The Biodesign Academy Library
Read a living material through a molecular lens.
You already work with living materials, and you know some of what they do: A mycelium grows a solid block out of loose waste. An alga pulls carbon out of the air as it grows. A soil bacterium cements loose sand into stone at room temperature.
This is where you look at that behaviour at the molecular scale: the actor doing the work, what the material draws on, and where your own design could enter. Reading it at this scale keeps the living thing in view, and keeps the organism a collaborator you stay in relation with.
THE PACE
One material at a time, with the tools you alraedy use.
THE KIT
A search, a model you can ask, a few public databases you can open yourself.
THE BARRIER
None. No lab required.
WHAT YOU GET
Two things, behind one login.
START HERE
Foundational reads
For each material, a read that starts where your practice already is. It takes a material a studio works with, names the property worth caring about, shows the molecular actor that carries it, and asks what that property draws on and what it asks of the organism that makes it. These are the floor, and the floor keeps growing, both in the materials it covers and in what "foundational" comes to mean.
EVERY TWO WEEKS
The Readings
One real material, followed to the molecule doing the work. They don't all share a shape, because each Reading goes as far as its material needs. What every Reading holds to is the same: one named material; the actor that carries the property, not just a word for it; the desk tools to see it for yourself; every claim traceable to a source you can open; an honest account of what the property asks of the living thing it comes from; and an ending you can act from.
What's open, and what the membership adds
Some tools stay in the open
Some of the tools are out in the open, free to use. The blank instruments you run yourself, like the Biodesign Promise Worksheet and the Molecular Behaviour Reference with its 12 verbs.
The membership adds the reading
The membership is those tools worked through on a real material, plus the foundational reads and a new Reading every two weeks. You are paying for the twenty hours of reading and cross-checking already done for you, on materials nobody else has traced to the molecule for a designer.
The Materials
Seven families so far, and growing.
Each read to the molecule that carries the property you care about. Members browse them all in the Reading Room.
Mycelium
01
Algae & Cyanobacteria
02
Bacteria
03
Fibres
04
Bio-cement
05
Slime Mould
06
Other
07
JOIN
€100/year or €12/month
Join the people reading at the edge of biology and design.
One membership, the entire library, nothing held back.
This is the founding rate. It goes up as the library grows, and if you join now you keep the price you joined at.
One login, for you. Cancel whenever you like.
One thing to be clear about
This is a personal membership.
You can read everything, use it in your own practice, and keep it beside you while you work. What it does not cover is teaching. It is not a course pack, it is not for uploading to a VLE or a shared drive, and it is not licensed for handing to a class or a cohort. Every Reading is written to sharpen one person's judgement.
If you need material you can teach from, a module, a proper institutional licence, something built for a room of students, that is a different thing, and I would rather build it with you than watch you stretch this to fit. Email me at [email protected] and tell me what you are teaching.
From the Molecule Up, by Biodesign Academy. Read one living material with care, as a relation you are joining, then meet the next on its own terms.
