At the 2026 Design Research Society conference (DRS 2026, the academic design research gathering, held in Edinburgh in June), several new design terms appeared together. They include Three-Eyed Seeing, Gap System, Meanderability, Kin Bank and Soil to Oneone. Each comes from a different group of researchers, and each names a careful way of designing with living systems, ecologies and relationships. Read together, they share one thing: every one of them is a way of reading the whole or the relations between parts. None of them describes what happens at the molecular scale, the level of the actual molecules doing the work inside a living material. That gap is the subject of this page.
Each term below links to its source paper so you can read the original.
Three-Eyed Seeing.
A framework for regenerative ecological design that holds three ways of knowing in conversation at once: Western scientific method, Indigenous relational knowledge, and imagined futures. The designer's job is to keep all three honest to each other rather than collapse them into one view. (Wetherell, Speed and Albareda, doi.org/10.21606/drs.2026.1880)
Gap System. Looks at the gaps, the overlooked or empty spaces, as the place where regeneration can start. The worked example is weaving: the holes between the yarns, not the yarns themselves, become the site of design. (Fourquier, Fantini van Ditmar and Nicenboim): https://dl.designresearchsociety.org/drs-conference-papers/drs2026/researchpapers/328/
Meanderability. A way of doing research that follows a winding, responsive path instead of a fixed goal. The researcher shapes the situation and is shaped back by it. It comes out of a soil and nutrient-cycling project in Hong Kong. Wernli, Chan, Yu and Wolper: https://dl.designresearchsociety.org/drs-conference-papers/drs2026/researchpapers/127/
Kin Bank. A speculative design project that uses synthetic data (data made up to stand in for information we do not have) and the picture of a shared bank account to show the give-and-take between people and non-human life that city data usually ignores. (Dunbar and Speed, https://doi.org/10.21606/drs.2026.2825)
Soil to Oneone. Regenerative textile production that begins and ends in the soil. Oneone is the Māori word for soil. The work is guided by Māori practice and grows linen and dye plants for the fashion industry in Aotearoa New Zealand. Rae, Russell, Burnie and Cowell: https://doi.org/10.21606/drs.2026.1676
Ruderal. Borrows a word from ecology. Ruderal plants are the first to grow back on disturbed or damaged ground, like weeds on a building site. The term carries that idea into design: working with margins, disturbance and growth that arrives on its own. (Roberts and Lalanne, DRS 2026 Exploration track.)
These are good terms, and the tradition they come from, regenerative and more-than-human design, is one Biodesign Academy works alongside. The point here is not a fault. It is a pattern worth naming.Look at what the words describe. Ways of seeing across worldviews. Kinship as something to bank. The gaps between systems. Designing from inside a tangle. Soil as a continuum.
This is rich language for the whole and for the relations between things. It reads the system.Across the whole set, there is no word for what the biology is actually doing inside the material. When a designer says a grown textile "self-heals" or a living surface "senses" something, the system-level vocabulary does not reach down to the molecule that would have to perform that job, or tell you whether it can. That smaller scale has its own questions. What is doing this?
Under what conditions? With what evidence? Reading the system and reading the molecule are two scales of the same instinct, to look at what is really there rather than trust a word that sounds settled. The field has built a deep vocabulary for one scale.
The other is still open.That open scale is what molecular design literacy names: the ability to read a biological promise at the level of the molecules that carry it. It does not replace the regenerative vocabulary above. It sits underneath it, as the floor the system-level claims finally rest on.
What is DRS 2026?
DRS 2026 is the 2026 conference of the Design Research Society, the main international gathering for design research. It was held in Edinburgh in June 2026. The terms on this page come from papers and Exploration-track sessions presented there.
Is this against regenerative or more-than-human design?
No. Biodesign Academy works alongside that tradition and treats its vocabulary as common ground. The argument is only that this language reads the system, and that a second scale, the molecular one, is still missing its words. Both are needed.
Where does molecular design literacy fit?
It sits below the system-level terms. The regenerative vocabulary describes relationships and wholes. Molecular design literacy asks what the biology actually does at the level of the molecules, so a promise like "self-healing" can be checked rather than assumed. You can read more in the explainer linked below.
This page is one half of a pair of scales. The regenerative terms above read the system and its relations. Molecular design literacy reads what the biology does at the molecular level, well enough to tell a real biological promise from one that only sounds settled.
Both belong in the same toolkit. Molecular design literacy, molecular reasoning, and the rest of Biodesign Academy's vocabulary are collected in the . The underlying ability is explained in These ideas are developed in depth in From the Molecule Up, the design-education project and forthcoming book from Biodesign Academy.