"It's Alive" is Not Enough

Dear {{first_name | reader}},

Most of us did not come to living materials because we wanted a more efficient production system.

We came because biodesign seemed to offer another way of being with the living world. A partnership instead of extraction. A material you tend, feed, wait for, and care for. A thing with a life of its own, not a passive substance waiting to be used.

That instinct is one of the field’s strongest commitments, and I share it.

So when someone says that designers need to understand living materials at the molecular level, it is fair if something in you tightens.

The phrase can sound like an old habit in new clothes: take the living thing apart, turn it into a mechanism, and make it easier to control.

Val Plumwood gave that habit a clear name. She called it the master model: a way of relating to the living world from above it. It depends on two quiet moves.

One is backgrounding, where you depend on the living world but treat it as scenery. The other is hyperseparation, where you make the living other seem so distant from you that you never have to meet it on its own terms.

If molecular reading meant that, the suspicion would be right.

But I want to make a different claim.

Close attention to what a living material actually does, including the molecular work when the material acts at that scale, is not a betrayal of the ethics many of us already hold.

It is one way those ethics stay honest.

This is not a correction of the projects that already put organisms, growth, care, and cohabitation at the centre. Those projects have made a rare and important turn. They face the organism when much of design still looks past it.

What I want to add is one step inside that same turn.

The material is alive? Good.

Now what kind of life is it living? What does it need? What does it do in return? Which part of its living process makes the material bind, sense, change colour, soften, stiffen, clean, decay, or heal?

A warm word left on its own can leave the meeting unfinished. The point is not to cool the relationship down. The point is to follow the care all the way into the behaviour of the material itself.

This field already values attention. Anna Tsing calls this the “arts of noticing”: the practiced ability to pay attention to what is happening around you, especially in damaged, mixed, and more-than-human worlds.

Noticing, in this sense, is not a mood or an aesthetic preference. It is work. You get better at it by staying with a thing long enough to see how it lives, changes, responds, and depends on others.

That matters deeply to biodesign because a living material is never only a sample on a table. It feeds, grows, dries, resists, contaminates, adapts, and dies. It asks for conditions. It gives some behaviours and refuses others. To design with it, you have to notice those relations. You have to learn what the material is doing, not just what it appears to be.

The question is scale. At one scale, you might notice that a mycelium composite grows faster in one substrate than another. You might see that the edges colonize before the centre, that moisture changes the surface, that drying alters the feel, or that pressing changes the stiffness. This is already good noticing. It gives the student a real material, not an idea of one.

But there is another question inside it. What is doing the binding? What part of the fungus meets the surface? Which structures help it grip? At that scale, the answer is no longer simply that the material is alive. The hyphae grow into and around the substrate, while cell-wall polymers and surface proteins help create adhesion. That does not make the relationship colder. It makes the attention more exact.

This is why words like alive, collaborative, responsive, or self-healing can be true and still not be enough. They are doorway words. They invite the meeting, but they do not complete it. Molecular attention is one way to complete the meeting.

The field has already mapped the larger scale carefully. Elvin Karana, Bahareh Barati, and Elisa Giaccardi describe livingness as a material quality in its own right: something an artefact can carry into everyday use as it senses, grows, adapts, and eventually dies. Their account follows the organism into the conditions that keep it alive.

What I am describing sits one scale inside that. Livingness tells you how the organism stays alive in the artefact. Molecular reading asks what that particular life is doing at the point where the material behaves. The two are not rivals. One holds the larger relation. The other looks inside that relation for the behaviour that matters to the design.

This is also how I read Adela Orcajada and colleagues’ idea of biodesign literacy. Biodesign literacy joins biological knowledge with design’s own ways of knowing. Molecular literacy is one scale inside that broader literacy. It does not compete with it. It helps biodesign literacy become more precise where the material demands precision.

The worry is real because there are different ways of knowing. Donna Haraway gave one of them a sharp name: the “god trick,” or the view from nowhere. This is the fantasy of seeing everything from no body, no place, and no responsibility. It is knowledge that pretends to be complete so it can speak as if it owns the world. That is the kind of knowing the ecofeminist critique was right to distrust.

Haraway offered another kind of knowing in its place: situated knowledge. In plain words, this means knowing from somewhere. You see from a body, a place, a method, a history, and a set of limits. You say what you can see from there, and you do not pretend that your view is the whole.

Molecular attention, done honestly, belongs to this second kind. It does not say, “Now we know the living thing completely.” It says something more modest and more useful: under these conditions, with this material, this behaviour seems to depend on this process. The account is partial. It can be revised. It has to answer to the material again.

That is not the god trick. It is not the view from nowhere. It is a located account of what can be seen, tested, read, and questioned from where you stand.

There is also restraint built into this. You do not go infinitely deep. You go as deep as the promise in front of you requires. If the claim is that a material changes colour, you need to understand enough to know what causes the change and what conditions it depends on. If the claim is that it binds, you need to understand what does the binding. If the claim is that it cleans, you need to understand what is removed, transformed, trapped, or degraded, and under what conditions.

Then you stop.

Mastery wants the total account. Situated attention takes responsibility for the specific account. The problem was never depth by itself. The problem is the wish to own what you find there.

There is a defensive reason this matters. The language of ecological design is easy to borrow. Regenerative, circular, carbon-negative, living, self-healing: an honest project and a weak claim can use the same vocabulary. So yes, molecular attention helps you ask whether a physical promise has physical support. It helps you see whether the claim rests on a material process or only on a persuasive metaphor.

But that is the smaller reason. The better reason is that attention gives you design decisions.

A mycelium composite grows with the right moisture and enough time. Its final stiffness depends on the substrate, the extent of colonisation, and what happens after growth, including drying and pressing. Left vague, this sounds like a list of constraints. Read closely, each point becomes something the designer can act on.

You can choose the substrate. You can stage the growth. You can design the drying process. You can press toward a target stiffness. You can build growth time into the form instead of treating time as an inconvenience. The fact stops being a warning and becomes part of the material palette.

That is what attention buys. It gives the designer something to work with.

This matters even more now because students increasingly meet biological claims through fluent explanations, generated summaries, diagrams, and predicted structures. A confident account of what a protein does, or a clean picture of a folded structure, can be useful. It can also be a good guess dressed as a fact.

The student is not necessarily engineering a protein. More often, they are reading a claim and deciding whether it means anything for a material, a studio brief, or a public promise. Teaching students to ask what does the work, under what conditions, and with what evidence is becoming part of the craft.

I have turned the practical part of this letter into a one-page PDF you can use directly with students. It is called The Molecular Attention Studio Card, and it gives you four ways to teach students to read a living material closely with no lab, no budget, and no biologist on staff.

The moves are simple.

The card is meant to be used, not just read.

Pin it up in a studio. Keep it beside a crit. Send it to students before they start working with a living material.

If you want to go deeper, pair it with the Biodesign Promise Worksheet and the Molecular Behaviour Reference.

The Studio Card gives the teaching moves. The Worksheet gives students a page to fill in. The Reference gives them a short palette of what biological materials actually do.

Each of these newsletters takes one idea about living materials and leaves behind something you can use. Over time, the set will run from the molecule up to the materials, organisms, and relations we design with. That is what From the Molecule Up is for. I am writing it in the open, a piece at a time. You are reading it before it becomes a book.

Same invitation as always.

If you teach with living materials and you have a studio move that helps this kind of attention land for students, write back and tell me.

Until next time,

Raphael

P.S. If you are not teaching anyone right now, run the first two moves on yourself. Watch the material before you design with it. Then let its real behavior shape the brief. That works alone at a bench as well as it does in a room full of students.

The argument here stands on a tradition the reader already knows. Everything below was verified to source in the 2026-07-06 fact-check, in the order the ideas appear.