Homework 1

Interactive Second Skin

From Passive Material Layer to Active Interface

1. What would I like to biomanufacture and why?

Interactive Second Skin is an ongoing research project that I developed prior to this assignment, exploring how clothing could evolve from a passive layer covering the body into an active interface capable of interacting with the skin.

As a fashion designer, I am interested in the relationship between the body, materials and the living world. Rather than beginning with a specific biological technology, my starting point is a design question:

Can a textile be biologically manufactured to act as an interface that carries, retains and gradually transfers beneficial compounds to the human skin?

The material I aim to develop would behave as a flexible, wearable second skin. Rather than functioning only as a protective or covering layer, it would act as an interface through which functional compounds contained within the material could be retained and gradually transferred through contact with the skin.

In my previous material experiments, I explored plant-derived ingredients such as aloe vera in combination with agar, glycerin and textile substrates. This work led me to look beyond biomaterials simply as substitutes for conventional textiles, and towards materials that could perform additional functions through their relationship with the body.

For this assignment, I want to investigate how biomanufacturing could extend this existing research direction.

The objective is not simply to reproduce an existing textile through a biological process, but to investigate whether biomanufacturing could enable a new material system in which structure and function are developed together.

Aloe-derived compounds provide one possible starting point because of my previous experimentation with the material, but they are not intended to define the only possible active component. The broader research question is how a biologically manufactured textile matrix could carry functional compounds, retain them within the material, and enable their controlled transfer at the interface with the skin.

The project therefore proposes a shift:

Passive textile → Active material interface → Interaction with the skin

2. What living system would I use?

At this stage, I do not want to assume that a single biological system represents the final solution. Instead, I see the choice of living system as part of the research itself, to be evaluated in relation to the material and functional requirements of the project.

One promising starting point is a microbial system capable of producing cellulose, such as cellulose-producing bacteria. This approach is particularly relevant to the project because bacterial cellulose can be grown directly as a continuous fibrous material, offering the possibility of developing the material structure through the biological production process itself.

Conceptually, the process could be:

nutrient medium → microbial growth → cellulose formation → material harvesting → functionalisation → wearable interface

The biologically produced cellulose could provide the structural matrix of the material. The next research question would be whether plant-derived or other functional compounds could be incorporated into this matrix, retained within it, and gradually transferred through contact with the skin.

I am deliberately treating this as a hypothesis rather than an established solution.

Several approaches could be investigated. Functional compounds might be introduced during microbial growth, incorporated after the cellulose has been produced, or integrated with the biological material through a secondary functionalisation process.

An important part of the project would therefore be comparing these approaches and understanding how each one changes the material’s flexibility, strength, moisture behaviour, surface and capacity to retain and release compounds.

Other living systems, including fungal or biohybrid approaches, could also become relevant as the research develops. The reason for beginning with microbial cellulose is not that it represents a predetermined solution, but that it provides a tangible biological manufacturing system through which the central concept of an active textile interface can be experimentally investigated.

3. How would I use automation?

Automation could be particularly valuable during the experimental development of the material.

My previous biomaterial research has involved preparing formulations manually and comparing different combinations of ingredients. Moving into biomanufacturing would introduce additional variables, including nutrient composition, growth conditions, culture time, material thickness, incorporation of functional compounds and post-processing.

Rather than testing these variables one at a time, I would use automated liquid handling, through a platform such as Opentrons, to prepare a systematic matrix of small-scale experiments in which multiple material and biological parameters could be varied in a controlled and reproducible way.

For example, a first experimental series could vary:

• growth-medium composition;
• concentration of selected functional compounds;
• moment at which these compounds are introduced;
• culture time;
• post-growth treatment.

The resulting samples could then be evaluated using criteria directly relevant to the development of a wearable active interface: material thickness, flexibility, mechanical strength, moisture retention, surface quality, functional-compound loading, and release behaviour over time.

For me, automation would not replace the design process, but expand the material possibility space that can be explored systematically and reproducibly. It would allow a larger number of material variations to be generated and compared, while design decisions would continue to be informed by both functional performance and sensory qualities.

4. How much would I need to make, and how long would it take?

For the first meaningful scale, I would define the objective as producing enough material for one full-scale wearable prototype, rather than immediately considering industrial production.

As an initial design assumption, I would target approximately 1.5 m² of usable material. This represents a working estimate of the surface area required to construct one full-scale wearable prototype, rather than a fixed production requirement.

If one experimental growth tray produced a sheet approximately 30 cm × 40 cm:

0.30 m × 0.40 m = 0.12 m² per tray

To obtain 1.5 m²:

1.5 m² / 0.12 m² ≈ 12.5 trays

This means that approximately 13 successful sheets of this size would be required. In practice I would plan for around 15–16 trays to allow for unsuccessful or inconsistent samples.

The exact production time would need to be experimentally established for the selected organism and culture conditions. As an initial planning range, I would assume approximately 10–14 days of microbial growth per batch, consistent with cultivation periods reported for bacterial cellulose production (Uğurel & Öğüt, 2024), followed by harvesting, purification, functionalisation and material conditioning.

If multiple trays were grown in parallel, producing the surface area required for one prototype could therefore potentially happen within a single growth cycle rather than sequentially.

A preliminary prototype timeline could be:

10–14 days of microbial growth + several days for harvesting, purification, functionalisation, conditioning and testing ≈ 2–3 weeks for one material generation.

This is intentionally a back-of-the-envelope estimate. The real yield would depend on the biological system, growth medium, thickness required and percentage of material lost during processing.

At a later stage, scale would become a different design problem. Rather than simply multiplying the number of growth trays, I would want to investigate whether the material could be grown closer to the geometry required by the body or garment. This could reduce cutting waste while opening the possibility of integrating biological growth more directly into the garment construction process.

5. What don’t I know yet?

The project currently has three major technical questions.

1. Can a biologically manufactured material achieve the physical and sensory qualities required for a second skin?

A material may be biologically producible but still be too rigid, fragile, unstable or uncomfortable to function as clothing. Flexibility, touch, breathability, moisture behaviour and movement with the body would therefore need to be evaluated.

2. How can functional compounds be incorporated and transferred to the skin in a controlled way?

It is not yet clear whether these compounds should be introduced during biological growth or after the structural material has been produced. I would need to understand how much can be retained, how quickly it is released and whether incorporation changes the mechanical behaviour of the material.

3. Can biological growth itself become part of the design and construction process?

Instead of producing uniform sheets that are later cut like conventional textiles, I am interested in whether growth could eventually be spatially controlled: different thicknesses, properties or functional zones could potentially correspond to different areas of the body.

This is currently a research direction rather than an established capability, but it is particularly important to the project because it could change not only what a textile is made from, but also how a garment is designed and manufactured.

Conclusion

Interactive Second Skin proposes biomanufacturing not simply as an alternative way to produce textile material, but as an opportunity to reconsider what clothing can do.

The long-term ambition is to move from clothing as a passive boundary between the body and its environment toward clothing as an active interface capable of carrying, retaining and transferring properties through contact with the skin.

The biological system, the functional compounds and the manufacturing process are therefore not predetermined answers. They are variables to investigate around one central design question:

How can we grow a material that does more than cover the body?

References

• Asin-Garcia, E., Fawcett, J. D., Batianis, C. & Martins dos Santos, V. A. P. (2025). A snapshot of biomanufacturing and the need for enabling research infrastructure. Trends in Biotechnology, 43(5), 1000–1014. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.tibtech.2024.10.014
• Averesch, N. J. H., Berliner, A. J., Nangle, S. N., Zezulka, S., Vengerova, G. L., Ho, D., Casale, C. A., Lehner, B. A. E., Snyder, J. E., Clark, K. B., Dartnell, L. R., Criddle, C. S. & Arkin, A. P. (2023). Microbial biomanufacturing for space-exploration—what to take and when to make. Nature Communications, 14, 2311. https://doi.org/10.1038/s41467-023-37910-1
• Rasor, B. J., Vögeli, B., Landwehr, G. M., Bogart, J. W., Karim, A. S. & Jewett, M. C. (2021). Toward sustainable, cell-free biomanufacturing. Current Opinion in Biotechnology, 69, 136–144. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.copbio.2020.12.012
• Petzold, C. J. & Mukhopadhyay, A. (2025). From bench to biofactory: high-throughput technologies and automated workflows to accelerate biomanufacturing. Current Opinion in Biotechnology, 94, 103320. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.copbio.2025.103320
• Uğurel, C. & Öğüt, H. (2024). Optimization of bacterial cellulose production by Komagataeibacter rhaeticus K23. Fibers, 12(3), 29. https://doi.org/10.3390/fib12030029

AI Use

AI client: ChatGPT (OpenAI).

Interactive Second Skin is my own ongoing research project, developed prior to this assignment. My background is in fashion design and material experimentation, and I used ChatGPT primarily as a research support tool to investigate scientific and biological aspects relevant to exploring the project through biomanufacturing. AI prompts and research questions included:

• possible living systems for producing a flexible material suitable for an active textile interface;
• microbial cellulose as one potential biological material platform;
• possible strategies for incorporating, retaining and releasing functional compounds from a biologically manufactured material;
• how automated experimentation could support systematic and reproducible material development;
• how to estimate the production scale and timeline required for a full-scale wearable prototype.

The original project concept, previous material experimentation, creative direction and design decisions are my own.