Living Materials

Contribution to the catalogue of the exhibition More Than Human, a major exhibition at the Design Museum (London), which brings together art, science and radical thinking to ask how design can help our planet thrive by shifting its focus beyond human needs.

"Many would consider the philosophical debates of animacy prompted by the design of self-operating systems to be far removed from contemporary projects designing with and for living systems. Yet in the present day, a parallel convergence is occurring between the authorial hand of the maker and mimetic acts of nature. In guiding metabolic flow, redirecting root systems, and prolonging the temporality of living matter, a new ordering and re-presentation of nature is underway. Contemporary designers are no longer imitating the physiology of the animal, but they are authoring the life cycle of living organisms. In swapping mechanical life for the biological, new modes of thought are emerging to complicate long-standing definitions between living and non-living, between the natural and the artificial, between the knower and the known. What does it mean to “work with nature”? To co-perform with the animal—or the microorganism? How do you guide a material with a life form of its own? When does discovered biology become manufactured technology? What new cultural techniques and new ethics are required as material designers investigate the possibilities of incorporating living systems within material design? In these new practices of tending, what is the boundary between the English word for gardening and agriculture—between the intimate and domestic act of cultivating, and the distanced institutionalized practices of food production? What styles of spiritualism or ethics or germination of Western thought might delineate the boundaries between cooperation and extraction?" — Excerpt from "Living Materials"