What is biofabrication?
The published definitions were written for medicine. Most design work falls outside them.
Biofabrication is letting an organism grow the material in conditions you tend, rather than shaping a material that is already made.
That is the design sense of the word, and not the one you will find first.
Two definitions, and why the medical one won
The word covers everything from a kombucha mat to printed human tissue. Wikipedia’s definition is automated and medical. Dezeen’s is anything grown.
Wikipedia opens on “the automated production of biologically functional products through bioprinting or bioassembly and subsequent tissue maturation processes”, and never mentions design. Dezeen has published no definition, but scoping its own coverage it files under the term “products, components and buildings that are grown using natural processes and materials”, and what sits under that tag is mostly fashion.
These are not rival poles. One is narrow and the other is broad enough to swallow it, since cells growing into tissue is a natural process too.
The narrow one won because medicine got there first and published more. The most-cited definition paper, Groll and colleagues in 2016, acknowledges non-medical applications in a figure and then narrows to tissue engineering. One word does most of the damage: automated. Growing a mycelium panel in a mould is neither automated nor trying to be.
A design student searching the word they were taught in studio gets a definition that excludes what they are doing.
What counts
The test sits inside the definition. Did an organism grow the material in conditions you tended, or did you shape a material that arrived finished?
A mycelium panel grown to the shape of its mould counts, because the fungus made the material and the form at once.
So does a bacterial cellulose sheet, and algae grown into a sheet.
Leather from a cow does not. An organism grew that hide, which is why the case is worth stating: the cow was living its own life, and nobody was tending conditions for a material.
A starch bioplastic cooked on a hob is out for the same reason.
The blurry middle
Three cases come up constantly and none has a clean answer.
A bacterial cellulose sheet dried, milled and recast as a composite. The material was grown, and by the time it reaches the product almost nothing of the grown form survives.
An organism is grown to produce a compound, and the compound is then spun, cast or moulded into the object. The molecule was biofabricated. The object was manufactured.
You build the form, the organism colonises it. Who made the object, you or the fungus? Usually both, and which one you credit depends on which is doing the load-bearing work.
None of these is settled, and pretending otherwise would be worse than saying so. When you are in the middle, describe the process instead of reaching for the label. Grown by Komagataeibacter, then dried and pressed tells a reader more than biofabricated does, and it cannot be misread.
What this is not
Common questions
Yes. The bacteria and yeast build a cellulose mat at the surface of the liquid, so the material is grown. Drying, pressing and cutting it afterwards is ordinary fabrication.
Both words get used. The 2020 Fashion for Good and Biofabricate primer reserves biofabricated for what cells produce, and calls a grown macroscale structure bioassembled. Most of the field says biofabricated for both, and so does this page.
Where this fits
Biofabrication is how the material arrived. What it can then do for you is a separate question, and usually a more useful one, because a grown material’s properties sit in four quite different places.
Groll, J., Boland, T., Blunk, T., Burdick, J. A., Cho, D.-W., Dalton, P. D., Derby, B., Forgacs, G., Li, Q., Mironov, V. A., Moroni, L., Nakamura, M., Shu, W., Takeuchi, S., Vozzi, G., Woodfield, T. B. F., Xu, T., Yoo, J. J., & Malda, J. (2016). Biofabrication: reappraising the definition of an evolving field. Biofabrication, 8(1), 013001. doi: 10.1088/1758-5090/8/1/013001.
Fashion for Good & Biofabricate (2020). Understanding ‘Bio’ Material Innovations: A Primer for the Fashion Industry. Biofabricated materials p.17, bioassembled p.19, glossary p.79.
Dezeen. Biofabrication tag, dezeen.com/tag/biofabrication/. A tag scope rather than a published definition. Accessed 27 August 2026; tag descriptions carry no revision history.
Wikipedia. Biofabrication. Accessed 27 August 2026. Cited as evidence of what the term currently returns, not as an authority on the design sense.
