The Biodesign Academy library membership is open
A new weekly Reading, private podcast, growing archive, practical tools and a members-only community channel for designing and teaching with living materials.
Today I'm opening the Library to paid members.
Membership gives you a new in-depth Reading every week, a 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, the previews are 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 ask: 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 it in full, 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.
A podcast episode for every Reading
Every weekly Reading also comes with a private episode of The Reading Room podcast: the Reading in audio form, then everything that goes beyond the page.
I narrate and record each session myself, as a real person and not an AI clone. I talk about the things I was unsure about, evidence I followed further, and connections that did not make it into the written version. Members get it through a private feed, so it plays in the app you already use.
The Community opens 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 what is happening across biodesign.
Gypsum, and the buffering that isn't
Gypsum 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 mislabelled 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.
Raphael
