A Plain-Language Glossary

Biodesign Academy's key ideas, in plain language, and where each one leads.These are the key ideas behind Biodesign Academy's work: a shared vocabulary for reading what a living material actually does, well enough to tell a real biological promise from one that only sounds settled. They run through the newsletter, the teaching cases, and the book, From the Molecule Up.

Molecular design literacy

The ability to read a biological idea at the level of the molecules that do the work. You ask, of any biological promise: what is doing this, under what conditions, and with what evidence. You do not need to be a scientist to have it.This is the ground the rest stand on.

Explainer:

Molecular reasoning

Molecular design literacy in use: taking one promise and tracing it down to the biology it depends on, one plain question at a time. The literacy is the muscle; this is the lifting.Reach for it whenever a material's promise sounds settled and you are about to build on it.

Explainer: Forthcoming

The biodesign promise

The sentence about what a living material does that a project has come to rely on, like "this material self-heals." One word can hide several different behaviours, each needing a different test. Biodesign Academy makes a free worksheet for taking a promise apart before you build on it; the explainer shows how it works.

Explainer:

Where a grown material's strength comes from

A worked example of molecular reasoning. In a grown material like bacterial cellulose, the strength is not in a protein; it is in the structure the protein leaves behind. It shows a wider test: is the protein the maker that builds and leaves, or the product that stays and does the work?Read this to watch the method work on a real material.

Explainer:

Better design judgement

The outcome the rest build toward. Not a separate technique, but what grows from doing molecular reasoning often enough that it becomes habit: weighing a biological promise on its merits, and designing with the biology rather than around it.

Explainer: forthcoming.

From the Molecule Up

Biodesign Academy's forthcoming book, a designer's guide to proteins, AI, and biological possibility. It develops the ideas above in depth and in order.

The book: Forthcoming

Related glossaries from the field

New regenerative design terms from DRS 2026

Sometimes a development in the wider field shows where this vocabulary fits. The 2026 Design Research Society conference produced a set of . They are good terms, and they all read the system and its relations. None reaches the molecular scale, which is the scale molecular design literacy names. The page below explains the terms in plain language and shows how the two scales fit together.