Hey! So excited to have found this group. I have a long background in policy and in design (both in tech) and am now working on a design x science x tech x policy mashup. I'm in the artist community for the Year 13 NEW INC incubator at the New Museum, and I'm a member at Genspace, a community biolab in New York. I'm working on some kinetic sculptures (robots), materials experiments and also seeing how sciencey I can get as someone without a science background.
Eldy Lazaro's paper in Biotechnology Design is open access and worth reading. Link below. Her argument is that working out what a biomaterial can do is an ongoing practice rather than something you settle once. Materials keep shifting through handling, humidity and time, and what they can offer shifts with them, so the reading has to be redone. Transformation ends up as something you can design with rather than a fault to remove.
Post what you're working on. A grown sample, a paper, a course you're building, a tool, a talk, a batch that failed? Finished or half done, both are fine. Say what it is, what stage it's at, and whether you want feedback or are just showing it.
Hi, I'm Raphael!
I trained as a scientist and spent years in a wet lab doing protein chemistry, at Roche and then Imperial, before moving into design and never quite putting the biology down.
Teaching is the other half of it. I did my MA at the Royal College of Art and my PhD at Queen Mary, spent a postdoc in the Materials Experience Lab at TU Delft, and have taught at the RCA as a visiting lecturer on Design Interactions and Innovation Design Engineering. I write Biodesign Academy from Stockholm.
I opened this room because writing weekly only goes one way. I can tell you what a paper reports, and I would be curious to know what you make of it. More than that, I want this to be a place where you get heard.
So, your turn. What do you teach or make, which living material do you keep returning to, and what brought you here?
Best wishes,
Raphael
BioDesign'26 runs at TU Delft from 26 to 28 August 2026: the first international conference on emerging research at the crossroads of design, biology, computation and sustainability. This channel is where we follow it.
Most of this community will not be in the room, so whatever gets posted here is what the rest of us get to see. Post whether you are presenting, sitting in the audience, or reading the proceedings from home. The channel stays open after the conference closes, because the papers take longer than three days to digest.
To start:
- A paper, pictorial or demo from the programme, and the line in it that made you stop
- A question you would ask the authors if you had the microphone
- Something a session changed about how you would run your own work
For educators, practitioners and students who want to get past the finished results and into the research behind living materials. We read papers here in the open, and Reading Room members get a thread on every Reading plus a weekly slot where I answer what is waiting.
