Today I’m opening the Library to paid members.
Membership gives you a new in-depth Reading every week, growing shelf of material primers and reference tools, a private podcast episode with every Reading, and access to the members-only Reading Room channel.
If you want to see what the Library is like before joining, check out the previews as I outline them below.
What the Library is
The Library is where I take the claims we make about living materials and follow them down to the biology underneath.
Most Readings start with a material, paper, method or assumption and asks: what is actually happening here? What conditions does the organism need? Which parts are supported by evidence? Where does that evidence stop? And what does that mean if you are trying to design, make or teach with it?
Every source is linked so you can check the evidence yourself.
A new Reading is published every week, and members get the full Reading, along with a podcast episode that goes beyond what is on the page.
Start with a Mycelium Reading
This week’s Reading looks at a 3D-printed mycelium project and a problem that extends far beyond it: when we change a material to make fabrication easier, we are also changing the conditions the organism has to live in.
The researchers adjusted grind size, water content, print geometry, pH and binder concentration to make their material printable. Each decision solved a real fabrication problem. Each also changed the environment available to the fungus.
The Reading works through those decisions, the biology underneath them, and a practical way to assess fabrication choices before they quietly become biological constraints.
The opening is free to read. And over the next few days, the shelf will grow with further Readings and companion podcast episodes.
One thing worth saying: the analysis I undertook for the Reading is possible because the authors reported their recipe, failed trials and incomplete result in unusual detail. That openness makes the work far more useful, not less.
Listening Companion Podcast episode for every Read
Every weekly Reading also comes with a private episode of The Reading Room podcast.
The episode includes the Reading in audio form, then goes beyond the page. I narrate and record each session myself as a real person (not an AI clone) and I chat about things I was unsure about, evidence I followed further, and connections that did not make it into the written version.
This week’s episode is Printability is not neutral.
Library members get it through a private podcast feed, so it can play in the app you already use. Here is a sneak preview:
Join the Library
You can use The Biodesign Academy for free.
Free readers get the opening section of every weekly Reading, one complete Reading so you can see the full format, the archive of letters published since 2024, the glossary, reference pages, desk tools and the community.
Library membership is $20/month or $200/year.*
Members get:
Every weekly Reading in full
The complete Reading archive from day one
Starting primers for each material
The Reading Room private podcast
The members-only Reading Room channel where you can interact with other members
The growing collection of Library tools and reference material
*This is the founding membership rate.
It stays open until the twelfth Reading is published. Join before then and you keep that rate for as long as your membership remains active.
Cancel any time.
Plus: Opening of the Biodesign Academy Community, which is accessible to everyone
You do not need a Library membership to join The Biodesign Academy Community.
Free subscribers can come in, introduce themselves, share work they are making, ask questions, exchange papers and take part in discussions around things happening across biodesign.
We will also open temporary online discussion threads around physical events worth following. The first is for BioDesign Conference 2026, taking place in Delft, The Netherlands, from 26–28 August.
If you are going, presenting, following from elsewhere or simply want to know what is emerging from the conference, there will be a place to talk about it together.
Next Tuesday: Gypsum
One of the several Readings that will follow, starts with something much smaller.
Gypsum.
It appears in mycelium fabrication recipes across the field and is regularly described as a buffering agent.
There is a problem with that explanation: chemically, gypsum does not behave as a useful pH buffer under the conditions found in these substrates.
So where did the explanation come from, and what is gypsum actually doing?
I followed the claim through suppliers, growing guides, research papers and reviews.
What emerged is less a story about one incorrectly labelled ingredient than about how protocols become inherited knowledge.
A step gets repeated long enough that eventually nobody is assigned the job of asking why it is there.
Gypsum appears to be doing several useful things in these recipes.
Buffering is not one of them.
Tuesday’s Reading follows that chain and finishes with five ways to spot an inherited step hiding inside your own protocol.
Until Tuesday,
Raphael
Teaching with Biodesign Academy content? Tell me what you are running and I’ll tell you whether the shelf is ready for it yet. Drop me a line, [email protected]
