Material Negotiations: Practices of Biodesign

In search of non-extractive production models, biological systems became a central interest for the design practice since 10 years. Designers embraced growing strategies rather than shaping technologies, transient organisms rather than stable materials, environment-sensitive assemblages rather than resistant and passivated objects. How this »biological turn« is questioning the methods, tools, attitude and political role of designers today?

To approach active, transient, evolving or animated materials demands care rather than control. Design practice, instead of forcing matter into shapes, has to unfold into sym-poiesis, making with. To do so, designers need to understand and apprehend the non human actors they team up with. Be it bacterias, mushrooms, biowaste, DNA or algae, meeting with these micro-organisms requires new mediation tools like microscopes, Petri dishes or biolabs. Trained to listen to their wills, habits and instabilities, the resulting shapes and functions are always an ongoing negotiation. A crucial aspect of biodesign also lies in size and repeatability of the processes. Their scales, both in terms of space and time, are quite unusual for the design field. Meeting the human or the architectural dimensions raises many challenges, not only in terms of infrastructures for production, but also in terms of standards. Wether living, semi-living or non-living, biomaterials have a great tendency to produce difference rather than exact copies of the same. Even if the recipe is identical at every iteration, the repetition of growing mechanisms produce ranges of different forms and functions. The designer’s role, in such case, cannot stay linked to precise drawings of a model to reproduce industrially - she/he has to produce recipes with open ended results. If we are all used to difference in fruits, vegetables or wood products, can we accept variability in packaging, electronics, clothing or architecture ?

The virtual symposium »Material Negotiations« gathered design practitioners to discuss and understand the scope, challenges and interest of such a shift. The symposium was hosted by Prof. Dr. Claudia Mareis and Dr. Emile de Visscher as part of the Material Form Function group.

Speakers

Marie-Sarah Adenis, PILI, France

French designer and biologist graduate from ENSCI and ENS, Marie-Sarah Adenis is the creative director of a biotechnology company she co-founded: PILI, which develops new technologies for the production of renewable dyes, based on the fermentation of micro-organisms. Along with this position, she teaches biodesign at ENSAD and ENSCI, and developed her own design studio exploring the links between scientific knowledge, imaginaries and form-making of biological organisms, from DNA to microbes and viruses.

Prof. Dr. Marcos Cruz, Bartlett School of Architecture - UCL, United Kingdom

Marcos Cruz is an architect, critic, educator and researcher, currently co-Director of Bio-Integrated Design at the Bartlett School of Architecture. Bio-ID is a multidisciplinary research platform and Masters programme that investigates design that is driven by advances in bio-technology, computation and fabrication, towards strategies of material growth in architecture. Before that, Marcos Cruz ran March Unit 20 at the Bartlett for 19 years. He has been co-editor of Syn.de.Bio, founder of the BiotA Lab, teacher at IAAC and UCLA, as well as Director of the Bartlett from 2010 to 2014. He also co-directed MAM-Arch (marcosandmarjan) in London, an architecture practice whose work has been exhibited and awarded numerously. His research and writings recently focused on «Bioreceptive and Poikilohydric Design» which is key to understand the potentials and challenges of biology within architectural practice.

Andrea Ling, Andrea S Ling Studio, Canada / ETH Zurich, Switzerland

Andrea Ling is an architect, artist, and researcher working at the intersection of design, fabrication and biology. Her work focuses on how the critical application of biological and computational processes can move society away from exploitative systems of production to regenerative ones. She is the 2020 S+T+ARTS prize winner for her work as the 2019 Creative Resident at Ginkgo Bioworks designing the decay of artifacts in order to access material circularity and renegotiate the relationship with materials to include activities that are usually considered undesirable. She graduated from the MIT Media Lab, Mediated Matter group, where she was a research assistant on the Aguahoja project. Andrea is an architect with the Ontario Association of Architects and a founding partner at designGUILD, a Toronto-based art & design collective and is a former project lead at Philip Beesley Architect. She is currently an A&T fellow at the Institute of Technology and Architecture at ETH Zurich.

Prof. Dr. Julia Lohmann, Aalto University, Finland

German-born designer based in Finland, Julia Lohmann’s work questions our relations with flora and fauna. In 2013, she initiated the Department of Seaweed, a transdisciplinary community of practice exploring the marine organisms' potential as a design material, core of her PhD at the Royal College of Art and Victoria and Albert Museum London. . Seaweed and Rattan have since become the base for numerous installations, artworks and commissions in major museums and events around the world. Currently Professor of Contemporary Design at Aalto University, Julia Lohmann’s practice calls for new forms of collaborations with biological systems.

Dr. Ingrid Paoletti, Politecnico di Milano University, Italy

Ingrid Paoletti is an architect, researcher and central figure of the ABC department (Architecture, Build Environment and Construction Engineering) at Politecnico di Milano. She is the founder and scientific director of Material Balance research Unit @SAPERLAB, focusing on active, ecological and biological research within architecture. Ingrid Paoletti and her team develop research with mycelium, cellulose, self-shaping textiles or moss. Recently, the work of her lab has been exhibited at the Biennale of Architecture in Venice and Expo Dubai 2020. Key to their work is the question of scale, or how to match architectural dimensions with micro-organisms.

Rasa Weber, Rasa Weber Design Studio, Germany

Rasa Weber is a Berlin-based designer exploring the narrative and choreographic potential of materials and processes. Her insights on bio-based materials such as algae as an alternative pigment for textile production and her research on »mining« urban waste for architectural re-use brought her to working with numerous materials. She teaches at ZhdK Zürich and BAU Berlin, and is currently a practice-based PhD candidate at ZhdK in cooperation with Kunstuniversität Linz. In her ongoing research, she will investigate how to build more-than-human habitats in marine environments, as a way to both practice and question architecture today.

Charlett Wenig, Max Planck Institue of Colloids and Interfaces / »Matters of Activity«, Germany

Charlett Wenig is an interdisciplinary material and product designer with a research focus on underrated biological materials, questioning the social and economical value of leftovers. She is currently PhD candidate at the Max Planck Institute of Colloids and Interfaces, in Golm, as well as associate researcher at Matters of Activity Excellence Cluster - Humboldt Universität zu Berlin. She notably developed a major investigation on bark processing to obtain different properties, forms and potential functions for this timber waste. Charlett Wenig’s work highlights the boundaries between social acceptance, material biographies and the Anthropocene.

Schedule

9:00 am
Welcome

9:15 am
FIRST PANEL: COLLABORATIONS, MAKING WITH AND TRANSIENCE

9:30 am
Rasa Weber, Rasa Weber Design Studio, Germany

10:15 am
Prof. Dr. Julia Lohmann, Aalto University, Finland

11:00 am
Prof. Dr. Marcos Cruz, Bartlett School of Architecture - UCL, United Kingdom

11:45 am
First panel conclusion and discussions

1.00 pm
SECOND PANEL: SCALES, REPETITION AND ECOLOGIES

1.15 pm
Dr. Ingrid Paoletti, Politecnico di Milano, Italy

2.00 pm
Charlett Wenig, Max Planck Institue of Colloids and Interfaces / MoA, Germany

2.45 pm
Marie-Sarah Adenis, Marie-Sarah Adenis Studio, France

3.30 pm
Andrea Ling, Andrea S Ling Studio, Canada / ETH Zurich, Switzerland

4.15 pm
Second panel conclusion and discussions

4.45 pm
Closing remarks

5.00 pm
End.

Registration