Futures Published: Our First Steps into the Open Biodesign Archive

Dear reader,

This week, our very first official publication, the AlphaFold Futures Workshop Report, is now live. It captures the curious energy of our three-day gathering: designers, artists, scientists folded together like proteins themselves, mapping the speculative edge of biology and AI.

With this release, Biodesign Academy plants its first formal marker in the open-access landscape, and invites you to remix, teach, and build with it.

TL;DR (30-second summary):

Our First Official Publication Is Out!

We’ve just published the AlphaFold Futures Workshop Report, the first formal release from Biodesign Academy. It’s now live on Zenodo, complete with a DOI, making it:

• ✅ Citable in academic and professional work

• 🔍 Discoverable on Google Scholar

• 🌍 Free to access, remix, and share

This 3-day workshop brought together designers, researchers, and early-career creatives to explore protein folding, AI tools like ESMFold and AlphaFold 3 (via Neurosnap), and speculative mutation design.

The report documents how we structured the sessions, what tools were used (including PyMOL for validating mutation outcomes), and what participants learned.

Includes Supplementary Materials
To support reuse and remix, we’ve also published supplementary materials:

• Presentation slides

• PyMOL workflow + cheatsheets

Everything is openly licensed and version-controlled, so if you’re teaching, building your own protein tools, or just exploring, you can build directly from this.

Biodesign Archive Now Live

We’ve also launched the Biodesign Archive: a Zenodo community to host open-access biodesign materials from Biodesign Academy and beyond. You’ll be able to publish your own toolkits, sequence sets, visuals, or speculative research here, all with a DOI.

Coming Soon: Free Publishing Walkthrough

Want to publish your own workshop, toolkit, or biodesign material?
We are currently recording a free tutorial video showing the exact process: how to upload to Zenodo, get a DOI, and make your work discoverable and citable: with zero cost and zero friction.

Biodesigner & Project Feature

🍄 When Smart Means Slow

What if your thermostat didn’t track temperature, it grew in response to it?

In this week’s feature, we spotlight work by Jasper Scheffer, a 23-year-old designer from Eindhoven, and his living thermostat made from Reishi mycelium. It’s a provocation, rethinking what “smart” could mean in a more-than-human home.

→ Read the full story on Thermocelium

Interested in Business Side of Biodesign?

While most of our Biodesign Academy readers are students, educators, designers and artists, you might be curious about the next step: translating biodesign into startups, platforms, or investable products.

That’s exactly what we cover in Protein Futures: a focused special interest group we update every Tuesday. It’s written more for founders, startups, CTOs, investors, and C-suite teams building at the intersection of AI and protein design.

But… if that’s your direction too, or if you’re just curious, you’re absolutely welcome to join. Just reply to this email and let me know you’d like to receive the Protein Futures Tuesday updates.

What to Expect:

Here’s a taste of past issues:

• Who to Watch: Startup Landscape in Biodesign: Link.

• How to prepare for GPT-agent and GPT-5 driven tools to improve biodesign workflows: Link.

Now Live: The Protein Futures Vault

This is our internal intelligence engine: now open to Protein Futures special interest group. It includes:

✅ Startup Landscape Maps – Who’s building what, where, and with which stack
✅ AI Toolchain Use Cases – Real examples of AI optimizing protein structure, function, or scale
✅ Function-First Case Studies – How teams improved real proteins (not just predictions)
✅ Lab-to-Market Playbooks – Translational blueprints from academic hits to commercial leads
✅ Platform Design Patterns – How the best teams integrate full-stack design, from GPT-agents to wet lab validation

🔓 Browse it here → Protein Futures Vault

If you're staying focused on design education for now, all good, Biodesign Academy will continue landing in your inbox each week. But if you're starting to think “how does this go from idea to industry?” Protein Futures was made for you.

As summer bends toward its final bloom, we open the archive gates and the doors to new futures: slow thermostats, living circuits, and the whispered promise of proteins yet to be designed.

Whether your path stays within the poetic wilds of education or veers into the structured unknown of startups, know that both roads are part of this growing field.

Until next week,
Raphael, Biodesign Academy.