The Biodesign Conference
, held at the end of August, had long been marked in my calendar: the 1st International Conference on Emerging Research at the Crossroads of Design, Biology, Computation, and Sustainability. Elvin Karana – formerly leading the research group Biobased Art & Design at CARADT and now Professor of Materials Innovation and Design at Delft University of Technology is the initiator of this three-day event, structured around plenary sessions and parallel paper presentations on the first two days, followed by workshops and excursions on the third.
At the opening of the conference in and around Delft University of Technology, Karana defined what the field of biodesign currently means to her:
‘Biodesign, as this corpus practices it, is the design of, with, and for living systems treated as active, temporally unfolding participants in the work. It is an ongoing, asymmetrical relationship, where the organism’s own growth, decay, unpredictability, and agency are taken as legitimate design material rather than noise to be engineered out.’
The call for a dedicated conference, which will now take place every two years, grew ever louder, Karana explained, because biodesign is, ‘by its own best account, methodologically inventive out of necessity – building bespoke frameworks for uncertainty, care, decentralised teaching, and cross-disciplinary trust – each one developed because the field it draws from had no ready answer.’ Existing platforms, judging biodesign by criteria drawn from more established disciplines, are often unable to accommodate this inventiveness. In this regard, Karana emphasised that sustainability and ethics cannot be an afterthought but must be among the very frameworks a field like biodesign has to invent for itself.
The plenary part of the conference consisted of three panel sessions and two keynote speakers, who together painted a diverse picture of the young discipline. In his keynote speech ‘Biodesign – The Nature of Relationship’, transdisciplinary design researcher Maurizio Montalti spoke of an emerging new biodesign vocabulary. He proposed to learn with and from, as he put it, ‘real experts – mycologists, biotechnologists, bioprocess engineers – to absorb the languages and tools of science, thus understanding and embracing the nature of living processes.’ Another point he made was that designers must learn to allow the living material they work with to flourish ‘on its own time’, ‘not to push fungal time into industrial time’. The designer’s role shifts from sole author to participant. A biodesigner proposes a context; the microbial collaborator responds by growing, whereby irregularity should not be interpreted as a technical failure: ‘When we polish, we are erasing a memory.’
Design Informatics researcher Larissa Pschetz, part of the panel ‘Agential Matter’, also challenged the paradigms we take for granted by posing two interrelated questions: ‘How can biological systems expand our understanding of social, economic and ecological contexts?’ and ‘How can we respond to this through design?’ These two questions seem, at first glance, more closely aligned than is often the case in practice. Biological systems are, by definition, multi-species and relational – yet the scientific knowledge we draw on to understand them is typically produced through isolation, through the reduction of a system to a single, controllable variable. In other words, what we know about biology is shaped by a method poorly suited to biology’s own, entangled nature. When asked for a final statement in another panel, phytoplankton ecologist Dedmer van de Waal eloquently summed it up: ‘Diversity begets stability but reduces predictability’.
This methodological gap – between multi-species entanglement and reductionist knowledge-production – is compounded by another, temporal one. In the panel ‘Biodesign Across Time and Space’, biodesign researcher Orkan Telhan revealed this latter gap through presenting his investigation into the use of dried, organically grown fungal mycelium to produce environmentally friendly computer chips. To do so, he has been farming mycelium over the past few years whereby he noticed that every April the mycelium harvest goes bad. To explain the differences in knowledge ‘across time and space’, he shared a simple but telling insight: humans have been farming lettuce for 7000 years and strawberries for 700 years, but have only been cultivating mycelium for a decade. Some knowledge cannot be produced quickly, no matter how sound the method. It can only accrue through repetition, season after season, harvest after harvest.
In addition to the plenary section, the first two days were filled with ‘paper and pictorial’ presentations, each taking place across three parallel sessions, which meant choices had to be made. Fortunately, there was a genuine range to choose from, including sessions on self-healing living materials, non-human intelligences, multispecies ecosystems, engineered mycelium materials, and education-focused block sessions, to name but a few. The teacher in me was drawn to the presentations on methods for working with biomaterials, such as fermentation and scent extraction, like the research by Emma Sicher of Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin, who honed her craft of growing SCOBY (Symbiotic Culture Of Bacteria and Yeast) ‘from scratch’ through vernacular acetic fermentation techniques in Thailand, known as ‘Nam Mak’, yielding incredibly thick and large slabs of bacterial cellulose that any lab technician in the Netherlands would find irresistible. It goes to show once again that much innovation is not about looking ahead, but rather about preserving existing, often traditional and indigenous, knowledge.
As an artist-researcher, I opted for more experimental and speculative research, such as the project by Anastasiia Raina of Rhode Island School of Design on sea urchins, or, as they are known in Dutch, ‘zee-egels’. Together with her team, she undertook the incredible task of ‘approaching biodesign as a convergence of design, science, economics and gastronomy’. Her presentation began by noting that sea urchins can adapt to a three-degree rise in water temperature, making them prime candidates for survival amid the current climate catastrophe. Following this fact, a deluge of actions, methods and output flew by, culminating in a communal dinner where virtually everything was made with or from sea urchins: the ceramic tableware from which people ate and drank, including the glaze, and the napkins, which had been dyed with sea urchin dye. They also prepared a sea urchin menu, featuring the three species that depend on one another to thrive: kelp, oysters and sea urchins.
Full papers
It was interesting to see that especially with the paper presentations the chasm between purely speculative projects and taking those projects towards an industry context seemed, at times, unbridgeable. Yet then, in turn, projects were presented that manage to combine precisely these two elements, successfully setting out future-oriented plans with high ethical standards whilst simultaneously implementing them in a scaled-up production process that will make these products accessible to a wide audience. I do not wish to attach any value judgements here, because biodesign, by its very nature, is unstable and unpredictable. No fixed quality criteria should be therefore linked to a project’s failure or success at scaling up. Especially since the requirement of scaling up, at times, is precisely what stands in the way of genuine innovation. With this seeming ambiguity, Elvin Karana’s opening statement offers solace, when she writes: ‘[Biodesign] is critically self-aware almost to the point of internal contradiction, capable in the same conference of romanticising ‘regenerative’ materials and warning, in the next paper, against exactly that romanticism.’
Risk Hazekamp, September 2026
Risk Hazekamp, researcher from the Regenerative Art and Design group (previously the Biobased Art and Design group, 2018-2024) has received funding from Regieorgaan SIA for their PD project – Unlearning Photography: Listening to Cyanobacteria.
‘It is through the “not-knowing” that a stimulating and caring environment can be created to confidently share vulnerability.’
Risk Hazekamp is researcher in the Regenerative Art and Design research group at CARADT, the Art & Sustainability research group of the Research Centre Art & Society (Hanze) and the Centre of Design Research for Regenerative Material Ecologies (DREAM) at the Technical University Delft.
The Regenerative Art and Design (RAD) research group seeks to contribute to a new generation of regenerative designers and artists who address the pressing need for transitions that support planetary health. By taking whole systems responsibility through collaborative practices, the group aims to create transformative pathways for reimagining design futures grounded in care and ecological integrity.
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