SENSBIOM proposes to help humans reconnect with the planet through environmentally interactive materials derived from renewable resources. Ultraviolet radiation and airborne chemical exposures are often imperceptible, yet they shape health and everyday environments: UVR can damage skin and eyes, while volatile compounds from outdoor pollution and indoor material off-gassing are associated with respiratory, hormonal and developmental impacts. SENSBIOM develops large-scale architectural assemblies from bioplastic lattices and cellulose-based biomaterial skins infused with tailored, non-living biochemical reactions that enable real-time, living-like sensing and response through material transformation. Across a series of canopies, partitions and curtains, these assemblies translate invisible environmental conditions into legible outputs – most directly through reversible color change and embodied olfactory cues – supporting public awareness and interpretation on site. In parallel, we develop a cell-free, deoxyribonucleic acid programmable strand as a pathway toward future biosensing sites that can be integrated as modular components. This article argues that biochemically computing matter can help diagnose and communicate the state of our surroundings toward healthier futures.

This paper proposes plant root systems as biological role models and active biomaterials for innovative architectural design. Focusing on both coarse and fine root systems, the research combines biomimetic analysis, material-driven design and experimental biodesign methods to explore how root growth principles can inform structural, anchoring and connective systems. A temporary biolab enabled cultivation experiments, including root entanglement in granular media, hydroponic connectivity studies, embedded growth in 3D-printed soil structures and the fabrication of patterned root mats. In parallel, digital modelling and analysis of scanned root systems supported the development of simulation workflows and speculative design applications. The project follows a radical exploration methodology integrating biological research, computational tools and hands-on experimentation. Preliminary insights suggest roots’ capacity to stabilise substrates, connect inert components and generate adaptive material systems. The findings establish a foundation for scalable, bio-integrated and bio-inspired construction strategies and contribute to sustainable, resilient and ecologically responsive practices.

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 deoxyribonucleic acid (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.

As architecture engages with regenerative and circular systems, photosynthetic microorganisms such as cyanobacteria and microalgae are emerging as agents of biotechnological transformation. Microbial biocementation offers a pathway to couple carbon fixation with biological mineral formation, providing an alternative to carbon-intensive construction. However, translating laboratory-scale advances into architectural practice remains constrained by challenges of scale, long-term durability, environmental robustness and fabrication integration. This paper presents three studies investigating biodesign approaches for implementing photosynthetic living materials in architecture on the formulation, biofabrication and infrastructural scale. The first proposes a material workflow that supports long-term microbial viability by developing tailored formulations and encapsulation strategies. The second establishes a design-led fabrication workflow with microbe-based materials. The third examines on-site cultivation under variable environmental conditions and introduces a concept of “living building material agriculture” for industry-oriented cultivation. Collectively, these approaches bridge laboratory biology and architectural production toward a scalable framework for photosynthetically mediated construction systems.

This research inquiry proposes the re-interpretation of a traditional 18th-century perfume technique called “enfleurage” through biodesign. Traditionally, enfleurage was employed for flowers too delicate to endure more aggressive extraction methods, using a fat-based carrier to capture their scent. The novel bio-enfleurage technique is designed, instead, to capture the scent from Streptomyces griseus, a bacterial strain found in most healthy soil. The paper will discuss the production of a petrichor scent with this novel bio-enfleurage process. Petrichor, the earthy fragrance experienced when rain hits dry ground, has long been chased by scientists and perfumers for its enduring appeal, resulting in the use of geosmin, its main odour compound, as a highly evocative material in scent formulation. This research bridges traditional perfume craft with biotechnology, illustrating a new process for capturing microbial-based aromatic compounds, which is transferable to other organisms and provides a sustainable, low-tech alternative for scent production.

This paper presents an observational comparative study of three photosynthetic biomineralisation workflows: gelatine-based hydrogel, liquid non-gel and alginate-based hydrogel systems. Each workflow was applied to eleven waste-derived materials across the food, wood, paper, textile and ceramic waste categories, resulting in three proof-of-concept material sample collections. These collections were used as design research artefacts to compare the fabrication processes and material outcomes of each workflow. The workflows were assessed through five design-led criteria: workflow feasibility, resource inputs, visible cyanobacterial retention, material qualities and preliminary biomineralisation indicators. Results show distinct trade-offs: the gelatine system offered reliable casting and structural stability; the non-gel system reduced binder use and retained a stronger visible cyanobacterial presence; and the alginate system enabled subsequent cultivation but led to dimensional instability in the resulting samples. Rather than identifying a single optimal fabrication method, the study provides an early basis for adapting photosynthetic biomineralisation workflows for circular product design.

Climate change and land-use pressures destabilise invertebrate populations not only at landscape scales but also within the microclimates of soil and near-surface habitats, where small variations in humidity, shade or airflow can critically affect survival. Existing insect hotel strategies typically rely on structurally stabilised, long-lasting materials and homogeneous cavities, privileging cavity-nesting bees while offering limited support for moisture-dependent decomposers such as litter-dwelling and soil-surface invertebrates that depend on organic substrates and buffered humidity. This paper introduces a multiscale design experiment that explores how designed porosity could engage moisture-dependent invertebrate ecologies. The prototype combines a gyroid-type triply periodic minimal surface fabricated from post-consumer eggshell waste with a moisture-retentive mycelium material layer, forming a time-evolving porous column. Outcomes from an initial 48-day field deployment are analysed through observations of fungal colonisation, material erosion and faint scraping marks interpreted as indicators of ecological engagement rather than habitat performance.

Indoor environmental performance is commonly addressed through energy-intensive mechanical systems with limited integration into architectural components. Algae-based systems show potential for carbon uptake and environmental mediation, yet most applications focus on façade-scale or exhibition prototypes, with limited validation in interiors. This research develops AlgaMatrix, a modular interior photobioreactor conceived as an architectural component. The system cultivates Chlorella vulgaris within ultrasonically welded thermoplastic membranes supported by 3D-printed frames. Continuous fluid circulation and embedded sensing enable monitoring of biological activity and localized CO2 variation. Computational fluid dynamics simulations informed internal channel geometry and circulation strategies to promote uniform flow and reduce sedimentation, linking digital design to fabrication constraints. A 14-day comparative experiment demonstrated sustained biomass growth in the circulating system, while a static control declined. Localized CO2 reductions occurred during peak photosynthesis. The study establishes a reproducible framework for integrating and monitoring biological processes within fabricated architectural systems, advancing adaptive indoor ecologies.

This paper investigates Ganoderma lucidum as a living mycelium membrane, exploring its proprieties beyond the scale of individual mycelial pellets and through systematic material processing and characterisation. Mechanical properties and surface differentiation strategies are examined to identify design opportunities where functional performance and aesthetic expression emerge from the material’s living behaviour. Two complementary methods structure the study: tensile testing to quantify mechanical performance and membrane-masking experiments to assess regenerative capacity and qualitative growth behaviour. The results show that living mycelium membranes are thinner than 1 mm and have a Young’s modulus of approximately 1.3–1.5 MPa and tensile strength of 6–10 MPa. Masking experiments demonstrate the potential for selective regrowth and controlled aerial hyphae patterning to create hydrophobic regions. Together, these findings integrate qualitative and quantitative insights to inform applied design contexts, laying the groundwork for advancing fungal living materials toward applied use of engineered living materials (ELMs).

Glass has been central to modern architecture, enabling visual transparency while acting as an impermeable boundary between interior and exterior environments. Yet, despite its recyclability, architectural glass generates significant waste that is frequently downcycled. This project repurposes waste glass to develop porous scaffolds that support photosynthetic growth, blurring architectural boundaries for inhabitation beyond the human scale. A series of material experiments across foamed, sintered and slumped-cast glass examines water absorption, evaporation, light transmission and long-term growth retention to understand how biological life can be sustained within an otherwise inert substrate. The resulting interconnected pore networks and semi-translucent qualities enable colonisation to establish within the material rather than only on its surface. At façade scale, this bio-integrated system reframes ideas of maintenance and purity, positioning glass as a scaffold for deep bioreceptivity and multi-species interaction.

This paper explores bio-based soft actuators as an emerging design-oriented innovation in Human Computer Interaction (HCI), examining how their adoption evolves within distributed, hybrid, lab-based educational programs. Through a longitudinal corpus analysis of the Fabricademy course open repository, the study analyses how participants integrate biomaterials into a soft robotics learning module and final projects. Combining quantitative and qualitative methods, the research traces the development of “biobotic” practices, revealing adoption supported by peer referencing and shared fabrication workflows. Two final projects illustrate iterative development and applications in HCI contexts. The findings identify persistent challenges, heterogeneous documentation quality and key affordances of bio-based actuators. Building on these insights, the paper discusses how biodesign challenges current practices in soft robotics design education and positions the repository as a living archive enabling iterative prototyping and sustainable material-driven interaction design.

Artificial reefs offer potential for urgent coral reef restoration, yet are frequently fabricated from materials of opportunity, without accounting for the dynamic and temporal processes necessary for a healthy reef system. We introduce a novel calcium carbonate biocomposite designed as a living artefact supporting recruitment while enabling bioerosion and recycling by reef organisms. By recognising material agentic capacity, how material properties influence organism behaviour, we consider substrate design as more-than-human design practice distinct from conventional approaches. Rather than finished objects, we reconceptualise substrates as active participants in sympoietic processes where organisms and materials mutually constitute reef ecosystems. An 8.8-month in-situ reef study shows the CaCO3 biocomposite supported early-stage colonisation but did not yet develop communities equivalent to natural coral rubble, requiring further research and analysis of more mature benthic communities. This research demonstrates that designing with organisms as active partners, grounded in material agency, enables collaborative reef restoration practice.

Biodesigners are increasingly recognising the limitations of purely utilitarian approaches to designing with living organisms when pursuing the broader, holistic regenerative aims of biodesign. Yet developing more inclusive, self-reflective practices that consider the well-being of other beings remains challenging, as it requires unlearning deeply embedded anthropocentric assumptions and modes of thinking. In response, we present a three-year self-reflective account of a biodesigner navigating between protocol-driven laboratory experimentation and an exploratory more-than-human (MTH) design approach in a studio-lab hybrid setting while working with cyanobacteria. We employed augmented and immersive digital tools to support the biodesigner’s journey – not only to cultivate new sensibilities, but also to enable shifts in scale and perspective beyond the constraints of laboratory experimentation. Through rich visuals and storytelling, and drawing on an autoethnographic approach, we compare these modes of practice to articulate microbially attuned perspectives and multispecies-aware approaches, revealing both opportunities and challenges for integrating MTH sensibilities into biodesign.

This pictorial presents Rootcraft, a practice-led research inquiry into designing-with grass roots. Situated at the intersection of growing design and more-than-human design, Rootcraft parts with one-point temporality in which agency is heavily scripted through mold geometry, stabilized growth and evaluated through a final artifact. Instead, it reorients root-crafting toward the grow phase as an unfolding site of negotiation, where form emerges through repeated encounters among roots, designer, tools and environmental conditions. Across four iterations, we answer: “How can intermediate artifacts enable distributed agencies between humans and grass roots in an act of designing-with,” in staging encounters and shifting away from assertive set-ups that prescribe root trajectories toward propositional infrastructures that invite deviation and response. Using vertically oriented molds, porous scaffolds and pliable textile guides, we intervened during the growth phase, allowing bodily engagement, tool-mediated actions and roots to mutually redirect the making process. Rootcraft contributes situated exemplars of such encounter-driven growth set-ups and a vocabulary for redistributing agency in designing-with living materials, including set-up assertiveness, growth legibility, interaction repertoire, temporal alignment and root–substrate coupling.

This paper explores the development of a process for living 3D-printed mycelium objects through a low-tech, DIY-oriented fabrication approach. By transforming the extrusion system of common ceramic 3D printer, the project aims to lower technical and economic barriers to working with living materials. Rather than relying on highly controlled laboratory conditions the method emphasizes accessible tools, open-ended tinkering and hands-on experimentation. The workflow integrates locally available materials, simple mechanical modifications and basic and affordable environmental control to enable the growth of structurally stable, living 3D-printed mycelium objects. The project positions DIY mycelium printing as a practical entry point for artists, designers and researchers interested in biofabrication and contributes to broader discussions on democratizing living material technologies through low-tech and open practices.

Biodesign education increasingly integrates living systems and biomaterials into design curricula, introducing material conditions that fundamentally reorganise how learning unfolds. This paper proposes that eco material libraries function as pedagogical infrastructures that stabilise material inquiry, mediate cross-disciplinary engagement and render ecological interdependence tangible. Drawing on eight years of situated pedagogical practice across two university contexts, it develops an exploratory conceptual analysis of how biomaterial samples operate as boundary objects within infrastructural arrangements that preserve iterations, breakdowns and process documentation. This infrastructural framing reveals how embodied material engagement recalibrates design epistemologies – repositioning learners as situated participants within material-ecological systems. Such recalibration has implications for challenge-based learning environments, where transversal competences are frequently presupposed but rarely explained. By demonstrating that such competences are enacted within organised material conditions rather than transmitted through instruction alone, the paper contributes a conceptual vocabulary for understanding how material environments shape learning trajectories in emerging biodesign pedagogies.

This study explores the material effects of mechanics-driven reinforcement topologies on fully compostable membranes made from fungal mycelium or recycled cellulose tissue using material extrusion. Biodegradable poly(3-hydroxybutyrate-co-3-hydroxyhexanoate) (PHBH) was additively printed as defined diamond and re-entrant lattice structures onto compliant substrates. The systematic Make–Break–Simulate approach combines fabrication, tensile testing, simplified mechanical modelling and Life Cycle Assessment (LCA). Additive reinforcement significantly increased ultimate tensile strength and Young’s modulus in all configurations. Cellulose-based hybrids showed higher stiffness and ultimate tensile load than mycelium systems, indicating more efficient stress transfer due to substrate homogeneity. Diamond lattices exhibited stretching-dominated behaviour with axial load amplification, whereas re-entrant lattices produced geometry-induced stiffening and progressive fracture. The re-entrant topology consistently achieved the highest stiffness values and enabled distributed fracture behaviour through geometric stress redistribution. The screening-level LCA further showed that the mechanical gains of re-entrant reinforcement exceeded the corresponding increase in global warming potential (GWP). The findings demonstrate that mechanical properties of bio-based membranes can be tuned through geometric pattern design without altering the biological substrate. Topology-controlled additive reinforcement thus offers a scalable strategy to enhance structural reliability while preserving full compostability and material circularity. The presented approach further highlights the potential of geometry-controlled reinforcement as a design strategy for lightweight biodesign and membrane-based applications.

Current bio-digital systems frequently position organisms as sensors or esthetic elements, while their inherent computational capabilities remain underutilized. At the same time, when biological processes are integrated into technical systems, they often remain hidden or abstracted away, failing to foster awareness and appreciation of the biological intelligence (Kim et al. 2023). This dual limitation prevents both technical innovation and conceptual understanding of what biological computers might become. We present MagnoSphere, a living biodesign installation that addresses both gaps by demonstrating the natural sensing and collective response capabilities of magnetotactic bacteria (MTB) as potential building blocks for bio-digital computation. The project investigates how microorganisms’ intrinsic sensing and collective behavior can be made perceptible through design. Rather than implementing a complete computational system, the project investigates foundational questions: how do microorganisms respond to environmental changes in ways that could serve computational functions, and how can design make these biological dynamics perceptible and understandable? MTB biomineralize magnetic nanoparticles (magnetosomes) within their cellular structure, making them responsive to external magnetic fields (Goswami et al. 2022). MTB navigate using magnetotaxis, creating complex collective behaviors in response to magnetic stimulation. These observable responses could potentially be harnessed as forms of information processing in computational paradigms like Physical Reservoir Computing (Nakajima 2020). However, before computational implementation is possible, we must first surface, understand and characterize these responses, along with their repeatability over time. Drawing on Kim et al.’s Surfacing Livingness paper (Kim et al. 2023), MagnoSphere employs sensorial amplification strategies to make the bacterial responses visible and tangible for human observers. The installation emphasizes exploration: visitors manipulate the magnetic field to direct bacterial movement within the chamber, observing how populations collectively migrate, shimmer and reorganize over time. This approach enables visitors to perceive biological sensing as an observable process revealing characteristics like shimmering intensity, response speed, collective organization and temporal patterns that could serve as computational building blocks. Magnetic field manipulation serves as input, bacterial movement and lighting patterns serve as computational transformation and sensorial amplification layers make this process perceptible: real-time microscopy projections enlarge the bacterial dynamics, and data visualization tracks response characteristics over time. The system uses digital components for real-time readout of the bacterial state and amplification (supporting observation and understanding), while the biological system provides the sensing and collective response dynamics. The sensorial amplification aims at creating a communication bridge, enabling humans to witness this relationship between and explore these biological capabilities. The installation unites biodesign with computational investigation through a demonstration where living organisms’ responses are made directly observable rather than abstracted away. For the biodesign community, the contribution is threefold. First, it concretizes MTB’s computational potential through quantitative population-level characterization of bacterial collective behavior – thereby revealing the dynamics that underpin its computational capabilities. Secondly, it operationalizes the concept of surfacing livingness, demonstrating how sensorial amplification can reveal otherwise hidden biological intelligence. Third, it enables critical discussion about how synergistic bio-digital computational systems might be realized in practice. Conference attendees will engage with an installation where they can manipulate magnetic inputs and observe the unfolding living responses. Through this direct exploration, visitors develop intuition about bacterial dynamics, while encountering questions about how such capabilities might serve future computational functions. As an installation, MagnoSphere communicates the potential for biological intelligence and digital systems to interweave – creating dialogue about alternative computational futures.

Bacteria have emerged as an innovative medium in Biodesign, yet their use as coloring agents is still largely framed by textile applications. Bactereature extends this scope by investigating pigment-producing bacteria as a living dye for porous ceramics and textured surfaces. Through iterative material tinkering with pigments derived from Serratia marcescens, this pictorial identifies porous ceramic bodies as effective carriers that absorb dye solutions and enable surface patterning. Rather than treating coloration as a fixed finish, we examined how porosity, liquid uptake, surface texture, time and environmental exposure shape visual outcomes such as color intensity, edge diffusion and fading. We present a set of textured ceramic artworks that serve as comparative evidence and synthesize the visual-material relationships observed into a practical pathway to design bacterial dye patterning beyond 2D planes.