Biodesign Academy
The vocabulary designers meet when they work with living materials, defined in plain words. Most entries go one step further than a definition: they say what the definition alone does not tell you, which is usually where a claim outruns its evidence.
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Design work with living matter where AI models are present from the start of a project, their outputs are read for what they cannot show, and each change is weighed against what it would mean for the organisms and people involved.
Often taken to mean protein design. Proteins are one place it happens, not the whole of it.
A designer of living matter who works with AI models from the start of a project, reads what their outputs cannot show, and asks what a change would mean for the organisms and people involved.
“From the start” means present, not first. The work often begins with the living matter itself.
A mat of pure cellulose fibres built outside the cell by bacteria, usually Komagataeibacter, at the surface of a sugary liquid. It is the material behind kombucha leather.
Most claims about its strength describe the wet mat. Almost all of them are tested after drying.
Design that works with living systems and the materials they grow. The designer sets up and tends the conditions in which an organism makes the material, rather than shaping one that arrives finished.
The word is shared with medical-device biodesign, taught at Stanford. Both apply design method to biology, and there the resemblance stops: different materials, different literatures, colliding search results.
The energy and water used, and the heat given off, by the data centres that run the AI tools in a biodesign project. Most of it happens far from the studio, in places the designer never sees.
An AI footprint is often taken to mean water per prompt. But a footprint also includes energy and heat, and it depends on where the work happens, which a per-prompt average cannot show.
Using the low-temperature waste heat from data centres to keep living matter warm while it grows, or to dry what it makes. Examples include fungal mycelium, bacterial cellulose, and algae and cyanobacteria.
Heat reuse is often taken to mean heating homes. Growing living matter needs low, steady heat all year, including in summer, when homes need little.
The sentence about what a living material does that a design project has come to rely on. “This mycelium heals its own cracks.” It names an effect, and it usually arrives unchosen, picked up from a paper or a supervisor.
One word can hide five unrelated behaviours. “Self-heals” is the usual example.
Letting an organism grow the material in conditions you tend, rather than shaping a material that is already made.
The word covers everything from a kombucha mat to printed human tissue. Wikipedia’s definition is automated and medical. Dezeen’s is anything grown.
Citrate is the dissolved form of citric acid in a bacterial cellulose recipe. Recipes say citric acid, papers say citrate, and they are not the same molecule. Citrate is the one that bacteria meet.
Called a buffer in protocols since the 1980s, usually without a test.
When something added to keep one part of an experiment steady also changes another biologically important part of the system. The control still does its job. That is what makes it easy to miss.
Changing the variable you are testing can change the control’s chemistry along with it. Holding a buffer’s concentration constant is not the same as holding its effects constant.
A change caused by previous conditions that persists in a living material and can influence its response to later conditions. Two runs can share the same final recipe and begin with organisms prepared differently.
The tests that establish how a material behaves can become part of its preparation. Calibration can change the material being calibrated.
The liquid a culture is grown in: a sugar source, a nitrogen source, water, and whatever else the recipe inherited.
Calcium sulfate dihydrate, added to mushroom substrate and mycelium recipes. It keeps grain from clumping, supplies calcium and sulfur, and is very often described as a pH buffer.
A buffer resists a change in pH. What was actually measured is gypsum lowering pH in one kind of compost, which is a different thing. The chemistry offers no buffering capacity either.
The buffer in many cyanobacteria and algae recipes. It is added to keep the pH from drifting as the cells feed and change the water around them. Under light, and with help from the medium, HEPES also makes hydrogen peroxide.
Whether HEPES matters depends on who is there to clear the peroxide. A crowded culture can. A thinly seeded one cannot, unless a neighbouring organism steps in.
A causal explanation in a protocol, growing more specific with each retelling while the evidence behind it stays the same. Nothing is invented. The explanation just thickens.
Walk one inherited sentence back through its sources. If every step added a sentence and none added a measurement, that is what you are looking at.
The ability to read a claim about a living material and see the biology it depends on: what is doing the work, what sets it off, and what evidence would show it is real. It is a reading skill before it is a making skill.
Often taken to mean lab skill. It is closer to reading a label than to running a protocol.
A behaviour that several conditions produced together, written down as a property of one ingredient or organism. Move it somewhere else and the behaviour does not come with it.
The short version fits a protocol table, a database field and a model variable. The version with the conditions attached fits none of them. That is why the short one travels.
A correct account of what an ingredient does in a living system, taken for the complete account. The label is right, which is what makes a swap look safer than it is.
Nothing here is false, so a fact check finds nothing wrong. A correct label still narrows what anyone thinks to test, and makes a swap look safer than it is.
Structural colour is the colour produced by the physical arrangement of a material rather than by a pigment or dye. The arrangement reflects, redirects and scatters light so that some wavelengths reach the eye more strongly than others.
Usually offered as colour without dye, and so as the sustainable choice. Nothing here is coloured though, so the colour lasts only as long as the arrangement holds.
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