Unambiguously, to design is a political act.
This is true because reality is constructed or reinforced through design, and our beliefs, biases, and privileges influence our design choices.
Take for example the Mercator map—a 16th century Eurocentric representation of the world that has been used for the last five centuries to teach children about our planet. In truth, the Mercator projection exaggerates the size of the lands between the tropics and the poles at the expense of lands at the equator, which propagates a widely accepted yet distorted view of the world through design. The effect literally inflates places like the Unites States of America and Australia.
“Design is never mute,” wrote designer Viktor Papanek [1]. Every time something is designed, it is created from the worldviews and cultural values of the designer. In today’s world, rationalist logic elevates economic and technological over cultural and ecological design. As a result, the world has been made unsustainable by our design choices.
Amidst the dysphoria, however, we must remind ourselves that we already have a wide range of design and fabrication solutions to address (or at least ease) issues of sustainability. But the limited distribution and utilization of this knowledge is slowing the journey towards equitable and regenerative futures.
Biotextiles for example, are not just of the 21st century. At the dawn of the 20th century, members of the Italian Futurism movement championed the use of organic materials such as hemp or fish skin. One of Italy’s first commercial successes in that regard was lanital, a milk-fiber synthesized from casein, the most abundant protein in cow’s milk [2]. The original production process used copious amounts of water and toxic formaldehyde, which were neither profitable nor sustainable. Current productions, however, are more cost-effective, fully natural, and biodegradable [3].
Similarly, French microbiologist Maurice Lemoigne identified biodegradable forms of plastics as early as 1925 [4]. Polyhydroxyalkanoates (PHAs) are biodegradable plastics that can be made from bacteria and that share similar mechanical properties to non-degradable oil-based polymers. Considering this knowledge was described almost 100 years ago, how much longer will we leave our planet to choke on plastics before replacing them with PHAs and other alternatives? We’re hopefully on the verge of a materiality revolution that will help us maximize our resources and minimize our waste.
At the core, I think, is a colonialist understanding of humanity’s relationship with nature. “The concept of Nature has obviously not served us well,” writes philosopher Timothy Morton [5]. “If it had, we wouldn’t be here. Here, meaning planet Earth at this moment, the moment of global warming. If so-called Nature and its balance and wisdom had been something that really functioned well as an idea, there would have been no way we would’ve burned all those fossil fuels and endangered all life on Earth.”
By describing Nature as an outsider, Morton argues that we are not taking responsibility for its survival. Echoing the knowledge developed over thousands of years by First Nations people across the globe, he proposes that we should instead embrace the concept of biosphere: a place shaped by the interdependencies between all living actors of an ecosystem, and where our actions carry meaning and repercussions.
All this knowledge should be seen as an opportunity for design. Biophilic design, biomimicry, and biodesign are contemporary yet underutilized approaches to design and fabrication with significant potential to regenerate our wounded planet. But whereas the former, biophilic design and biomimicry, refer to the production of materials, objects, and systems either better connected with nature or inspired from biological models, biodesign provides a more elegant and relevant answer through the use of biomaterials and living organisms as core components of the finished work.
In the context of this design paradigm, my work is anchored in the reality of contemporary living. How will designers work together with communities to address the unprecedented challenges of our time? And with recent projections showing that global population growth combined with mass-urbanisation could add another 2.5 billion people to urban areas by 2050, how will our cities of tomorrow look and feel?
As such, I started a speculative bio-cities research studio combining my interests in urban, speculative, and bio-based design. In this studio, we explore pathways towards circular, regenerative, and more-than-human urban futures and question, for example, the possibility of retrofitting inner-city commercial buildings into net-zero, mixed-use towers.
This line of questioning resulted in the production of The Other Place. Behind a parametric double-layer green skin designed to reconnect residents of an all too often barren urban landscape with nature, the building’s core feeds a meshed network of circular bio-systems with organic waste. This system-based approach to city living enables the production of renewable energy and recycled water, as well as biodegradable materials for the production of everyday objects and construction materials. The biotechnologies that would enable The Other Place to function already exist but have not been scaled up to the point of use in contemporary urban design. Meanwhile, large covered spaces for public and private use provide citizens with secluded environments to escape air pollution and our increasingly unstable climate. In a nutshell, The Other Place is a living machine that provides shelter for both human and nonhuman species while fostering interspecies cooperation towards protecting the environment.
If design is a political act, biodesign is as well. Beyond an elegant way to face the many crises plaguing our contemporary world, biodesign is a practice that enables us to reconnect with the natural systems supporting our existence, and collaborate with other biological intelligences for the survival of the collective biome. Hopefully, it will change our behavior so future generations don’t have to suffer the consequences of our inaction.
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[1] Koeberle, Susanna. “Victor Papanek: The Politics of Design.” World-Architects, Accessed 20 January 2021.
[2] Waters, Michael. “How Clothing Made From Milk Became the Height of Fashion in Mussolini’s Italy.” Atlas Obscura. Accessed 20 January 2021.
[3] Cowley, Liné. “What is milk fibre yarn?” Eco World. Accessed 20 January 2021.
[4] Hocking, PJ, and Marchessault, RH. “Polyhydroxyalkanoates.” Biopolymers from Renewable Resources, edited by D.L. Kaplan, Berlin, Heidelberg, Springer, 1998.
[5] Morton, Timothy. “Voices (towards Other Institutions) #17.” e-Flux Architecture, Open? - 2020 Russian Federation Pavilion at the Venice Biennale, 23 September 2020.
Cite This Essay
Cotsaftis, Ollie. “The Politics of Biodesign.” Biodesigned: Issue 5, 21 January, 2021. Accessed [month, day, year].