To design is to be human.

And as humans, we have been transforming almost everything around us since the beginning—to meet our needs, desires, and overcome our fears. We carried seeds in our pockets and spread them into distant places; domesticated animals; wiped out entire forests; shaped the course of rivers; settled into “new” territories by displacing their previous inhabitants.

Today, we only call a subset of these activities biodesign, mostly out of convention. While the ambition is the same, the scope, scale, and impact varies in magnitude. We not only transform existing lifeforms for food, clothing, or construction materials, but also curiously reimagine them to create hybrids, chimeras, and semi-living artifacts, which claim their own place in evolution. Biodesign is about curiosity, understanding what it means to be alive, and what else life can be.

Design asks questions as much as finds answers. While some designers are concerned with finding alternatives to polluting, wasteful, energy-consuming ingredients, others see it as an opportunity to interrogate humanity’s relationship with nonhumans. Why is it that everything on this planet has to become a resource to meet human needs? Can human interests ever be equitable, ethical, and respectful to other species on the planet? Biodesign is also a critique of being human and a way to renegotiate our place among the living and non-living.

Informed by curiosity and critique, I teach biodesign at different scales. My students and I first start on the scale of cells, the foundational building blocks that grow, replicate, and organize into multitudes. One can learn a lot about the origins of life by trying to design artificial cells purely from chemical parts in the lab. Why are cells attracted to each other? Why do they divide and make copies of themselves? Curiosity also quickly teaches us that human knowledge is vastly limited. We still cannot make life from scratch. Life still only comes from other life.

Microbial design comes at the second scale. We work with bacteria, fungus, and animal cells. We grow them into cultures and observe them forming multitudes. The bacteria we grow form biofilms, generate electricity, or clean pollutants in water. We grow mycelium into bricks and biodegradable packaging. For us, animal cells become lab-grown meat, cowless milk, or chickenless eggs. We genetically transform organisms—add or subtract genes—and engineer them to synthesize new chemicals. We rely on their ability to photosynthesize, ferment, and massively reproduce to make anything from beer to insulin.

The third scale is building multi-species interactions. Yeast in the presence of bacteria makes delicious sourdough bread, but also makes SCOBY culture, which turns a kombucha drink into a new type of leather. This “victimless” leather comes in all types of thickness and texture that animals cannot make. We learn that microorganisms depend on other microorganisms. Microbiomes, which exist inside and around us, constantly shape our body and mind. By making small interventions in complex environments, we convert designer microbiomes, ecologies, and atmospheres into products. For example, a daily dose of novel probiotics promises to allow us to run longer and faster. GMO mosquitoes released into forests are expected to eradicate their own kind and limit the transmission of disease. Plants are imagined to survive space travel and transform Mars for human habitation.

As biodesign moves across scales—both in volume and population—the field’s ethical, environmental, and political responsibilities grow as well. Between curiosity and critique, today, a growing practice is being shaped by artists, architects, fashion designers, and humanities scholars, all of whom are nonexperts learning biology outside the traditions of science, medicine or engineering. New fields not only bring new aspirations, but also introduce different societal concerns. Biodesign is becoming a new intellectual discourse where ideas and values evolve, compete, and get negotiated across different disciplines. Should we create a new lifeform because we can? Isn’t all manipulation of life ultimately a colonial gesture? Why don’t we reduce animal consumption instead of trying to make expensive lab-grown substitutes? Why not eliminate plastics altogether instead of spending time making biodegradable versions?

As humans, we need tools to reflect on the impact of our activities. Ideas such as unlimited growth, guilt-free alternatives to pollution, and our dominance as a species have already proven to be illusions in the face of the climate crisis, environmental injustice, and resource scarcity. Unfortunately, the persistence of these illusions has caused more suffering to some than others. 

Biodesign is both the mirror and the medium that shows us possible ways out. Curiosity and critique also meet with the desire to care for and maintain what remains. It helps us tackle challenges by resisting the urges to intervene and change.

The next decades of biodesign will transform both what it means to design and what it means to be human with respect to each other. It will be one of the most important disciplines to help us identify the root causes of design problems, while also providing the tools and technologies to act on them.

While fully immersed in criticality, design is fundamentally the ability to remain optimistic. Biodesign will hopefully keep inspiring us to imagine new meanings and expressions of life—not only by and for humans, but for new organisms born at the lab, and those that will emerge in farms, forests, oceans, and cities. Together, we will evolve on this planet and perhaps explore it elsewhere.

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Cite This Essay
Telhan, Orkan. “What Biodesign Means to Me.” Biodesigned: Issue 1, 6 May, 2020. Accessed [month, day, year].