process. Attendees move through a digital design display, 3D-printed master molds, PDMS replicas, live one-pot BC microneedle growth systems, and a comparative station of microneedles. Functional stations let participants observe Parafilm M penetration, rehydration kinetics, and model drug delivery in real time. Together, this work positions BC biolithography as a scalable, sustainable, materially expressive platform for biofabrication and biodesign.

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 heating, ventilation and air conditioning (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 within a functionally graded wall system. Material testing indicates a moisture buffering value of 2.14 g·m−2·%RH−1. NORDTEST room scale simulations show relative humidity 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.

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.

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 up further research and multiple application scenarios Moreover, the study presents an interdisciplinary approach that bridges creative design practice with scientific rigour, contributing to sustainable innovation in biodesign and biofabricated materials.

In recent years, bio-receptivity has gained increasing attention within regenerative practices. In the built environment, bio-receptive façades function as living interfaces that sustain cryptogamic and microbial growth, thus reshaping ecological interactions in urban areas. Although bio-receptivity has been studied by scientists for decades, architects and designers now play a critical role in advancing its application. This study investigates key parameters influencing bio-receptivity, including surface patterning, substrate composition, fabrication methods and spatial orientation. Parametric geometries were computationally developed to enhance hydrodynamic performance, while material variations were evaluated for their capacity to support moisture retention and biological attachment. The prototypes were produced through an integrated workflow that combined subtractive, additive and formative manufacturing processes and subsequently inoculated with a selected cryptogamic–microbial culture to examine growth dynamics. The research culminated in a nine-month full-scale installation entitled SPIKA, exhibited at the Milan Triennale, serving as a public demonstrator of bio-digital fabrication and ecological integration.

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.

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 self-identified biodesigners and autoethnographic accounts of teaching in improvised studios, kitchens-as-labs and hybrid digital fabrication 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 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, 15.24 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.

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.

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, emphasising 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 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.

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 biodiversity into growing design practices. Building on systematic laboratory experimentation, this contribution presents two open-source protocols that support parallel testing of alternative plants in 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 environments, increasing accessibility across practitioners with varying expertise, equipment, and infrastructure. The presented exploratory research demonstrates how this methodology integrates quantitative and qualitative insights, enabling the evaluation of customized 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-driven Biodesign and approaches to material cultivation.

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.

Microbially induced calcium 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 (TPMSs) 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 towards architecturally scaled bio-fabricated mineral components.