What is biodesign?
Design that works with living systems and the materials they grow, where the organism keeps its own schedule.
Biodesign is design that works with living systems and the materials they grow. The designer sets up and tends the conditions in which an organism makes the material, rather than shaping one that arrives finished.
In practice that means mycelium, algae, bacterial cellulose, microbial films, and now proteins designed with help from AI. It runs through product and material design, fashion, architecture, and speculative work, and outside medicine it is a young field with edges people still argue about.
Two fields use this word
There are two biodesigns, and the thread between them is thinner than the shared word suggests.
The one this page is about is design-and-biology: designers working with living organisms and grown materials. The other is medical-device biodesign, a structured process for developing health technology, taught most visibly at Stanford.
They do have something in common. Both treat design method as a serious way into a biological problem, both came out of engineering schools, and both care about getting from a need to a made thing. That is the whole of it. The materials are different, the literatures barely cite each other, and the two rarely meet in the same room. If you arrived here looking for clinical need-finding and device development, this page will not help you.
The two collide often enough to be annoying. Search for almost any term in design-and-biology and you will get medical results back. Wikipedia hands the word biomaterial to medicine, as something engineered to interact with biological systems for a medical purpose, and gives biofabrication entirely to tissue engineering and bioprinting.
A design student searching either word gets a definition that excludes everything they are actually doing.
What counts as biodesign
Not everything made from a biological material is biodesign, and the boundary is more useful than it sounds. The question that settles most cases: did an organism grow this material in conditions you tended, or did you shape a material that arrived finished?
Leather is biological, and it is not biodesign. The cow was living its own life and nobody was tending conditions for a material. A starch bioplastic cooked on a hob is out for the same reason. In both cases the material was done before you touched it, and what you did next was ordinary fabrication.
Mycelium. A fungus is fed a substrate in a mould and grows through it, binding it solid. The organism makes the material and the form in one move.
Bacterial cellulose. Bacteria at the surface of a sugary liquid push out cellulose fibres that mat into a sheet. Kombucha leather is this.
Algae, grown into sheets, films, or bound composites.
Microbial films more broadly, including the ones grown for colour rather than structure.
These four are also where the published research is, which matters more than it sounds. A material with papers behind it can be read down to what it actually does. One without them cannot, whatever it is called.
The organism has its own plans
Working with something alive means working with something that keeps its own schedule. It grows at its own rate. It decays. It responds to a warm week, a draught, a change of water. Some of the time it does none of what you wanted.
In ordinary material design that variation is a fault, and the job is to design it away. In biodesign it is the material you are working with.
You set the conditions, and then you negotiate. A designer who wants full control over a living material tends to end up killing the thing that made the work worth doing.
That is also why the method below looks the way it does. You cannot specify a living material the way you would specify a sheet of aluminium, so the work goes into finding out what it actually does, under what conditions, before you build on it.
How a biodesign project actually runs
Most descriptions of the biodesign process are innovation funnels: identify a need, research, prototype, scale. That describes any design project. Here is what is specific to working with biology.
Every biodesign project rests on a sentence about what the living material does. This mycelium self-heals. This algae cleans the air. You usually did not choose it. It arrived from a paper, an exhibition, a supplier, or a supervisor, and it has been sitting inside the project as an assumption ever since.
Mycelium self-heals could mean the fungus grows back across the damage, or two cut surfaces fuse, or the surface closes over and looks mended, or the material swells when wet so the gap pinches shut, or a person patches it by hand. Five different things wearing one word, each needing a different test and a different maintenance story.
Ask what does the work: a molecule, an arrangement, a living process, or a relationship between organisms. Take the carrier away and the property goes with it. Two of those four need the organism alive. Two do not, and designing at the wrong one is where most wasted months in biodesign go.
The crack looks closed is a question about a surface. It senses lead in the water is a question about a protein. You stop at the level where the real answer lives.
The making happens after that, and it goes much better for it.
Three worked examples
Dried bacterial cellulose has essentially no protein left in it. The bacteria built the fibres using a cellulose-building machine, two proteins called BcsA and BcsB switched on by a small signal molecule, c-di-GMP, and then the proteins were gone. The strength lives in how straight those fibres are, how tightly they pack, and how neatly they line up as the sheet dries. Dry the same sheet carelessly and it is weak. Strong, like leather is a claim about a structure, not a fixed fact about the material.
Some marine bacteria glide into ordered, evenly spaced rows as a colony spreads, and the spacing is close to the width of a light wave, so one colour comes back strongly and the rest cancel. Nothing in those cells is green: this is structural colour. Sullivan and colleagues fixed Cellulophaga lytica colonies in 2023: the cells were dead and the colour held, because fixing locks the packing in place. Drying switched the colour off. Wetting switched it back on. If you go looking for the pigment to extract, you can spend months hunting something that was never there.
A grown sheet built to sense something works the other way round. The sensing machinery is a protein sitting in the finished material, doing the job there. It needs water, food, and warmth, or it dies. Same category of material, opposite answer to the same question, and completely different demands on whoever has to keep it working.
What biodesign is not
And it currently promises more than it delivers. The constraints are unglamorous ones: technicians burning out, materials that miss the numbers their own papers report, certification systems written for inert matter, and the plain fact that plenty of people find handling something alive unpleasant. The field’s practice sits well behind its theory, and any honest account of biodesign carries that gap.
None of which is hostile to speculative or provocative work. If a project means to provoke rather than function, an unproven promise can be a deliberate choice. Testing it just makes sure it is a choice you are making on purpose.
Common questions
Biomimicry takes inspiration from how nature solves a problem and rebuilds that solution in conventional materials. Biodesign involves the living organism itself in making the material or the object. A building shaped like a termite mound is biomimicry. A panel grown by a fungus is biodesign.
Biofabrication is one method inside biodesign: letting an organism grow the material in conditions you tend. Biodesign is the wider practice, including the research, the testing, the ethics, and the design decisions around that material. Note that the published definitions of biofabrication were written for tissue engineering and require the process to be automated, which excludes nearly everything done in a design studio.
A biodesigner works out what a living material actually does, under what conditions, and with what evidence, then designs with that rather than around it. In practice that means growing and testing materials, reading enough biology to check a claim, and working with scientists who can answer what the design cannot.
No. Growing a material can be more resource-intensive than manufacturing the thing it replaces, and being biological says nothing about what happens when it is thrown away. Treat a sustainability claim about a grown material the same way you would treat any other: ask for the assessment.
No, and most people working in it do not have one. What you need is enough molecular design literacy to know where a promise lives, so you can tell an idea that is finished from one that only looks finished.
No, though they are not strangers. Stanford Biodesign is a medical-device development process; this page is about designers working with living systems and grown materials. Both apply design method to a biological problem, and that is about as far as the overlap goes. Different materials, different literature, different people.
Where this fits
Knowing what biodesign is tells you what kind of work you are doing. It does not yet tell you what any particular material’s properties depend on, which is the question that decides what the material will ask of you and how its promise is most likely to fail.
Myers, W. (2012; revised edition 2018). Bio Design: Nature, Science, Creativity. Museum of Modern Art / Thames & Hudson. ISBN 978-0-500-29439-0.
Ginsberg, A. D., Calvert, J., Schyfter, P., Elfick, A., & Endy, D. (2014). Synthetic Aesthetics: Investigating Synthetic Biology’s Designs on Nature. MIT Press. ISBN 978-0-262-01999-6.
Camere, S., & Karana, E. (2018). Fabricating materials from living organisms: an emerging design practice. Journal of Cleaner Production, 186, 570-584. doi: 10.1016/j.jclepro.2018.03.081.
Karana, E., Barati, B., & Giaccardi, E. (2020). Living artefacts: conceptualizing livingness as a material quality in everyday artefacts. International Journal of Design, 14(3), 37-53.
Karana, E., Blauwhoff, D., Hultink, E.-J., & Camere, S. (2018). When the material grows: a case study on designing (with) mycelium-based materials. International Journal of Design, 12(2), 119-136.
Groll, J., et al. (2016). Biofabrication: reappraising the definition of an evolving field. Biofabrication, 8(1), 013001. doi: 10.1088/1758-5090/8/1/013001.
Kientz, B., et al. (2016). A unique self-organization of bacterial sub-communities creates iridescence in Cellulophaga lytica colony biofilms. Scientific Reports, 6, 19906. doi: 10.1038/srep19906.
Sullivan, C. J., et al. (2023). Iridescent biofilms of Cellulophaga lytica are tunable platforms for scalable, ordered materials. Scientific Reports, 13, 13192. doi: 10.1038/s41598-023-38797-0.
Fashion for Good & Biofabricate (2020). Understanding ‘Bio’ Material Innovations: A Primer for the Fashion Industry.
Every biodesign project rests on one sentence about what the material does, and that sentence usually has not been tested. The newsletter takes those sentences apart, one material at a time: the behaviour, the conditions, and the evidence they rest on.
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