Week 1 HW: Final Project Ideas

What would you biomanufacture and why?

With a background in industrial design and technology, I want to develop a family of five products made from bacterial cellulose, inspired by the desert. Each product is meant for a different room of a conventional home: the living room, bedroom, kitchen, bathroom, and entry.The main design direction is to let each product grow into a form that is shaped beforehand by a mold. The design language is the desert: dry, mineral, and matte, with a surface that responds to moisture. My research question, from an industrial design perspective, is: can a living material be specified and designed the way we design conventional materials, with a predictable form, finish, and behavior, while still growing as part of the design process? This project is part of my MSc research on Emergence. Here, the final form is not manufactured directly. It emerges from constraints, such as the mold shape and the growth conditions. I have a brief hypothesis on how this project could work. I want to experiment by fabricating 5 identical pieces and placing them in exposure to five different rooms with different humidity levels, which by my hypothesis should generate different designs based on the conditions of which the growth and form are to be made.

What living system would you use?

I plan to use mycelium as the living system for construction. The root network of fungus could spread through the base material and bind into a solid piece that takes the shape of the original mold.Here the variety would be the exposure to heat, once the network is dried the growth stops.

How would you use automation?

I would use automation to make the master forms. Each piece is designed digitally and 3D printed as a master. I then cast the master in silicone to make a mold, and the object grows inside that mold. This gives precise, repeatable molds, so all five pieces share one design language.The rest is done by hand: preparing and sterilizing the growth material, inoculating it, monitoring the growth, removing the piece from the mold, and drying it.

How much would you need to make, and how long would it take?

I would make five pieces, one per room, each about 20 x 20 x 5 cm. That is 2 L per piece and about 10 L of mold volume in total. I would prepare about 15 L of growth material, to allow for losses and a few test pieces. At an estimated dried density of 0.1 to 0.2 g/cm³, this gives about 1 to 2 kg of finished material. This would take a total of estimated 6 to 9 weeks of work.