ABOUT
A publication that helps designers read what their biology actually does.
Biodesign gets stronger when designers can tell a real biological promise from a plausible-sounding one. Biodesign Academy gives the field a molecular floor: enough literacy to design with the biology rather than around it. Judgment is the craft.
WHAT THIS IS
A weekly, independent publication on AI-era biodesign, read from a design and education perspective. The antagonist isn't AI or the speculative tradition, but a promise that floats free of what the biology can do, and AI fluency mistaken for proof.
The molecular floor completes the critical and speculative tradition rather than replacing it: it gives designers a way to ask whether a beautiful idea can actually hold.
Designers, students and design researchers working in or around biodesign, and the institutions teaching it. Written to be read by a second-language audience, with short sentences, plain words, glossed terms.
If you teach this material, the case-study library and modules are built to be taught from, a specialist content a programme can't easily build in-house.
MAKER AND CURATOR
RAPHAEL KIM, PhD
A biodesigner who spent close to a decade at the lab bench, and who reads AI-era molecular biology for a creative audience.
Biodesign Academy is written by Raphael Kim. He trained as a scientist before becoming a designer: a BSc in Biotechnology and close to a decade of wet-lab work in microbiology, molecular biology and protein chemistry. He then took an MA in Design Interactions at the Royal College of Art, a PhD at Queen Mary University of London, and a postdoc at the Material Experience Lab, TU Delft.
He is a recurring organiser of the microbe- and bio-HCI communities, a visiting lecturer at the RCA, and a long-standing figure in the DIY and community biology scene, with multiple first-author peer-reviewed papers and international exhibitions behind him. He works across the field's design schools and labs. The bench and publication record are what let this publication read molecular claims honestly, without overstating them.
THE SHELF · 01–03
01
Newsletter
Free and weekly. Making sense of AI-driven biodesign.
02
Library
Worked case studies for teaching. For individuals and institutions.
Read it Weekly.
Free · plain language · unsubscribe anytime.
