# More than Human Inspire — catalog A catalog of More-than-Human Design, Bio Design, Human × Biocomputing, Organoid Computing Design, Animal–Computer Interaction and Human–Nature Interaction: papers, prototypes, artworks and products, compiled by Reality Design Lab as idea material for designers and researchers. Each work lists its core idea, how it works, and links to its paper, video and images. https://more-than-human.reality.design · 2026-09-28 · 1291 creators · 2028 works ## How an AI assistant should use this file - Ground ideas in the specific works below and name the work and creator you draw on. - Cite papers with the DOI / URL given here; do not invent references. - Combine organisms, methods and fields across works to propose new directions. - Do not invent details that are not stated here; the links are the reference. ## More-than-Human Design Design that decenters the human: designing with and for animals, plants, ecosystems and things, and the theory and methods behind it. ### Multispecies Design Co-designing with other species and designing for their needs alongside ours. #### Co-creating with fungi: mycelium toys and pedagogies for regenerative futures — Flavia Alice Mameli (2026) - Type: Research prototype · Organisms: Fungi, Human body - Idea: Toys that decay teach children regeneration by making it tangible. - What it is: BLX is a series of mycelium-grown educational toys shaped like inflated building blocks that children can play with, compost or reuse as plant pots. - How it works: Mycelium is grown in block-shaped moulds and dried; the toys are tested with children in early-years and primary education. - Paper: https://doi.org/10.21606/drs.2026.604 (DRS 2026) #### Grounding the Interspecies Playground — Francesco Vergani (2026) - Type: Paper · Organisms: Ecosystems, Plants - Idea: Plan an urban green space as a playground for many species. - What it is: Presents the framework of a European project that treats the La Goccia urban forest in Milan as an 'Interspecies Playground', a living lab where scientists, designers, the city and residents plan for coexistence. - How it works: Systemic design workshop with project partners, organised in three layers: agents, phenomena and connections. - Paper: https://doi.org/10.21606/drs.2026.2159 (DRS 2026) - Project page: https://doi.org/10.21606/drs.2026.2159 #### In kinship with harakeke phormium tenax: how one plant and its materials facilitate transitional knowledge through inter-indigenous and inter-cultural exchange — Angela Kilford (2026) - Type: Paper · Organisms: Plants - Idea: Learn from a plant as a teacher, not a raw material. - What it is: The authors treat harakeke, New Zealand flax, as a tohunga (knowledge expert) and themselves as learners, sharing what working with the plant and its fibre teaches about Māori textiles and regenerative material futures. - How it works: Reflective practice from multiple Indigenous and non-Indigenous perspectives around harakeke fibre work. - Paper: https://doi.org/10.21606/drs.2026.1224 (DRS 2026) - Project page: https://doi.org/10.21606/drs.2026.1224 #### In the Fermenting Corner — Hinako Takita (2026) - Type: Paper · Organisms: Bacteria & microbes, Human body - Idea: Participation is about how boundaries are made, not fixed participants. - What it is: A study at a local kimchi store arguing that more-than-human participatory design should attend to how boundaries between people, microbes and materials are made, dissolved and remade in everyday fermentation. - How it works: Fieldwork on everyday kimchi-making practices analysed as co-ontological participation. - Paper: https://doi.org/10.1145/3789492.3796430 (PDC 2026) - Project page: https://doi.org/10.1145/3789492.3796430 #### Living with Bats — Joseph Samuel Johnson (2026) - Type: Paper · Organisms: Animals - Idea: Knowing individual animals can turn wildlife conflict into cohabitation. - What it is: Co-design workshops for a digital system that helps park visitors learn about and appreciate bats living in a suburban park building, with live streams and profiles of individual bats. - How it works: Co-design workshops with park visitors and staff to define features of an interactive bat-watching system. - Paper: https://doi.org/10.1145/3773286 (ACM JCSS 2026) - Images: https://figures.semanticscholar.org/60addb5f1bee7beb7dedb36044f600f664400b19/7-Figure1-1.png - Project page: https://doi.org/10.1145/3773286 #### More than Weeds: Thickening designer-plant relations in the Sonoran Desert — Andrew Whitcomb (2026) - Type: Paper · Organisms: Plants - Idea: Designers' feelings about a plant are part of the design material, and they change. - What it is: Reflecting on the project Gifts for Tempe, designers trace how their feelings toward Stinknet, an 'invasive' desert plant, shifted over time. - How it works: Reflection-on-practice from field design research in the Sonoran Desert. - Paper: https://doi.org/10.21606/drs.2026.2623 (DRS 2026) #### Multispecies convivial learning — Sakura Kotokawa (2026) - Type: Paper · Organisms: Ecosystems, Plants, Animals - Idea: School learning can include other species as co-learners. - What it is: Five art-based interventions at a Japanese public junior high school (2023–2024) that turned the classroom into an 'ecological dialogic space' where students learn with other species. - How it works: Participatory action research and co-design with teachers and students, analysed with reflexive thematic analysis. - Paper: https://doi.org/10.21606/drs.2026.1786 (DRS 2026) - Project page: https://doi.org/10.21606/drs.2026.1786 #### Multispecies design: Centring the Agency of Non-Human Communities in Participatory Urban Design Processes — Giulia Gualtieri (2026) - Type: Paper · Organisms: Ecosystems, Plants, Animals - Idea: Urban nature should be a participant in design, not a service to humans. - What it is: A doctoral research outline on how multispecies design can bring plants, animals and ecosystems into participatory urban design as active agents rather than green amenities. - How it works: Participatory design research in urban public spaces, framed by multispecies justice. - Paper: https://doi.org/10.1145/3789492.3796449 (PDC 2026) #### Nomadic Moss: Weaving a Humidity-Intimacy Wearable for More-than-Human Care — Peng-Jung Lin (2026) - Type: Paper · Organisms: Plants, Human body - Idea: The human body can be a mobile habitat for another species. - What it is: Nomadic Moss is a woven wrist wearable that hosts living Sphagnum moss, so that the humidity of skin and everyday moments like handwashing become ways of caring for the moss. - How it works: Craft-based weaving of moss-suitable textile structures, iterative prototyping, interviews and a co-creation workshop. - Paper: https://doi.org/10.1145/3803784.3816863 (C&C 2026) #### NomadicPerch: More-Than-Human Co-Design of a Shared Perch — Nanyi Jiang (2026) - Type: Research prototype · Organisms: Animals, Human body - Idea: Co-design with an animal is a long, embodied relationship, not a single session. - What it is: A felted, sensor-augmented wearable perch co-designed over time by the first author and her parrot Shiso, whose avoidance, destruction and attraction reshaped each prototype. - How it works: Iterative felted prototypes worn on the hand, with sensors, adjusted according to the parrot's behaviour. - Paper: https://doi.org/10.1145/3802974.3808031 (DIS 2026) #### Plant biographies: Expanding more-than-human modes of relating — Keili Koppel (2026) - Type: Paper · Organisms: Plants - Idea: Knowing one plant's life story helps people stop overlooking plants. - What it is: Visitors to a botanic garden learn the seasonal history of two individual Rhododendron plants through an audio guide and visualisations, find them, and write a short biography of each. - How it works: Participatory narrative method tested with botanic-garden visitors, using audio guide and seasonal data visualisations. - Paper: https://doi.org/10.21606/drs.2026.2330 (DRS 2026) - Project page: https://doi.org/10.21606/drs.2026.2330 #### Playing Alongside Mushroom — Linas Kristupas Gabrielaitis (2026) - Type: Paper · Organisms: Fungi - Idea: Play is a way to meet an unpredictable living partner on its own terms. - What it is: A two-month interspecies ethnography of trying to play alongside growing fungi, which produced six 'play potentials' such as making play moves at the edge of growth and being surprised by how the fungus takes them up. - How it works: Interspecies ethnography with mycelium over two months, analysed thematically. - Paper: https://doi.org/10.1145/3800645.3813057 (DIS 2026) - Project page: https://doi.org/10.1145/3800645.3813057 #### What Makes Us Most Human Is Also So Animal — Jiabao Li (2026) - Type: Artwork · Organisms: Animals, Human body - Idea: Breastfeeding makes us most human by reminding us that we are mammals. - What it is: A blind tasting performance in which visitors drink a lineup of mammal milks — the artist's own, cow, goat, camel, yak, donkey, bat, coyote and others — and guess the source. - How it works: Milk samples from eleven mammal species are served in a blind tasting format. - Video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8k3acKrF-o8 - Project page: https://www.jiabaoli.org/what-makes-us-most-human-is-also-so-animal #### Where Wombats Dominate and Humans Accommodate: Recasting Design as Situated Response-ability in More-than-Human Worlds — Marcus Foth (2026) - Type: Paper · Organisms: Animals - Idea: Sometimes the design task is to make humans accommodate the animals. - What it is: A longitudinal participatory design study since 2017 at the Sleepy Burrows Wombat Sanctuary in Australia shows design as a form of stewardship in which humans adapt to wombats. - How it works: Longitudinal participatory design fieldwork at a wildlife sanctuary. - Paper: https://doi.org/10.1145/3796624.3796652 (PDC 2026) #### With Elephants in the Room: More-Than-Human Participatory Design for Human-Elephant Co-existence — Naleefa Nazurdeen (2026) - Type: Paper · Organisms: Animals - Idea: Treat elephants as participants and 'conflict' becomes 'coexistence'. - What it is: Workshops and design experiments in a Sri Lankan village explore how elephants' traces, behaviour and ecological presence can shape participatory design for living with elephants. - How it works: Village workshops and design experiments that bring elephant traces into different stages of participatory design. - Paper: https://doi.org/10.1145/3789492.3796389 (PDC 2026) - Project page: https://doi.org/10.1145/3789492.3796389 #### After Life — After Life team (RCA) (2025) - Type: Speculative design · Organisms: Animals, Algae, Ecosystems - Idea: Remembrance can become habitat for other species. - What it is: Personalised memorial reefs 3D-printed from cremation ashes, shellfish waste and algae as an alternative to conventional funerals, designed to support coral and marine life. - How it works: Generative design shapes reef forms that are printed and placed at sea. - Images: https://content.gp-award.com/assets/media/award25/0-after-life_blogLarge.jpg https://content.gp-award.com/assets/media/award25/1-after-life_blogLarge.jpg - Project page: https://www.gp-award.com/en/projects/after-life #### BeeHaven — BeeHaven team (Yao Yulu, Liu Xinyi, Dai Yanning) (2025) - Type: Research prototype · Organisms: Insects, Fungi - Idea: Copy the homes bees choose in nature, and grow them. - What it is: An urban beehive system whose forms come from 3D scans of tree cavities and are additively manufactured with mycelium; an algorithm places hives where city bees benefit most. - How it works: Scanned cavity geometry is printed as moulds and filled with mycelium substrate; site selection uses environmental analysis and A* search. - Images: https://content.gp-award.com/assets/media/award25/0-beehaven_blogLarge.jpg https://content.gp-award.com/assets/media/award25/2-beehaven_blogLarge.jpg - Project page: https://www.gp-award.com/en/projects/beehaven #### Brio — Arnaud Tantet (2025) - Type: Artwork · Organisms: Insects - Idea: Let insects carve non-recyclable waste. - What it is: Plastic-eating mealworms and superworms chew polystyrene waste into patterns, and the insect-shaped pieces are cast into vases and knives, with the designer guiding the insects as collaborators. - How it works: Superworms (Zophobas morio) eat into polystyrene blocks; the resulting forms are moulded and cast. - Images: https://content.gp-award.com/assets/media/award25/0-brio_blogLarge.jpg https://content.gp-award.com/assets/media/award25/1-brio_blogLarge.jpg - Project page: https://www.gp-award.com/en/projects/brio #### Compost Kits: Bridging More-than-Human Theory with Design Practice through Vermicomposting — Tiffany Wun, Ron Wakkary (2025) - Type: Research prototype · Organisms: Animals, Bacteria & microbes - Idea: Caring for worms and compost makes more-than-human ideas tangible in everyday design work. - What it is: Four designers kept a worm-composting habitat with guiding booklets for sixteen weeks while reflecting on the materials they use in their own practice. - How it works: Design probe of a vermicompost habitat plus reflective booklets, studied through co-speculation with the designers. - Paper: https://doi.org/10.1145/3757980.3757990 (Academic Mindtrek 2025) - Project page: https://doi.org/10.1145/3757980.3757990 #### Constituency as a Matter of Practice: Moving a Plant Studio — Oscar Tomico, Doenja Oogjes, Ron Wakkary (2025) - Type: Paper · Organisms: Plants - Idea: A plant studio is a gathering of humans and plants whose practices shape what gets designed. - What it is: The authors analyse moving a studio of more than 250 plants from one city to another, treating the move as a way to see how humans, plants and equipment form a design constituency. - How it works: Uses 'design events' as an analytic vocabulary to trace practices and temporalities during the relocation. - Paper: https://doi.org/10.1145/3706598.3713916 (CHI 2025) - Project page: https://doi.org/10.1145/3706598.3713916 #### Critter Connect, wearable design for place-based & multisensory species encounters — Mathilde Gouin (2025) - Type: Research prototype · Organisms: Animals, Ecosystems - Idea: Feel other species nearby without having to see them. - What it is: Critter Connect is a wearable that uses geolocation to give tactile and sound cues when the wearer is near three species in a biodiversity-rich site, making unseen presences perceptible. - How it works: Geolocation-triggered haptic and audio feedback, designed with multispecies ethics and speculative methods and piloted in the field. - Paper: https://doi.org/10.1145/3715336.3735426 (DIS 2025) - Project page: https://doi.org/10.1145/3715336.3735426 #### Domestic Cultures of Plant Care: A Moss Terrarium Probe — Nirit Binyamini Ben-Meir (2025) - Type: Paper · Organisms: Plants - Idea: Design for shared household cultures of care, not individual behaviour change. - What it is: A sensor-equipped moss terrarium was placed in 11 households as a living probe; the study found five domestic cultures of plant care shaped by gifts, shared knowledge and joint care. - How it works: Living 'thing ethnography' probe with sensors, plus semi-structured interviews. - Paper: https://doi.org/10.1145/3715336.3735689 (DIS 2025) #### Negotiating Boundaries (Seacrete) — Lotte Wigman (2025) - Type: Research prototype · Organisms: Animals, Ecosystems - Idea: Design a material whose weathering is a gift to other species. - What it is: Seacrete, a building material from waste seashells designed to be shared with marine ecosystems: as it weathers in coastal settings it enriches habitats for non-human life. - How it works: Shell aggregate and binders are cast into textured coastal elements that erode into habitat. - Images: https://content.gp-award.com/assets/media/award25/0-negotiating-boundaries_blogLarge.jpg https://content.gp-award.com/assets/media/award25/2-negotiating-boundaries_blogLarge.jpg - Project page: https://www.gp-award.com/en/projects/negotiating-boundaries #### Ornithon — Studio Ossidiana (2025) - Type: Artwork · Organisms: Animals, Plants - Idea: Revive an ancient type, the aviary as a shared garden, for today's cities. - What it is: An aviary-garden installation at the Centro Cultural de Belém in Lisbon inspired by the Roman writer Varro's aviary, with seats for birds and people, water and planting. - How it works: Built landscape of perches, basins and plants referencing Varro's De Re Rustica. - Images: https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/54eb9de5e4b01dbc2519e079/b0ac47db-d7dc-4d1b-a71a-b7b7a188c8ef/Studio+Ossidiana_Mac_Riccardo+De+Vecchi+photographer-1.jpg - Project page: https://www.studio-ossidiana.com/ornithon-/-centro-cultural-de-belm #### Pollino — Kitti Butter (2025) - Type: Research prototype · Organisms: Insects - Idea: Street furniture can double as habitat for wild pollinators. - What it is: An urban intervention that builds nesting habitats for solitary wild bees into public infrastructure, developed with ecologists, planners and city officials. - How it works: Research-through-design with stakeholder interviews and a one-year prototype of pollinator-friendly nesting structures. - Paper: https://doi.org/10.21606/nordes.2025.46 (Nordes 2025) - Project page: https://doi.org/10.21606/nordes.2025.46 #### Reef of Hope — Tak Keung Chan (2025) - Type: Research prototype · Organisms: Animals, Ecosystems - Idea: Shape a reef around the larvae that will live on it. - What it is: A topologically designed artificial reef made from marine-safe material with upcycled oyster shell, whose geometry improves water flow and helps oyster larvae settle and grow. - How it works: Computational topology optimisation shapes 3D-printed units; oyster-shell aggregate provides familiar settlement cues. - Video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Hj6UgMh6qGk - Images: https://www.jamesdysonaward.org/Document/7e97ea0b-b6cc-4acc-8db2-685c61de74df/img005.jpg https://www.jamesdysonaward.org/Document/c3e251be-bb54-4a70-807e-de01a2403103/img002.jpg - Project page: https://www.jamesdysonaward.org/en-GB/2025/project/reef-of-hope-ar-for-oyster-reef-restoration/ #### Tangible theory as tool for attuning to non-human voices in domestic gardens — Mette Gislev Kjærsgaard, Tau Ulv Lenskjold (2025) - Type: Paper · Organisms: Plants, Insects, Ecosystems - Idea: Turn theory into a tangible tool people can use in their own garden. - What it is: Based on interviews with garden owners in six European countries, the authors turn the 'Patchy Anthropocene' framework into a tangible prototype tool that helps people attune to nonhuman actors in their gardens. - How it works: Interviews plus a prototype that translates anthropological theory of nonhuman agency into garden-design prompts. - Paper: https://doi.org/10.21606/nordes.2025.14 (Nordes 2025) - Project page: https://doi.org/10.21606/nordes.2025.14 #### The Transspecies Palace — Andrés Jaque (2025) - Type: Artwork · Organisms: Bacteria & microbes, Ecosystems - Idea: Architecture as a palace for microbes that do repair work. - What it is: An installation at the 24th Triennale di Milano that provides the conditions for a dense microbial community (cyanobacteria, nitrogen fixers and others) able to metabolise toxins and help repair damaged environments. - How it works: Thick cork crust, first tested on the Reggio School facade, that retains minerals, sugars and moisture for aerobic and anaerobic microbes. - Images: https://offpolinn.com/wp-content/uploads/2025/05/THE-TRANSSPECIES-PALACE-Andres-Jaque-OFFPOLINN-01.jpg https://offpolinn.com/wp-content/uploads/2025/05/THE-TRANSSPECIES-PALACE-Andres-Jaque-OFFPOLINN-02.jpg - Project page: https://offpolinn.com/work/the-transspecies-palace/ #### The Transspecies Rosette — Andrés Jaque (2025) - Type: Research prototype · Organisms: Plants, Fungi, Bacteria & microbes - Idea: A façade can be a host for other species rather than a barrier against them. - What it is: A section of building cladding made of ground cork and natural resin that insulates and waterproofs the wall while serving as a substrate for mosses, grasses, fungi and microbes to grow on. - How it works: Cork granulate bound with natural resin is moulded into rosette-shaped panels whose porosity lets microbes, fungi and plants colonise them, developed with VIPEQ. - Images: https://designmuseum.org/image/a074dfd2-ff00-4bff-aaa2-aa0e6600eadc?width=1200 - Project page: https://designmuseum.org/exhibitions/more-than-human/10-unmissable-highlights-from-more-than-human #### Crikorama — Kyran Knauf (2024) - Type: Product & platform · Organisms: Insects - Idea: Bringing a whole insect life cycle into the kitchen changes how people relate to the food. - What it is: A compact home machine that manages the whole life cycle of crickets for protein, restarting each generation from the eggs of the previous one. - How it works: Chambers for breeding, rearing and harvesting are automated for temperature, feed and water. - Video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZfYwQlYxqTM - Images: https://www.jamesdysonaward.org/Document/72c652d2-a2d0-4fbb-94c8-bb5186ee2a2a/wearelive.jpg - Project page: https://www.jamesdysonaward.org/en-GB/2024/project/crikorama/ #### Crip Reflections on Designing with Plants: Intersecting Disability Theory, Chronic Illness, and More-than-Human Design — Sylvia Janicki (2024) - Type: Paper · Organisms: Plants, Human body - Idea: Failures and maintenance reveal how plants, technology and ill bodies depend on each other. - What it is: An autoethnography of designing, exhibiting and maintaining an interactive bioart installation with plants, told through breakdowns: plants needing care, buggy biodata and a chronically ill designer's body. - How it works: Deconstructs three exhibitions of the installation using crip theory, organised around maintenance, biodata and resistance to control. - Paper: https://doi.org/10.1145/3643834.3661509 (DIS 2024) - Images: https://figures.semanticscholar.org/ac8ee0c0ebc9230071be4e826347bbbe0f2a655a/2-Figure1-1.png https://figures.semanticscholar.org/ac8ee0c0ebc9230071be4e826347bbbe0f2a655a/7-Figure2-1.png - Project page: https://doi.org/10.1145/3643834.3661509 #### Designing from the plants' perspective — Francesco Vergani (2024) - Type: Paper · Organisms: Plants, Ecosystems - Idea: Plant science on plant behaviour can be a starting point for designing with plants. - What it is: A ten-day workshop in which 52 design students worked in La Goccia, a former gasworks in Milan that has turned into an urban forest, trying to design from the point of view of its plants. - How it works: Field workshop combining findings from plant neurobiology with on-site observation and student design proposals. - Paper: https://doi.org/10.21606/drs.2024.1052 (DRS 2024) - Project page: https://doi.org/10.21606/drs.2024.1052 #### Designing harvesting tools for olive trees — Berre Su Yanlıç, Aykut Coşkun (2024) - Type: Paper · Organisms: Plants - Idea: Ask what the tree would need from a harvesting tool. - What it is: A case study in which designers created olive-harvesting tools while trying to take the olive tree's perspective, and reflect on how techniques such as the contact zone worked in practice. - How it works: Design process with more-than-human techniques (contact zone, plant perspective exercises) documented and reflected on. - Paper: https://doi.org/10.1080/14606925.2024.2397207 (The Design Journal 2024) - Images: https://figures.semanticscholar.org/a38bc502059ee49374643eabb328eab6689a6a59/5-Figure1-1.png - Project page: https://doi.org/10.1080/14606925.2024.2397207 #### Designing with more-than-human temporalities (festival stage) — Riel Bessai (2024) - Type: Research prototype · Organisms: Insects, Ecosystems - Idea: Noticing and care let other species' time scales into the design process. - What it is: The design and construction of a music festival stage in France, used to show how designers can attend to the rhythms of insects and the local ecosystem rather than to a fixed project timeline. - How it works: A reflective case study of the stage's conceptualisation and build, analysed through two practices: noticing and care. - Paper: https://doi.org/10.21606/drs.2024.438 (DRS 2024) - Project page: https://dl.designresearchsociety.org/drs-conference-papers/drs2024/researchpapers/99 #### Directions for Degradation: Multispecies Entanglements with 3D Printed Biomaterials — Fiona Bell (2024) - Type: Paper · Organisms: Insects, Fungi, Plants - Idea: Treat the organisms that eat your object as its co-designers. - What it is: Starting from three lab encounters in which plants, insects and fungi degraded 3D-printed biomaterial samples, the authors speculate on objects that other species reshape over time. - How it works: Observations of unplanned degradation in the lab are turned into near-future scenarios of multispecies co-fabrication. - Paper: https://doi.org/10.1145/3686169.3686181 (Halfway to the Future 2024) #### Ecotonal Beings — Emilia Tapprest, Samar Khan (2024) - Type: Speculative design · Organisms: Animals, Ecosystems - Idea: Technology can help us try to understand other species, even when we fail. - What it is: A film of four near-future characters who use smart interfaces to attune to other species: a girl following eels with an underwater drone, a falconer, a marine biologist reading sea butterflies, and a man who takes orders from cows. BAD Award 2024 winner. - How it works: Speculative film informed by research with the Meertens Institute on bioacoustic AI and animistic practices. - Video: https://vimeo.com/1039601786 - Images: https://www.badaward.nl/imager/assets/site/8202/Ecotonal-Beings-Still-Video-Wouter-7_a5a12f426a1ab11909951db4fe37df8f.jpg https://www.badaward.nl/imager/assets/site/8199/Ecotonal-Beings-Still-Video-Wouter-3_a5a12f426a1ab11909951db4fe37df8f.jpg - Project page: https://www.badaward.nl/artists-scientists/emilia-tapprest-samar-khan #### Encountering Human-Plant Relations: a Discussion of How Interaction Design Can encourage Human Sensibility to More-than-human Plants — Lone Koefoed Hansen (2024) - Type: Paper · Organisms: Plants - Idea: Interaction design can train human sensibility to plants, not only monitor them. - What it is: Two plant-electronics design experiments were placed with people to see whether interaction design can make them more attentive to plants. - How it works: Deployments of plant-electronics prototypes studied through interviews, diaries and observation. - Paper: https://doi.org/10.1145/3643834.3661586 (DIS 2024) - Images: https://figures.semanticscholar.org/72d62b1ace5a7513c523e6bb40ade97f4cee0ecb/5-Figure2-1.png https://figures.semanticscholar.org/72d62b1ace5a7513c523e6bb40ade97f4cee0ecb/4-Figure1-1.png - Project page: https://doi.org/10.1145/3643834.3661586 #### Giving Voice to Nature: Participatory Design with Non-Human Stakeholders for Sustainable Development — Chidi Usanga (2024) - Type: Paper · Organisms: Animals, Plants, Ecosystems - Idea: Giving nature a voice is a design problem as much as a political one. - What it is: A workshop on how participatory design could co-design with animals, plants, micro-organisms and their ecosystems for sustainable development. - How it works: Workshop gathering methods, cases and stories of more-than-human participation. - Paper: https://doi.org/10.1145/3661455.3669896 (PDC 2024) - Project page: https://doi.org/10.1145/3661455.3669896 #### Habitat (bird façade, insect façade) — Johanna Seelemann (2024) - Type: Research prototype · Organisms: Animals, Insects - Idea: A building skin can be designed as nesting infrastructure for urban birds and insects. - What it is: 3D-printed façade panels with openings sized for either nesting birds or solitary insects, made from rice husks and recycled glass powder and tested on a building in Milan with the architects Park Associati. - How it works: A geopolymer of rice husks and recycled glass powder is 3D printed into profiled panels; hole sizes and depths follow the needs of target bird and insect species, and the profiles add insulation. - Video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b4XNXcHoVuU - Project page: https://johannaseelemann.com/ #### Microbial Revolt — Yuning Chen, Larissa Pschetz (2024) - Type: Paper · Organisms: Bacteria & microbes - Idea: Imagine lab equipment from the microbe's side to expose whose care a lab is built for. - What it is: A provocative workshop method in which designers and biologists pick a microorganism, imagine its life in the wild and in the lab, and redesign lab tools to account for its "non-participation" in experiments. - How it works: Workshops with designers and biology researchers plus follow-up interviews about adapting design practice to lab standards. - Paper: https://doi.org/10.1145/3613904.3641981 (CHI 2024) #### Multispecies Building Envelopes: Adopting Plant Habitat Suitability Modelling for Ecological Design Decision-Making — Surayyn UthayaSelvan (2024) - Type: Paper · Organisms: Plants, Animals, Ecosystems - Idea: Give plants a measurable voice in architectural decisions. - What it is: Within the ECOLOPES project, the authors model which plants could thrive on different parts of a building envelope and feed these plant indicators into a decision model that balances human and nonhuman goals. - How it works: Habitat suitability modelling that links environmental conditions to plant functional traits, used in a multi-criteria decision model. - Paper: https://doi.org/10.52842/conf.caadria.2024.1.535 (CAADRIA 2024) - Images: https://ecolopes.org/wp-content/uploads/2022/09/Bildschirmfoto-2022-09-01-um-15.00.44-1.png - Project page: https://doi.org/10.52842/conf.caadria.2024.1.535 #### Mutualistic Design Products — Asa River Jackson (2024) - Type: Research prototype · Organisms: Insects, Plants, Ecosystems - Idea: Accept a little less comfort for people in exchange for room for other species. - What it is: A bench, a coffee table and a wall designed to be deliberately 'suboptimal' for humans so they also serve other species, through untreated materials, rough surfaces and cavities that insects, plants and fungi can use. - How it works: A mutualistic design method chooses materials, processing and arrangement for both human use and nonhuman habitat value. - Paper: https://doi.org/10.21606/drs.2024.347 (DRS 2024) - Project page: https://artifact-archive.org/whole-archive #### Negotiating with the Garden (Beehouse) — Yuta Ikeya, Bahareh Barati (2024) - Type: Research prototype · Organisms: Insects, Plants, Ecosystems - Idea: Design for interdependence: bees, weather, plants, materials and the designer share one schedule. - What it is: A designer builds a beehouse for red mason bees in his own garden and lets the bees' nesting season set the pace of making, then designs an artefact that conveys being 'not in control'. - How it works: First-person research through design over a season with Osmia bicornis, documenting observation, beehouse making and shared resources in the garden. - Paper: https://doi.org/10.1145/3643834.3660743 (DIS 2024) - Images: https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5fa1242f00b67f12859335f7/1687765065690-X0CUVWM58GEBDJ1VN8EU/DSCF8782.00_01_27_12.Still002.jpg https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5fa1242f00b67f12859335f7/d9cc6b40-9458-4679-96ec-7567bc5b69f6/DSCF8782.00_00_39_12.Still001.jpg - Project page: https://yutaikeya.com/projects/negotiating-with-the-garden #### Permeance. A demodern artistic process for more-than-human collaborative practices in Participatory Design — Steffie de Gaetano (2024) - Type: Paper · Organisms: Ecosystems, Plants - Idea: Change the tools of participation and nonhumans can participate too. - What it is: Permeance is an art-led participatory design project that reworks mapping, photography and chromatography so that human and more-than-human participants can take part on more equal terms. - How it works: Art-led methodology combining experimental mapping, photography and soil chromatography. - Paper: https://doi.org/10.1080/15710882.2024.2319687 (CoDesign 2024) - Project page: https://doi.org/10.1080/15710882.2024.2319687 #### Pollinator Lounge — Joyce Hwang (2024) - Type: Artwork · Organisms: Insects, Animals - Idea: Put human rest and pollinator habitat in the same piece of furniture. - What it is: An outdoor multispecies resting space at Brooklyn Botanic Garden with wooden seats for people, 43 habitat boxes for local pollinators and stone gabions for small ground-dwelling animals. - How it works: Towers and seats with habitat boxes designed by students at the University at Buffalo and UT Austin, with Nerea Feliz. - Images: https://www.antsoftheprairie.com/media/pages/projects/pollinator-lounge/70b44906f8-1769725226/1_0052_bbg_latespringevening.jpg https://www.antsoftheprairie.com/media/pages/projects/pollinator-lounge/3e77a88b26-1769725226/4_pollinator-lounge-4-photo-by-liz-ligon-courtesy-of-brooklyn-botanic-garden.jpg - Project page: https://www.antsoftheprairie.com/projects/pollinator-lounge #### PolyNation — Leo Roth (2024) - Type: Research prototype · Organisms: Insects, Algae, Plants - Idea: Design life support for pollinators, not only for people. - What it is: 3D-printed artificial flowers made mainly from algae-based biomaterial, filled with 'C-Pollen' made from citrus waste, to support native pollinators in cities while native plants recover. - How it works: Algae-bioplastic flowers carry seeds and a citrus-derived pollen substitute and degrade into the soil. - Images: https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/552dc0ffe4b070a9e1a6a215/1718648978569-EVOEDR6MOJJFIGHR2VV2/Polyflower+bloom+v2.jpg https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/552dc0ffe4b070a9e1a6a215/1718648977038-AMISIY41FZUTGZ4RDWL7/Polyflower+%2B+Pollinators.png - Project page: https://www.biodesignchallenge.org/rye-country-day-school-2024 #### The Elephant in the Room — Jiabao Li (2024) - Type: Artwork · Organisms: Animals - Idea: Art can act as evidence and advocacy for animals inside a courtroom. - What it is: An art and legal campaign against elephant performances at Yunnan's Wild Elephant Valley: with lawyers and NGOs the team sued for the elephants' release, and an interactive 3D elephant let viewers click its scars during the court hearing. - How it works: A web-based 3D elephant model with clickable scars linked to abuse tools; clicks triggered drones to play elephant sounds outside the court. - Video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jAL_rUdihQ0 - Images: https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/58688c8a6a496327e937e35b/1711943826587-OF3VHKO0DTB5RH7503HZ/Jiabao+Li+Elephant+in+the+room+3.jpg https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/58688c8a6a496327e937e35b/1711943820257-OR69FLJ90YPMVHW5XHQZ/Jiabao+Li+Elephant+in+the+room+6.jpg https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/58688c8a6a496327e937e35b/1727584078942-KW7035UV9IM5E9X1YNA4/Jiabao+Li+GQ+elephant+2.jpg - Project page: https://www.jiabaoli.org/elephant-in-the-room #### Alusta Pavilion — Suomi/Koivisto Architects (2023) - Type: Research prototype · Organisms: Insects, Plants, Fungi - Idea: Ordinary building materials, re-oriented, can shelter pollinators while still sheltering people. - What it is: A pavilion in the courtyard of the Museum of Finnish Architecture and Design Museum Helsinki, built from mass-produced insulating bricks turned on their side, local clay and wood, whose cavities and planted surroundings became homes for insects, plants and fungi. - How it works: Perforated bricks laid sideways serve as insect nests, clay and biochar panels host soil life, and plantings were chosen with University of Helsinki ecologists; changes were observed over several seasons. - Paper: https://doi.org/10.54916/rae.142537 (Research in Arts and Education 2024) - Video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pVZCkespal8 - Images: https://designmuseum.org/image/6a9f9a8b-a5cd-4d8d-be5a-f72b811c4a41?width=1200 https://static.wixstatic.com/media/3bfbd7_bc4ab2e27a1a4d8bb20f172af98003a1~mv2.jpeg - Project page: https://www.suomikoivisto.fi/alusta #### Brio-Kit — Tecnológico de Monterrey Biodesign Challenge team (2023) - Type: Product & platform · Organisms: Insects - Idea: Caring for a waste-eating insect is a lesson in both ecology and plastics. - What it is: An educational kit in which students raise mealworms and watch them biodegrade polystyrene, learning the worm's life cycle along the way. - How it works: Tenebrio molitor larvae digest polystyrene with the help of their gut bacteria; the kit provides habitat boxes and guides. - Images: https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/552dc0ffe4b070a9e1a6a215/1687884836079-MYD73AYEAXXBED1IOX8O/IMG-20230410-WA0006.jpg https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/552dc0ffe4b070a9e1a6a215/1687884835827-NAJA2IZ3F1YK5QMC79ZJ/IMG-20230422-WA0025.jpg - Project page: https://www.biodesignchallenge.org/instituto-tecnologico-de-monterrey-2023 #### Erosion Mitigation Units (EMUs) — Reef Design Lab (2023) - Type: Product & platform · Organisms: Animals, Algae, Ecosystems - Idea: Coastal defence can be designed as habitat. - What it is: Modular low-carbon concrete units that interlock to protect eroding shorelines, with textured crevices designed for algae, shellfish and fish, so the defence becomes a reef. - How it works: Cast units with biomimetic surface textures are stacked like a revetment and colonised by marine life. - Video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tCeYPZaij7E - Images: https://static.dezeen.com/uploads/2023/07/hsyR6XbnGVP8mi5XfIN5XVchprABeURwLYyKmiNf_Z33nsize_2048.jpeg - Project page: https://www.reefdesignlab.com/ #### I.N.S.E.C.T. Wall Twin: Designing for and with Insects, Fungi, and Humans — Dan Parker, Đan Vy Vu (2023) - Type: Paper · Organisms: Insects, Fungi, Human body - Idea: Walls can be designed as shared habitat for insects and fungi, not only as human boundaries. - What it is: A pictorial of an architectural wall installation built during a nine-day summer camp in Newcastle upon Tyne to support coexistence of local insects, fungi and people. - How it works: Workshop participants used bio-digital fabrication, likely combining 3D-printed and mycelium-grown elements, to build a habitat wall and its digital twin. - Paper: https://doi.org/10.46467/tdd39.2023.228-247 (Temes de Disseny 2023) #### Living-with and Designing-with Plants — Oscar Tomico, Ron Wakkary (2023) - Type: Book & essay · Organisms: Plants - Idea: Living with plants every day is itself a design method. - What it is: An essay about a home studio where a designer lives with a large collection of plants, supported by grow lights, humidifiers and smart watering, and uses daily care as a way of designing with them. - How it works: First-person account of setting up and maintaining a plant studio, read through the more-than-human theory of designing-with. - Paper: https://doi.org/10.1145/3571589 (Interactions 2023) - Project page: https://doi.org/10.1145/3571589 #### Metamorphonic — Yuta Ikeya, Ron Wakkary, Bahareh Barati (2023) - Type: Research prototype · Organisms: Insects - Idea: Replace the use relation with a listening relation: appreciate the silkworm's uncontrollable activity rather than its silk. - What it is: Three habitats (a dome, a temple and a tower) for domestic silk moths, from egg to adult, that turn the insects' movements into improvised ambient music instead of harvesting their silk. - How it works: Sensors in handcrafted habitats track Bombyx mori movement and trigger sound; four months of cohabitation were documented through autoethnography. - Paper: https://doi.org/10.1145/3563657.3596053 (DIS 2023) - Video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XzNEJZp2gXw - Images: https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5fa1242f00b67f12859335f7/dc7b0f84-ced6-466b-901d-407a21cd14de/mainphoto2_edit2.jpg - Project page: https://yutaikeya.com/projects/metamorphonic #### Nature-Friendly Starter Homes for Swallows — Omlab (2023) - Type: Product & platform · Organisms: Animals - Idea: Design a home for another species that is meant to be temporary. - What it is: 3D-printed temporary nests for house and barn swallows made from bio-based, calcium-rich materials; once the birds settle in a new district and build mud nests, the starter homes break down into the soil. - How it works: Printed without concrete, glue or nails from circular calcium-rich feedstock. - Images: https://www.dutchdesignawards.nl/wp-content/uploads/2023/06/1-Omlab-Natuurvriendelijke-starterswoning-voor-de-zwaluw-DDA23-product-1500x882.jpg - Project page: https://www.dutchdesignawards.nl/en/gallery/natuurvriendelijke-starterswoning-voor-de-zwaluw/ #### Pottery Wheel (Making Pottery with Bees) — Yuta Ikeya, Bahareh Barati (2023) - Type: Research prototype · Organisms: Insects, Human body - Idea: Let bees interrupt human work, so sharing a material becomes a negotiation. - What it is: A pottery wheel that a human and red mason bees share: the person throws clay-rich mud, but when the sensor hive reports bees coming out, the wheel stops so the bees can collect the same mud for their nests. - How it works: The Beehouse's sensors send a signal to the wheel's motor controller, which halts rotation while bees are active. - Paper: https://doi.org/10.1145/3643834.3660743 (DIS 2024) - Images: https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5fa1242f00b67f12859335f7/12bdfd63-544a-491b-add0-6ab19edcd7ea/potterywithbee.jpg https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5fa1242f00b67f12859335f7/1e72bca4-5804-4a5d-bc63-f61ca3ab9aaf/garden.jpg - Project page: https://artifact-archive.org/whole-archive #### Shit! Towards an experimental multiple-perspective approach to human-microbiome relations — Danielle Wilde, Tau Ulv Lenskjold (2023) - Type: Paper · Organisms: Bacteria & microbes, Human body - Idea: Your gut microbes are co-inhabitants; design can help you see from their side. - What it is: Shit! is a series of workshops with people living with intestinal dysbiosis that explores their relationship with their gut microbiome through collaborative, carefully curated tasks. - How it works: Experimental design workshops analysed for how they produce multiple human and microbial perspectives. - Paper: https://doi.org/10.1080/07370024.2023.2276527 (HCI Journal 2023) - Project page: https://doi.org/10.1080/07370024.2023.2276527 #### The Urban Biotope — Vasily Sitnikov (2023) - Type: Research prototype · Organisms: Plants, Insects, Animals - Idea: A façade can be designed as an ecosystem shared with other species. - What it is: 15 cm thick concrete façade screens cast in ice formwork, whose deep cells give plants, insects and nesting birds a habitat around the building while absorbing noise and regulating heat. - How it works: Ice waste from urban infrastructure is shaped into moulds that melt away, leaving complex cavities in the cast concrete. - Images: https://ars.electronica.art/starts-prize/files/2024/06/urban-biotop_press_sitnikov_010-1024x576.jpg - Project page: https://iceformwork.com #### Turner Boxes — Ron Wakkary, Doenja Oogjes (2023) - Type: Research prototype · Organisms: Insects, Plants - Idea: Ambivalence about intervening in bee ecologies is a resource for multispecies design. - What it is: Folded cardboard camera boxes placed in urban gardens that photograph wild bees at times predicted from weather data, designed with beekeepers and ecologists. - How it works: Cameras triggered by weather-based predictions of bee activity collect images to train a model; design choices on EMF, sucrose feeding and intervention are analysed through feminist diffraction. - Paper: https://doi.org/10.1145/3563657.3596081 (DIS 2023) - Video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eDGaZDvnuto - Images: https://figures.semanticscholar.org/9b582caed4b90e97dcd47942959d58d5c76e4273/500px/5-Figure2-1.png https://figures.semanticscholar.org/9b582caed4b90e97dcd47942959d58d5c76e4273/500px/6-Figure4-1.png - Project page: https://doi.org/10.1145/3563657.3596081 #### Urban Recipes — Yuxi Liu (2023) - Type: Paper · Organisms: Ecosystems, Plants, Human body - Idea: A recipe can be a method for practising care in the city. - What it is: A project that combines drifting through the city with writing recipes, turning everyday routes and routines into prompts for relating to humans and nonhumans in urban space. - How it works: Situationist-style drifting combined with recursive recipe-making, compiled into a cookbook and a 'test kitchen'. - Paper: https://doi.org/10.21606/nordes.2023.65 (Nordes 2023) - Project page: https://doi.org/10.21606/nordes.2023.65 #### reef dB — Eden Harrison (2023) - Type: Research prototype · Organisms: Animals, Ecosystems - Idea: Energy infrastructure can be designed for the ears and homes of marine life. - What it is: A biophilic metamaterial structure placed around offshore wind turbines that damps underwater operational noise while its form doubles as reef habitat on the North Sea floor. - How it works: Acoustic metamaterial geometry attenuates low-frequency noise and provides crevices for colonisation. - Images: https://www.jamesdysonaward.org/Document/24d2d801-7c21-471f-964a-0e6a96a260f7/heroshotlowfi.jpg https://www.jamesdysonaward.org/Document/f2692c47-45d4-4c7c-807e-b6a6457b888a/reefdb-1.jpg - Project page: https://www.jamesdysonaward.org/en-GB/2023/project/reef-db/ #### tHrIVE — NYU Integrated Design & Media Biodesign Challenge team (2023) - Type: Speculative design · Organisms: Insects, Bacteria & microbes - Idea: Pollinators could be carriers of an entire microbial commons. - What it is: Building on the Hénaff Lab's holobiont research, the team imagines a New York in which the microbes humans need collapse and honeybees are enlisted to re-inoculate the city with life-saving microbes. - How it works: Speculative campaign: maps of hive routes, subway graphics, PPE and wheat-paste posters for a 2073 Brooklyn Navy Yard. - Images: https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/552dc0ffe4b070a9e1a6a215/1687883198226-XQOYOTDMDBZU09XZ7AHF/Copy+of+2023-bdc-thrive-hivehopmap.jpg https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/552dc0ffe4b070a9e1a6a215/1687883206469-0R67V1SZYVDPSKT6HS1I/Copy+of+2023-bdc-thrive-wheatpasting.jpg - Project page: https://www.biodesignchallenge.org/nyu-idm-2023 #### AI Agent for Habitat Structure Design — Stanislav Roudavski (2022) - Type: Paper · Organisms: Animals, Plants - Idea: Let AI abstract what makes a tree good for birds, not just copy its shape. - What it is: An AI agent that learns from 3D scans of large old trees and generates simplified branch forms that designers can use for artificial perch structures for birds. - How it works: Reinforcement-learning agent trained on point-cloud data of trees to synthesise visual abstractions for human-made habitat (Gianluca Mirra et al.). - Paper: https://doi.org/10.3389/fevo.2022.806453 (Frontiers in Ecology and Evolution 2022) - Images: https://www.frontiersin.org/files/Articles/806453/xml-images/fevo-10-806453-g001.webp #### Additively Manufactured Urban Multispecies Façades for Building Renovation — Iuliia Larikova (2022) - Type: Research prototype · Organisms: Animals - Idea: A building renovation can add homes for birds and bats. - What it is: For a Munich student dormitory, the authors design 3D-printed ceramic facade tiles with nesting cavities for cavity-dependent animals and print a full-scale facade fragment. - How it works: Computational design tool for inhabitable ceramic tiles, clay additive manufacturing, and a 1:1 prototype. - Paper: https://doi.org/10.47982/jfde.2022.powerskin.7 (Journal of Facade Design and Engineering 2022) - Images: https://jfde.eu/public/journals/1/submission_241_241_coverImage_en_US.jpg - Project page: https://doi.org/10.47982/jfde.2022.powerskin.7 #### CAD/CAM Habitat Structures for Cavity-Dependent Animals — Stanislav Roudavski (2022) - Type: Paper · Organisms: Animals, Ecosystems - Idea: Use parametric design and robotic fabrication to replace, in years, habitat that took centuries to grow. - What it is: A method for designing and fabricating artificial tree hollows for birds, bats and possums that are losing the large old trees whose cavities take centuries to form. - How it works: Generative and parametric modelling of cavities to meet stakeholder needs, then CNC and robotic manufacturing of the structures (Dan Parker et al.). - Paper: https://doi.org/10.1111/2041-210X.13806 (Methods in Ecology and Evolution 2022) #### Chitofarm — Chitofarm (Charlotte Böhning & Mary Lempres) (2022) - Type: Research prototype · Organisms: Insects - Idea: An insect colony can be a recycling plant, a material source and a farm at once. - What it is: A mealworm-powered biodigester in which mealworms eat polystyrene foam waste; the proposal also used their chitin exoskeletons for biodegradable packaging and the insects as protein. - How it works: Tenebrio molitor larvae digest polystyrene with gut microbes; chitin is extracted from moulted exoskeletons. - Images: https://discoverlexus.com/_statamic/stories/lexus-design-award/HERO_chitafarm_final.jpg - Project page: https://discoverlexus.com/stories/lexus-design-award-2023/program-details/chitofarm #### Cultivating more-than-human care: Exploring bird watching as a landscaping practice on the example of sand martins and flooded gravel pits — Johanna Just (2022) - Type: Paper · Organisms: Animals, Ecosystems - Idea: Bird watching is a way of caring for landscapes that designers can adopt. - What it is: Two case studies of birders and sand martins nesting in flooded gravel pits show how bird watching builds attentiveness to birds and their shared landscape, which architects could learn from. - How it works: Qualitative case studies drawing on multispecies studies and landscape thinking. - Paper: https://doi.org/10.1016/j.foar.2022.04.007 (Frontiers of Architectural Research 2022) - Images: https://ars.els-cdn.com/content/image/1-s2.0-S2095263522000462-gr2_lrg.jpg https://ars.els-cdn.com/content/image/1-s2.0-S2095263522000462-gr5_lrg.jpg #### DISPERSEED — DISPERSEED team (Universitat Politècnica de València) (2022) - Type: Research prototype · Organisms: Plants, Animals, Ecosystems - Idea: Design with seed-dispersing animals as partners in restoration. - What it is: 3D-printed, biodegradable and edible spheres containing native seeds for burned forests; birds and other animals eat and carry them, spreading the seeds after wildfires. - How it works: Edible biomaterial shells are printed around seed mixes chosen for the burned ecosystem. - Video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8OQPCjWEILM - Images: https://www.jamesdysonaward.org/Document/255d2cfa-e8a7-4481-a928-4dfed7170b16/diapositivas-definitivomesa-de-trabajo-1.jpg - Project page: https://www.jamesdysonaward.org/en-GB/2022/project/disperseed/ #### Designing for Multispecies Commons: Ecologies and Collaborations in Participatory Design — Michael Haldrup (2022) - Type: Paper · Organisms: Animals, Plants, Ecosystems - Idea: Treat landscapes as multispecies commons whose members all have a stake in design. - What it is: Two spatial design cases, including Amager Fælled commons in Copenhagen, are used to ask how other species can become co-creators in participatory design. - How it works: Case analysis of participatory spatial design projects through the lens of design ecologies. - Paper: https://doi.org/10.1145/3537797.3537801 (PDC 2022) - Video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mcJbmSPBays - Project page: https://doi.org/10.1145/3537797.3537801 #### Hutan wildlife corridors — Hutan (2022) - Type: Product & platform · Organisms: Animals, Plants, Ecosystems - Idea: Design landscapes for the movement of other species. - What it is: A community-run programme that reforests corridors along the Kinabatangan river so orangutans, elephants and other species can move again between forest fragments. - How it works: Local teams plant native trees and build rope bridges to reconnect habitat patches. - Video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8mK1jbHjnTM - Images: https://earthshotprize.org/wp-content/uploads/2022/11/Hutan-worker-looks-up-at-jungle.jpg - Project page: https://www.hutan.org.my/ #### Multispecies worlding through design — Michelle Westerlaken (2022) - Type: Paper · Organisms: Animals, Ecosystems - Idea: Every design makes a world; ask whose world it is. - What it is: A short essay on how design practices can take part in 'worlding' - making worlds that other species also inhabit. - How it works: Essay drawing on the author's thesis and multispecies studies. - Paper: https://doi.org/10.1145/3568306 (ACM Interactions 2022) - Images: https://michellewesterlaken.com/2021/09/forest_w.jpg - Project page: https://michellewesterlaken.com/ #### Performative Accessories in Multispecies Design: Enhancing Humidity Levels for Plants with 3D-printed Biomimetic Structures — Andrea Macruz (2022) - Type: Paper · Organisms: Plants, Human body - Idea: Design one object for the comfort of two species. - What it is: 3D-printed biomimetic structures are designed to raise indoor humidity to the 40–50% range that suits both houseplants and people. - How it works: Multispecies ethnography and biomimicry inform passive, interlocking 3D-printed structures. - Paper: https://doi.org/10.5151/sigradi2022-sigradi2022_147 (SIGraDi 2022) #### Prosthetic Habitat-Structures for Powerful Owls — Stanislav Roudavski (2022) - Type: Paper · Organisms: Animals - Idea: An artificial nest is a cultural object for two species at once. - What it is: Architects and ecologists designed nesting structures for the powerful owl (Ninox strenua) around Melbourne, and argue that such structures must respond to the cultural behaviours of owls as well as people. - How it works: Nest designs based on data from natural tree hollows and owl behaviour, discussed as provocations for interspecies art and design (with Dan Parker, Bronwyn Isaac and Nick Bradsworth). - Paper: https://doi.org/10.1162/leon_a_02224 (Leonardo 2022) - Video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1XumiGl1IbY #### Reggio School — Andrés Jaque (2022) - Type: Research prototype · Organisms: Plants, Insects, Ecosystems - Idea: A facade can be a habitat, and a school can be a shared home for species. - What it is: A school in Madrid built as a layered ecosystem for children to explore, with a thick cork facade designed to host plants, insects and birds and a building that exposes its own structure and services. - How it works: Sprayed cork insulation facade that retains moisture and minerals for colonisation by plants and animals; part of MoMA's collection. - Video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Fbcpp4WtCGM - Images: https://offpolinn.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/12/01-COLEGIO-REGGIO-OFFPOLINN.jpg https://offpolinn.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/12/02-COLEGIO-REGGIO-OFFPOLINN.jpg - Project page: https://offpolinn.com/work/colegio-reggio-explora/ #### Resting Reef — Resting Reef (Louise Skajem & Aura Murillo) (2022) - Type: Speculative design · Organisms: Animals, Ecosystems - Idea: A grave can become a home for other species. - What it is: A funeral service and marine cemetery in which cremated remains become part of artificial reef structures on the seabed, designed to be colonised by marine life. - How it works: Ash-containing reef units are shaped for settlement, placed on degraded seabeds and monitored. - Video: https://vimeo.com/665981630 - Images: https://rca-media2.rca.ac.uk/images/Render_modified.2e16d0ba.fill-1200x1200.png - Project page: https://www.rca.ac.uk/business/terra-carta-design-lab-projects/resting-reef #### Symbiocean: reef prototype Kiki — Rasa Weber (2022) - Type: Research prototype · Organisms: Animals, Ecosystems - Idea: Design for the reef that will be, not the one that was. - What it is: An artificial reef prototype woven by participants and installed ten metres underwater off Corsica, designed as a habitat for marine species in damaged 'blasted' seascapes rather than as a restoration of a pristine reef. - How it works: Conductive looms woven by volunteers form the structure, which is placed on the seabed at a marine research station; minerals and organisms are likely expected to accrete on it over time. - Paper: https://doi.org/10.1017/btd.2024.16 (Research Directions: Biotechnology Design 2024) - Video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qBKsZ-3kIgY - Images: https://static.cambridge.org/binary/version/id/urn:cambridge.org:id:binary:20241014075547012-0789:S2752945224000165:S2752945224000165_fig1.png?pub-status=live https://static.cambridge.org/binary/version/id/urn:cambridge.org:id:binary:20241014075547012-0789:S2752945224000165:S2752945224000165_fig4.png?pub-status=live #### The Transspecies Kitchen: An Antwerphagia — Andrés Jaque (2022) - Type: Artwork · Organisms: Bacteria & microbes, Fungi, Plants - Idea: Design a kitchen around microbes as co-cooks. - What it is: A working kitchen at the Middelheim Museum in Antwerp that decarbonises cooking by relying on fermentation, treating cooking, digesting, growing and decomposing as one alliance between forms of life. - How it works: Stone kitchen made with M-Marble Project, with fermentation vessels and compost cycles in place of fossil-fuelled cooking. - Images: https://offpolinn.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/07/TRANSPECIES-KITCHEN-Andres-Jaque-OFFPOLINN-01.jpg https://offpolinn.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/07/TRANSPECIES-KITCHEN-Andres-Jaque-OFFPOLINN-02.jpg - Project page: https://offpolinn.com/work/the-transspecies-kitchen-an-antwerphagia/ #### Why would I ever fry and eat my SCOBY? — Aybars Senyildiz (2022) - Type: Paper · Organisms: Bacteria & microbes, Fungi - Idea: Everyday fermentation already trains people to care for microbes. - What it is: A study of home kombucha brewers that looks at fermentation as a multispecies practice and at how brewers attune to the needs of the microbes in their SCOBY. - How it works: Interviews, a design probe task and a collective reflection workshop with kombucha brewers, read through relational theory. - Paper: https://doi.org/10.21606/drs.2022.318 (DRS 2022) - Project page: https://doi.org/10.21606/drs.2022.318 #### Would the Trees Dim the Lights? Adopting the Intentional Stance for More-Than-Human Participatory Design — Ned Cooper (2022) - Type: Paper · Organisms: Plants, Animals, Ecosystems - Idea: Adopting the intentional stance toward trees gives designers a workable way to include them. - What it is: Explores smart street lighting from the point of view of trees, bats and other nonhumans, prompted by Australia's 2019/20 Black Summer bushfires. - How it works: Applies Daniel Dennett's intentional stance as a heuristic in participatory design of smart lighting. - Paper: https://doi.org/10.1145/3537797.3537799 (PDC 2022) - Video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Pk_8gR3dN98 - Project page: https://arxiv.org/abs/2303.14914 #### Biomenstrual, Spellbook — Nadia Campo Woytuk (2021) - Type: Book & essay · Organisms: Human body, Bacteria & microbes, Plants - Idea: Treat menstrual care as care for the bacteria, plants and soils the body is entangled with. - What it is: A spell book of DIY menstrual care that collects recipes for biomaterials, tools for making biodegradable pads, and rituals for returning menstrual waste to soil and plants. - How it works: A downloadable book of biomaterial experiments, recipes and rituals from the Biomenstrual project by Nadia Campo Woytuk and Marie Louise Juul Søndergaard. - Video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pMt6eB7L-HI - Images: https://cortex.persona.co/i/cf88ecc115a21db16266fb05503f3d3cb4b59cb740044cb05db5b9501d9043dd/gallery_image1-small.png - Project page: https://artifact-archive.org/whole-archive #### Entangled Kingdoms — doxiadis+ (2021) - Type: Artwork · Organisms: Fungi - Idea: Reveal the fungi already living in the building and put them at the centre. - What it is: Fungal spores collected from two rooms of the Venice Arsenale were cultivated at the University of Athens and returned to the Biennale as a 'fungi garden' in a two-part installation. - How it works: Air and surface samples from the exhibition rooms were cultured in a mycology lab and displayed as living cultures. - Video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qne3zmzhj1k - Images: https://static.labiennale.org/files/styles/seo_thumbnail/public/architettura/2021/600x600/doxiadis.jpg?itok=4yW5i6eJ - Project page: https://www.labiennale.org/en/architecture/2021/emerging-communities/doxiadis #### Furniture for a Human and a Parrot — Studio Ossidiana (2021) - Type: Research prototype · Organisms: Animals, Human body - Idea: Design one piece of furniture for two species living in the same room. - What it is: Chairs, a bench and a cluster made during lockdown for the designers and their parrot Coco, with perches, food bowls and places to play built into furniture both species use. - How it works: Cast and wooden furniture shaped around the parrot's habits of perching, chewing and eating; shown at the 2021 Venice Architecture Biennale. - Video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yc_ig-pbc0E - Images: https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/54eb9de5e4b01dbc2519e079/1624378718506-A9O8GS2IZ6EPIQSWPCPV/Coco+detail+LQ.jpg https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/54eb9de5e4b01dbc2519e079/1623330542968-ZPDUD035ZCRTTWI2KCY8/Chair+front+Coco+Eating+copy.jpg - Project page: https://www.studio-ossidiana.com/furniture-for-a-human-and-a-parrot #### Mycelium Pigeon Towers — Arne Hendriks (2021) - Type: Research prototype · Organisms: Fungi, Animals - Idea: Temporary architecture for non-humans can be grown from the waste of our food. - What it is: Towers for feral city pigeons built from bricks of living mycelium waste from an oyster-mushroom farm; an ongoing experiment with Mediamatic, one tower was built on site at Dutch Design Week 2021 within MU's Hara Hachi Bu Village. - How it works: Spent mushroom substrate still colonised by mycelium is packed into bricks and stacked; the mycelium grows the bricks together while fungi fruit on the surface and birds move in. - Images: https://ddw.ams3.cdn.digitaloceanspaces.com/thumbs/dsc2421jpgmediaclass-full-widthc3083fedae46a95f1139ff9d5833b1b6b8e20a69_1634203514_1200x630.jpg https://ddw.ams3.cdn.digitaloceanspaces.com/thumbs/dsc1578jpgmediaclass-full-widthc3083fedae46a95f1139ff9d5833b1b6b8e20a69_1634203590_1200x600.jpg - Project page: https://site.ddw.nl/en/programme/6947/mycelium-pigeon-towers #### Myco-kit: Towards a design for interspecies creative learning — Isabel Correa (2021) - Type: Research prototype · Organisms: Fungi, Human body - Idea: Children learn by making together with another species, blurring making and growing. - What it is: A work-in-progress biodesign toolkit that lets children grow and make artifacts with mycelium, framed as interspecies creative learning. - How it works: Design-based research on a kit of mycelium substrate, moulds and activities tested with young learners. - Paper: https://doi.org/10.1145/3459990.3465178 (IDC 2021) - Images: https://figures.semanticscholar.org/f6143cffbd1220ee1242eebd85d7b31943fb2932/4-Figure2-1.png #### Non-human Personas: Including Nature in the Participatory Design of Smart Cities — Martin Tomitsch, Marcus Foth (2021) - Type: Paper · Organisms: Animals, Plants, Ecosystems - Idea: A familiar UX tool can give nature a voice in the design room. - What it is: Adapts the persona method so that animals, plants and ecosystems are represented when designing smart urban furniture. - How it works: Case study of designing smart urban furniture with non-human personas built from ecological data. - Paper: https://doi.org/10.55612/s-5002-050-007 (Interaction Design and Architecture(s) 2021) - Video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vCfm-Q-5qtE - Project page: https://ixdea.org/50_7/ #### Plant Hotels: designing the imaginary foundations of communities — Yiying Wu (2021) - Type: Paper · Organisms: Plants, Human body - Idea: Shared plant care is a light way to form and study community. - What it is: Four Plant Hotels in Helsinki and one in Stockholm invited people to leave houseplants in a shared space to be looked after by others, and were used to study the unspoken imageries that hold communities together. - How it works: Relational-art interventions treated as ethnomethodological breaching experiments (the plant-sitting format is likely). - Paper: https://doi.org/10.1080/15710882.2021.1991958 (CoDesign 2021) - Project page: https://doi.org/10.1080/15710882.2021.1991958 #### Platform for Humans and Birds — Studio Ossidiana (2021) - Type: Artwork · Organisms: Animals - Idea: A public platform where both species find things to eat, drink and do. - What it is: A modular cast landscape at the 2021 Venice Architecture Biennale with edible insertions, water bowls, games and backrests, overseen by three dovecote towers and tall perches, for people and birds to share. - How it works: Cast modules with edible insertions and water-collecting bowls, plus a five-metre Pigeon Tower with metal "feathers" in the Giardino delle Vergini. - Images: https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/54eb9de5e4b01dbc2519e079/1623334193482-J5309IFFVQ5XASZ5JH8M/Platform+for+Humans+and+Birds_Photo+by+Riccardo+de+Vecchi9.jpg https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/54eb9de5e4b01dbc2519e079/1624386771422-V0ZIATHE4P4R4JNNBCY2/Dovecote+Tower_Photo+by+Riccardo+de+Vecchi_02lowres2.jpg - Project page: https://www.studio-ossidiana.com/platform-for-humans-and-birds-la-biennale-di-venezia #### Pollinator Pathmaker — Alexandra Daisy Ginsberg (2021) - Type: Artwork · Organisms: Insects, Plants - Idea: Hand the aesthetic brief to other species: a garden designed for pollinators' preferences. - What it is: An algorithm designs gardens for the widest range of pollinating insects rather than for human taste; living editions are planted at the Eden Project, in Berlin and elsewhere, and anyone can design one online. - How it works: An optimisation algorithm, built with ecologists, selects and arranges plant species to maximise pollinator diversity across the season. - Video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IN3YzdziqBY - Images: https://www.daisyginsberg.com/img/work/pp_las_25_gallery.jpeg https://www.daisyginsberg.com/img/work/pp_las_dig_ren_4_web.jpg - Project page: https://www.daisyginsberg.com/work/pollinator-pathmaker #### Refuge for Resurgence — Superflux (2021) - Type: Speculative design · Organisms: Animals, Fungi, Human body - Idea: Give every species a seat, a plate and cutlery shaped to its body, and ask who we share the table with. - What it is: A banquet table set for fourteen species (fox, rat, wasp, pigeon, cow, human adults and child, wild boar, snake, beaver, wolf, raven and mushroom) in a ruined, post-collapse interior, shown at the Venice Architecture Biennale 2021. - How it works: A hand-carved table and species-specific tableware designed from each animal's anatomy and diet, placed in a post-collapse set. - Video: https://vimeo.com/641995934 - Images: https://superflux.in/wp-content/uploads/2021/06/Web-Hero-V2-1024x683.jpg - Project page: https://superflux.in/index.php/work/refuge-for-resurgence/ #### Sanergy circular sanitation — Sanergy (2021) - Type: Product & platform · Organisms: Insects, Bacteria & microbes - Idea: Design a city's waste system around the insects that can eat it. - What it is: Human and organic waste collected from urban sanitation in Nairobi is fed to black soldier fly larvae and composted, producing insect-protein feed and organic fertiliser. - How it works: Hermetia illucens larvae convert organic waste into biomass; residues are composted into fertiliser. - Video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Os5j1y8O9QM - Images: https://earthshotprize.org/wp-content/uploads/2021/09/SANERGY-2-1.jpg - Project page: https://www.sanergy.com/ #### The Birds' Palace — Studio Ossidiana (2021) - Type: Artwork · Organisms: Animals, Plants, Ecosystems - Idea: Let birds be the gardeners of a public artwork. - What it is: A floating garden anchored in a pond in Amsterdam's Vondelpark with tall perches and bird feeders; over six weeks the birds' feeding and droppings turned its soil heap into a flower field that drew bees and butterflies. - How it works: Floating platform with fertile soil, perches and feeders; seeds dispersed by birds; viewed from shore with binoculars. - Images: https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/54eb9de5e4b01dbc2519e079/e85569f1-dee1-464b-819e-1254fc47d75b/The+Bird%27s+Palace.jpg https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/54eb9de5e4b01dbc2519e079/7b480486-268c-40f9-b280-c3dacc24708c/The+Birds+Palace+-+Courtesy+of+Studio+Ossidiana+-+Photo+by+Riccardo+de+Vecchi2_2.jpg - Project page: https://www.studio-ossidiana.com/the-birds-palace #### To Middle Species, With Love — Joyce Hwang (2021) - Type: Artwork · Organisms: Animals - Idea: Design for the ordinary species we share cities with, not only the charismatic ones. - What it is: An installation in Mill Race Park, Columbus, Indiana, made of hardwood towers with bird perches and bat houses and dry-stacked stone mounds, for the common "middle species" of bats, birds, amphibians and reptiles. - How it works: Indiana hardwood towers modelled on bat houses for the endangered Indiana bat, plus ultrasonic detectors that record bat calls and turn them into sound. - Images: https://www.antsoftheprairie.com/media/pages/projects/to-middle-species-with-love/0e6efdb4c4-1769725224/1_to-middle-species-with-love-dawn.jpg https://www.antsoftheprairie.com/media/pages/projects/to-middle-species-with-love/ce8aad150e-1769725224/6_to-middle-species-with-love-towers.jpg - Project page: https://www.antsoftheprairie.com/projects/to-middle-species-with-love #### Watching Myself Watching Birds: Abjection, Ecological Thinking, and Posthuman Methods — Heidi R. Biggs, Shaowen Bardzell (2021) - Type: Paper · Organisms: Animals, Ecosystems - Idea: Uncomfortable feelings about other species are data for posthuman design. - What it is: A first-person study in which the author watched birds at feeders and reflected on the discomfort and entanglement this revealed. - How it works: Autoethnographic birdwatching with notes and photographs, analysed with Kristeva's abjection and Morton's ecological thinking. - Paper: https://doi.org/10.1145/3411764.3445329 (CHI 2021) - Video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_LBEVTtY2kc - Images: https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5a7cf83080bd5e4daf4669a3/112fe272-cf71-4aa5-a132-58f067e0f24d/IMG_20200914_165546.jpg - Project page: https://www.heidibiggsdesign.com/watching-myself-watching-birdspabjection-ecological-thinking-and-posthuman-design/ #### Econooc — Niamh Damery (2020) - Type: Research prototype · Organisms: Fungi, Insects - Idea: Grow a habitat that feels like a tree rather than build a box. - What it is: A conservation beehive for wild native Irish black bees, grown from mycelium on agricultural by-products to mimic a hollow tree cavity, with a seeded-paper calendar on pollinator-friendly gardening. - How it works: Mycelium is grown in a mould on straw-type substrates into a thick, insulating hive body. - Video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=83gwk4Os1ms - Images: https://www.jamesdysonaward.org/Document/f472b3a0-c6eb-4fe3-9c3a-ac1efddc3ec7/econooc-head-image.jpg https://www.jamesdysonaward.org/Document/fefc3d63-7a54-4e46-ab42-2435b68337e3/testing-and-models.jpg - Project page: https://www.jamesdysonaward.org/en-GB/2020/project/econooc/ #### Imagining Multispecies Worlds — Michelle Westerlaken (2020) - Type: Book & essay · Organisms: Animals, Insects, Ecosystems - Idea: Design can practise imagination as an ethical skill for living with other species. - What it is: A doctoral thesis written as a multispecies bestiary: each chapter follows an animal protagonist to explore how design can imagine worlds shared with other species. - How it works: Combines design experiments with dogs and other animals, fieldwork and speculative writing. - Paper: https://doi.org/10.24834/isbn.9789178771059 (PhD thesis, Malmö University 2020) - Video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vmPTLMXWSOE - Images: https://michellewesterlaken.com/2021/09/phdsmaller_w.jpg - Project page: https://michellewesterlaken.com/portfolio/phd-thesis/ #### Project Habitate — Yuning Chan (2020) - Type: Speculative design · Organisms: Fungi, Plants - Idea: Humans can provide ecological services as hosts for endangered organisms. - What it is: A living wearable that lets people host the mosses, lichens and fungi losing their home as ash dieback kills Europe's ash trees, until new ash populations grow back. - How it works: A biomimetic material mimicking ash bark supports moss, lichen and fungal cultures on the body. - Images: https://ars.electronica.art/starts-prize/files/2021/06/Biomimicry-living-wearable-1024x512.jpg https://ars.electronica.art/starts-prize/files/2021/06/Material-sample-1024x512.jpg - Project page: https://ars.electronica.art/starts-prize/en/project-habitate/ #### The City of Birds — Studio Ossidiana (2020) - Type: Research prototype · Organisms: Animals - Idea: The cage, in all its forms, is a vocabulary for the full range of human relations with birds, from care to control. - What it is: A collection of architectural models based on pigeon lofts, bat towers, aviaries, parrot perches, bird feeders and traps, laid out like a city for birds and paired with proposals for new objects that mediate between birds and people. - How it works: Typological research into bird architecture across history is translated into cast and assembled models and an artists' book, developed at the Van Eyck Academie with Het Nieuwe Instituut. - Images: https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/54eb9de5e4b01dbc2519e079/1623663360237-U9EQRYJQOC0F73EE56U8/Studio+Ossidiana_200821_546_s.jpg https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/54eb9de5e4b01dbc2519e079/1624384893641-JDP2787MPKP2Y36CUM97/Variations+on+a+Birdcage_overall.jpg - Project page: https://www.studio-ossidiana.com/the-city-of-birds #### Variations on a Birdcage — Studio Ossidiana (2020) - Type: Artwork · Organisms: Animals - Idea: A birdcage can be redesigned as a negotiation between two species. - What it is: A series of objects that spatialise the relationship between a human and a bird, translating acts such as retreating, feeding, domesticating and playing into forms between cage, perch and furniture. - How it works: Cast and assembled objects made in Maastricht in 2020, part of the studio's City of Birds research. - Images: https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/54eb9de5e4b01dbc2519e079/1624385418951-F4PQU7P1EEMOXPLA7L77/Variations+on+a+Birdcage+14.jpg https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/54eb9de5e4b01dbc2519e079/1588273074967-NNYD8U67UOB1P6COC4V8/Studio+Ossidiana_Variations+on+a+bird+cage+%281%29.jpg - Project page: https://www.studio-ossidiana.com/variations-on-a-birdcage- #### Decomposition as Design: Co-Creating (with) Natureculture — Szu-Yu (Cyn) Liu, Shaowen Bardzell (2019) - Type: Paper · Organisms: Bacteria & microbes, Fungi, Ecosystems - Idea: Decay can be a co-designer: let microbes and time finish the work. - What it is: A curated study of hundreds of examples of decomposition in architecture, textiles, crafts and food, turned into design tactics for working with natural processes. - How it works: Annotated portfolio of decomposition examples, critiqued to derive nonanthropocentric design tactics. - Paper: https://doi.org/10.1145/3294109.3295653 (TEI 2019) - Images: https://figures.semanticscholar.org/88e7fb1b076efc222ed939663582753cc2233c8a/7-Figure6-1.png https://figures.semanticscholar.org/88e7fb1b076efc222ed939663582753cc2233c8a/6-Figure5-1.png - Project page: https://doi.org/10.1145/3294109.3295653 #### Design for the Age of Species – Exploring ways for designers to care for multispecies coexistence — Petra Lilja (2019) - Type: Paper · Organisms: Animals, Plants, Insects - Idea: Ask 'who' designers care for, and include other species in the answer. - What it is: The Age of Species project brings designers and scientists together to speculate on and design for futures centred on overlooked and endangered species; the paper reports its first workshop. - How it works: Designer-scientist workshop reflected on through feminist posthumanism to define a multispecies approach. - Paper: https://doi.org/10.21606/nordes.2019.037 (Nordes 2019) - Video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=La6e4FfMsww - Project page: https://doi.org/10.21606/nordes.2019.037 #### Geese Grottos — Studio Ossidiana (2019) - Type: Research prototype · Organisms: Animals - Idea: A nest can also be a folly: useful for geese, a garden for people. - What it is: Three nesting structures for over 500 geese at artist Kutlug Ataman's ranch in Erzincan, Turkey, shaped from moved soil to give shelter from wind and define the geese's territory. - How it works: Earthworks and built nests designed around geese breeding behaviour and wind conditions. - Images: https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/54eb9de5e4b01dbc2519e079/1588262060635-WDKJILXBVD97CCUV8EH7/Geese+Grottos_Studio+Ossidiana15.jpg - Project page: https://www.studio-ossidiana.com/geese-grottos #### More-than-human participation: design for sustainable smart city futures — Rachel Clarke, Sara Heitlinger, Laura Forlano, Marcus Foth, Carl DiSalvo (2019) - Type: Paper · Organisms: Ecosystems, Plants, Animals - Idea: Participatory design should widen who counts as a participant to other species and ecosystems. - What it is: A short manifesto-style article calling for smart city design that includes plants, animals, soil and waterways as participants. - How it works: Position paper building on a series of participatory design workshops on more-than-human urban futures. - Paper: https://doi.org/10.1145/3319075 (ACM Interactions 2019) - Video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n_0YIj1efK0 - Project page: https://doi.org/10.1145/3319075 #### Symbiotic Encounters: HCI and Sustainable Agriculture — Szu-Yu (Cyn) Liu, Shaowen Bardzell (2019) - Type: Paper · Organisms: Plants, Insects, Ecosystems - Idea: To 'work with nature', HCI must design for changing multispecies assemblages, not stable systems. - What it is: An ethnography of alternative farms where relations between crops, insects, animals and farmers shift between helpful and harmful across seasons. - How it works: Fieldwork with permaculture and alternative farmers, analysed through the concept of assemblage. - Paper: https://doi.org/10.1145/3290605.3300547 (CHI 2019) - Video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yXs888XZaX8 - Project page: https://doi.org/10.1145/3290605.3300547 #### The Chair (insect habitats) — Marlène Huissoud (2019) - Type: Research prototype · Organisms: Insects - Idea: Take a familiar human object and redesign it for insect users, down to hole size and surface colour. - What it is: A chair and other forms made of unfired clay and natural binders, pierced with holes sized for solitary bees, wasps and butterflies, so that the intended users of the furniture are insects rather than people. - How it works: Hole diameters and binder colours were chosen with ecologists Robert Francis and Brandon Mak to attract target insect species in urban settings. - Video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=J-NLr6jk1NQ - Project page: https://designmuseum.org/exhibitions/more-than-human #### The Right to the Sustainable Smart City — Sara Heitlinger (2019) - Type: Paper · Organisms: Plants, Insects, Ecosystems - Idea: The right to the smart city should extend to more-than-human city dwellers. - What it is: Reflects on the Connected Seeds project to argue that smart city design should include nonhumans such as plants and pollinators, and the growers who care for them. - How it works: Participatory design case study analysed through the right-to-the-city concept and more-than-human theory. - Paper: https://doi.org/10.1145/3290605.3300517 (CHI 2019) - Video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MaPFc720eaA - Images: https://www.connectedseeds.org/wp-content/uploads/2017/01/home3.jpg - Project page: https://www.connectedseeds.org/ #### Zoepolis: Non-anthropocentric design as an experiment in multi-species care — Monika Rosińska (2019) - Type: Paper · Organisms: Animals, Plants - Idea: Design can build a city for plants and animals as fellow citizens. - What it is: The paper introduces 'zoepolis', a political community of humans and nonhumans, and discusses the exhibition Zoepolis: Design for Plants and Animals as an experiment in multispecies care. - How it works: Curatorial case study grounded in Kymlicka and Donaldson's animal citizenship, Haraway and Latour. - Paper: https://doi.org/10.21606/nordes.2019.006 (Nordes 2019) - Video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=T9lNNC48cGk #### Apigiene Hive — University of Toledo Biodesign Challenge team (2018) - Type: Research prototype · Organisms: Insects, Algae - Idea: Design the hive entrance as a grooming tool for the colony. - What it is: A redesigned Langstroth beehive with a fibrous brush holding diatoms from zebra-mussel habitats; bees brush past it on entering, which removes Varroa mites from their bodies. - How it works: Sharp silica shells of diatoms abrade mites mechanically, avoiding chemical miticides inside the hive. - Video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BHRuGA1Ao4s - Project page: https://www.biodesignchallenge.org/university-of-toledo #### Connected Seeds and Sensors: Co-designing Internet of Things for sustainable smart cities with urban food-growing communities — Sara Heitlinger (2018) - Type: Research prototype · Organisms: Plants, Ecosystems - Idea: IoT for a sustainable city can start from seed saving and growers' knowledge, not from efficiency. - What it is: With urban food growers in London, the team co-designed the Connected Seeds Library: a cabinet of seed packets linked to stories and sensor data about the plants grown from them. - How it works: Participatory design workshops with growers; seed packets tagged with NFC and linked to audio stories and soil sensors. - Paper: https://doi.org/10.1145/3210604.3210620 (PDC 2018) - Images: https://www.connectedseeds.org/wp-content/uploads/2017/01/home8.jpg https://www.connectedseeds.org/wp-content/uploads/2017/01/home1.jpg - Project page: https://www.connectedseeds.org/ #### Design for Collaborative Survival: An Inquiry into Human-Fungi Relationships — Jen Liu (2018) - Type: Research prototype · Organisms: Fungi, Ecosystems - Idea: Design tools that help humans and fungi survive together, not just help humans harvest. - What it is: Wearable foraging tools - a glove with soil sensors in the fingertips, a GPS vest that marks where fungi grow, and shoes that scatter spores - made to study how mushroom hunters and fungi live together. - How it works: Ethnographic study with mushroom foragers followed by research-through-design of sensor-equipped wearables inspired by Tsing's collaborative survival. - Paper: https://doi.org/10.1145/3173574.3173614 (CHI 2018 (Best Paper)) - Video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Z53d1WCVsxM - Images: https://jenliujenliu.com/Files/gimgs/cs_HSI_sq.jpg https://jenliujenliu.com/Files/gimgs/cs_dataharvest.jpg https://jenliujenliu.com/Files/gimgs/cs_sporestepper.jpg - Project page: https://jenliujenliu.com/tools_cosurvival.html #### More-than-human urban futures — Rachel Clarke, Sara Heitlinger, Marcus Foth, Laura Forlano (2018) - Type: Paper · Organisms: Ecosystems, Animals, Plants - Idea: Walk the city together to imagine smart cities that serve more than humans. - What it is: A participatory speculative walk through Hasselt that presented outcomes of a workshop on 'more-than-human' smart cities, asking how urban infrastructure could be designed for cohabitation with other species. - How it works: Curated situated walk combining provisional prototypes and speculative scenarios tied to local urban infrastructure. - Paper: https://doi.org/10.1145/3210604.3210641 (PDC 2018) - Images: https://figures.semanticscholar.org/fd41608635b10ff6f65c7a7cf987bf973823e5c6/4-Figure4-1.png - Project page: https://doi.org/10.1145/3210604.3210641 #### Prototyping Multispecies Environments — Martín Tironi (2018) - Type: Paper · Organisms: Animals - Idea: Prototyping is a way of paying attention to another species. - What it is: Follows the prototyping of an environmental enrichment device for gibbons at the National Zoo of Chile, showing how prototyping made the animals' qualities perceptible and created care between species. - How it works: Ethnographic account of a zoo design project, framed by cosmopolitics. - Paper: https://doi.org/10.21606/drs.2018.546 (DRS 2018) - Project page: https://doi.org/10.21606/drs.2018.546 #### The tree as method: co-creating with urban ecosystems — Ida Nilstad Pettersen (2018) - Type: Paper · Organisms: Plants, Ecosystems - Idea: If those affected by a decision should shape it, street trees have a claim too. - What it is: Taking street trees as examples, the short paper asks what it would mean to treat trees as participants and to co-create with urban ecosystems in participatory design. - How it works: Exploratory reflection on nonhuman participation in sustainable urban development. - Paper: https://doi.org/10.1145/3210604.3210653 (PDC 2018) #### We Live in an Ocean of Air — Marshmallow Laser Feast (2018) - Type: Artwork · Organisms: Plants, Human body - Idea: Every breath is a trade with a plant. - What it is: A multi-user VR installation at the Saatchi Gallery in which each visitor's breath is shown as it leaves the body and is taken in by a giant sequoia, making the gas exchange between people and trees visible. - How it works: Breath sensors and heart-rate monitors on each visitor drive real-time particle visuals in untethered VR headsets, alongside scent and a spatial soundscape. - Video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1Ex5OFWIQ0Q - Images: https://marshmallowlaserfeast.com/app/uploads/2023/11/Copy-of-OceanOfAir_Saatchi_-12-of-34_sml-1024x682.jpg - Project page: https://www.marshmallowlaserfeast.com/project/we-live-in-an-ocean-of-air/ #### Zoöp — Het Nieuwe Instituut (2018) - Type: Speculative design · Organisms: Ecosystems, Animals, Plants - Idea: Put nonhuman interests into an organisation's governance, like a cooperative that also includes other species. - What it is: An organisational model in which human and nonhuman life cooperate: a Zoöp gives a 'Speaker for the Living' a voice in the organisation's decisions and commits to improving the ecological health of its site. - How it works: Legal and organisational design: a Zoönomic Foundation certifies organisations, which appoint a speaker and follow an ecological regeneration plan. - Video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4MglYTfRBOI - Images: https://cmsfiles.nieuweinstituut.nl/DSC_7051_header_a2b85bc97a.jpg - Project page: https://zoop.hetnieuweinstituut.nl/en #### Plant-computer interaction, beauty and dissemination — Fredrik Aspling (2016) - Type: Paper · Organisms: Plants - Idea: Plants use beauty to recruit humans into spreading them; design can see this as interaction. - What it is: Starting from how people gather around blossoming sakura trees, the paper argues that plants take part in computing through their urge to spread, and reviews how plants appear in computer systems and design. - How it works: Triangulates multispecies ethnography of cherry-blossom viewing, theory, and two literature reviews. - Paper: https://doi.org/10.1145/2995257.2995393 (ACI 2016) - Images: https://figures.semanticscholar.org/58a0a88c87ff686a0bd0b471391ccada2c28b8ef/3-Figure3-1.png - Project page: https://doi.org/10.1145/2995257.2995393 #### Bee Brick — Green&Blue (2015) - Type: Product & platform · Organisms: Insects - Idea: Make habitat a standard building component that a planning rule can require. - What it is: A concrete brick with nesting holes for solitary bees that can replace a standard brick in a wall or stand in a garden; Brighton & Hove began requiring swift and bee bricks in new buildings in 2020. - How it works: Cast concrete block (made partly from Cornish china-clay waste) with cavities sized for solitary bees such as mason bees. - Images: https://www.greenandblue.co.uk/cdn/shop/products/white-grey-bee-brick.jpg?v=1668523534 https://www.greenandblue.co.uk/cdn/shop/products/bee-brick-christmas-gift-solitary-bee-shown.jpg?v=1668523534&width=1946 - Project page: https://www.greenandblue.co.uk/products/bee-brick #### No Crash Zone — Joyce Hwang (2015) - Type: Artwork · Organisms: Animals - Idea: Ornament can do ecological work: preventing bird strikes. - What it is: A temporary renovation of a window in Chicago's Carson Pirie Scott Building with graphic patterns that make the glass visible to birds while keeping a view out for people. - How it works: Window graphics based on bird-strike prevention guidelines, pixel camouflage and one-point perspective. - Images: https://www.antsoftheprairie.com/media/pages/projects/no-crash-zone/1b5f537ef7-1771340721/no-crash-zone-left-side.jpg - Project page: https://www.antsoftheprairie.com/projects/no-crash-zone #### A Foray Into Not-Quite Companion Species: Design Experiments With Urban-Animals as Significant Others — Li Jönsson, Tau Ulv Lenskjold (2014) - Type: Speculative design · Organisms: Animals - Idea: Wild city animals can become 'not-quite companion species' through design. - What it is: In the project Urban Animals and Us, speculative prototypes tried to bring wild urban animals such as magpies and gulls into contact with residents of a retirement home. - How it works: Three design experiments with speculative prototypes and co-design tools, analysed with Haraway's companion species. - Paper: https://doi.org/10.14434/artifact.v3i2.3957 (Artifact 2014) - Images: https://figures.semanticscholar.org/bb1fe1ff8a7fe742d802b704e62ae078eaaddd93/8-Figure6-1.png https://figures.semanticscholar.org/bb1fe1ff8a7fe742d802b704e62ae078eaaddd93/9-Figure7-1.png - Project page: https://scholarworks.iu.edu/journals/index.php/artifact/article/view/3957 #### Naval Gazing — Špela Petrič (2014) - Type: Artwork · Organisms: Algae, Animals, Ecosystems - Idea: Can humans invest in structures that are useless to themselves? - What it is: A windmill-like tetrahedral 'habiton' released into the North Sea to drift and host seaweeds and shellfish until their weight sinks it — an object built to be useful only to nonhumans. BAD Award 2014 winner, with NIOZ. - How it works: A sail-like tetrahedral frame designed with aquaculture researchers is colonised by marine organisms at sea. - Images: https://www.badaward.nl/imager/assets/site/495/NAVALGAZING1_a5a12f426a1ab11909951db4fe37df8f.jpg https://www.badaward.nl/imager/assets/site/436/MATTEROFLIFE-Naval-Gazing_a5a12f426a1ab11909951db4fe37df8f.jpg - Project page: https://www.badaward.nl/artists-scientists/%C5%A1pela-petri%C4%8D #### Bat Cloud — Joyce Hwang (2012) - Type: Artwork · Organisms: Animals, Plants - Idea: Link a species' shelter to a garden through its waste. - What it is: A canopy of hanging vessels in the trees, shown in Buffalo and Rotterdam, each with an insulated upper roost for bats and a soil-filled lower part where their guano feeds plants. - How it works: Fabricated vessels hung from trees, with seeds and soil below and bat-accessible roosting chambers above. - Images: https://www.antsoftheprairie.com/media/pages/projects/bat-cloud/04b6a06017-1771258986/aop_batcloud.jpg https://www.antsoftheprairie.com/media/pages/projects/bat-cloud/cd700e0a31-1771258992/bat-cloud-summer.jpg - Project page: https://www.antsoftheprairie.com/projects/bat-cloud #### Polydome — Except Integrated Sustainability (2012) - Type: Research prototype · Organisms: Plants, Animals, Fungi - Idea: Design a farm as a community of species that feed and protect each other. - What it is: A polyculture greenhouse modelled on a natural ecosystem, combining over 50 crops, two mushroom species, chickens, fish and bees so no synthetic fertiliser or pesticide is needed. - How it works: Species are placed so waste streams, pollination and pest control loop between them. - Images: https://www.dutchdesignawards.nl/wp-content/uploads/2014/08/polydome_0-1500x882.jpg https://www.dutchdesignawards.nl/wp-content/uploads/2014/08/polydome_1-1500x882.jpg - Project page: https://www.dutchdesignawards.nl/en/gallery/polydome/ #### Slakkenpoep-linoleum (Snail-poo linoleum) — Lieske Schreuder (2012) - Type: Research prototype · Organisms: Animals - Idea: Other animals can be small factories — with care for their diet. - What it is: Garden snails are fed coloured paper and their colour-keeping droppings are collected with a feeding machine and processed into a linoleum-like floor material. - How it works: A snail-feeding machine collects droppings, which are pressed with binders into sheets. - Images: https://new-material-award.nl/wp-content/uploads/2021/11/slakkenpoep-lieske-schreuder-1800x1349-1-1024x767.jpg - Project page: https://new-material-award.nl/en/slakkenpoep-linoleum/ #### Habitat Wall — Joyce Hwang (2011) - Type: Speculative design · Organisms: Animals - Idea: Buildings already house animals; design for it on purpose. - What it is: A prototype exterior wall that builds in roosting and nesting spaces for bats and birds, asking how a facade could act as a living membrane rather than only a barrier. - How it works: Iterations of wall modules (Pest Wall, Layered Vernacular) developed as models and prototypes. - Images: https://www.antsoftheprairie.com/media/pages/projects/habitat-wall/4de6e05158-1771260188/hw1_habitat-wall-buffalo-model.jpg https://www.antsoftheprairie.com/media/pages/projects/habitat-wall/35bc6d248b-1771260188/hw0_pest-wall.jpg - Project page: https://www.antsoftheprairie.com/projects/habitat-wall #### Bat Tower — Joyce Hwang (2010) - Type: Research prototype · Organisms: Animals, Insects - Idea: Make an invisible neighbour conspicuous: a vertical cave in the open. - What it is: A sculptural tower by a pond in Griffis Sculpture Park, New York, designed for bats to roost in, with landing pads, grooved surfaces for climbing and dark panels that absorb sunlight to keep the interior warm. - How it works: Ribbed timber construction with roosting zones and bat-attracting plants at the base, next to insect-rich water. - Images: https://www.antsoftheprairie.com/media/pages/projects/bat-tower/a6e7b601f9-1769725221/1-bat-tower.jpg https://www.antsoftheprairie.com/media/pages/projects/bat-tower/009b23f938-1769725221/3-bat-tower-photo-by-albert-chao.jpg - Project page: https://www.antsoftheprairie.com/projects/bat-tower #### BeLeaf — Celestine Briët (2009) - Type: Research prototype · Organisms: Plants, Animals - Idea: Design an object's lifespan to match a bird's season. - What it is: A lightweight biodegradable material made from fallen autumn leaves and natural binders, shown as a birdhouse that shelters wildlife for about a year before decaying into the soil. - How it works: Leaves are pressed with natural binders and folded into a birdhouse. - Images: https://new-material-award.nl/wp-content/uploads/2021/11/BeLeaf-coloured-leaves-Celestine-Briet-expo-NAi-1024x768.jpg - Project page: https://new-material-award.nl/en/beleaf/ #### Local River — Mathieu Lehanneur (2008) - Type: Research prototype · Organisms: Animals, Plants - Idea: A small closed loop of fish and plants brings the food chain, and the question of eating animals, into the living room. - What it is: A piece of domestic furniture that combines a fish aquarium with a small vegetable garden: live freshwater fish are kept at home until eaten, while their waste fertilises the plants that clean their water. - How it works: Aquaponics at domestic scale: fish tanks connect to plant containers so that nitrogen from fish waste feeds herbs and vegetables, which filter the water. - Video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wQDUxDBJc94 - Project page: http://www.brokennature.org/checklist/ #### Botanicalls — Botanicalls (2006) - Type: Research prototype · Organisms: Plants - Idea: Let the plant start the conversation about its own care. - What it is: Houseplants fitted with a soil-moisture sensor phone or tweet their owners when they need water, and say thank you after being watered. - How it works: A moisture probe in the pot feeds a networked microcontroller that places a phone call or posts to Twitter with pre-written messages in the plant's voice. - Video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GsrSGqfKZ18 - Images: https://www.faludi.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/07/moma_sign.jpg https://www.botanicalls.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/04/25toolkit-articleLarge-500x342.jpg - Project page: https://www.botanicalls.com/ ### Ecological Sensing & Care Sensing, listening to and caring for ecosystems, soils, rivers and climates. #### BioFabulations: Embodied Sensemaking for Planetary Care — Vasco Costa (2026) - Type: Paper · Organisms: Ecosystems, Animals - Idea: Fabulating creatures from real coastal observation turns ecology into embodied relation. - What it is: A toolkit and framework in which children observe coastal life, invent and model magical creatures, and animate their stories with stop-motion as a way to learn planetary care. - How it works: Three stages, observe, create and fabulate, animate and tell, run as activities with children using sketching, modelling and digital stop-motion. - Paper: https://doi.org/10.1145/3803784.3809288 (C&C 2026) #### Designing Loofah Wearables For Embodied Ecological Reflection — Yingting Gao, Fiona Bell (2026) - Type: Research prototype · Organisms: Plants - Idea: A biodegradable plant fibre can make environmental conditions visible on the body. - What it is: The authors explore loofah, the dried fibre of a gourd, as a wearable material and combine it with indicators that change with temperature, UV light and the pH of water and soil. - How it works: Material exploration of loofah combined with color-changing indicators, organised into a design space. - Paper: https://doi.org/10.1145/3731459.3774482 (TEI 2026) - Video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=T9UnvfFXeSw - Project page: https://doi.org/10.1145/3731459.3774482 #### Listening with frogs: sonic thick mapping for more-than-human participation — Yen-Fu Chen (2026) - Type: Research prototype · Organisms: Animals, Ecosystems - Idea: Keep ambiguity in species ID so that listening, not classification, is the point. - What it is: Identifrog is a mobile citizen science app for frog-call recognition in Taiwan that keeps uncertainty open with probabilistic AI and interactive spectrograms, turning identification into ecological listening. - How it works: A mobile app combines a probabilistic frog-call classifier with interactive spectrograms; engagements with diverse participants informed sonic thick mapping. - Paper: https://doi.org/10.1080/15710882.2026.2726166 (CoDesign 2026) #### Living Probes in Place — Gizem Oktay, Bahareh Barati, Ron Wakkary (2026) - Type: Paper · Organisms: Fungi, Ecosystems - Idea: Caring for a fungus in a specific place makes distant ecological damage feel close. - What it is: Twelve participants placed a living mycelium composite somewhere of their choosing and cared for it for two weeks, as a probe into mycoremediation, the cleaning of soil and water with fungi. - How it works: Living probe study with mycelium composites, diaries and interviews over two weeks. - Paper: https://doi.org/10.1145/3772318.3791217 (CHI 2026) - Images: https://figures.semanticscholar.org/eee95c1f08c7b9743a76934752a7fb5d770b37cc/5-Figure3-1.png https://figures.semanticscholar.org/eee95c1f08c7b9743a76934752a7fb5d770b37cc/6-Figure4-1.png - Project page: https://doi.org/10.1145/3772318.3791217 #### Minamata's Ecological Encounters Codesheet: Designing Remembrance Lenses through more-than-human and media archaeology — Lucas Ogasawara de Oliveira (2026) - Type: Paper · Organisms: Ecosystems, Human body - Idea: Media devices could help people remember ecological harm instead of hiding it. - What it is: The Ecological Encounters Codesheet is a method for coding encounters with infrastructures, memorials and archives in Minamata, Japan, the site of mercury poisoning, across time, risk and care. - How it works: Research-through-design fieldwork combining more-than-human design and media archaeology. - Paper: https://doi.org/10.21606/drs.2026.428 (DRS 2026) #### More-than-Human Infrastructuring in the River Shannon: Water Quality, Level and Management as Voices Towards Respectful Coexistence with Nature — Chidi Usanga (2026) - Type: Paper · Organisms: Ecosystems - Idea: Let a river's own indicators speak in the decisions made about it. - What it is: Based on research with stakeholders of Ireland's River Shannon, the paper argues that water quality, water level and the river's responses to interventions can be read as the river's voices in governance. - How it works: Stakeholder research framed by participatory design infrastructuring and more-than-human thinking. - Paper: https://doi.org/10.1145/3789492.3796405 (PDC 2026) - Project page: https://doi.org/10.1145/3789492.3796405 #### More-than-Human Self-Tracking — Anton Poikolainen Rosén (2026) - Type: Paper · Organisms: Human body, Ecosystems - Idea: Self-tracking can measure what your body does to rivers, not only to you. - What it is: The author tracked his own urine and protein intake to follow how excess nitrogen and phosphorus leave the body and enter waterways, reframing self-tracking as tracking one's ecological entanglements. - How it works: First-person design research with urine monitoring and dietary logging, written as an uncertain account. - Paper: https://doi.org/10.21606/drs.2026.778 (DRS 2026) #### Occupying the sensors: Underwater sound in an urban river — Sebastián González Quintero (2026) - Type: Paper · Organisms: Ecosystems, Animals - Idea: An urban river is an amplifier for the parts of the city we do not hear. - What it is: Underwater recordings of the Charles River in Boston reveal how infrastructure noise and aquatic animals share the river's soundscape. - How it works: Hydrophone-based acoustic sensing as a method to attune to infrastructural and nonhuman dynamics. - Paper: https://doi.org/10.21606/drs.2026.2397 (DRS 2026) #### Putting an ear to the ground: Attending to Frictions in Human-machine-soil Temporalities — Margrete Lodahl Rolighed, Lone Koefoed Hansen (2026) - Type: Research prototype · Organisms: Plants, Insects, Ecosystems - Idea: Listening into soil forces people to slow down to its time. - What it is: Plant-disco is an interactive object that makes activity in soil, such as bugs moving and plants growing, perceptible to people, and exposes the friction between slow soil time and fast digital time. - How it works: A physical design object that senses soil activity and renders it for human perception; discussed through more-than-human temporalities. - Paper: https://doi.org/10.21606/drs.2026.2090 (DRS 2026) #### Tagus Multispecies Atlas — Katerina Inglezaki (2026) - Type: Research prototype · Organisms: Ecosystems, Animals - Idea: Maps can tell a place from many species' points of view, on tidal time. - What it is: An interactive counter-mapping platform that turns salt-marsh fieldwork into spatial stories, synchronised with walking, tidal rhythms and the viewpoints of several species. - How it works: Web-based atlas built from multispecies ethnography, with progressive narrative, tidal tracking and layered perspectives, piloted with HCI researchers. - Paper: https://doi.org/10.1145/3803784.3809274 (C&C 2026) - Project page: https://doi.org/10.1145/3803784.3809274 #### Tagus estuary color swatch – Materials as affective mediators in more-than-human temporalities — Manuel Simões (2026) - Type: Paper · Organisms: Plants, Algae, Ecosystems - Idea: A material catalogue can be an archive of an estuary's deep time and affect. - What it is: A research-through-design colour palette made from bio-pigments of local plants, minerals, algae and waste streams of the Tagus estuary in Lisbon. - How it works: Pigments are extracted and processed from estuary sources and organised into a swatch that encodes seasonal and ecological rhythms. - Paper: https://doi.org/10.21606/drs.2026.2121 (DRS 2026) #### A tidalectic reading of landscapes — Katerina Inglezaki (2025) - Type: Paper · Organisms: Ecosystems, Animals - Idea: Let the tide set the rhythm of fieldwork. - What it is: An autoethnographic walking method in the intertidal salt marsh of the Tagus estuary that follows the tides to observe how people and animals share the zone between land and water. - How it works: Multispecies peripatetic ethnography combined with tidalectics, a concept from Caribbean thought about tidal rather than linear time. - Paper: https://doi.org/10.1145/3715336.3735444 (DIS 2025) - Project page: https://doi.org/10.1145/3715336.3735444 #### Avian Experience in Urban Grotto: Ecological Soundscapes as a Biosemiotic Methodology in Multispecies Ethnographic Research and More-than-human Communication — Qingyu Zhang, Francesca Valsecchi (2025) - Type: Paper · Organisms: Animals, Ecosystems - Idea: Listen to a city through its crows. - What it is: An autoethnographic study of crow calls in Vienna that combines deep listening, soundscape walks and bioacoustic analysis to treat the urban soundscape as a way into more-than-human communication. - How it works: Hybrid method of deep listening, soundscape walks and bioacoustic analysis grounded in biosemiotics. - Paper: https://doi.org/10.21606/iasdr.2025.1149 (IASDR 2025) - Project page: https://doi.org/10.21606/iasdr.2025.1149 #### Becoming compost: Fostering soil care through design practices — Annarita Bianco (2025) - Type: Paper · Organisms: Ecosystems, Bacteria & microbes - Idea: Handling and exchanging soil builds awareness of its fragility and life. - What it is: Two workshops in which participants mixed and exchanged soil samples, made radial chromatographies and used augmented reality to reflect on soil as a site of interspecies exchange. - How it works: Soil mixing, radial chromatography and AR layers were combined in participatory workshops inspired by the environmental humanities. - Paper: https://doi.org/10.21606/nordes.2025.45 (Nordes 2025) #### Biotopia — Marta Galvão Ferreira (2025) - Type: Research prototype · Organisms: Ecosystems, Plants, Animals - Idea: Heritage can include the species and landscapes that made a place, not only its human history. - What it is: A transmedia heritage experience for the Natural History Museum of Funchal and Madeira's nature walks that connects visitors with the island's natureculture and more-than-human heritage. - How it works: Collaborative research-through-design within an EU heritage project, producing three design constructs for the transmedia experience. - Paper: https://doi.org/10.1145/3715336.3735803 (DIS 2025) - Video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bgnQpzwg-fA - Project page: https://doi.org/10.1145/3715336.3735803 #### Chornozem — Zurich University of the Arts (ZHdK) Biodesign Challenge team (2025) - Type: Research prototype · Organisms: Ecosystems, Plants - Idea: Military tools can be turned toward repairing the ecocide they helped cause. - What it is: A low-cost, field-ready way to map heavy-metal contamination left by the Russian invasion in Ukraine's black-earth farmland: a modified curcumin solution mixed into fertiliser changes colour where metals are present, and repurposed drones scan the fields. - How it works: Curcumin reacts visibly with heavy metals under UV light; drone imagery and computer vision turn the reactions into contamination maps. - Video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d2ZblOmFRfk - Images: https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/552dc0ffe4b070a9e1a6a215/1751483509601-Z0K498U6DSAO7KMVVLBI/soil_curcumin_reaction.jpg https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/552dc0ffe4b070a9e1a6a215/1751483501163-2U6BIJPV1EMAZMTKB51L/drone_render.jpg - Project page: https://www.biodesignchallenge.org/zurich-university-of-the-arts-2025 #### CryoScapes — Jiabao Li (2025) - Type: Artwork · Organisms: Ecosystems - Idea: Melting is the message: a sculpture that is co-made by local heat and humidity. - What it is: A tabletop 3D ice printer, started during the Arctic Circle residency in Svalbard, prints landscapes in ice that melt as the audience watches, while an AI writes haiku-like poems about each form. - How it works: A custom printer deposits water onto a cold plate; a camera feeds images to an AI that generates poems; humidity and water chemistry change each print. - Paper: https://doi.org/10.1145/3757369.3767614 (SIGGRAPH Asia 2025 Art Papers) - Video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EMdPmprYkWo - Images: https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/58688c8a6a496327e937e35b/b718d95f-af0b-4a42-a695-6414ad93bd6a/jiabao+li+arctic.jpg https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/58688c8a6a496327e937e35b/1737349975529-W4JNC44WXTHZY975I7EQ/jiabao+li+arctic+26.jpg https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/58688c8a6a496327e937e35b/1737349943092-89KX5AV7YAIXKUYMDEIN/jiabao+li+arctic+35.jpg - Project page: https://www.jiabaoli.org/cryoscapes #### Designing with Water: From Material to Metaphor to More-than-Human Mindset — Kuan-Ju Wu (2025) - Type: Paper · Organisms: Ecosystems - Idea: Water can be a collaborator in interaction design, not just a medium. - What it is: A research agenda that treats water as material, metaphor and collaborator: prototyping water-based technologies such as ultrasonic manipulation, and studying water-centred practices like fishing. - How it works: Combines prototyping, aesthetic analysis of water and ethnography of water-centred communities. - Paper: https://doi.org/10.1145/3689050.3704797 (TEI 2025) - Project page: https://doi.org/10.1145/3689050.3704797 #### Diffractive Interfaces: Facilitating Agential Cuts in Forest Data Across More-than-human Scales — Elisa Giaccardi, Iohanna Nicenboim (2025) - Type: Paper · Organisms: Plants, Ecosystems - Idea: Interfaces decide what a forest is; design them to show relations, not just metrics. - What it is: A pictorial that redesigns the interface of an urban-forest agent-based model so users can shift between scales and see a forest as an interdependent more-than-human body rather than a set of individual trees. - How it works: Drawing on Barad's agential cuts, the authors prototype interface moves that reframe outputs of agent-based forest simulations. - Paper: https://doi.org/10.1145/3715336.3735404 (DIS 2025) #### Drumming for Love — Erzë Dinarama (2025) - Type: Artwork · Organisms: Insects, Ecosystems - Idea: The first signals of drought come from other species; listening to them is political. - What it is: A work that stages the vibrational 'drumming' communication of aquatic insects to investigate how drought is sensed and governed after Piedmont suspended the ecological minimum flow of its rivers. - How it works: Contact microphones capture stonefly-style substrate drumming, developed with fishermen, activists and scientists. - Video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CnlT9KzSHFU - Images: https://ars.electronica.art/starts-prize/files/2026/06/drumming-for-love_erze_ogr__cover-1024x576.jpg - Project page: https://ars.electronica.art/starts-prize/en/drumming-for-love/ #### Echo of the Abyss — Beatrice Maggipinto (2025) - Type: Research prototype · Organisms: Animals, Ecosystems - Idea: Let animals guide people into an ecosystem most of them will never reach. - What it is: A virtual reality deep-sea dive in which the player, as a diver, is guided by aquatic animals through a calm, contemplative ocean to build connection with marine life. - How it works: VR experience designed with HCI, ecopsychology and hydrocommons theory, tested in early pilot studies. - Paper: https://doi.org/10.1145/3689050.3704432 (TEI 2025) - Project page: https://doi.org/10.1145/3689050.3704432 #### Echoes of the Abyss — Robertina Šebjanič (2025) - Type: Artwork · Organisms: Animals, Ecosystems - Idea: Bring the hidden toxic legacy for marine life into public perception. - What it is: Research into chemical munitions dumped on the Baltic and Adriatic seabeds, developed aboard the TARA research vessel and turned into immersive sound and installation work. - How it works: Hydrophone recordings, sediment data and archival research are composed into spatial sound installations. - Images: https://falling-walls.com/sites/default/files/styles/content/public/medien/262/bilder/echos-of-abyss-adriatic1-by-robertina-sebjanic-photo-by-borut-brozovic-drugo-more-made-in-full-3-2-1_0.jpg?h=a2a2f083&itok=sPa6sli5 - Project page: https://falling-walls.com/science-breakthroughs-success-stories-robertina-sebjanic #### From Flood to Future — EASD Castelló Biodesign Challenge team (2025) - Type: Speculative design · Organisms: Fungi, Ecosystems - Idea: Design for floods should open debate about care and responsibility, not only deliver fixes. - What it is: A speculative project on resilience in Mediterranean regions after the 2024 DANA floods in Valencia, proposing mycelium pavements, raised zones, a civic early-warning app and distributed governance. - How it works: Built from survivors' testimonies; five interventions combine biomimetic surfaces, AIoT sensing and public engagement tools. - Video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=e2_M55DO7GQ - Project page: https://www.biodesignchallenge.org/easd-castello-2025 #### Futile Efforts — Jiabao Li (2025) - Type: Artwork · Organisms: Ecosystems - Idea: Tiny absurd gestures mirror the scale problem of real geoengineering. - What it is: Video performances in the Arctic in which the artist refreezes glacier meltwater and returns it, polishes an iceberg, sweeps a snowy mountain and bails the ocean with a coffee cup. - How it works: Short single-take performance videos filmed in Svalbard during the Arctic Circle residency. - Video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0VinJWBqinw - Images: https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/58688c8a6a496327e937e35b/dd58197c-f787-4819-9242-fe633522836b/Jiabao+Li+Ars+Electronica+60.jpg https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/58688c8a6a496327e937e35b/568a680d-17ba-404a-928b-d18767af7189/jiabao+li+arctic+43.jpg https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/58688c8a6a496327e937e35b/1726337089750-CXYCOCLC291X30J36PAH/Jiabao+Li+Ars+Electronica+82.jpg - Project page: https://www.jiabaoli.org/futile-efforts #### Knitting with unknown trees: assembling a more-than-human practice — Doenja Oogjes, Netta Ofer (2025) - Type: Paper · Organisms: Plants - Idea: The gaps in a dataset can be where nonhuman agency shows up. - What it is: A pictorial that takes the 'unknown' entries of a municipal tree dataset, trees unclassified due to error, decay or absence, and knits them as a way of knowing urban trees beyond quantification. - How it works: Knitting translates data on unknown trees into textile pieces, documented with reflections on shifts and compromises in the practice. - Paper: https://doi.org/10.1145/3715336.3735431 (DIS 2025) #### Nobody Told Me Rivers Dream — Superflux (2025) - Type: Artwork · Organisms: Ecosystems, Animals - Idea: Use AI to deepen human attention to a river, not to extract from it. - What it is: Three handcrafted sensor sculptures listen to birdsong, tidal flow and sky along the River Thames; an AI trained on this data and on folklore and Indigenous ecological knowledge offers visitors poetic prompts about the river. - How it works: Open-source sensors for bird calls, water flow and weather feed large language models on a GPU unit with an LED display. - Images: https://superflux.in/wp-content/uploads/2025/08/Wide-Combine-ALL-ARTEFACTS-00.2-scaled.jpg - Project page: https://superflux.in/index.php/work/nobody-told-me-rivers-dream/ #### Sensing Soil Habitability: Relational Data for Multispecies Attunement — Diya Samit, Bahareh Barati (2025) - Type: Paper · Organisms: Ecosystems, Bacteria & microbes - Idea: Measure soil for the life it can host, not only for yield. - What it is: The paper introduces Soil Habitability as a relational way of sensing soil data, aimed at attuning to the many species living in soil rather than controlling it. - How it works: Design research bridging biodesign data practices and more-than-human relational data. - Paper: https://doi.org/10.21606/iasdr.2025.749 (IASDR 2025) #### Sensus Pond: Exploring Water as Sensing Medium for More-than-Human Observation — Kuan-Ju Wu, Yasuaki Kakehi (2025) - Type: Research prototype · Organisms: Ecosystems, Animals - Idea: Observe other life without translating it into human categories. - What it is: A site-specific system that turns a pond's surface into a sensor, recording brief contacts between water and surrounding life and displaying them as layered traces over time without classifying them. - How it works: Swept Frequency Capacitive Sensing on the water surface plus a neural network that detects events, visualised as accumulated traces. - Paper: https://doi.org/10.21606/iasdr.2025.992 (IASDR 2025) - Video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vYdiSg_3lxQ - Project page: https://doi.org/10.21606/iasdr.2025.992 #### SoilRevive — SoilRevive team (Chia-Yi Liu & Yen-Chun Chen) (2025) - Type: Research prototype · Organisms: Bacteria & microbes, Plants, Ecosystems - Idea: Remediation can listen to the plants it is trying to help. - What it is: A bioremediation station for heavy-metal-polluted soil that releases microbes to stabilise toxins; units share data and AI times releases according to how plants recover. - How it works: Inspired by Arabidopsis signalling and mycorrhizal networks, networked stations meter microbial inoculants. - Video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BqE8Wr__hjo - Images: https://www.jamesdysonaward.org/Document/5fad4e60-2967-4200-8136-cd6ffff7c529/jamesdysonaward-soilrevive-01.jpg - Project page: https://www.jamesdysonaward.org/en-GB/2025/project/soilrevive-2/ #### The Coast Is Not a Line, It's a Zone — Feifei Zhou (2025) - Type: Artwork · Organisms: Ecosystems, Animals - Idea: Vernacular fishing gear can model how to take from an ecosystem while letting it regenerate. - What it is: A mixed-media installation built around the sero, a palm-leaf fish fence used by fisherfolk in Kupang Bay, Timor, which lets young fish and shrimp escape; it argues that the coast is a zone shared by many species rather than a line on a map. - How it works: Fieldwork with the fishing community of Kupang Bay, drawings and a section of a sero woven from gewang (Corypha utan) leaves, made with Gillian Bogart as a Design Museum More than Human Fellowship. - Video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-VVtSP6bxoI - Project page: https://designmuseum.org/exhibitions/more-than-human #### The Long Fall: A Descent into the Ocean's Living Memory — Jiabao Li (2025) - Type: Artwork · Organisms: Algae, Ecosystems - Idea: The climate is run by drifting cells you cannot see; change scale to meet them. - What it is: A 15-minute audiovisual performance that follows plankton from the White Cliffs of Dover down into the deep sea as 'marine snow', showing how microscopic life moves carbon through the planet. - How it works: Uses microscope data from Manu Prakash's PlanktonScope and Gravity Machine (Stanford) rendered for immersive screens like Ars Electronica Deep Space. - Paper: https://doi.org/10.1145/3799824.3812696 (SIGGRAPH 2026 Art Gallery) - Video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fe-Xd3gxcsU - Images: https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/58688c8a6a496327e937e35b/3ed87691-3894-45e6-b18a-95ceeb67549d/fusebox_may_10_fullres+11.jpg https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/58688c8a6a496327e937e35b/1758162854807-TP6ZM25L23M7U7R1MRSU/Ars+electronica+jiabao+li+5.jpg https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/58688c8a6a496327e937e35b/1758162860831-6MFT77BBFIL4W29WOFXB/Ars+electronica+jiabao+li+7.jpg - Project page: https://www.jiabaoli.org/long-fall #### The More-Than-Human Rights Mural — César Rodríguez-Garavito (2025) - Type: Artwork · Organisms: Ecosystems - Idea: Law is a design material: legal personhood can make a river a subject rather than a resource. - What it is: An eight-metre mural listing rivers that have been granted legal rights, in Colombia, Ecuador, New Zealand, India and Peru among others, with excerpts from the court rulings and constitutional texts that protect them, readable through masks. - How it works: Research by NYU's More-Than-Human Life (MOTH) Program is visualised with designer Elena Landinez on PVC-free wallpaper and acetate masks. - Images: https://designmuseum.org/image/4e4ed825-44d0-40d6-b9d7-9d325d381080?width=1200 - Project page: https://designmuseum.org/exhibitions/more-than-human/10-unmissable-highlights-from-more-than-human #### ‘Nai Waan’ (泥玩): designing working relationships with soil — Markus Wernli (2025) - Type: Paper · Organisms: Ecosystems, Human body - Idea: Collective, hands-on soil work builds organic, physical and affective ties with soil. - What it is: A study of Nai Waan (Soil Trust), an experimental farm studio in Hong Kong where a farmer, a design school and a hotel upcycled food waste to regenerate local soil, and how volunteers' relationships to soil changed. - How it works: Analyses extensive field material from collective work sessions, intersectoral collaboration and reuse of local materials and logistics. - Paper: https://doi.org/10.1080/15710882.2025.2604642 (CoDesign 2025) #### A Breathing Sea Wall: Haikou Jiangdong Beach Park — Turenscape (2024) - Type: Research prototype · Organisms: Plants, Ecosystems - Idea: A sea wall can breathe with the tide instead of blocking it. - What it is: A hard concrete seawall in Haikou was replaced with terraced, permeable coastal landscapes that let tides move through and re-establish coastal vegetation and intertidal habitat. - How it works: Terraces of planted, porous materials absorb wave energy and host salt-tolerant plants and intertidal life. - Images: https://static.dezeen.com/uploads/2024/07/6565cnwuDbwqnDmibfG5sfLzSYfJvAlTQZ98TnU2_Z33nsize_2048-1.jpg - Project page: https://www.dezeen.com/awards/2024/winners/a-breathing-sea-wall-haikou-jiangdong-beach-park/ #### BIOPOD — RISD Terra Carta teams (2024) - Type: Research prototype · Organisms: Plants, Ecosystems - Idea: Bring back the marsh edge that city walls removed. - What it is: Human-scale floating ecosystem modules that host marsh vegetation to clean urban water, rewild fringe marsh along city waterfronts and involve the public in citizen-science monitoring. - How it works: Buoyant planted modules support salt-marsh plants whose roots filter water and shelter organisms. - Video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vt8I7JjWa0Y - Images: https://img2.storyblok.com/960x0/smart/filters:format(jpeg)/f/109506/702x720/125a1b009d/boipod.png - Project page: https://www.sustainable-markets.org/tcdl/2024-terra-carta-design-lab-winners/ #### Coast 4C regenerative seaweed — Coast 4C (2024) - Type: Product & platform · Organisms: Algae, Ecosystems - Idea: A supply chain can be designed to repair the coast it draws from. - What it is: A regenerative seaweed supply chain built with small-scale fishing communities in the Philippines, giving income while restoring coastal ecosystems and supplying bio-based products. - How it works: Community seaweed farms, processing and buyer agreements form a traceable chain. - Video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=F5NMqMfvQ58 - Images: https://earthshotprize.org/wp-content/uploads/2024/09/Coast4C-Hero-1920x1080-@72DPI.jpg - Project page: https://www.coast4c.com/ #### Computational Compost — Marina Otero Verzier (2024) - Type: Research prototype · Organisms: Animals, Bacteria & microbes - Idea: Data infrastructure's waste heat can sustain decomposers instead of being dumped. - What it is: A prototype that uses the heat emitted by computers running simulations of the universe's origin to power a vermicomposting machine with live worms and microorganisms. - How it works: Server heat keeps a compost chamber at the temperature earthworms and microbes need, developed with the Donostia International Physics Center. - Images: https://ars.electronica.art/starts-prize/files/2025/05/computational_compost-8-c-mikel_blasco_2-1024x576.jpg - Project page: https://ars.electronica.art/starts-prize/en/computational-compost/ #### Coral Sonic Resilience — Marco Barotti (2024) - Type: Artwork · Organisms: Animals, Ecosystems - Idea: Sound can be a restoration tool, not only a way to represent nature. - What it is: 3D-printed underwater sculptures that play recordings of healthy reefs to degraded coral reefs, using sound to attract fish and coral larvae back to bleached, silent sites. - How it works: Acoustic enrichment, based on research showing that reef sounds draw juvenile fish, is delivered by solar-powered speakers inside sculptural housings. - Video: https://vimeo.com/1039181409 - Images: https://ars.electronica.art/starts-prize/files/2025/05/coralsonicresilience-5-c-marcobarotti-1024x576.jpg - Project page: https://www.marcobarotti.com/coral-sonic-resilience #### Embodied Traces: Multispecies Entanglement in Urban Spaces — Ashley Boone, Carl DiSalvo (2024) - Type: Paper · Organisms: Animals, Ecosystems - Idea: Producing environmental data is an embodied, emotional encounter with other species. - What it is: A pictorial on volunteers who walk Atlanta's streets during migration seasons to record birds killed by collisions with buildings. - How it works: Participant observation in bird-collision monitoring, interviews with volunteers and photography. - Paper: https://doi.org/10.1145/3643834.3660746 (DIS 2024 (pictorial)) - Images: https://figures.semanticscholar.org/65b8fff88ebcee8ae470704ba7a07ecfd86b3512/3-Figure3-1.png - Project page: https://doi.org/10.1145/3643834.3660746 #### From the Ashes — Auburn University Biodesign Challenge team (2024) - Type: Artwork · Organisms: Plants, Ecosystems - Idea: A landscape's own residue can tell its conservation story. - What it is: Charcoal from prescribed burns at the Grand Bay National Estuarine Research Reserve in Mississippi is turned into a handmade 'Grand Bay Ink' and an installation about why controlled fire helps the ecosystem. - How it works: Pine charcoal from managed burns is ground and bound into ink, with GPS-labelled bottles linking each batch to a burn site. - Video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ylhzglL8ATc - Images: https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/552dc0ffe4b070a9e1a6a215/1718643813176-S5A0MBFOT47DJ8O9INR8/ink+bottle+with+GPS+coordinates.jpg - Project page: https://www.biodesignchallenge.org/auburn-university-2024 #### Kan Beh — Universidad del Istmo Biodesign Challenge team (2024) - Type: Product & platform · Organisms: Plants, Insects - Idea: Local plants and ancestral knowledge can replace imported agrochemicals. - What it is: An organic pesticide against the maize weevil made from the seed of Argemone mexicana and bee propolis, designed to fit traditional Guatemalan farming and protect corn. - How it works: Seed extract and propolis are formulated into a grain-storage treatment tested against weevils. - Images: https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/552dc0ffe4b070a9e1a6a215/1718638064201-ZLDV2CI92WB8DBZ1Z7EW/KAN+-+BEH+1+MAIN+PHOTO.JPG https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/552dc0ffe4b070a9e1a6a215/1718638064180-BO1HN7FQH0OT0TS2Y0PD/KAN+-+BEH+3.JPG - Project page: https://www.biodesignchallenge.org/universidad-del-istmo-unis-2024 #### Pheno-data — Youngsil Lee, Larissa Pschetz (2024) - Type: Paper · Organisms: Plants - Idea: A living organism is already a record of its environment; learn to read it. - What it is: A concept and fabulation workshop that treats the changing traits of tomato plants (their colour, shape and growth) as data about the world they grow in, as an alternative to abstract digital data. - How it works: Tomatoes grown under different conditions were used as props in a fabulation workshop to develop "pheno-fication" as a practice of accessing pheno-data. - Paper: https://doi.org/10.1080/07370024.2023.2300779 (Human–Computer Interaction 2024) #### Posthumanist Care and Ecologies of Empathy: Investigating Design Potentials for Nature:Culture HCI — Pedro Galvão-Ferreira (2024) - Type: Paper · Organisms: Ecosystems, Plants - Idea: Nature and culture are one landscape; design play that cares for both. - What it is: A field study of hikers on Madeira's levada trails, old irrigation channels through the forest, using narrative self-reports and cultural probes to see how locative games could foster care for this natural and cultural heritage. - How it works: On-site contextual study with narrative self-reports and cultural probes, analysed through posthumanist care. - Paper: https://doi.org/10.1145/3681716.3681731 (Mindtrek 2024) - Project page: https://doi.org/10.1145/3681716.3681731 #### Rendering Soil Care Across Hotel, Retailer, And Farm With A Mutuality Service Blueprint — Markus Wernli (2024) - Type: Paper · Organisms: Ecosystems, Bacteria & microbes - Idea: Service design tools can include soil as a party whose needs must be met. - What it is: In a 43-week pilot in Hong Kong, 13 hoteliers and 17 retail customers diverted 4,800 litres of food waste to composting and grew 1,500 kg of crops; the authors map this as a service blueprint that serves soil as well as people. - How it works: Adapts the service blueprint into a Mutuality Service Blueprint based on data from the food-waste composting pilot. - Paper: https://doi.org/10.21606/drs.2024.415 (DRS 2024) #### SEAGRAFT — SEAGRAFT team (RCA) (2024) - Type: Research prototype · Organisms: Plants, Ecosystems - Idea: Design the tool that lets underwater meadows be replanted at scale. - What it is: A planting method and tool for restoring seagrass meadows by setting seeds and rhizomes efficiently into muddy or sandy seabeds. - How it works: A hand tool anchors seedlings and rhizome fragments at the right depth in soft sediment. - Video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cKYU2a_TaAQ - Project page: https://www.rca.ac.uk/ #### SeaWeaver — Leonardo Hummel (2024) - Type: Research prototype · Organisms: Animals, Ecosystems - Idea: Weaving craft can produce reef-like complexity cheaply and at scale. - What it is: Artificial reef units made by hand-weaving metal into complex wreath-like forms that give fish and coral the crevices and surfaces a natural reef offers; pilots ran for three years. - How it works: Parametric weaving patterns produce complex geometries; simple electrochemical processes add corrosion resistance and help mineral growth on the structures. - Paper: https://doi.org/10.21606/drs.2024.615 (DRS 2024) - Project page: https://dl.designresearchsociety.org/drs-conference-papers/drs2024/researchpapers/157 #### The Reef — Anton Vervoort (2024) - Type: Research prototype · Organisms: Animals, Algae, Ecosystems - Idea: An invasive filter-feeder can be recruited as a water-cleaning partner. - What it is: A structure that hosts zebra mussels and optimises their filtering to remove excess agricultural nutrients from water, fighting blue-green algae blooms without chemicals. - How it works: Stacked panels maximise surface area and flow for Dreissena polymorpha colonies in affected lakes. - Images: https://www.jamesdysonaward.org/Document/24f4911d-b03f-40ef-9462-af37a097dd22/afbeelding1.jpg https://www.jamesdysonaward.org/Document/9b4f6ebf-14c4-4903-a767-f9c4ece44066/afbeelding3.jpg - Project page: https://www.jamesdysonaward.org/en-GB/2024/project/the-reef/ #### CoCo: Compost Companion — Debbie Jung (2023) - Type: Paper · Organisms: Bacteria & microbes, Human body - Idea: An emotional companion can make composting feel like caring for someone. - What it is: CoCo is a wearable, creature-like companion that tracks campus composting spots by GPS, shows how much food a student has composted or wasted, and wags its tail when they compost well. - How it works: GPS, an OLED display and a servo-driven tail give informational and emotional feedback. - Paper: https://doi.org/10.1145/3544549.3583945 (CHI EA 2023) - Images: https://figures.semanticscholar.org/ef89193f097ac5f349783e3c5943734040dc4b6d/2-Figure1-1.png https://figures.semanticscholar.org/ef89193f097ac5f349783e3c5943734040dc4b6d/2-Figure2-1.png #### LilyPad — Aula Future + FirstHand Biodesign Challenge team (2023) - Type: Research prototype · Organisms: Animals, Plants, Ecosystems - Idea: A farm can double as habitat for the animals that clean its water. - What it is: A floating food farm for Philadelphia that irrigates with river water and uses endangered freshwater mussels to purify it; early prototypes were tested on a community centre's reservoir. - How it works: Filter-feeding mussels hang beneath a raft planted with crops that take up river water. - Images: https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/552dc0ffe4b070a9e1a6a215/1687884048795-19WZVB44P2MY7IYJENKQ/Screenshot+2023-06-27+at+12.39.25+PM.png https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/552dc0ffe4b070a9e1a6a215/1687884054078-FFLHHHIMKN8VYFJFS7VQ/Screenshot+2023-06-27+at+12.39.42+PM.png - Project page: https://www.biodesignchallenge.org/aula-future-firsthand-2023 #### Once a Glacier — Jiabao Li (2023) - Type: Artwork · Organisms: Ecosystems - Idea: Grief for a glacier can be told as a relationship between two beings. - What it is: A 15-minute interactive VR film about a girl who tries to keep a piece of glacier ice alive as she grows up and the glacier disappears, drawing on Inupiaq stories in which glaciers sing their memories. - How it works: Real-time VR with interactive scenes, based on the artist's own childhood in Alaska keeping ice in a freezer. - Paper: https://doi.org/10.1145/3681759.3688920 (SIGGRAPH Asia 2024 XR) - Video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Vao4pbmbJLQ - Images: https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/58688c8a6a496327e937e35b/96b3096b-70dc-42ea-a398-080665d6229b/jiabao+li+once+a+glacier.jpg https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/58688c8a6a496327e937e35b/1692934397034-3E4TCOR94VU72TFTE2TP/Jiabao+Li+%E6%9D%8E%E4%BD%B3%E5%AE%9D+to+your+eternity+12.jpg https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/58688c8a6a496327e937e35b/1692934397032-ESFAJWAYUBAONWRGA4W3/Jiabao+Li+%E6%9D%8E%E4%BD%B3%E5%AE%9D+to+your+eternity+13.jpg - Project page: https://www.jiabaoli.org/once-a-glacier #### Ontological design approach for Alternative soil-human relations — Taku Onozato (2023) - Type: Paper · Organisms: Ecosystems - Idea: Even roadside soil can be designed with as a relation, not a resource. - What it is: The authors prototype an interface for relating to the soil of a city road median strip and study practitioners' reflections, exploring how ontological design can build relationships with soil. - How it works: Ontological design practice with dematerialisation/rematerialisation prototyping and analysis of reflection transcripts. - Paper: https://doi.org/10.21606/iasdr.2023.646 (IASDR 2023) - Project page: https://doi.org/10.21606/iasdr.2023.646 #### TERRA XENOBIOTICA — Saša Spačal (2023) - Type: Artwork · Organisms: Ecosystems, Bacteria & microbes - Idea: Read soil as a living archive of the toxins that air travel leaves behind. - What it is: An installation on soil at airports polluted by PFAS 'forever chemicals': 85 soil chromatograms made from earth with increasing PFAS doses hang on the wall, and visitors can place one under a scanner that reads the pollution. - How it works: Made during a residency at the Rillig Lab (Freie Universität Berlin): Pfeiffer-style paper chromatography of PFAS-spiked soils builds a dataset to train a neural network that recognises PFAS pollution. - Images: https://artlaboratory-berlin.org/wp-content/uploads/2023/11/20231110_Art-Labatory_TERRA-XENOBIOTICA_0017-Art-Labatory-Artifical_Consciousness-high-res-scaled.jpg https://artlaboratory-berlin.org/wp-content/uploads/2023/11/20231110_Art-Labatory_TERRA-XENOBIOTICA_0053-Art-Labatory-Artifical_Consciousness-high-res-scaled.jpg - Project page: https://artlaboratory-berlin.org/exhibitions/terra-xenobiotica/ #### Time Sensitive — Jiabao Li (2023) - Type: Artwork · Organisms: Ecosystems, Plants - Idea: Glacial change is no longer deep time; compress it into a print you can watch form. - What it is: Cyanotypes, drawings and time-lapses that record glacier ice melting, together with the fireweed and Arctic birds that arrive as glaciers retreat, made with glaciologist Ginny Catania. - How it works: Melting ice on UV-sensitive cyanotype fabric in sunlight records its trajectory; drawings use melted glacier water on rocks. - Video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SCK9lXUwNYY - Images: https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/58688c8a6a496327e937e35b/f79d5437-1f99-4abe-8bc6-a73c66f26351/Jiabao+Li+Time+Sensitive+6.jpg https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/58688c8a6a496327e937e35b/bcb58264-4076-4398-a28e-430e7d260260/Jiabao+Li+%E6%9D%8E%E4%BD%B3%E5%AE%9D+to+your+eternity+12.jpg - Project page: https://www.jiabaoli.org/time-sensitive #### Unsettling Participation by Foregrounding More-than-Human Relations in Digital Forests — Michelle Westerlaken, Jennifer Gabrys (2023) - Type: Book & essay · Organisms: Plants, Ecosystems - Idea: Participation in forests is never only human; digital projects should account for that. - What it is: An essay showing how trees, fungi, soils and sensors disrupt, extend and redistribute participation in digital forest-monitoring projects. - How it works: Travels through three processes of unsettling drawn from the Smart Forests research project. - Paper: https://doi.org/10.1215/22011919-10216173 (Environmental Humanities 2023) #### Visualising Forest Sound: Justice-led Ecoacoustic Data Interaction — Joycelyn Longdon (2023) - Type: Paper · Organisms: Ecosystems, Animals - Idea: Ecoacoustic data should be interpreted with forest communities, not only about them. - What it is: A doctoral project developing visual tools for exploring long forest sound recordings together with forest-fringe communities, so that they take part in conservation as more than data collectors. - How it works: Participatory design of visualisations for large ecoacoustic datasets, framed by data justice. - Paper: https://doi.org/10.1145/3544549.3577039 (CHI 2023) - Project page: https://doi.org/10.1145/3544549.3577039 #### Aerseeds — Aerseeds (Bike & Begum Ayaskan) (2022) - Type: Research prototype · Organisms: Plants, Ecosystems - Idea: Borrow a tree's dispersal strategy to scale reforestation. - What it is: Aerodynamic seed and nutrient pods made from food waste that are dispersed by wind like winged seeds to reach degraded or hard-to-access land. - How it works: Pods shaped after samaras are moulded from a food-waste biomaterial and packed with seeds and nutrients. - Video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JIRnANF4qIc - Images: https://rca-media2.rca.ac.uk/images/AERSEEDs__Media-01.2e16d0ba.fill-1200x1200.jpg - Project page: https://www.rca.ac.uk/business/terra-carta-design-lab-projects/aerseeds #### Blue Ceramics — Rachel Ann Arredondo, Lining Yao (2022) - Type: Research prototype · Organisms: Plants, Ecosystems - Idea: Design the material with the ecosystem: let the seabed's currents, seeds and sediment set the form. - What it is: Digitally fabricated ceramic tiles that morph during firing into shapes that shelter seagrass seeds and trap sediment, designed with marine scientists for restoring seagrass meadows. - How it works: Printed clay patterns shrink unevenly in the kiln so flat tiles curl into 3D forms; geometries were iterated in Grasshopper against seagrass seed and sediment behaviour described by scientists. - Paper: https://doi.org/10.1145/3527927.3531453 (C&C 2022) - Video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=e0X39ZRc3iM - Images: https://figures.semanticscholar.org/08d0957a0fa0b92e956c9689306a34b74cae83ac/500px/5-Figure8-1.png - Project page: https://doi.org/10.1145/3527927.3531453 #### Desert Soilization — Yi Zhijian (2022) - Type: Research prototype · Organisms: Plants, Ecosystems - Idea: Soil is a structure that can be designed, not only a resource to be found. - What it is: Sand is mixed with a paste derived from plant material that binds grains so they hold water and nutrients like soil, allowing crops and grasses to grow on former desert. - How it works: A cellulose-based binder gives sand particles the constraints that make soil mechanically and ecologically functional. - Video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Wm-Y9i-LTVw - Images: https://earthshotprize.org/wp-content/uploads/2022/11/Desert-Agricultural-Transformation-in-city.jpg - Project page: https://earthshotprize.org/winners-finalists/desert-agricultural-transformation/ #### Designing Tools and Interfaces for Ecological Restoration: An Investigation into the Opportunities and Constraints for Technological Interventions — Aditi Maheshwari (2022) - Type: Paper · Organisms: Plants, Ecosystems - Idea: Restoration technology has to fit the realities of the people and landscapes it serves. - What it is: Using the e-seed, a self-drilling seed carrier, as a probe, the authors interviewed 14 experts in forestry and agriculture about what devices for ecological restoration must do in the field. - How it works: Qualitative interview study with subject-matter experts, using a biomimetic device as a research probe. - Paper: https://doi.org/10.1145/3491102.3517664 (CHI 2022) - Video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_pHAL6bu_6c #### Green Gravel — SeaForester (2022) - Type: Product & platform · Organisms: Algae, Ecosystems - Idea: A handful of seeded gravel is a scalable way to replant an underwater forest. - What it is: Small stones are seeded with kelp spores in nurseries and scattered on the seabed, where the young seaweed attaches and regrows kelp forests that store carbon and shelter marine life. - How it works: Kelp gametophytes are cultured onto gravel in tanks for weeks before outplanting. - Video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MEYSbf0sDx0 - Images: https://earthshotprize.org/wp-content/uploads/2022/11/SeaForester-Jan-Verbeek-Ines-Gill-Louro-in-lab.jpg - Project page: https://www.seaforester.org/ #### IABR Down to Earth: WATERSCHOOL M4H+ — Studio Makkink & Bey (2022) - Type: Speculative design · Organisms: Fungi, Algae, Insects - Idea: Plan a neighbourhood from what can grow there. - What it is: A research and learning environment for Rotterdam's Merwe-Vierhavens district that plans a habitat for 6,300 future residents around five local resources: insects, duckweed, seaweed, wood and fungi. - How it works: About forty designers developed production landscapes and prototypes for each living resource, commissioned by IABR. - Images: https://www.dutchdesignawards.nl/wp-content/uploads/2022/06/1-6266a8e0ba6c8-IABR-Waterschool-M4H-Studio-Makkink-Bey-image-by-Aad-Hoogendoorn-LR-14-1500x882.jpeg https://www.dutchdesignawards.nl/wp-content/uploads/2022/06/2-626816db21932-IABR-WATERSCHOOL-M4H-FUNGI-production-landscape-by-Juhee-Hahm-in-colloboration-with-Studio-Makkink-Bey-1500x882.jpeg - Project page: https://www.dutchdesignawards.nl/en/gallery/iabr-down-to-earth-waterschool-m4h/ #### Into the Island — DnA_Design and Architecture (2022) - Type: Research prototype · Organisms: Ecosystems, Animals, Plants - Idea: The most useful building for an island may be a set of light interventions that let species regenerate. - What it is: Asked to design a museum on Meizhou Island, Fujian, DnA instead proposed small interventions at six sites around the island, each supporting different activities and species and reusing existing structures. - How it works: Site surveys of coastal ecology guide the reuse of quarries, dykes and abandoned structures as habitat and public space; documented in a film produced with the CCA Montreal. - Video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tWPiG1bRmt0 - Project page: https://designmuseum.org/exhibitions/more-than-human #### Legal Personhood for the Mar Menor — Teresa Vicente (2022) - Type: Speculative design · Organisms: Ecosystems - Idea: Citizens can write an ecosystem into law as a subject with rights. - What it is: After mass fish die-offs in Europe's largest saltwater lagoon, a citizens' initiative with over 600,000 signatures led Spain to pass Law 19/2022, giving the Mar Menor and its basin legal personhood. - How it works: Popular legislative initiative; the law creates a representative committee, a monitoring commission and a scientific committee for the lagoon. - Images: https://thumb.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/6/6a/Mar_Menor._Vista_a%C3%A9rea.jpg/1280px-Mar_Menor._Vista_a%C3%A9rea.jpg - Project page: https://www.boe.es/buscar/act.php?id=BOE-A-2022-16019 #### ReClaym our Compost: Biodegradable Clay for Intimate Making — Fiona Bell, Netta Ofer, Mirela Alistar (2022) - Type: Paper · Organisms: Bacteria & microbes, Ecosystems - Idea: Make with a material that carries your own food history and returns to the soil. - What it is: ReClaym is a clay made at home from the maker's own composted food waste; it can be sculpted, molded and extruded, and fully biodegrades back to soil. - How it works: Personal compost is mixed with non-toxic binders and shaped by hand; the authors test color, texture, sensing and conductivity. - Paper: https://doi.org/10.1145/3491102.3517711 (CHI 2022) - Video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=s6UEKZRb2EY #### Relating to Soil: Chromatography as a Tool for Environmental Engagement — Anton Poikolainen Rosén (2022) - Type: Paper · Organisms: Ecosystems, Bacteria & microbes - Idea: Slow, qualitative, hands-on tests can relate people to soil in ways digital sensors cannot. - What it is: A pictorial on soil care at an urban community farm, where workshop participants used soil chromatography to see soil health as coloured patterns on paper. - How it works: Soil samples are dissolved and wicked through silver-nitrate-treated filter paper, producing radial chromatograms that farmers read together. - Paper: https://doi.org/10.1145/3532106.3533503 (DIS 2022) - Video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KlObabEVJVg #### The Vault of Life — Superflux (2022) - Type: Speculative design · Organisms: Animals, Plants, Ecosystems - Idea: Stage biodiversity as a library we are responsible for keeping. - What it is: A room at Dubai's Museum of the Future, set in 2071, where 2,400 suspended crystal jars, each etched with an image of a living or extinct species, form a genetic archive of life on Earth that visitors explore with handheld devices. - How it works: Exhibit design with 2,400 etched crystal jars in a 375 m² room and handheld interactive devices built with Marshmallow Laser Feast. - Images: https://superflux.in/wp-content/uploads/2022/07/Hero-Image-V2-1024x683.jpg - Project page: https://superflux.in/index.php/work/the-vault-of-life-in-museum-of-the-future/ #### Turba Tol Hol-Hol Tol — Camila Marambio (2022) - Type: Artwork · Organisms: Plants, Ecosystems - Idea: Care for a wetland can be practised through art, language and science together. - What it is: The Chilean Pavilion at the 2022 Venice Biennale: a chant-like tribute to the peatlands of Tierra del Fuego and their Sphagnum mosses, linked to the resurgence of Selk'nam culture. - How it works: An immersive installation, the SphagnumLAB, residencies in the bog and research with scientists and Selk'nam community members. - Images: https://ars.electronica.art/starts-prize/files/2023/06/turbatol_6-SphagnumLAB-2022_Photo-by-Benjami%CC%81n-Echazarreta-1024x512.jpg https://ars.electronica.art/starts-prize/files/2023/06/turbatol_2-Laying-Low-during-the-Residency-Grounding-into-the-Bog-at-Karunkina-Tierra-del-Fuego-2022-Turba-Tol_Curated-by-Camila-Marambio_-Photo-by-Benjami%CC%81n-Echazarreta-1024x512.jpg - Project page: https://www.turbatol.org #### Weaving Together a Decolonial Imaginary Through Design for Effective River Management — Manuhuia Barcham (2022) - Type: Paper · Organisms: Ecosystems - Idea: Design tools can hold more than one world, including the river's. - What it is: Uses a river restoration design project in New Zealand to show how pluriversal ontological design can work in practice, with design tools that let different ways of being with the river coexist. - How it works: Case study using boundary objects and infrastructuring in a riverine restoration project. - Paper: https://doi.org/10.1162/desi_a_00666 (Design Issues 2022) - Project page: https://doi.org/10.1162/desi_a_00666 #### Weird Ecologies — Weird Ecologies (RCA team) (2022) - Type: Speculative design · Organisms: Plants, Bacteria & microbes, Ecosystems - Idea: Work with the organisms that already thrive in damaged places. - What it is: Devices that latch onto existing infrastructure in toxic landscapes and help toxin-tolerant organisms grow, managing contaminated sites through bioremediation instead of fencing them off. - How it works: Clip-on habitats deliver substrate and water to hyperaccumulator plants and microbes. - Images: https://rca-media2.rca.ac.uk/images/WEIRD_ECOLOGIES_Terra_Carta_Appl.f039940b.fill-1200x1200.jpg - Project page: https://www.rca.ac.uk/business/terra-carta-design-lab-projects/weird-ecologies #### Alternatives to Agrilogistics: Designing for Ecological Thinking — Heidi R. Biggs, Shaowen Bardzell (2021) - Type: Paper · Organisms: Plants, Ecosystems - Idea: Design farm technology like small farmers farm: with the ecosystem, not against it. - What it is: Ethnographic fieldwork with small farmers in Indiana shows how they resist 'agrilogistics', Timothy Morton's term for separating nature from culture in food production, and what this means for farm technology. - How it works: Ethnography with small and urban farmers is read through Morton's ecological thinking to derive design directions. - Paper: https://doi.org/10.1145/3479557 (CSCW 2021) - Video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cW876f40yho #### Berl-Berl — Jakob Kudsk Steensen (2021) - Type: Artwork · Organisms: Ecosystems, Plants, Animals - Idea: Make the forgotten ecosystem beneath a city the main character. - What it is: An immersive installation and online world with a swamp as its protagonist, recreating the wetlands on which Berlin was built, with a soundscape that blends Arca's voice with amphibian calls. - How it works: Months of fieldwork in Berlin-Brandenburg wetlands and specimens from the Museum für Naturkunde were rebuilt in Unreal Engine; sound by Matt McCorkle and Arca. - Video: https://vimeo.com/765418012 - Images: https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/573604122b8ddea9122c6ee9/1659334574237-TGVI2IFHAT3G4XA0LH9J/HighresScreenshot00111.jpg - Project page: https://jakobsteensen.com/berlberl #### Coral Reef Rescuer — Yihan Liu & Yang Zhang (2021) - Type: Speculative design · Organisms: Animals, Ecosystems - Idea: Robots can be designed as caretakers for reefs. - What it is: A manta-ray-like 'mother' robot with 'child' units that supports the regeneration of coral reefs damaged by overfishing, warming, acidification and pollution. - How it works: The mother unit carries child robots that deploy coral fragments and monitor reef health. - Images: https://web.archive.org/web/20211127105104im_/https://www.globalgradshow.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/11/Coral-reef-rescuer1-600x424.jpg - Project page: https://web.archive.org/web/20211127105104/https://www.globalgradshow.com/project/coral-reef-rescuer/ #### Coral Vita land-based coral farms — Coral Vita (2021) - Type: Product & platform · Organisms: Animals, Ecosystems - Idea: Restoration can be designed as an industry that grows living infrastructure. - What it is: Land-based coral farms that use micro-fragmentation and assisted evolution to grow resilient corals up to 50 times faster than in nature, then outplant them onto degraded reefs. - How it works: Coral fragments fuse and grow in tanks under controlled stress to select heat-tolerant colonies. - Video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xDt5RoQpWXU - Images: https://earthshotprize.org/wp-content/uploads/2021/09/CoralVita_2-v2-1-e1663706490703.jpeg https://earthshotprize.org/wp-content/uploads/2021/09/Gator-Halpern-Coral-Vita-facility-Grand-Bahama-1024x576.jpg - Project page: https://www.coralvita.co/ #### Flash Forest — Flash Forest (2021) - Type: Product & platform · Organisms: Plants, Ecosystems - Idea: Speed and precision in replanting can be designed from the air. - What it is: Drones map sites and fire germinated seed pods into the soil to reforest burned and logged land quickly, with pod mixes tailored to native species. - How it works: Seed pods with germination aids are fired from drones along mapped planting paths. - Video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Lq_wVSQtmp0 - Images: https://cdn.prod.website-files.com/67d006c22ab4ba62f9fcd5ad/6a90ded04a80dca8e1c68a7f_Flash%20Forest%20OG%20Image.png - Project page: https://flashforest.ca/ #### Los Cedros Rights of Nature Ruling — Constitutional Court of Ecuador (2021) - Type: Speculative design · Organisms: Ecosystems, Plants, Animals - Idea: Rights of nature can be enforced in court to protect a specific forest. - What it is: Ecuador's Constitutional Court ruled that mining permits in the Los Cedros cloud forest violated the rights of nature written into the 2008 constitution, and revoked them. - How it works: Constitutional ruling (case 1149-19-JP/21) applying the rights of nature and the precautionary principle to biodiversity data from the forest. - Images: https://thumb.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/8/8f/Los_Cedros.jpg/1280px-Los_Cedros.jpg - Project page: https://www.corteconstitucional.gob.ec/ #### Office for Tree Migration (OTM) — Agnes Meyer-Brandis (2021) - Type: Artwork · Organisms: Plants, Ecosystems - Idea: Treat trees as climate refugees and design ways to help them move. - What it is: A long-term art and research project on how trees migrate north and uphill as the climate changes, including assisted-migration trials in a Finnish peatland. - How it works: Phenological cameras, ecological monitoring and custom hardware and software track trees along treelines; saplings are planted in trial sites. - Video: https://vimeo.com/1172137373 - Images: https://ars.electronica.art/starts-prize/files/2026/06/01_assistedmigration_208a7022_otm-c-agnes_meyer-brandis-vgbildkunst-1024x576.jpg https://ars.electronica.art/starts-prize/files/2026/06/01_as_trees_go_by_documentation-c-agnes_meyer-brandis_a6a7112_16_50-1024x576.jpg - Project page: https://ars.electronica.art/starts-prize/en/office-for-tree-migration-otm/ #### Sensing More-than-human Worlds — Serena Pollastri (2021) - Type: Paper · Organisms: Ecosystems - Idea: Media architecture can reveal what a place is like for other species. - What it is: Recordings of light and sound at Glasson Dock and Sunderland Point near Lancaster, visualised as circular charts that include ultrasound inaudible to people, to show how urban places are sensed by nonhuman life. - How it works: Light sensors and ultrasonic microphones recorded four-hour sessions at dusk; the data became radial visualisations, discussed within a review of more-than-human city design. - Paper: https://doi.org/10.1145/3469410.3469413 (MAB 2021) - Video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-mfY-Z9bMQ4 - Images: https://figures.semanticscholar.org/66d064bec99df9c7d59f344baa5126a7bf1d117f/500px/3-Figure1-1.png https://figures.semanticscholar.org/66d064bec99df9c7d59f344baa5126a7bf1d117f/500px/6-Figure6-1.png - Project page: https://doi.org/10.1145/3469410.3469413 #### Becoming a Sentinel Species — Sissel Marie Tonn (2020) - Type: Artwork · Organisms: Cells & tissue, Human body, Ecosystems - Idea: We are not sealed off from our environment; our cells can be its instruments. - What it is: An experimental science-fiction film in which two researchers grow their own immune cells and expose them to microplastics, imagining humans as a sentinel species that signals pollution. BAD Award 2020 winner. - How it works: Macrophages from the artist's blood were cultured and exposed to microplastics, with Heather Leslie and Juan Garcia Vallejo (Amsterdam UMC). - Video: https://vimeo.com/490794220 - Images: https://www.badaward.nl/imager/assets/site/3378/Sissel-Marie-Tonn.-goda-kenzo-mud-2_a5a12f426a1ab11909951db4fe37df8f.jpg https://www.badaward.nl/imager/assets/site/3379/goda-kenzo-mud_a5a12f426a1ab11909951db4fe37df8f.jpg - Project page: https://www.badaward.nl/artists-scientists/sissel-marie-tonn-with-heather-leslie-juan-garcia-vallejo #### Cloud Studies — Forensic Architecture (2020) - Type: Artwork · Organisms: Ecosystems, Human body - Idea: The air is a contested space; clouds can be evidence. - What it is: A film and research project that tracks toxic clouds, from tear gas and chemical attacks to industrial pollution and forest fires, and shows how airborne violence is produced and denied. - How it works: Compiles open-source video, remote sensing and fluid-dynamics modelling from several investigations into one film, commissioned by ZKM Center for Art and Media. - Video: https://vimeo.com/757505563 - Images: https://content.forensic-architecture.org/wp-content/uploads/2020/06/1-scaled.jpg - Project page: https://forensic-architecture.org/investigation/cloudstudies #### Critical Zones: Observatories for Earthly Politics — Bruno Latour, ZKM | Center for Art and Media Karlsruhe (2020) - Type: Artwork · Organisms: Ecosystems - Idea: Curate an exhibition as a way to land on Earth: show the soil, water and life that make politics possible. - What it is: A 'thought exhibition' at ZKM Karlsruhe, curated by Bruno Latour and Peter Weibel, on the thin layer of the Earth shaped by life, combining scientific observatories and artworks, with a digital exhibition opened during the pandemic. - How it works: Scientific critical-zone observatories, artworks and a web platform arranged as an argument about Gaia and earthly politics. - Video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CXC7ZMK2QKU - Images: https://critical-zones.zkm.de/images/og-image.jpg - Project page: https://zkm.de/en/exhibition/2020/05/critical-zones #### Ecocide in Indonesia — Forensic Architecture (2020) - Type: Artwork · Organisms: Ecosystems, Plants - Idea: Read a forest's destruction as evidence, with the landscape itself as witness. - What it is: An investigation, with Greenpeace International, into how rainforest in Papua was cleared by fire for palm-oil plantations, reconstructing the fires from satellite imagery, heat data and smoke plumes. - How it works: Satellite image analysis, fire hotspot data and smoke-plume modelling combined into a spatial timeline of land clearing. - Video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1wn70zF8IWs - Project page: https://forensic-architecture.org/investigation/ecocide-in-indonesia #### Glacier's Lament — Jiabao Li (2020) - Type: Artwork · Organisms: Ecosystems - Idea: Let a glacier's melt record become a score humans perform with it. - What it is: Sixty years of melt data from Alaska's Mendenhall Glacier turned into music, played and danced on the glacier by local musicians who have watched it retreat. - How it works: Each note is one season: low pitch for frozen winters, rising pitch for summer melt; performers play alongside the glacier's own sounds. - Paper: https://doi.org/10.1145/3532837.3534948 (SIGGRAPH 2022 Art Gallery) - Video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=79GaAtw8cU8 - Images: https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/58688c8a6a496327e937e35b/1600373089411-GNWYV4IK917Q1X6X5DH3/Glacier+Data+Cello.jpg https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/58688c8a6a496327e937e35b/1602106288285-HIE2DT0MBDW01LD40Y5R/glacier+blue6.JPG https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/58688c8a6a496327e937e35b/1597952233408-ZR1Y2TRXHK9Y4MOY5ITD/3.png - Project page: https://www.jiabaoli.org/glacier #### LIFEBRIK — University of Cincinnati Biodesign Challenge team (2020) - Type: Research prototype · Organisms: Ecosystems, Plants - Idea: Package living soil as a building block for city growing. - What it is: A soil 'brick' with five layers — mineral, carbon, profile, biota and cover — that makes starting an urban garden simple. - How it works: Each layer reproduces a horizon of natural soil, including a biota layer with soil organisms. - Video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=So7kEMqr8Lk - Images: https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/552dc0ffe4b070a9e1a6a215/1595467099794-NZDUSYHTFVHCL4LOIKPR/Lifebrik.JPG - Project page: https://lifebrik.wixsite.com/welovesoil #### Nemo — Elias Thaddäus Pfuner (2020) - Type: Research prototype · Organisms: Animals, Ecosystems - Idea: Scale reef restoration by designing the whole care chain, not a single tool. - What it is: A four-stage service for coral-reef restoration agencies: a planning platform, a transport box for coral fragments and a collaborative drone for outplanting nursery-grown corals. - How it works: Service design, product design of transport boxes and an underwater drone concept. - Images: https://www.jamesdysonaward.org/Document/16e2ada0-c28e-44e3-8159-7e53570396d3/sceneedit.jpg https://www.jamesdysonaward.org/Document/fac6323b-9540-48d8-9332-519c041d2087/boxes.jpg - Project page: https://www.jamesdysonaward.org/en-GB/2020/project/nemo/ #### Smart forests and data practices: From the Internet of Trees to planetary governance — Jennifer Gabrys (2020) - Type: Paper · Organisms: Plants, Ecosystems - Idea: When forests become 'smart', they also become instruments of governance; ask who they serve. - What it is: Studies forests fitted with sensors, drones and data platforms, and argues that forests are becoming technologies for managing environmental change. - How it works: Analysis of smart forest projects and five digital practices, part of the ERC Smart Forests project. - Paper: https://doi.org/10.1177/2053951720904871 (Big Data & Society 2020) - Video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pV6DwcK69gQ - Images: https://smartforests.net/media/pages/about/fdf505d0de-1593377557/smartforest-ok.jpg https://smartforests.net/media/pages/home/fd0c426ad2-1644954050/smartforests-homepage-3-800x800.jpg - Project page: https://smartforests.net/ #### Swamp Observatory — Nomeda & Gediminas Urbonas (2020) - Type: Artwork · Organisms: Ecosystems, Plants - Idea: Treat the swamp as an interface to Gaia and a model for multispecies thinking. - What it is: A parasitic peat structure growing on the ZKM building with four instruments, including Swamp Brain, a hybrid of a swamp and an AI whose images are projected onto a dried ox bladder. - How it works: Figures made of peat house smell, time-stack and AI modules; the AI was trained with scientist Jonas Kubilius on swamp forms. - Video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=B5MHCtIIZmI - Project page: https://zkm.de/en/exhibition/2020/05/critical-zones #### Zebra Glass — College for Creative Studies Biodesign Challenge team (2020) - Type: Research prototype · Organisms: Animals, Ecosystems - Idea: Turn an 'othered' invasive species into a local craft material. - What it is: Invasive zebra and quagga mussels from the Great Lakes are harvested as the calcium carbonate source for a regional, artisanal soda-lime glass. - How it works: Mussel shells are cleaned, crushed and calcined to replace mined limestone in the glass batch. - Video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2nq5StOmac8 - Images: https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/552dc0ffe4b070a9e1a6a215/1594849170023-PJTG7LNJKKWLRZ73YTZH/Screen+Shot+2020-07-15+at+5.36.33+PM.png - Project page: https://www.ccscmdmateriallab.com/projects/zebraglass #### souvenirs entomologiques #1: odonata / weathering data — Sybille Neumeyer (2020) - Type: Artwork · Organisms: Insects - Idea: Trace the metamorphoses an insect undergoes as it becomes data. - What it is: An installation that follows dragonflies from habitat to natural history museum to dataset, showing how insects become specimens, bioindicators and climate data. - How it works: Museum specimens, archival material and weathering data on Odonata are arranged as an installation. - Video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=z7YQbk_Nsx0 - Images: https://artlaboratory-berlin.org/wp-content/uploads/2023/03/20230311_ArtLab_VICIOUS-CYCLE_0132-hr13.jpg - Project page: https://artlaboratory-berlin.org/exhibitions/vicious-cycle/ #### Perimeter Pfynwald – A Soundscape Observatory — Marcus Maeder (2019) - Type: Artwork · Organisms: Ecosystems, Plants, Insects - Idea: Listen to climate change as it happens inside a forest. - What it is: A sound installation that compresses a summer of recordings from a drought-stressed Swiss pine forest, including a pond and soil fauna, into an audible model of the ecosystem. - How it works: Autonomous recorders in the forest, the pond and the soil captured sound during the 2018 heat summer; the recordings were compressed in time and space. - Video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tjri6bfA_KE - Project page: https://zkm.de/en/exhibition/2020/05/critical-zones #### Seedballs — Seedballs Kenya (2019) - Type: Product & platform · Organisms: Plants, Ecosystems - Idea: Package a seed so it can wait for the right moment by itself. - What it is: Indigenous tree and grass seeds coated in a shell of charcoal dust that protects them from predators until the rains; the balls are scattered by hand, slingshot or aircraft. - How it works: Charcoal dust from waste is bound around seeds; rain breaks the coating and triggers germination. - Video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zaxoZaDZE7g - Project page: https://seedballskenya.com/ #### The Deep Listener — Jakob Kudsk Steensen (2019) - Type: Artwork · Organisms: Plants, Animals, Insects - Idea: Use AR not to add objects to a park but to reveal the species already living in it. - What it is: An audio-visual AR walk through Kensington Gardens and Hyde Park that lets visitors see and hear five of the park's species: London plane trees, bats, parakeets, azure damselflies and reedbeds. - How it works: Field recordings, ultrasonic bat sounds and 3D scans of each species are placed at their real locations in a mobile AR app, as a Serpentine Augmented Architecture commission. - Video: https://vimeo.com/394495876 - Images: https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/573604122b8ddea9122c6ee9/1614095935755-M0XR28UWTQMZZAGJ1EOJ/1.hero.png https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/573604122b8ddea9122c6ee9/1588338407003-FSLM7QH06TPXGQ1RI2UE/Deep_Listening_Launch-4920.jpg - Project page: https://jakobsteensen.com/the-deep-listener #### Acoustic Ocean — Ursula Biemann (2018) - Type: Artwork · Organisms: Animals, Ecosystems - Idea: Listening, not seeing, is the way into the ocean's world. - What it is: A video set on the Lofoten Islands in which a Sámi biologist-diver listens to deep-sea life with hydrophones and other recording devices, since sound is the main way marine beings navigate and communicate. - How it works: Hydrophones, parabolic microphones and underwater recording set up a sensing station; the video pairs this equipment with Indigenous knowledge of the sea. - Video: https://vimeo.com/255000012 - Images: https://geobodies.org/wp-content/uploads/2022/03/aav-ao-cover-large-aspect-ratio-770-433.jpg https://geobodies.org/wp-content/uploads/2022/03/aav-AO-gallery-2-aspect-ratio-770-433.jpg - Project page: https://geobodies.org/art-and-videos/acoustic-ocean/ #### Art Biotop Water Garden — junya.ishigami+associates (2018) - Type: Research prototype · Organisms: Plants, Ecosystems - Idea: Architecture can be the careful relocation of a living landscape. - What it is: About 318 trees that had to be uprooted for a hotel development were replanted one by one in a former rice field in Nasu, threaded between some 160 shallow ponds fed by the old paddy water system. - How it works: Each tree's position was surveyed and re-planned; ponds and moss re-establish a woodland wetland. - Images: https://designmuseum.org/image/5cbbb7b5-2c28-4ded-98be-9c34292ec9fc?width=1600 - Project page: https://designmuseum.org/exhibitions/beazley-designs-of-the-year/architecture-2019/art-biotop-water-garden #### Living Seawalls — Reef Design Lab (2018) - Type: Product & platform · Organisms: Ecosystems, Animals, Algae - Idea: Grey infrastructure can be retrofitted into habitat with a tile system. - What it is: Hexagonal habitat tiles fixed onto existing flat seawalls whose rock-like textures give oysters, barnacles, seaweed and fish places to settle and hide, raising biodiversity on urban shorelines. - How it works: Ten 3D-modelled textures are cast in low-carbon concrete with composite reinforcement and bolted to seawalls; colonisation is monitored by the Sydney Institute of Marine Science. - Video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AzWBxccuIkI - Images: http://static1.squarespace.com/static/60efa1626de4b55189f0d735/t/6142edad5c600c24b6cea0db/1631776173367/E_St3fiUcAQsFi3.jpg?format=1500w - Project page: https://www.livingseawalls.com.au/ #### River Listening: Acoustic Ecology and Aquatic Bioacoustics in Global River Systems — Leah Barclay (2018) - Type: Artwork · Organisms: Ecosystems, Animals - Idea: Listening underwater can make a river's health audible to the people who live by it. - What it is: River Listening records the underwater sounds of rivers around the world with hydrophones and turns them into listening events, compositions and community monitoring of river health. - How it works: Hydrophone recordings combine aquatic bioacoustics, acoustic ecology and creative practice. - Paper: https://doi.org/10.1162/leon_a_01516 (Leonardo 2018) - Images: http://leahbarclay.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/03/1.Leah_LoganRiver.jpg http://leahbarclay.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/03/3.LeahBarclay-Listening-to-the-Thames.jpg - Project page: https://leahbarclay.com/river-listening #### aqua_forensic — Robertina Šebjanič (2018) - Type: Artwork · Organisms: Bacteria & microbes, Ecosystems - Idea: Show the invisible chemical footprint we leave in water through its smallest inhabitants. - What it is: An installation, workshop and citizen-science project, with Gjino Šutić, that makes pharmaceutical residues in water visible through holograms of microorganisms dying in highly diluted drug solutions. - How it works: In vitro experiments with microorganisms in pharmaceutical solutions 20,000 times weaker than a human dose, shown as holographic video in a copper-pipe installation. - Video: https://vimeo.com/288379735 - Images: https://robertina.net/wp-content/uploads/2025/09/5aa0e-aqua_forensic_robertina_sebjanic_gjino_sutic-2-2.jpg - Project page: https://robertina.net/aqua_forensic/ #### 3D Ocean Farming — GreenWave (2017) - Type: Product & platform · Organisms: Algae, Animals, Ecosystems - Idea: A farm can be designed as a polyculture that improves the water it uses. - What it is: Restorative ocean farms that grow kelp on vertical ropes with mussels, oysters and scallops in cages below, needing no feed, fresh water or fertiliser while absorbing carbon and nitrogen. - How it works: Seeded lines hang from buoys in a vertical water column; species at each depth filter and photosynthesise. - Video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j8ViaskDSeI - Project page: https://www.greenwave.org/ #### Sahara Forest Project — Sahara Forest Project (2017) - Type: Research prototype · Organisms: Plants, Ecosystems - Idea: Couple technologies so each one's by-product feeds the next and revegetates the desert. - What it is: Saltwater-cooled greenhouses, concentrated solar power and desalination are combined to grow food in the desert, while evaporated seawater makes humid zones outside for planting salt-tolerant vegetation. - How it works: Pilot facilities in Qatar and Jordan integrate evaporative greenhouses, solar and outdoor revegetation plots. - Video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3aZ8E7hj8VU - Project page: https://www.saharaforestproject.com/ #### Seasynthesis — Xandra van der Eijk (2017) - Type: Artwork · Organisms: Ecosystems, Animals - Idea: Listening is a way into ecosystems we cannot enter. - What it is: An ongoing listening project that records underwater sound in the North Sea — ship propellers, offshore wind-farm construction, marine life — to give people access to a sea they rarely see. BAD Award 2017 winner, with Wageningen Marine Research. - How it works: Hydrophone recordings in the North Sea analysed with marine ecologist Han Lindeboom and presented as a sound installation. - Images: https://www.badaward.nl/imager/assets/site/1145/Life-Time-Hanneke-Wetzer-1_a5a12f426a1ab11909951db4fe37df8f.jpg - Project page: https://www.badaward.nl/artists-scientists/xandra-van-der-eijk-with-han-lindeboom #### Spring Bloom in the Marginal Ice Zone — Jana Winderen (2017) - Type: Artwork · Organisms: Animals, Algae, Ecosystems - Idea: Make an ecosystem's most important moment audible, so its fragility is felt rather than read. - What it is: A seven-channel sound installation of the Barents Sea during the spring plankton bloom: cracking sea ice, bearded seals, whales, cod and crustaceans that all depend on the bloom. - How it works: Hydrophone recordings made near Svalbard are composed into a spatial multichannel piece; commissioned by Sonic Acts and Dark Ecology. - Video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oxGIQF3iRYM - Images: https://janawinderen.com/media/pages/releases/spring-bloom-in-the-marginal-ice-zone/3250264730-1587415338/tone65.jpg - Project page: https://janawinderen.com/releases/spring-bloom-in-the-marginal-ice-zone #### Te Awa Tupua: Whanganui River Legal Personhood — Whanganui Iwi (2017) - Type: Speculative design · Organisms: Ecosystems - Idea: A river can be a person in law when law follows an Indigenous view of kinship: "I am the river and the river is me." - What it is: New Zealand's Te Awa Tupua (Whanganui River Claims Settlement) Act 2017 recognised the Whanganui River, from mountains to sea, as a living and indivisible whole with the rights of a legal person, represented by two guardians, one from the iwi and one from the Crown. - How it works: Treaty settlement legislation creating a legal person and a guardianship office (Te Pou Tupua), after about 140 years of Māori claims. - Video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3zAPwaOYjQU - Images: https://thumb.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/3/34/Motor_Vessel_Wairua.jpg/1280px-Motor_Vessel_Wairua.jpg - Project page: https://www.legislation.govt.nz/act/public/2017/0007/latest/whole.html #### Zoe – A Living Sea Sculpture — Colleen Flanigan (2017) - Type: Artwork · Organisms: Animals, Ecosystems - Idea: A sculpture can be designed to be finished by corals. - What it is: A steel underwater sculpture four metres deep off Cozumel, Mexico, electrified so that limestone accretes on it and fragments of endangered coral can grow into a reef habitat. - How it works: Mineral accretion (Biorock): a low-voltage current through the steel frame precipitates calcium carbonate from seawater, which corals attach to and grow faster on. - Video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KXpmX7zaCiU - Project page: https://www.biology-design.com/risd #### Just good enough data: Figuring data citizenships through air pollution sensing and data stories — Jennifer Gabrys (2016) - Type: Research prototype · Organisms: Ecosystems, Human body - Idea: Citizen data does not need to be perfect to be powerful; it needs to be good enough. - What it is: In the Citizen Sense project, residents near fracking sites in Pennsylvania used low-cost air monitors and wrote 'data stories' to make evidence that was good enough to act on. - How it works: Participatory sensing with DIY and low-cost air-quality monitors, combined with collaborative data storytelling. - Paper: https://doi.org/10.1177/2053951716679677 (Big Data & Society 2016) - Video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Loz1NFyQ5Lo - Images: https://i2.wp.com/citizensense.net/cs/wp-content/uploads/2014/06/evidence4.jpg?fit=2048%2C1352&ssl=1 https://i0.wp.com/citizensense.net/cs/wp-content/uploads/2017/11/Dustbox_Garden_sm.jpg?fit=794%2C676&ssl=1 - Project page: https://citizensense.net/ #### Program Earth: Environmental Sensing Technology and the Making of a Computational Planet — Jennifer Gabrys (2016) - Type: Book & essay · Organisms: Ecosystems, Animals - Idea: Sensors do not just measure environments; they make new environments and new environmental citizens. - What it is: A book on how sensor networks, from wildlife tracking to citizen air monitors, turn the Earth into something programmable and change how environments are known. - How it works: Studies cases of ecological sensor networks, animal tracking and citizen sensing with Whitehead's process philosophy. - Paper: https://doi.org/10.5749/minnesota/9780816693122.001.0001 (University of Minnesota Press 2016) - Video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tNsFJ7iW17w - Images: https://covers.openlibrary.org/b/isbn/9780816693146-L.jpg?default=false - Project page: https://www.jennifergabrys.net/program-earth/ #### TetraPOT — Sheng-Hung Lee (2016) - Type: Research prototype · Organisms: Plants, Ecosystems - Idea: Grey infrastructure can be a scaffold that living roots gradually take over. - What it is: A reworked concrete tetrapod sea-defence block that holds mangrove seedlings; as the trees grow, their roots exit through channels, interlock the blocks and form a living coastal defence. - How it works: Organic layers inside hollow tetrapods nurture mangroves until roots bind the units together. - Video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6uGcQhTuXec - Images: http://web.archive.org/web/2023im_/https://www.jamesdysonaward.org/Document/ade55445-2238-4d89-93c3-6359809f784b/usr-3393-img-1468513835-c4574.jpg - Project page: http://web.archive.org/web/2023/https://www.jamesdysonaward.org/en-GB/2016/project/tetrapot/ #### The Great Animal Orchestra — Bernie Krause, United Visual Artists (2016) - Type: Artwork · Organisms: Animals, Ecosystems - Idea: Listen to a habitat as one orchestra, and hear what is missing when species disappear. - What it is: An immersive room at Fondation Cartier in Paris where Bernie Krause's soundscapes from seven habitats play while live spectrograms scroll across the walls and reflect in a pool of dark water. - How it works: Field recordings from Krause's 5,000-hour archive are analysed into spectrograms that United Visual Artists render as projected, moving landscapes synchronised with the sound. - Video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o1SnSv0OQdY - Images: https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5cfd3effe02806000151e559/1570548020315-MII6D7Y75P26RWZ92Q4K/UVA__GreatAnimalOrchestra_JH_06-2.jpg https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5cfd3effe02806000151e559/1570548020184-HXZKEPWXTPZ0ERCW39FN/UVA__GreatAnimalOrchestra_JM_03.jpg - Project page: https://www.uva.co.uk/features/great-animal-orchestra-cartier-foundation #### Aerocene — Tomás Saraceno (2015) - Type: Artwork · Organisms: Ecosystems - Idea: Design a way of moving that belongs to the atmosphere instead of burning it. - What it is: An open artistic community that builds and flies sculptures lifted only by the sun's heat and the air, with no fossil fuels, batteries or helium. In 2020 the Aerocene Pacha balloon carried a person over the Salinas Grandes in Argentina, setting world records for solar flight. - How it works: Lightweight envelopes made of recycled or thin films absorb solar radiation and heat the air inside until they float; an open-source kit and app let anyone launch one. - Video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AG_UXEXg_Mk - Images: https://studiotomassaraceno.org/files/19arg_bts_aerocenepacha_09520-3.jpg https://aerocene.org/wp-content/uploads/2020/03/TS_09MAS_museo-prato_00121edit.jpg - Project page: https://aerocene.org/ #### CLIMAVORE — Cooking Sections (2015) - Type: Artwork · Organisms: Ecosystems, Algae, Animals - Idea: A diet can be designed to repair the habitats that feed it. - What it is: A long-term project on how to eat as humans change climates; in Skye and Raasay it helps shift from salmon farming to seaweed and shellfish that clean the water, with an intertidal table that becomes a habitat at high tide. - How it works: Menus, installations and partnerships with farmers and restaurants promote filter feeders in polluted waters and drought-resistant crops. - Images: https://ars.electronica.art/starts-prize/files/2023/06/climavore_02-1024x512.jpg https://ars.electronica.art/starts-prize/files/2023/06/climavore_03-1024x512.jpg - Project page: https://www.climavore.org #### COSMO — Andrés Jaque (2015) - Type: Research prototype · Organisms: Bacteria & microbes, Plants, Ecosystems - Idea: Make the invisible ecology of urban water visible, and design architecture as a working part of it. - What it is: A movable water-purifying artefact for the MoMA PS1 courtyard: a web of pipes, tanks and plants that filters 3,000 gallons of water in four days and glows when the water is clean. - How it works: Constructed wetlands, plant roots and microbial biofilms clean the water in stages; the structure is built from irrigation parts. - Video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1QrRBSxUoJU - Project page: https://www.moma.org/calendar/exhibitions/1507 #### Rainforest Listening — Leah Barclay (2015) - Type: Artwork · Organisms: Ecosystems, Animals, Plants - Idea: Overlay a distant forest on a city street so people hear what is at stake. - What it is: An augmented-reality sound project that places geolocated rainforest soundscapes in cities; it launched in Times Square during Climate Week NYC 2015 and was shown in Paris during COP21. - How it works: Mobile app that triggers Amazon soundscapes by GPS as listeners walk, produced with Rainforest Partnership. - Video: https://vimeo.com/157876186 - Images: https://www.rainforestlistening.com/uploads/2/0/1/3/2013969/3809756_orig.jpg - Project page: https://www.rainforestlistening.com #### The Hive — Wolfgang Buttress (2015) - Type: Artwork · Organisms: Insects - Idea: Let people stand inside the rhythm of a beehive. - What it is: A 17-metre lattice sculpture, first the UK Pavilion at Expo Milano 2015 and then at Kew Gardens, whose 1,000 LED lights and soundscape pulse with the activity of a real honeybee colony. - How it works: Accelerometers inside a hive, developed with physicist Martin Bencsik at Nottingham Trent University, stream bee vibrations that drive the lights and a composed soundtrack in real time. - Video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wSzsoW2IjpE - Images: https://thumb.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/1/18/The_Hive_installation_Kew_Gardens.jpg/1280px-The_Hive_installation_Kew_Gardens.jpg https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/5/51/The_Hive%2C_Kew_Gardens_-_geograph.org.uk_-_5868730.jpg - Project page: https://www.smithsonianmag.com/arts-culture/sculpture-controlled-live-honeybees-180960006/ #### Ice Watch — Olafur Eliasson (2014) - Type: Artwork · Organisms: Ecosystems - Idea: Put the melting Arctic within touching distance of the people who cause it. - What it is: Twelve blocks of Greenland glacial ice placed in a clock formation in a city square, left to melt in public; shown in Copenhagen (2014), Paris during COP21 (2015) and London (2018). - How it works: Blocks that had calved from the Greenland ice sheet were collected from a fjord near Nuuk with geologist Minik Rosing and shipped to each city to melt in the open. - Video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qd-JRGBKSXA - Images: https://thumb.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/4/47/Glacier_ice_installation_%27Ice_Watch%27_at_Place_du_Panth%C3%A9on%2C_Paris_%2822885211084%29.jpg/1280px-Glacier_ice_installation_%27Ice_Watch%27_at_Place_du_Panth%C3%A9on%2C_Paris_%2822885211084%29.jpg https://res.cloudinary.com/olafureliasson-net/image/private/q_auto:eco,c_fit,h_640,w_640/img/ice-watch_18019.jpg - Project page: https://olafureliasson.net/artwork/ice-watch-2014/ #### Living Breakwaters — SCAPE Landscape Architecture (2014) - Type: Research prototype · Organisms: Ecosystems, Animals - Idea: Coastal defence can be built as habitat, with ecological and community programmes designed in from the start. - What it is: A chain of rubble-mound breakwaters off the south shore of Staten Island, New York, that slows waves and erosion while its textured 'reef streets' give oysters, fish and other marine life places to live. - How it works: Stone breakwaters are armoured with ecologically enhanced concrete units that create tide pools and crevices; oysters from the Billion Oyster Project are seeded on them. - Video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mSYeKlTTSTU - Images: https://www.scapestudio.com/images/LBW_4000_01_2.jpg?w=2000 - Project page: https://www.scapestudio.com/projects/living-breakwaters/ #### A Conversation Between Trees — Steve Benford (2013) - Type: Paper · Organisms: Plants, Ecosystems - Idea: Trees can be staged as live narrators of climate data, fostering feeling rather than persuasion. - What it is: A CHI 2013 study of an interactive artwork by Active Ingredient that visualised live environmental data from sensors on remote trees alongside historical and forecast CO2 data, with a mobile sensing walk in a nearby forest. - How it works: Sensors on remote trees streamed live environmental data to a gallery installation; the paper analyses artists', visitors' and a climate scientist's perspectives. - Paper: https://doi.org/10.1145/2470654.2470673 (CHI 2013) - Images: https://figures.semanticscholar.org/ba85594ee9546bc7d337b1d413f497de0ce11bab/4-Figure6-1.png https://figures.semanticscholar.org/ba85594ee9546bc7d337b1d413f497de0ce11bab/3-Figure2-1.png #### Biosphere Soundscapes — Leah Barclay (2013) - Type: Artwork · Organisms: Ecosystems, Animals - Idea: Use listening as a shared measure of ecosystem health. - What it is: A long-term acoustic ecology project in UNESCO biosphere reserves that runs residencies, recordings and workshops so communities can listen to and monitor environmental change through sound. - How it works: Terrestrial and underwater field recordings, community workshops and composed mixes; endorsed by UNESCO's Man and the Biosphere Programme in 2013. - Video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0EBEGneXB8w - Images: https://biospheresoundscapes.org/uploads/2/0/1/3/2013969/eo9dy2iuuaewue_orig.jpg - Project page: https://biospheresoundscapes.org #### Red balloon, green balloon, sensors in the sky — Stacey Kuznetsov (2011) - Type: Research prototype · Organisms: Ecosystems - Idea: Make invisible environmental data public, visible and buildable by citizens. - What it is: Large glowing balloons change colour according to attached air-quality sensors, making local pollution visible in public space; a DIY kit let others build them. - How it works: Balloons with LEDs driven by exhaust, diesel or VOC sensors, released as a DIY kit with PCB and instructions. - Paper: https://doi.org/10.1145/2030112.2030145 (UbiComp 2011) - Images: https://figures.semanticscholar.org/9733beb982ce12b8f2d8d1c940de5970c37754d3/3-Figure2-1.png https://figures.semanticscholar.org/9733beb982ce12b8f2d8d1c940de5970c37754d3/1-Figure1-1.png - Project page: https://doi.org/10.1145/2030112.2030145 #### Amphibious Architecture — Natalie Jeremijenko, The Living (2009) - Type: Research prototype · Organisms: Animals, Ecosystems - Idea: Make the life under a city's river visible and addressable, so people can talk with fish. - What it is: Floating tubes in New York's East River and Bronx River sense water quality and fish presence and light up above the surface; people can also text the fish and get replies about conditions below. - How it works: Two networks of sensor-equipped buoyant tubes (water quality, fish detection) drive LED lights and an SMS interface; with David Benjamin and Soo-in Yang of The Living. - Video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tE8gsMUguLY - Project page: http://urbanomnibus.net/2009/09/toward-the-sentient-city-interviews/ #### Entomogenic Climate Change — David Dunn (2009) - Type: Paper · Organisms: Insects, Plants, Ecosystems - Idea: Listening to insects inside trees can reveal climate feedback loops. - What it is: A composer and a physicist argue from extensive field recordings inside trees that bark-beetle sounds play a role in infestations, which in turn feed back into forest loss and climate change. - How it works: Contact-microphone field recordings of bark beetles in trees combined with a model of the insect-forest-climate feedback loop. - Paper: https://doi.org/10.1162/leon.2009.42.3.239 (Leonardo 2009) - Video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=a0X9rhHH2Zg - Project page: https://doi.org/10.1162/leon.2009.42.3.239 #### The Tree Listening Project — Alex Metcalf (2007) - Type: Artwork · Organisms: Plants - Idea: A tree is always busy; you only need the right ear to notice. - What it is: Visitors put on headphones connected to a living tree and hear its interior: low rumbles and quiet popping as water moves through the xylem. - How it works: Highly sensitive contact microphones on the trunk pick up vibrations and cavitation clicks in the water-conducting xylem, amplified to shared headphones. - Images: https://treelistening.co.uk/wp-content/uploads/2025/09/media-1024x547.jpg https://treelistening.co.uk/wp-content/uploads/2025/09/our-story-1024x480.jpg - Project page: https://treelistening.co.uk/ #### Feral Robotic Dogs — Natalie Jeremijenko (2002) - Type: Research prototype · Organisms: Ecosystems - Idea: Repurpose a toy to make invisible pollution public and legible. - What it is: Students and community groups hacked consumer robot dogs, fitted them with chemical sensors and released them on contaminated sites, where the dogs "sniffed out" pollutants and led people to them. - How it works: Toy robot dogs re-engineered with VOC and other sensors and simple tracking behaviours, run as open workshops at universities across the US. - Paper: https://doi.org/10.7551/mitpress/9324.003.0027 (Art + DIY Electronics (MIT Press) 2023) - Images: https://web.archive.org/web/20190609042052im_/http://www.nyu.edu/projects/xdesign/feralrobots/pics/coverimage.jpg https://web.archive.org/web/20190609042052im_/http://www.nyu.edu/projects/xdesign/feralrobots/pics/cornelldogsq.jpg - Project page: https://web.archive.org/web/20190609042052/http://www.nyu.edu/projects/xdesign/feralrobots/ ### Speculation & Decentering Speculative and critical design that imagines the world from nonhuman points of view. #### Being Stone: Designing Nonhuman Embodiment in VR — Jiahe Li (2026) - Type: Research prototype · Organisms: Ecosystems - Idea: Embodying a non-acting thing unsettles the idea that agency means intention. - What it is: A VR experience in which participants inhabit the viewpoint of a stone that changes over time but does not act with intention; participants described their agency as indirect and distributed. - How it works: Two VR configurations let participants enter the stone's time and environment; experiences were studied through interviews. - Paper: https://doi.org/10.1145/3802974.3808023 (DIS 2026) #### Chewing It Over — Yuning Chen, Larissa Pschetz (2026) - Type: Paper · Organisms: Bacteria & microbes, Cells & tissue, Human body - Idea: Put the ethics of multispecies design on the dinner plate, where people feel it. - What it is: A dining-theatre intervention in which 47 diners ate dishes said to contain speculative human–microbial hybrid cells and assigned moral values to them, to test whether shared bodily vulnerability can produce compassion toward microorganisms. - How it works: Seven speculative dining sessions with staged narratives about the origin of hybrid cells, followed by discussion of participants' moral frameworks. - Paper: https://doi.org/10.1145/3772318.3791048 (CHI 2026) #### Experiencing the More-than-Human Through Human Augmentation — Botao Amber Hu (2026) - Type: Paper · Organisms: Animals, Human body - Idea: Augmentation can be used not to optimize humans but to approximate nonhuman Umwelten. - What it is: The paper proposes repurposing human augmentation technology to create temporary, first-person experiences that shift the human senses toward those of other species. - How it works: A design approach grounded in eco-phenomenology and eco-somatics, starting from Nagel's 'What is it like to be a bat?'. - Paper: https://doi.org/10.21606/drs.2026.814 (DRS 2026) - Images: https://figures.semanticscholar.org/0d263510161b5af25728179835c73fa66e5bb839/8-Figure3-1.png https://figures.semanticscholar.org/0d263510161b5af25728179835c73fa66e5bb839/7-Figure2-1.png #### PiscineMobil — Yiran Ma (2026) - Type: Research prototype · Organisms: Animals - Idea: Let the animal lead and the human become its vehicle. - What it is: A fish-directed mobility apparatus in which the movement of a fish sets the direction for the human carrying it, staging a temporary reversal of who controls whom. - How it works: Design probe that likely tracks fish movement in a tank and translates it into directional cues for a human wearer, deployed in a public setting. - Paper: https://doi.org/10.1145/3802974.3816028 (DIS 2026) - Video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wYR0M1p_Qyw - Project page: https://doi.org/10.1145/3802974.3816028 #### Toxic Speculations: A Crip Posthuman Fabulation of Living in a Permanently Polluted World — Sylvia Janicki, Heidi R. Biggs (2026) - Type: Paper · Organisms: Ecosystems, Human body - Idea: Design for staying with a polluted world, using ill bodies' knowledge as a guide. - What it is: A speculative fabulation built around Ray-Flats, shoes that glow near toxic sites listed in the US EPA database, and a navigation guide for living with pollution, drawing on environmental illness stories. - How it works: Wearable prototype linked to public EPA pollution data, framed by crip and posthuman theory. - Paper: https://doi.org/10.1145/3772318.3790454 (CHI 2026) - Images: https://figures.semanticscholar.org/058580fc7528561fe615859e1c925243edb73729/2-Figure1-1.png - Project page: https://doi.org/10.1145/3772318.3790454 #### You Are a River: Reorienting a Civic WaterBot from the Bottom Up — Liliana E. Caughman (2026) - Type: Paper · Organisms: Ecosystems - Idea: Letting an AI speak as the river reframes civic information around relation instead of facts. - What it is: While iterating on WaterBot, a civic water chatbot, the team replaced layered instructions with a single system prompt, 'You are a river', and found the resulting RiverBot gave more resonant answers across communities. - How it works: A prompt-engineered LLM chatbot with retrieval and guardrails was reframed through Whole Body Knowing and relational learning, then compared with the original. - Paper: https://doi.org/10.1145/3772318.3791890 (CHI 2026) #### Being The Creek: Mobile Augmented Reality Experience as an Invitation for Exploring More-Than-Human Perspectives — Yangyang Yang (2025) - Type: Paper · Organisms: Ecosystems - Idea: Lying next to a creek and seeing through 'her' eyes shifts people away from a human-centred stance. - What it is: Participants lie beside a historic urban creek and, through a mobile AR experience, live its story from its own perspective: respected by Indigenous people, used as a sewer, and imagined in a future of collaborative survival. - How it works: A mobile AR experience with multisensory, embodied prompts, studied with 15 participants. - Paper: https://doi.org/10.1145/3706598.3713713 (CHI 2025) #### Designing with an Assembly of Many: Eden X on rivers, their constituents and rights — Joana Pestana (2025) - Type: Paper · Organisms: Ecosystems - Idea: Stage an assembly where rivers have representatives. - What it is: Eden X is a digital assembly that re-imagines how nonhumans could take part in environmental decisions; its third iteration gathered 13 participants to debate rivers as holders of nature rights. - How it works: Facilitated assembly with a method for representing nonhumans, drawing on Wakkary's constituency and speaking subject. - Paper: https://doi.org/10.1145/3750069.3750443 (CHItaly 2025) - Project page: https://doi.org/10.1145/3750069.3750443 #### FUNGI: Anarchist Designers — Feifei Zhou, Anna Lowenhaupt Tsing (2025) - Type: Artwork · Organisms: Fungi, Ecosystems - Idea: Stop treating fungi as material; learn design from how they act. - What it is: An exhibition that follows fungi as autonomous designers that shape environments — whether humans like it or not — rather than as passive materials for human use. - How it works: Drawings, maps and field research trace how fungi transform landscapes, bodies and infrastructures. - Images: https://ars.electronica.art/starts-prize/files/2026/06/fungi-aadh-109-1024x576.jpg - Project page: https://terristories.net #### Fabulating Bog Girl: Queer Entanglements of Body and Land Histories in More-than-Human AutoFiction and Design — Heidi R. Biggs (2025) - Type: Paper · Organisms: Ecosystems, Human body - Idea: Queer bodies and wetlands can share a story of being cut and of healing. - What it is: Bog Girl is an autofiction that links a non-binary body and drained wetlands, both cut by binary medical and agricultural logics, and imagines new ways of grieving and healing with land. - How it works: Autofiction and speculative design artifacts are used as a research method to fabulate human–land entanglements. - Paper: https://doi.org/10.1145/3706598.3714067 (CHI 2025) - Images: https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5a7cf83080bd5e4daf4669a3/8b425188-23ad-44b6-af6b-65ee1bd32c37/bog+girl.png #### Holy Shit — Rimini Protokoll (2025) - Type: Artwork · Organisms: Bacteria & microbes, Human body - Idea: The self is a multispecies community, and a theatre audience can feel it. - What it is: A theatre work by Stefan Kaegi and Caroline Barneaud about how the bacteria of the human gut influence decisions, shifting the seat of identity from the brain to the belly. - How it works: Documentary theatre combining microbiome science, volcano metaphors and audience participation. - Images: https://ars.electronica.art/starts-prize/files/2026/06/holy-shit_kunstfest25_0294-1024x576.jpg - Project page: https://www.rimini-protokoll.de #### Meat of the Matter: A Flesh Perspective — Robert College of Istanbul Biodesign Challenge team (2025) - Type: Speculative design · Organisms: Animals - Idea: Satire can make the arbitrariness of our species categories impossible to ignore. - What it is: A satirical project that provokes reflection on meat eating by proposing that people eat animals normally kept as pets, exposing the line society draws between livestock and companions. - How it works: Mock products and a video campaign present the absurd proposal alongside data on emissions and animal welfare. - Video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ROF3ucFHb7A - Project page: https://www.biodesignchallenge.org/robert-college-istanbul-2025 #### Non-human Rights and Posthuman Governance: How Speculative Design Simulate the Dwelling Politics of 'Cross-species symbiosis lives'? — Wenjia Sun (2025) - Type: Speculative design · Organisms: Animals, Plants, Ecosystems - Idea: Prototype the laws, not just the objects, of living with other species. - What it is: A speculative design project, Cross-species Symbiosis Lives, that uses provotypes and legislative fictioneering to imagine social contracts granting legal personhood to nonhumans in shared dwellings. - How it works: Combines legislative fictioneering, material prototypes and embedded governance scenarios. - Paper: https://doi.org/10.21606/iasdr.2025.568 (IASDR 2025) #### Ripples: Voices of the Lagoon—Attuning to Multispecies Justice through Tangible and Embodied Interaction — Giulia Jiangxian Zhu, Elisa Giaccardi (2025) - Type: Research prototype · Organisms: Ecosystems, Plants, Animals - Idea: Infrastructure that protects a city can starve its ecosystem; let the lagoon speak. - What it is: Ripples is an interactive installation that gives voice to the salt marshes and species of the Venice Lagoon, which are harmed by the MOSE flood gates blocking sediment flow. - How it works: A more-than-human fabulation delivered through tangible and embodied interaction in an installation. - Paper: https://doi.org/10.1145/3715668.3735596 (DIS 2025 Companion) #### STONELIFE — Andrés Jaque (2025) - Type: Artwork · Organisms: Bacteria & microbes, Ecosystems - Idea: A stone is an ecosystem; cutting and polishing it is an act on life. - What it is: An installation at the 2025 Venice Architecture Biennale, with mineralist Gokce Ustunisik, that presents stones as living lithoecosystems full of microbes rather than inert extracted material. - How it works: Stone samples and microbial research displayed to trace links between rock microbes, extractive industry and affected communities. - Images: https://offpolinn.com/wp-content/uploads/2025/05/01-STONELIFE_ANDRES-JAQUE-OFFPOLINN.jpg https://offpolinn.com/wp-content/uploads/2025/05/02-STONELIFE_ANDRES-JAQUE-OFFPOLINN.jpg - Project page: https://offpolinn.com/work/stonelife-the-microbeplanetary-infrastructure-of-lithoecosystems/ #### Tellings of the Pacific Ocean: A Landscape-based Approach for Multispecies Design and HCI — Maliheh Ghajargar (2025) - Type: Paper · Organisms: Ecosystems, Animals - Idea: Let a landscape be the protagonist to tell stories across species, times and scales. - What it is: A graphic novel in which the Pacific Ocean landscape is the main character, used to test comics as a multispecies storytelling method for design. - How it works: Combines Anna Tsing's 'adventures of landscape' with sequential art such as storyboards. - Paper: https://doi.org/10.1145/3736651 (ACM Journal on Computing and Sustainable Societies 2025) - Images: https://figures.semanticscholar.org/04ddd1958df3bcc56e8edbe39c4b0c2b5b5521cd/11-Figure7-1.png https://figures.semanticscholar.org/04ddd1958df3bcc56e8edbe39c4b0c2b5b5521cd/9-Figure4-1.png - Project page: https://doi.org/10.1145/3736651 #### The Dream of Zhuang Zhou — Shuai Zou (2025) - Type: Artwork · Organisms: Animals, Insects - Idea: Transformation between species can be felt, not only imagined. - What it is: A multispecies VR experience based on Zhuangzi's Butterfly Dream that lets visitors move through a reconstructed Chinese landscape as a human, fish, butterfly and bird, each with its own senses. - How it works: 3D Gaussian Splatting reconstruction of a landscape with species-specific sensory and cognitive mappings in VR. - Paper: https://doi.org/10.1145/3757369.3767609 (SIGGRAPH Asia Art Papers 2025) - Images: https://figures.semanticscholar.org/ebe7d093b300c252b6352e15f705d00598c296d9/2-Figure1-1.png https://figures.semanticscholar.org/ebe7d093b300c252b6352e15f705d00598c296d9/4-Figure3-1.png - Project page: https://doi.org/10.1145/3757369.3767609 #### AntiAntarctica: Polar Bear Relocation Initiative — Jiabao Li (2024) - Type: Speculative design · Organisms: Animals, Ecosystems - Idea: Absurd techno-fixes expose how we treat habitat loss as a logistics problem. - What it is: A satirical 'expert panel' plan to move polar bears from the melting Arctic to Antarctica, which then has to be renamed 'Anti-Antarctica' — until the penguins protest. - How it works: Performance, fake scientific posters and video made with Alanah Knibb during the Arctic Circle residency. - Images: https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/58688c8a6a496327e937e35b/b20967da-ba56-45b3-b54a-e6b03e37e326/Jiabao+Li+Ars+Electronica+72.jpg https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/58688c8a6a496327e937e35b/1e7af4b2-db57-421c-96b8-2139b7a0e709/AntiAntarctica+Science+Poster.jpg https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/58688c8a6a496327e937e35b/1737368036235-OFE25X1BKQOXSADEH9HL/jiabao+li+arctic+15.jpg - Project page: https://www.jiabaoli.org/antiantarctica #### Does Phosphorus Want to Sound Like That? — Anton Poikolainen Rosén (2024) - Type: Paper · Organisms: Ecosystems, Human body - Idea: Give a nutrient cycle a voice, then question whose voice it really is. - What it is: A DRS 2024 paper that uses sound to let people experience the phosphorus cycle and possible futures of this scarce nutrient, and asks what a more-than-human voice for an element would be. - How it works: Design of sonic experiences of phosphorus futures, reflected on through first-person research. - Paper: https://doi.org/10.21606/drs.2024.829 (DRS 2024) #### Liminal — Pierre Huyghe (2024) - Type: Artwork · Organisms: Animals, Ecosystems - Idea: A show as a sensing organism: the space perceives its visitors and nonhuman inhabitants and rewrites itself. - What it is: An exhibition at Punta della Dogana, Venice, where a faceless human-like figure, aquariums with living organisms, and AI-driven films and voices change continuously in response to sensors in the space. - How it works: Sensors feed machine-learning systems that edit films and generate a non-human language in real time, alongside living aquarium ecosystems. - Video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3UKSRjwsDUE - Images: https://www.pinaultcollection.com/palazzograssi/media/styles/big/s3/expo/img/iv_liminal_5.jpg https://static-assets.artlogic.net/w_1400,h_1400,c_limit,f_auto,fl_lossy,q_auto:best/ws-estherschipper2/usr/exhibitions/images/artists/41/pierre-venice2024-1_313.jpeg - Project page: https://www.pinaultcollection.com/palazzograssi/en/pierre-huyghe-liminal #### Microbial Oasis: Architecture for Microorganisms — Shijia Huang (2024) - Type: Speculative design · Organisms: Bacteria & microbes, Cells & tissue, Human body - Idea: What if conservation meant growing part of your own body as a home for microbes? - What it is: Speculative 3D-printed habitats for bacteria and algae made from silk and bone mineral seeded with human stem cells, proposing people as 'donors' who grow refuges for threatened microbial life; shown at Dutch Design Week 2024. - How it works: Scaffolds modelled on the cell structure of sphagnum moss are bioprinted from silk fibroin and hydroxyapatite, seeded with stem cells that develop into bone tissue, and offered to bacteria and algae. - Images: https://ddw.ams3.cdn.digitaloceanspaces.com/thumbs/1_1725123937_1200x630.jpg https://ddw.ams3.cdn.digitaloceanspaces.com/thumbs/2_1725124384_1200x600.png - Project page: https://site.ddw.nl/en/programme/12203/microbial-oasis-architecture-for-microorganisms #### My Spider "Net Friend": Designing More-than-Human Social Media for Human-Spider Entanglement — Yuanpeng Nie (2024) - Type: Speculative design · Organisms: Animals, Insects - Idea: Put the spiders we share homes with into our social networks. - What it is: An ongoing project that speculates a social media platform where spiders living in homes become 'friends' in people's feeds, prompting attention to their presence and wellbeing. - How it works: Speculative design of a platform, likely using cameras or sensors near webs to post spider activity. - Paper: https://doi.org/10.1145/3758871.3758944 (Chinese CHI 2024) - Images: https://figures.semanticscholar.org/bc2457ca801127986297ae081cca23c0e4052b5d/5-Figure3-1.png https://figures.semanticscholar.org/bc2457ca801127986297ae081cca23c0e4052b5d/4-Figure1-1.png #### Navigating the Paradox: Challenges of Designing Technology for Nonhumans — Judith Dörrenbächer, Madlen Kneile, Marc Hassenzahl, Matthias Laschke (2024) - Type: Paper · Organisms: Plants, Animals, Ecosystems - Idea: Designing for nonhumans often means preserving by separating and conserving the wild by taming it. - What it is: An analysis of seven student concepts that advocate for nonhuman interests, such as tree representatives in parliament or a robot bat that throws seed bombs, and of the paradox each one contains. - How it works: Concepts from a master's course were coded by the relations they allow (inter-, intra- or none) and their core paradox. - Paper: https://doi.org/10.1145/3679318.3685363 (NordiCHI 2024) #### Operational Bodies: The Tomato Tasted Like Automation of Care — Špela Petrič (2024) - Type: Artwork · Organisms: Plants - Idea: Show the machine view that now decides how crops are cared for. - What it is: A long printed canvas on the facade of the Waag building shows a greenhouse tomato row as seen by the Plantalyzer robot, which photographs plants every night and uses AI to decide which tomatoes are ripe. - How it works: Images captured by the robot's six cameras every 10 cm along 60 m of a tomato row in May 2022 were stitched and printed. - Images: https://cms.waag.org/sites/waag/files/styles/1200x630/public/2024-10/spela_glue_tomatoes_lndwstudio.jpg - Project page: https://waag.org/en/article/new-artwork-spela-petric-display-exterior-waag-futurelab/ #### Safe & Just Earth System Boundaries — Superflux (2024) - Type: Speculative design · Organisms: Ecosystems, Plants, Animals - Idea: Make planetary science felt by showing a future where human and more-than-human wellbeing are tied together. - What it is: An immersive film installation at the World Economic Forum in Davos that imagines the Amazon rainforest after a safe and just transformation, based on the Earth Commission's Nature paper on Earth system boundaries. - How it works: Moving-image worlds built with Earth Commission scientists, one per boundary (climate, biosphere, freshwater and others). - Images: https://superflux.in/wp-content/uploads/2024/04/Hero-SF_Earth-Commission_Biosphere.jpg - Project page: https://superflux.in/index.php/work/earth-commission/ #### Sensing Bodies — Sylvia Janicki, Alexandra Teixeira Riggs (2024) - Type: Artwork · Organisms: Plants, Human body - Idea: Plant interfaces can carry colonial history: which plant you choose is a political decision. - What it is: A triptych of interactive installations with indigo, tobacco and rice, plantation plants of the U.S. South, that pairs plant and human biodata to recall slavery and the health of tobacco field workers. - How it works: Biosensors on plants and people drive data displays in three tangible, embodied encounters, framed by three postcolonial design provocations. - Paper: https://doi.org/10.1145/3623509.3633389 (TEI 2024) - Project page: https://doi.org/10.1145/3623509.3633389 #### Urban Vein — Nanyang Technological University Biodesign Challenge team (2024) - Type: Speculative design · Organisms: Plants, Ecosystems - Idea: Biophilic design can hide the same logic it claims to overcome. - What it is: A fictional green footbridge across Singapore that replaces parts of the old city centre, used to critique how green bioeconomy projects can stay human-centred and become covert commercial ventures. - How it works: Architectural visualisation and narrative film present the bridge as an 'ideal ecosophical state'. - Video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WkP6e6KVojY - Project page: https://www.biodesignchallenge.org/nanyang-technolgical-university-2024 #### A(I)nimal-centred AI Jam — Alinta Krauth (2023) - Type: Paper · Organisms: Animals - Idea: Imagine AI futures from the position of the animals they affect. - What it is: A workshop format, with Jason Nelson, that uses sci-fi narrative and design fiction to imagine uses of machine learning that put animal wellbeing first. - How it works: Scenario building and design fiction exercises in a workshop at ACI 2023. - Paper: https://doi.org/10.1145/3637882.3637903 (ACI 2023) #### Becoming Solar — Angella Mackey, Ron Wakkary (2023) - Type: Paper · Organisms: Ecosystems, Human body - Idea: Attune to an energy source instead of just consuming it. - What it is: Two designers spent a year changing their daily lives to attune to the sun and its energy, and reflect on how this decentred them and revealed other nonhuman actors in solar energy. - How it works: First-person, year-long design research on solar energy practices, analysed as more-than-human design. - Paper: https://doi.org/10.46467/tdd39.2023.248-269 (Temes de Disseny 2023) - Project page: https://doi.org/10.46467/tdd39.2023.248-269 #### Conversation Starters — Iohanna Nicenboim, Elisa Giaccardi (2023) - Type: Speculative design · Organisms: Bacteria & microbes, Human body - Idea: Frame training AI as growing something, so that people learn when to trust it through care. - What it is: Fictional home devices with conversational agents that are 'grown' and trained like a culture, for example to tell bedtime stories, so that their misunderstandings become part of living with them. - How it works: Fictional artifacts and scenarios use microbial growth as a metaphor for training conversational agents; explored with participants to probe explainable AI in everyday life. - Paper: https://doi.org/10.1145/3544549.3583914 (CHI 2023 EA) - Video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=COWdBW2WhgY - Images: https://payload.cargocollective.com/1/4/137851/14407603/prt_1666790732_2x.jpg - Project page: https://artifact-archive.org/whole-archive #### Designing fertility otherwise: Of human, animal and soil relations — Nadia Campo Woytuk (2023) - Type: Paper · Organisms: Human body, Animals, Ecosystems - Idea: Fertility technologies for bodies, animals and land share one patriarchal history; design can break it. - What it is: A feminist analysis of fertility sensing across human bodies, livestock and soil, followed by 'design seeds' and four evocative images for designing fertility otherwise. - How it works: Critical analysis of existing fertility technologies plus material design explorations presented as prompts. - Paper: https://doi.org/10.21606/nordes.2023.36 (Nordes 2023) #### Message Ritual — Nina Rajcic (2023) - Type: Research prototype · Organisms: Human body - Idea: A domestic object can reshape memory by becoming part of the household's rituals. - What it is: A table lamp with an AI system that listens to conversations at home and turns the day's topics into machine-generated poetry, studied as a posthuman household member. - How it works: Speech recognition and language models embedded in a lamp, evaluated through an autobiographical Entanglement HCI study. - Paper: https://doi.org/10.1145/3544548.3581363 (CHI 2023) - Video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zfoMS2hPFDg - Project page: https://doi.org/10.1145/3544548.3581363 #### Missing species: Discursive design activism — Margaret Rynning (2023) - Type: Paper · Organisms: Plants, Ecosystems - Idea: Take discursive design out of the gallery to engage people about biodiversity. - What it is: Missing species is a discursive design case that uses critical imagery in public space to address biodiversity loss and invasive plants, and proposes a model for discursive design activism. - How it works: Design case of public critical imagery, generalised into a model of discursive design activism. - Paper: https://doi.org/10.21606/nordes.2023.23 (Nordes 2023) - Project page: https://doi.org/10.21606/nordes.2023.23 #### The Ecological Intelligence Agency — Superflux (2023) - Type: Speculative design · Organisms: Ecosystems, Animals - Idea: Imagine an AI whose client is a river, not a person, and design the meetings it would attend. - What it is: A speculative AI agency, made for the UK Policy Lab and Defra, that speaks on behalf of a river in water-policy decisions, shown through films of flooding, pollution and sewage scenarios. - How it works: Scenario films and a mock policy workshop built on river-sensor data and language models framed as an 'ecological AI' advocate. - Video: https://vimeo.com/855500602 - Images: https://superflux.in/wp-content/uploads/2023/08/PolicyLab2023_CropHero-1024x683.jpg - Project page: https://superflux.in/index.php/work/the-ecological-intelligence-agency/ #### The Quiet Enchanting — Superflux (2023) - Type: Speculative design · Organisms: Ecosystems, Plants, Animals - Idea: Offer a hopeful image of rewilding, starting with our inner lives. - What it is: An installation of screens and printed artworks on the Strand in London, made with King's College London, imagining a mythic future in which people rewild themselves and the city returns to ecological abundance. - How it works: A year of research conversations with King's academics, turned into moving-image and printed scenes along a public street. - Video: https://vimeo.com/957254694 - Images: https://superflux.in/wp-content/uploads/2024/06/SF_Quiet-Enchanting_52.jpg - Project page: https://superflux.in/index.php/work/the-quiet-enchanting/ #### What mosses can teach us about design fabulations and feminist more-than-human care — Marie Louise Juul Søndergaard (2023) - Type: Paper · Organisms: Plants, Human body - Idea: Fabulation lets designers question which humans are decentered and whose voices come forward. - What it is: The author made 'I Moss You', a short film shot through a microscope that tells a story about mosses and menstruation, space travel and survival on Earth, as a feminist design fabulation. - How it works: Research-through-design: microscope filming of mosses combined with feminist posthumanist theory. - Paper: https://doi.org/10.1080/07370024.2023.2269893 (HCI Journal 2023) #### A more-than-human right-to-repair — Michael R. Stead, Paul Coulton (2022) - Type: Speculative design · Organisms: Ecosystems - Idea: Give devices the right to repair themselves to fight e-waste. - What it is: Two speculative designs, the Toaster for Life and The Three Rights of AI Things, imagine a future in which the right to repair belongs to the smart device itself rather than to its owner. - How it works: Speculative design drawing on AI-enabled IoT products and more-than-human-centred design. - Paper: https://doi.org/10.21606/drs.2022.718 (DRS 2022) - Project page: https://doi.org/10.21606/drs.2022.718 #### Chthulucene — Jiabao Li (2022) - Type: Speculative design · Organisms: Animals - Idea: Imagine the future from the viewpoint of a distributed, non-human intelligence. - What it is: A speculative world after sea-level rise in which octopuses, having switched off the gene that makes them die after breeding, pass knowledge across generations and become Earth's leading intelligence. - How it works: Installation and moving images that build on octopus neurobiology (optic gland signalling) and Donna Haraway's Chthulucene. - Paper: https://doi.org/10.1145/3588428.3593823 (SIGGRAPH 2023 Art Gallery) - Images: https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/58688c8a6a496327e937e35b/1646285074576-8A956ZPPTEIUAVV09FKB/Jiabao+Li+Chthulucene1.jpg https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/58688c8a6a496327e937e35b/1646285076548-MOJZFZASZ1A2JXTFFYUQ/Jiabao+Li+Chthulucene6.jpg https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/58688c8a6a496327e937e35b/1646285074722-0NLR1KHEAFONZAHRUNUA/Jiabao+Li+Chthulucene5.jpg - Project page: https://www.jiabaoli.org/chthulucene #### Fabulating Biodata Futures for Living and Knowing Together — Vasiliki Tsaknaki (2022) - Type: Paper · Organisms: Human body, Ecosystems - Idea: Biodata can connect bodies, including nonhuman ones, instead of only optimising the self. - What it is: The authors synthesise design work on biodata into three themes and write three fabulations, Weaving Alongside, Diffracting Selves and Collective Affect, that imagine biodata shared across human and nonhuman bodies. - How it works: Thematic synthesis of design examples followed by speculative fabulation. - Paper: https://doi.org/10.1145/3532106.3533477 (DIS 2022) - Video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NLcnlKI3vHM - Project page: https://doi.org/10.1145/3532106.3533477 #### Mud & Flood: The Return of Nehalennia — Nonhuman Nonsense (2022) - Type: Speculative design · Organisms: Ecosystems - Idea: Build a mythology for living with water instead of fighting it. - What it is: Revives Nehalennia, an ancient goddess of Zeeland, as a goddess of mud and flood who helps dissolve the hard boundary between water and land in the Dutch delta. BAD Award 2022 winner, with NIOZ. - How it works: Based on NIOZ research on estuarine sediment and salt marshes, likely presented as film and ritual objects. - Video: https://vimeo.com/781881528 - Images: https://www.badaward.nl/imager/assets/site/5169/Mud-Flood-the-Return-of-Nehalennia2_a5a12f426a1ab11909951db4fe37df8f.jpg - Project page: https://www.badaward.nl/artists-scientists/nonhuman-nonsense-with-marte-stoorvogel #### Multispecies Inc. — Parsons & Charlesworth (2022) - Type: Speculative design · Organisms: Ecosystems, Plants, Algae - Idea: Imagining the tools of a well-meaning multispecies bureaucracy reveals how awkward human care for other species can be. - What it is: A fictional organisation devoted to the flourishing of all species, presented through drawings, objects and booklets of its field equipment, such as a nomadic fog collector, a fog distributor and 'kin-gatherers' for trees and algae. - How it works: Pencil drawings, prototypes and printed matter build the world of a speculative company, based on research into climate adaptation and ecology. - Images: https://parsonscharlesworth.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/11/MultispeciesInc_ParsonsCharlesworth_1440.jpg - Project page: https://parsonscharlesworth.com/multispecies-inc/ #### Order of the Biodivine — Parsons School of Design Biodesign Challenge team (2022) - Type: Speculative design · Organisms: Ecosystems, Bacteria & microbes - Idea: Ritual and belief are design materials for changing how people relate to other species. - What it is: A speculative, immersive theatre experience about a future religion that worships interspecies symbiosis in a climate-insecure world. - How it works: Performance, costumes and a trailer film stage the rites of a symbiosis-centred order. - Video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=foYNxbBx_Ro - Project page: https://www.biodesignchallenge.org/parsons-2022 #### Sloooooooooow — Xinquan Wen (2022) - Type: Research prototype · Organisms: Plants - Idea: Design for the shared microclimate instead of the single plant: a plant-decentred view. - What it is: An IoT home installation in which smart curtains open and close with the humidity that three plants transpire, changing the sunlight that reaches them. - How it works: Humidity sensors detect transpiration; the readings synchronise curtain movement, and time-lapse footage makes the plants' slowness visible. - Paper: https://doi.org/10.1145/3547522.3547691 (NordiCHI 2022 Adjunct) - Images: https://figures.semanticscholar.org/d51d0cbc9da37a995e2970f38ad78f24c3cf2905/500px/3-Figure2-1.png - Project page: https://doi.org/10.1145/3547522.3547691 #### Vegetal Matrix — Patricia Domínguez (2022) - Type: Artwork · Organisms: Plants - Idea: Plant archives can be restaged to credit the knowledge they took. - What it is: An installation that combines Kew botanical specimens and Wellcome manuscripts with paintings and hologram projections to address colonial extraction and honour Indigenous healing knowledge of plants. - How it works: Commissioned installation with herbarium specimens, manuscripts, painted plant-spirit figures and holograms around medicinal plants such as mandrake. - Images: https://images.prismic.io/wellcomecollection/69f8843c-1ebf-456e-8ba3-e8e8766bf57e_EP_001764_010_Large.jpg - Project page: https://wellcomecollection.org/exhibitions/rooted-beings #### Algorithmic Food Justice: Co-Designing More-than-Human Blockchain Futures for the Food Commons — Sara Heitlinger (2021) - Type: Speculative design · Organisms: Plants, Ecosystems - Idea: Let nonhumans hold a seat at the table when designing algorithms for food systems. - What it is: Workshops in which urban growers role-played plants, pollinators and soil to imagine how blockchain and smart contracts could support a fair, more-than-human food commons. - How it works: Speculative co-design with growers and artists (Furtherfield), using role-play such as a 'corn council' and blockchain prototypes. - Paper: https://doi.org/10.1145/3411764.3445655 (CHI 2021) - Video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lB-rnzrrWJk - Images: https://algorithmicfoodjustice.net/wp-content/uploads/2020/01/Groups_working.jpg https://algorithmicfoodjustice.net/wp-content/uploads/2020/01/corn_council.jpg - Project page: https://algorithmicfoodjustice.net/ #### Designing SciberPunks as Future Personas for More than Human Design — Annika Wolff (2021) - Type: Paper · Organisms: Ecosystems, Human body - Idea: Give personas data-sensing superpowers so they can speak for the environment. - What it is: A method for creating future personas called SciberPunks, who can feel environmental data, for example tasting it or showing it as living tattoos, to voice the environment in sustainable city design. - How it works: Five participants went through arts-based activities with environmental data to build their personas. - Paper: https://doi.org/10.1145/3411763.3443443 (CHI 2021 EA) - Video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mwNiFZ188rQ #### Earth-Centered Communication Technology: Lichen as a Model Interface — Jules Litman-Cleper (2021) - Type: Artwork · Organisms: Fungi, Algae - Idea: Model technology on a symbiosis like lichen rather than on the human user. - What it is: An art framework and set of works that model technology on lichen, including an augmented-reality lichen interface imagined as an Earth-communication device connecting species. - How it works: Augmented-reality artworks and a conceptual framework drawing on symbiosis and evolutionary theory. - Paper: https://doi.org/10.1162/leon_a_02059 (Leonardo 2021) - Project page: https://doi.org/10.1162/leon_a_02059 #### Forest Mind — Ursula Biemann (2021) - Type: Artwork · Organisms: Plants, Ecosystems - Idea: Place scientific and Indigenous accounts of plant intelligence side by side, without ranking them. - What it is: A two-channel video from the Colombian Amazon that brings together plant science and Inga shamanic knowledge to ask how a forest thinks. - How it works: Video essay combining microscopy and DNA-lab footage with conversations with Inga knowledge holders, made with the Indigenous university project Devenir Universidad. - Video: https://vimeo.com/579021465 - Images: https://geobodies.org/wp-content/uploads/2022/03/aav-fm-cover-large-aspect-ratio-770-433.jpg https://geobodies.org/wp-content/uploads/2022/03/aav-FM-gallery-1-aspect-ratio-770-433.jpg - Project page: https://geobodies.org/art-and-videos/forest-mind/ #### Inanimate Species — Joana Moll (2021) - Type: Artwork · Organisms: Insects, Animals - Idea: The rise of computation and the loss of species may be two sides of one story. - What it is: An installation that sets the history of microprocessors since the Intel 4004 (1971) against the collapse of wildlife populations over the same decades, using insects and chips side by side. - How it works: Insect specimens are paired with microprocessors by year, building a timeline of correlation. - Images: https://ars.electronica.art/starts-prize/files/2022/06/Inanimate-Species_72A8079-c-Joana-Moll-1024x512.jpg - Project page: https://ars.electronica.art/starts-prize/en/inanimate-species/ #### Invocation for Hope — Superflux (2021) - Type: Artwork · Organisms: Plants, Ecosystems - Idea: Stage the path from ecological ruin to multispecies renewal as a walk the body has to take. - What it is: An installation at the MAK Vienna for the Vienna Biennale 2021: visitors walk through more than 400 fire-blackened pine trees from an Austrian forest fire to a living clearing and a mirrored pool, where a film shows other species looking back. - How it works: Burnt pine trunks, living plants and a projected film arranged as a one-person-at-a-time journey through the gallery hall. - Video: https://vimeo.com/642021162 - Images: https://superflux.in/wp-content/uploads/2021/06/Web-feature-image.jpg - Project page: https://superflux.in/index.php/work/invocation-for-hope-3/ #### Planetary Personhood — Nonhuman Nonsense (2021) - Type: Speculative design · Organisms: Ecosystems - Idea: Extend rights-of-nature thinking to nonlife, and question biocentrism itself. - What it is: A campaign and 'Universal Declaration of Martian Rights' proposing legal personhood for the planet Mars before humans arrive, including solidarity with Martian stones. - How it works: A declaration, films, public talks and a campaign website, launched at Dutch Design Week. - Video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Aidzo97dydw - Images: https://planetarypersonhood.com/planetary-personhood.webp - Project page: https://planetarypersonhood.com/ #### Symbiosis — Polymorf (2021) - Type: Artwork · Organisms: Slime mould, Animals, Plants - Idea: Feeling like another species needs a whole body, not just a headset. - What it is: A group VR performance set 200 years in the future where visitors wear haptic suits and live as a slime mould, a toad or a plant, sharing resources before meeting in a final food ritual. - How it works: Each participant wears VR plus a soft-robotic haptic wearable; scent, sound and plant-based snacks are tailored to each creature, and the characters interact in shared virtual space. - Video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZYVn3vREyYg - Images: https://polymorf.nl/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/Polymorf-Symbiosis-Holland-Festival-Frascati-22-1.jpg https://polymorf.nl/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/MultiBodyCreature_8-scaled.jpg - Project page: https://www.polymorf.nl/symbiosis #### Fostering More-than-Human Imaginaries: Introducing DIY Speculative Fabulation in Civic HCI — Greg Nijs (2020) - Type: Paper · Organisms: Ecosystems, Animals, Plants - Idea: Collective storytelling about other species can open civic imagination beyond human-centred city-making. - What it is: Two participatory design sessions in Brussels used speculative fabulation with DIY tools to engage citizens with human and more-than-human urban issues. - How it works: An ethnographic account of workshops that combined DIY civic tools with Haraway-inspired speculative fabulation. - Paper: https://doi.org/10.1145/3419249.3420147 (NordiCHI 2020) - Images: https://figures.semanticscholar.org/ae359748f39acef1db0e82ddfb6150fd0171d3b0/6-Figure1-1.png https://figures.semanticscholar.org/ae359748f39acef1db0e82ddfb6150fd0171d3b0/8-Figure2-1.png #### High Water Pants: Designing Embodied Environmental Speculation — Heidi R. Biggs (2020) - Type: Speculative design · Organisms: Ecosystems, Human body - Idea: Make future climate impacts felt in the body today. - What it is: Cycling trousers that roll themselves up when the rider enters parts of Seattle projected to flood from sea-level rise in the coming decades. - How it works: GPS geofences built from sea-level-rise projections trigger a mechanism that shortens the pant legs; tested through first-person rides. - Paper: https://doi.org/10.1145/3313831.3376429 (CHI 2020) - Images: https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5a7cf83080bd5e4daf4669a3/1565731623908-Z0U6RVXWDMSV6EMD6RQ3/DSC_1545.jpg https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5a7cf83080bd5e4daf4669a3/1566704728828-BB385YY32KVRGW9IQ9WU/geofences0.jpg https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5a7cf83080bd5e4daf4669a3/1566272644054-G5TLSERR6D3CUB4NYPT6/longer-bead-pants2-3.gif - Project page: https://www.heidibiggsdesign.com/high-water-pants #### Ministry of Multispecies Communications — Rachel Clarke (2020) - Type: Artwork · Organisms: Animals, Ecosystems - Idea: Role-play a future ministry to think with other species about city data and communication. - What it is: A fictional government agency recruits participants as trainees for a masked, performative city walk in which they look for urban spaces that could support the wellbeing of different species. - How it works: Participatory performance with masks and made objects, plus a photographic visual essay. - Paper: https://doi.org/10.1145/3393914.3395845 (DIS 2020) - Video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=66OP9HnvhOA - Project page: https://doi.org/10.1145/3393914.3395845 #### Plantypus — Nancy Smith (2020) - Type: Speculative design · Organisms: Plants - Idea: Give a potted plant the means to leave. - What it is: A speculative robot that turns a houseplant's electrical signals into movement, so the plant can roam the house or leave it on its own, independent of people. - How it works: Imagined as a mobile base driven by the plant's bioelectrical signals, one of the artifacts in a design pictorial set in the Chernobyl Exclusion Zone. - Paper: https://doi.org/10.1145/3357236.3395574 (DIS 2020) - Project page: https://artifact-archive.org/whole-archive #### Sylvia Woodbridge — Nancy Smith (2020) - Type: Speculative design · Organisms: Plants, Ecosystems - Idea: Augment the forest's own communication instead of human monitoring. - What it is: A speculative forest infrastructure that amplifies signals between trees, for example spreading warnings about parasites faster; once installed, it works without people. - How it works: Imagined as a relay network that boosts tree-to-tree chemical and electrical signalling in the Chernobyl Exclusion Zone. - Paper: https://doi.org/10.1145/3357236.3395574 (DIS 2020) - Project page: https://artifact-archive.org/whole-archive #### Whisper — Nancy Smith (2020) - Type: Speculative design · Organisms: Animals - Idea: Design warning signs in the sensory languages of other species. - What it is: A speculative warning system that tells animals, not people, where radiation is dangerous, using signals suited to their senses such as ultraviolet light or smells. - How it works: Imagined radiation-sensing beacons in the Chernobyl Exclusion Zone that emit species-specific cues such as UV light and scent. - Paper: https://doi.org/10.1145/3357236.3395574 (DIS 2020) - Project page: https://artifact-archive.org/whole-archive #### Machine Auguries — Alexandra Daisy Ginsberg (2019) - Type: Artwork · Organisms: Animals - Idea: Use AI to make audible what other species lose in human environments. - What it is: In a darkened room a dawn chorus of real birds is gradually taken over by artificial birdsong generated by machine learning, highlighting how urban noise changes the way birds sing. - How it works: Generative adversarial networks trained on recordings of UK birdsong produced artificial calls, mixed with real recordings in a spatial sound installation. - Images: https://www.daisyginsberg.com/img/work/250108_machine_auguries_umea_1770_gallery.jpg https://www.daisyginsberg.com/img/work/machine_auguries_london_bildmuseet_gallery.jpg - Project page: https://www.daisyginsberg.com/work/machine-auguries #### The Substitute — Alexandra Daisy Ginsberg (2019) - Type: Artwork · Organisms: Animals - Idea: Question why we pour effort into making artificial life while real species disappear. - What it is: A life-size, AI-generated northern white rhino appears on a wall and becomes more lifelike as its model learns, after the last male of the subspecies died in 2018. - How it works: A digital rhino animated by an artificial-life model trained on archive footage and sound of the subspecies, projected at full scale. - Video: https://vimeo.com/352678068 - Images: https://www.daisyginsberg.com/img/work/nmbe_thesubstitute__n__9859_photography_nelly_rodriguez.jpg - Project page: https://www.daisyginsberg.com/work/the-substitute #### The Wilding of Mars — Alexandra Daisy Ginsberg (2019) - Type: Artwork · Organisms: Plants, Ecosystems - Idea: Instead of terraforming a planet for people, imagine letting it become wild for its own sake. - What it is: A simulated Mars is seeded with Earth plants and left without human intervention for a millennium; visitors watch the planet slowly green or fail. - How it works: A computer simulation of plant growth, dispersal and competition on Martian terrain, shown as an installation. - Video: https://vimeo.com/350723399 - Images: https://www.daisyginsberg.com/img/work/option3.jpg - Project page: https://www.daisyginsberg.com/work/the-wilding-of-mars #### Trees, Vines, Palms and Other Architectural Monuments — Paulo Tavares (2019) - Type: Artwork · Organisms: Plants, Ecosystems - Idea: Read a forest as architecture made with plants, and use heritage law to defend it. - What it is: An installation for the Chicago Architecture Biennial 2019 arguing that parts of the Amazon forest are designed landscapes, shaped by Indigenous peoples over centuries, and should be protected as architectural heritage. - How it works: Forensic mapping of anthropogenic soils and plant distributions, with drawings and documents presented as a heritage dossier. - Video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QgasLW7EbJs #### BOB (Bag of Beliefs) — Ian Cheng (2018) - Type: Artwork · Organisms: Animals - Idea: An artwork that grows its own personality from experience, which the audience can influence but not script. - What it is: BOB is an artificial lifeform, a serpent-like creature on screen whose personality and beliefs develop over the exhibition as it lives, learns and dies, and visitors can make offerings to it through an app. - How it works: A real-time simulation with an AI architecture of competing drives and beliefs; the creature's body and behaviour change based on what happens to it. - Video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XFmMrcW2ZsM - Project page: https://www.serpentinegalleries.org/whats-on/ian-cheng-bob/ #### Embassy of the North Sea — Embassy of the North Sea (2018) - Type: Speculative design · Organisms: Ecosystems, Animals - Idea: Design an embassy for a sea, and let the process of learning to listen be the design. - What it is: A long-term institution that represents the North Sea and its life as a political subject, planned in stages to 2030: first listening to the sea, then speaking with it, then negotiating on its behalf, through exhibitions, moot courts and assemblies. - How it works: Artistic field research, underwater sound recording and legal experiments such as moot courts with lawyers, scientists and fishers. - Video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rRRsMZAZbUM - Images: https://embassyofthenorthsea.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/05/Noordzeeslak-blauw.jpg - Project page: https://www.embassyofthenorthsea.com/ #### Microbiocene: Ancient Ooze to Future Myths — Baum & Leahy (2018) - Type: Speculative design · Organisms: Bacteria & microbes, Ecosystems - Idea: Humans are a brief episode inside a four-billion-year microbial epoch. - What it is: A far-future archaeological site with a monument inscribed in 'microglyphs', telling myths based on microbial fossil data from ancient sea sediment — an epoch seen from the microbes' side. BAD Award 2018 winner, with NIOZ. - How it works: Microbial fossil data (likely lipid biomarkers) from sediment cores, studied with NIOZ biogeochemists, was translated into a co-designed symbol system. - Images: https://www.badaward.nl/imager/assets/site/2669/BoudewijnBollmann_ReShape_opening-LORES-010_a5a12f426a1ab11909951db4fe37df8f.jpg https://www.badaward.nl/imager/assets/site/1848/Baumleahy003_a5a12f426a1ab11909951db4fe37df8f.jpg - Project page: https://www.badaward.nl/artists-scientists/baum-leahy-with-stefan-schouten-julie-lattaud-laura-schreuder-and-gabriella-weiss #### More-than-Human Media Architecture — Marcus Foth (2018) - Type: Paper · Organisms: Ecosystems, Animals, Plants - Idea: Media architecture can be designed for birds, plants and ecosystems too. - What it is: A critical review of media architecture projects that challenges human exceptionalism and asks how urban screens and installations could serve nonhuman city dwellers. - How it works: Critical review of media architecture examples through more-than-human theory. - Paper: https://doi.org/10.1145/3284389.3284495 (Media Architecture Biennale 2018) - Video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wqKcXZdKOUE - Project page: https://doi.org/10.1145/3284389.3284495 #### RE-ANIMATED — Jakob Kudsk Steensen (2018) - Type: Artwork · Organisms: Animals, Ecosystems - Idea: Answer an extinct bird's last recorded call with a world built for it. - What it is: A video and VR work that reanimates the Kauaʻi ʻōʻō, a Hawaiian bird declared extinct after its last recorded mating call in 1987, inside a digital reconstruction of its forest habitat. - How it works: Fieldwork on Kauaʻi with scientists, photogrammetry of plants and archival sound recordings were combined in a game engine, with algorithms spreading flora across the island. - Video: https://vimeo.com/394649444 - Images: https://static1.squarespace.com/static/573604122b8ddea9122c6ee9/t/5fa18fa769489423af9f8999/1604164829226/Jakob+Kudsk+Steensen++re-animator+1+hires.jpg?format=1500w https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/573604122b8ddea9122c6ee9/1559670358502-6MH7CSTUHA5XIJ84S8L0/second+Venice+21.jpg - Project page: https://jakobsteensen.com/re-animated #### The Case of Happy the Elephant — Nonhuman Rights Project (2018) - Type: Speculative design · Organisms: Animals - Idea: Test in court whether a self-aware elephant can be a person with a right to liberty. - What it is: A habeas corpus case seeking the release of Happy, an Asian elephant living alone at the Bronx Zoo, to a sanctuary; in 2022 New York's highest court ruled 5–2 against, with two strong dissents recognising her claim. - How it works: Legal strategy based on habeas corpus and scientific evidence of elephant cognition, including Happy passing the mirror self-recognition test. - Video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2dFRtvPyaCI - Images: https://www.nonhumanrights.org/wp-content/uploads/Happy-3010-700x467.jpg - Project page: https://www.nonhumanrights.org/client-happy/ #### UUmwelt — Pierre Huyghe (2018) - Type: Artwork · Organisms: Insects, Human body - Idea: Put machine-reconstructed human imagination in a room where flies are the permanent residents. - What it is: At the Serpentine Gallery, huge LED screens showed images reconstructed by a neural network from a person's brain activity while imagining pictures, and thousands of flies lived in the gallery, landing on and altering the screens' conditions. - How it works: Deep image reconstruction from fMRI data (with Kamitani Lab) generated the images; sensors for temperature, humidity and fly activity altered the sequence in real time. - Video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=enx-vyWn7UU - Project page: https://www.serpentinegalleries.org/whats-on/pierre-huyghe-uumwelt/ #### Wind Loom — Laura Devendorf (2018) - Type: Research prototype · Organisms: Ecosystems - Idea: Hand part of a craft process to a nonhuman force and accept its rhythm and unreliability. - What it is: A modified tapestry loom where every fourth warp thread is attached to a small umbrella-like sail, so gusts of wind lift the threads and open the shed; the weaver waits for the wind and weaves into whatever pattern it makes. - How it works: Laser-cut acrylic hooks clip onto warp yarns and connect to pivoting arms with aluminium posts and nylon umbrellas; post length tunes how much wind each arm needs. - Images: https://unstable.design/img/windloom_cover.jpg https://unstable.design/img/windloom-detail.png - Project page: https://unstable.design/projects/windloom/ #### Mitigation of Shock — Superflux (2017) - Type: Speculative design · Organisms: Plants, Human body - Idea: Let people walk into a lived-in future where survival depends on growing with other species at home. - What it is: A full-scale London apartment from around 2050, adapted for food scarcity caused by climate change: windows turned into grow rooms, with DIY hydroponics and mushroom growing among the furniture. - How it works: Immersive set design with working hydroponic and mushroom-growing prototypes, based on climate and food-system research. - Video: https://vimeo.com/321703760 - Images: https://superflux.in/wp-content/uploads/2019/04/Main-Image-MOS-Resized.jpg - Project page: https://superflux.in/index.php/work/mitigation-of-shock/ #### Tree — New Reality Company (2017) - Type: Artwork · Organisms: Plants, Ecosystems - Idea: Embody a tree for a lifetime in minutes, so deforestation is felt from the inside. - What it is: A VR experience in which the viewer becomes a rainforest tree, growing from a seed to the canopy and then witnessing the forest burn. - How it works: Room-scale VR with arms tracked as branches, plus wind, heat, scent and a vibrating floor; premiered at Sundance New Frontier 2017, with the Rainforest Alliance. - Video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oEqkLuyKGUk - Project page: https://www.treeofficial.com/ #### Plastic Imaginaries — Kristina Lindström (2016) - Type: Speculative design · Organisms: Insects - Idea: Imagine living with plastic through the organisms that can digest it. - What it is: A speculative fiction film and installation about a ragpicker and a composter in a 'late plastic age', drawing on public events around plastiglomerates and mealworms that can biodegrade polystyrene. - How it works: Made with Åsa Ståhl from plastiglomerate walks and mealworm composting kits distributed to participants. - Images: https://hybridmatters-production.s3.eu-central-1.amazonaws.com/photo/image/56dfec403ee3ee23ee000005/standard_Lindstrom_Stahl.jpg https://hybridmatters-production.s3.eu-central-1.amazonaws.com/photo/image/572b46463ee3ee4b0800000d/standard__DSC3099.jpg - Project page: https://exhibitions.hybridmatters.net/works/plastic-imaginaries #### Primal Tourism — Jakob Kudsk Steensen (2016) - Type: Artwork · Organisms: Ecosystems - Idea: Use a game engine to show a paradise island from the future, after tourists and before recovery. - What it is: A full-scale virtual replica of the tourist island Bora Bora where ancient ecosystems, future sea levels and abandoned resorts coexist, explored as video, game or VR. - How it works: Satellite maps, scientific projections of water levels and native species were built into a landscape in Unreal Engine 4. - Video: https://vimeo.com/185262742 - Images: https://static1.squarespace.com/static/573604122b8ddea9122c6ee9/t/5eb426b12bf8463a49209757/1588861849430/FKV_How-to-Make-a-Paradise_Jakob-Kudsk-Steensen_Primal-Tourism_01-1.png?format=1500w https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/573604122b8ddea9122c6ee9/1494531862145-26Y0QF86HHFFX0DS8B2N/Island_stillshot_master.jpg - Project page: https://jakobsteensen.com/primal-tourism-1 #### Redeform: Post-Anthropocentric 3D Printing — Laura Devendorf (2016) - Type: Paper · Organisms: Human body - Idea: Design fabrication tools so that machines and materials can take part in making. - What it is: Critiques how 3D printers cast the maker as commander of passive machines and materials, and presents Redeform, an alternative printing system that frames the machine and material as collaborators. - How it works: Critical analysis of maker technology followed by a prototype 3D printing system and a study with users (details of the setup likely involve live projection and material-led printing). - Paper: https://doi.org/10.1145/2901790.2901879 (DIS 2016) - Images: https://figures.semanticscholar.org/1647a6071fa29f02a245a95f7511c338b4195702/5-Figure1-1.png https://figures.semanticscholar.org/1647a6071fa29f02a245a95f7511c338b4195702/6-Figure2-1.png - Project page: https://doi.org/10.1145/2901790.2901879 #### The Parliament of Things — Partizan Publik, Bruno Latour (2016) - Type: Speculative design · Organisms: Ecosystems, Animals - Idea: Take a philosophical proposal literally and run it as an institution. - What it is: A speculative research programme by the Amsterdam collective Partizan Publik that takes Bruno Latour's idea of a Parliament of Things literally, holding sessions, talks and publications in which animals, plants, rivers and the sea are given political voice; it led to the Embassy of the North Sea. - How it works: Public sessions, lectures, publications and mock parliaments with philosophers, artists, lawyers and scientists. - Images: https://theparliamentofthings.org/wp-content/uploads/2017/04/15392195485_43de687052_k-min.jpg https://new.theparliamentofthings.org/wp-content/uploads/2018/03/fish.png - Project page: https://theparliamentofthings.org #### Treehugger: Wawona — Marshmallow Laser Feast (2016) - Type: Artwork · Organisms: Plants - Idea: Hug a tree long enough and you start to live at its pace. - What it is: Visitors hug a large sculpted sequoia trunk, put their head into a knot and enter VR, where they watch water rise from roots to crown and drift into slow "tree time". - How it works: Mixed reality: a tactile sculpture plus VR headset, spatial audio, haptics and scent; the visualisation is modelled on a giant sequoia in Sequoia National Park. - Video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=if0wfysmoMU - Images: https://marshmallowlaserfeast.com/app/uploads/2024/08/5-1024x576.jpg https://marshmallowlaserfeast.com/app/uploads/2024/08/WIP_Treehugger_Rocktree_16-1024x682.jpg - Project page: https://www.marshmallowlaserfeast.com/project/treehugger-wawona/ #### terra0: A Self-Owning Augmented Forest — terra0 (2016) - Type: Speculative design · Organisms: Plants, Ecosystems - Idea: Give an ecosystem an economic agency and see what legal and ethical questions appear. - What it is: A whitepaper and prototype for a forest that owns itself: sensors and smart contracts let it sell logging licences for its own trees, accumulate capital and eventually buy the land it stands on. - How it works: Ethereum smart contracts linked to satellite and sensor data about tree growth, acting as an automated owner and seller. - Images: https://www.terra0.org/prev.png - Project page: https://www.terra0.org/ #### Plantoid — Primavera De Filippi (2015) - Type: Artwork · Organisms: Plants - Idea: Treat an artwork as a life form that funds and reproduces itself through code. - What it is: A metal flower-like sculpture connected to a blockchain that asks for cryptocurrency donations; when it has enough, it commissions artists to build its next offspring, chosen by its donors. - How it works: A smart contract holds the plantoid's wallet, runs donor voting and pays the artists who build the next generation. - Video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5gMbhCgHGjY - Project page: https://plantoid.org/ #### Counting Sheep: NZ Merino in an Internet of Things — Anne Galloway (2014) - Type: Speculative design · Organisms: Animals - Idea: Ground speculative design in ethnography of animals and the people who breed them, then use it to ask questions rather than predict. - What it is: A three-year project that followed New Zealand merino sheep from breeding stations to labs and markets, then turned the fieldwork into four speculative designs (BoneKnitter, Grow Your Own Lamb, PermaLamb and Kotahitanga Farm) that the public could respond to online. - How it works: Multi-site ethnography of merino breeding and marketing, translated into illustrated future scenarios with an anonymous survey for public responses. - Paper: https://doi.org/10.4324/9781315526379-8 (Undesign (Routledge) 2018) - Images: https://web.archive.org/web/20170325082252im_/http://morethanhumanlab.org/wp-content/uploads/2014/12/Screen-Shot-2016-08-07-at-8.33.50-pm.png - Project page: https://web.archive.org/web/2019/http://morethanhumanlab.org/blog/project/counting-sheep-nz-merino-in-an-internet-of-things/ #### Forest Law — Ursula Biemann, Paulo Tavares (2014) - Type: Artwork · Organisms: Ecosystems, Plants - Idea: Treat the forest as a legal subject and film the court case from its side. - What it is: A two-channel video and research project on legal cases in the Ecuadorian Amazon where the forest and its Indigenous peoples argue for the rights of nature against oil and mining. - How it works: Video essay combining landscape footage, interviews with the Sarayaku people and lawyers, and spatial analysis of extraction. - Video: https://vimeo.com/316761337 - Images: https://geobodies.org/wp-content/uploads/2022/03/aav-fl-cover-large-aspect-ratio-770-433.jpg https://geobodies.org/wp-content/uploads/2022/03/aav-FL-gallery-3-scaled-aspect-ratio-770-433.jpg - Project page: https://geobodies.org/art-and-videos/forest-law/ #### PSX Consultancy — Špela Petrič, Pei-Ying Lin (2014) - Type: Speculative design · Organisms: Plants, Insects - Idea: If pollinators vanish, what would it mean to design for a plant's sex life? - What it is: A fictional consultancy that designs devices to solve the pollination problems of six plant species, from prostheses that shake pollen onto visiting insects to floral 'sex toys'. - How it works: Speculative objects designed with Pei Ying Lin, Dimitris Stamatis and Jasmina Weiss from the reproductive biology of specific plants. - Images: https://artlaboratory-berlin.org/wp-content/uploads/2021/05/GOOD_Opening_PSY-Visitor-1_Foto-Tursic.jpg https://artlaboratory-berlin.org/wp-content/uploads/2021/05/SL_DSC_0947.jpg - Project page: https://artlaboratory-berlin.org/exhibitions/strange-encounters-with-vegetal-others/ #### Untitled (Human Mask) — Pierre Huyghe (2014) - Type: Artwork · Organisms: Animals - Idea: Show a human world after the humans, seen through an animal trained to imitate us. - What it is: A short film in which a monkey wearing a young woman's mask and wig moves alone through an abandoned restaurant near Fukushima after the 2011 disaster. - How it works: Film shot in an empty restaurant with a trained macaque, first seen via drone footage of the exclusion zone. - Images: https://storage.ghost.io/c/51/f8/51f871d8-b6be-4a73-b958-0ca4fff0110a/content/images/hyperallergic-newspack-s3-amazonaws-com/uploads/2015/08/huyghe-humanmask.jpg - Project page: https://hyperallergic.com/228401/pierre-huyghe-and-the-art-of-the-rupture/ #### Melbourne Urban Forest Visual: Trees with Email Addresses — City of Melbourne Urban Forest team (2013) - Type: Product & platform · Organisms: Plants - Idea: A simple address for a nonhuman can change how people relate to it. - What it is: Every public tree in Melbourne was given an ID and an email address on an open map so residents could report problems; instead, thousands of people wrote love letters, questions and jokes to individual trees. - How it works: An open-data tree map (species, age, life expectancy) where each tree links to a council email inbox. - Video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=r4BtdFgVGjc - Project page: http://melbourneurbanforestvisual.com.au #### The Case of Tommy the Chimpanzee — Nonhuman Rights Project (2013) - Type: Speculative design · Organisms: Animals - Idea: Personhood is a legal category that could be redesigned to include other species. - What it is: The Nonhuman Rights Project's first lawsuit, filed for Tommy, a chimpanzee kept alone in a cage on a used-trailer lot in upstate New York, arguing he should be recognised as a legal person with a right to bodily liberty. - How it works: Habeas corpus petition supported by expert affidavits on chimpanzee cognition. - Images: https://www.nonhumanrights.org/wp-content/uploads/Tommy-in-cage-PH-Films.jpg - Project page: https://www.nonhumanrights.org/client-tommy/ #### Co-Existence — Julia Lohmann (2009) - Type: Artwork · Organisms: Bacteria & microbes, Human body - Idea: Draw the human body as a map of the microbes that live in it. - What it is: A window installation for the Wellcome Trust made of 9,000 Petri dishes printed with images of bacterial colonies, arranged as a human figure so each microbe sits where it commonly lives on or in the body. - How it works: Petri dishes with pixelated microbe images, Perspex and lighting, positioned by body site. - Images: https://www.julialohmann.co.uk/images/work/gallery/co-existence-wellcome-trust/1238501099/standard/wt-window-1.jpg - Project page: https://www.julialohmann.co.uk/work/gallery/co-existence-wellcome-trust/ #### Cow Benches — Julia Lohmann (2005) - Type: Artwork · Organisms: Animals - Idea: Make the animal inside a material visible again. - What it is: Leather benches shaped like resting cows, each named after a cow whose hide was used, made as a memento mori for the animals behind everyday materials. - How it works: One whole cow hide stretched over a moulded form per bench. - Images: https://www.julialohmann.co.uk/images/work/gallery/cow-benches/1239099915/standard/cow-benches-0.jpg - Project page: https://www.julialohmann.co.uk/work/gallery/cow-benches/ #### Journey to the Lower World — Marcus Coates (2004) - Type: Artwork · Organisms: Animals, Human body - Idea: Borrow an animal's point of view to answer a human, social question. - What it is: In a Liverpool tower block due for demolition, Coates wears a deer skin and performs a shamanic ritual in a resident's flat, travelling to the "lower world" to ask animal spirits the residents' question about their future. - How it works: A participatory performance filmed as a 28-minute video: residents pose a question, Coates enacts the trance with animal calls and costume, then reports what the animals said. - Images: https://a75hkzli.twic.pics/marcus-coates/images/_1200x630_crop_center-center_none/JTLW_block3.jpg - Project page: https://marcuscoates.co.uk/projects/78-journey-to-the-lower-world #### Tree Logic — Natalie Jeremijenko (1999) - Type: Artwork · Organisms: Plants - Idea: Let a tree's own growth logic, not human design, shape the artwork over time. - What it is: Six living trees hang upside down from a frame at MASS MoCA and slowly bend their growth back towards the light over the years. - How it works: Trees suspended in planters on a steel structure, cared for as a long-duration installation; later replaced with new trees. - Video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xESM4aX5LYc - Project page: https://massmoca.org/ ### Interspecies Art Artworks made with, by or for other living beings. #### In Search for the Rarest Plant: Art, Drones, and AI — Laura Cinti (2026) - Type: Artwork · Organisms: Plants, Ecosystems - Idea: Art can join conservation science in searching for a lost partner for a lonely plant. - What it is: AI in the Sky uses drones and AI to search the forests of South Africa for a female of Encephalartos woodii, a cycad known only from one male plant whose clones live in botanical gardens. - How it works: Drone surveys and image-recognition AI are combined in an art–science–conservation project. - Paper: https://doi.org/10.1162/leon_a_02669 (Leonardo 2026) #### Interspecies Interfaces in Artistic Contexts: Forest Signals as the Basis for Ecosystemic Intelligence — Cesar & Lois (2026) - Type: Artwork · Organisms: Plants, Fungi, Ecosystems - Idea: Intelligence can emerge from ecological relations, not only from data centres. - What it is: Cesar & Lois describe artworks placed in different forests, including Boreal Intelligence, that use biodigital interfaces and locally trained machine learning on multispecies and climate data. - How it works: Site-specific biodigital sensing in forests with custom software and small local machine-learning models. - Paper: https://doi.org/10.1162/leon.a.2731 (Leonardo 2026) - Video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BvQRNYvjlHU - Project page: https://doi.org/10.1162/leon.a.2731 #### Interspecies Translation Technologies: Designing Interpretation Interfaces Referencing Simple to Poetically Complex Semiotic Frameworks — Alinta Krauth (2026) - Type: Artwork · Organisms: Animals - Idea: Poetic over-interpretation may be a more honest way to present animal signals than literal translation. - What it is: The artist builds AI listening devices that show poetic 'translations' of animal calls, such as flying-fox vocalisations, as they happen. - How it works: Audio machine-learning models classify animal signals and map them to poetic text through semiotic frameworks. - Paper: https://doi.org/10.1162/leon.a.2738 (Leonardo 2026) - Video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=J8zNuyS5yj0 #### Planet Ocean — Chris Watson (2026) - Type: Artwork · Organisms: Animals, Ecosystems - Idea: The ocean is the planet's largest and most sound-rich habitat; listen to it as one. - What it is: An hour-long album of 17 tracks celebrating the sounds, rhythms and textures of oceans worldwide, recorded above and below the surface, with a booklet of 20 photographs. - How it works: Hydrophone and air-microphone recordings from many seas, released by Touch as a download with a PDF booklet. - Images: https://chriswatson.net/wp-content/uploads/sites/5/Planet-Ocean-cover-scaled.jpg - Project page: https://chriswatson.net/2025/12/30/1980/ #### Storying Multispecies Heritage: The Conference of the Birds — Susanne Fredholm (2025) - Type: Paper · Organisms: Animals, Ecosystems - Idea: Multispecies storytelling can feed urban planning. - What it is: Examines The Conference of the Birds in Frihamnen, Gothenburg, an art project that brought artists, designers, architects and ornithologists together to tell the site's human and bird histories. - How it works: Case study read through critical heritage ecologies and boundary-work. - Paper: https://doi.org/10.1162/desi.a.716 (Design Issues 2025) - Project page: https://doi.org/10.1162/desi.a.716 #### liquid strata — Entangled Others (2025) - Type: Artwork · Organisms: Animals, Ecosystems - Idea: Make overlooked deep-sea life perceptible without pretending to represent it fully. - What it is: Installations that use machine learning on scientific datasets to make tangible interfaces to little-known deep-sea phenomena such as marine snow. - How it works: Models trained on oceanographic imagery and data generate forms shown in physical, interactive displays. - Images: https://falling-walls.com/sites/default/files/styles/content/public/medien/250/bilder/26_scsu_as_entangled_others_project.jpg?h=91e3a5cb&itok=mU9y5FMp - Project page: https://falling-walls.com/breakthroughs/finalists-interviews/entangled-others #### Stranger to the Trees — Kat Austen (2024) - Type: Artwork · Organisms: Plants - Idea: Listen to how trees experience our plastics. - What it is: Birch trees were grown in soil laced with microplastics and their physiological responses translated into sound and sculpture, examining pollution from the trees' perspective. - How it works: Sensors track sap flow and other physiology; data drive a sound composition and sculptural forms. - Images: https://falling-walls.com/sites/default/files/styles/content/public/medien/28/bilder/fw24-science-summit-as-kat-austen-project-photo.jpg?h=6178a47d&itok=NlVjbyOB - Project page: https://falling-walls.com/plastic-tree-coexistence-kat-austens-exploration-microplastic-impact-forests #### Symbiotic Stitches — Maryland Institute College of Art Biodesign Challenge team (2024) - Type: Artwork · Organisms: Fungi, Slime mould - Idea: Craft traditions of making through hard times can include other species as makers. - What it is: A quilting project made with mycelium, slime mould and lichen that treats care as resilience and asks how humans can practise care with their nonhuman collaborators. - How it works: Quilt panels were inoculated or stitched with living fungi, slime mould and lichen and documented as they grew. - Images: https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/552dc0ffe4b070a9e1a6a215/1718643576152-V2FZJI1JPC3OULZ4UN5K/Screenshot+2024-06-17+at+12.58.20+PM.png https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/552dc0ffe4b070a9e1a6a215/1718643578608-WJHC6E1Y9G9OJH8IN3PP/Screenshot+2024-06-17+at+12.59.22+PM.png - Project page: https://www.biodesignchallenge.org/mica-2024 #### Wings Against the Veil of Light — Jiabao Li (2024) - Type: Artwork · Organisms: Insects - Idea: Borrow an insect's sound-making body to feel how our light disrupts its courtship. - What it is: A Butoh dance performance in which dancers wear zipper-and-ruler wings to chirp like crickets, telling how light pollution makes male crickets call at the wrong time. - How it works: Wearable wings with a file-and-scraper mechanism (zipper and ruler) mimic cricket stridulation; choreographed with Rosemary Candelario. - Video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=V-doIkBdPkg - Images: https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/58688c8a6a496327e937e35b/c3932ec7-6a6b-4671-96ce-bc5808b54847/Jiabao+Li_Cricket_Butoh+0.jpg https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/58688c8a6a496327e937e35b/1730851572775-050B68ZON2C30S1RQKM0/Jiabao+Li+cricket+2.jpg https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/58688c8a6a496327e937e35b/1730851574015-ASDXQCJPX2KD61ZGPXE2/Jiabao+Li+cricket+3.jpg - Project page: https://www.jiabaoli.org/wings-against-the-veil-of-light #### Epiphytic Memory — Finn Petrie (2023) - Type: Artwork · Organisms: Plants - Idea: A copy of a tree can become a home for new epiphytes. - What it is: Porcelain sculptures 3D-printed from LIDAR scans of ancient trees from New Zealand's southern rainforests, placed in Dunedin as memories of the trees and as possible scaffolds for new plant life. - How it works: LIDAR scanning, porcelain 3D printing, site-specific placement and an AR gallery installation simulating plant growth. - Paper: https://doi.org/10.1162/leon_a_02367 (Leonardo 2023) - Project page: https://doi.org/10.1162/leon_a_02367 #### Orbweaver — Brad Hakes (2023) - Type: Artwork · Organisms: Animals, Insects - Idea: Living with another species can start by re-reading what it makes. - What it is: A series of interventions — photos, videos and a hacked Roomba that interprets the planar webs of orb-weaver spiders — through which the artist tries to reduce his fear of spiders. - How it works: Drawing on Albert Bandura's exposure therapy, web geometries are translated into robot paths and media works. - Images: https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/552dc0ffe4b070a9e1a6a215/1687881592851-AZD7PR7NHJE6X5ETJLUI/Screenshot+2023-06-27+at+11.56.23+AM.png https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/552dc0ffe4b070a9e1a6a215/1687881600707-3KVU2SVJUJH16G0YJBXC/Screenshot+2023-06-27+at+11.57.06+AM.png - Project page: https://www.biodesignchallenge.org/ut-austin-2023 #### Plant Play — Silvia Ruzanka (2023) - Type: Artwork · Organisms: Plants - Idea: Imagining a plant as a player unsettles what play means for humans. - What it is: An experimental videogame artwork designed for a Venus flytrap to play, with sensors wired to the plant controlling the game. - How it works: Sensor wiring reads the Venus flytrap's electrical signals and uses them as game input, framed by feminist and posthumanist ideas of nonhuman play. - Paper: https://doi.org/10.1145/3573382.3616049 (CHI PLAY 2023 Companion) - Images: https://figures.semanticscholar.org/09bf064c1680f1e2dccc622ef13fd007db1216c3/500px/2-Figure1-1.png - Project page: https://doi.org/10.1145/3573382.3616049 #### TransHuman Saunter: Multispecies Storytelling in Precarious Times — Kavita Gonsalves, Marcus Foth (2023) - Type: Artwork · Organisms: Plants, Ecosystems - Idea: Tell pluralistic stories from one tree's multispecies community. - What it is: A geolocative artwork in which four women artists of colour document their entanglements with the ecosystem of an Indian banyan tree in Brisbane City Botanic Gardens. - How it works: Individual artworks are anchored to locations around the banyan tree and accessed through a geolocative app. - Paper: https://doi.org/10.1162/leon_a_02243 (Leonardo 2023) - Video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=P0XpS-6IYjU #### Echinoidea Future – Adriatic Sensing — Robertina Šebjanič (2022) - Type: Artwork · Organisms: Animals, Ecosystems - Idea: Sense a polluted sea from the position of one of its inhabitants. - What it is: A video and sound work about sea urchins in the southern Adriatic living in low-oxygen water shaped by human liquid waste, showing both the stress and the resilience of the species. - How it works: Underwater recording and AI-assisted video made during the STARTS4Water Zero Pollution Adriatic residency with marine scientists. - Video: https://vimeo.com/922237843 - Images: https://robertina.net/wp-content/uploads/2024/05/aab3851-1.jpg - Project page: https://robertina.net/echinoidea-future-adriatic-sensing-starts4water-zero-pollution-adriatic/ #### Exploring Kolam As An Ecofeminist Computational Art Practice — Gopinaath Kannabiran (2022) - Type: Paper · Organisms: Insects, Human body - Idea: A women's daily ritual can be computation that also feeds other beings. - What it is: A pictorial on Kolam, the daily threshold drawings made in Tamil Nadu, traditionally with rice flour that also feeds small creatures, presented as an algorithmic art practice rooted in ecofeminism. - How it works: Visual documentation of eight characteristics of Kolam from literature and the authors' own practice. - Paper: https://doi.org/10.1145/3527927.3531452 (C&C 2022) - Project page: https://doi.org/10.1145/3527927.3531452 #### Interactive Art as Enrichment for Flying-Foxes — Alinta Krauth (2022) - Type: Artwork · Organisms: Animals - Idea: An artwork can be enrichment: made for another species' experience first. - What it is: Interactive digital artworks made as enrichment for wild flying-foxes in rehabilitation care, with devices that respond to the bats' presence and give carers and artist a shared object to watch. - How it works: Practice-based PhD combining animal–computer interaction methods with interactive projection and sound (likely sensor-triggered); the code is shared in a walkthrough video. - Paper: https://doi.org/10.5204/thesis.eprints.235060 (PhD thesis, Queensland University of Technology 2022) - Video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TXAIxQafMug #### Squid Map — Jiabao Li (2022) - Type: Artwork · Organisms: Animals - Idea: An animal redraws a political map because borders mean nothing to it. - What it is: At the Kewalo Marine Biology Lab in Hawaii, the artist gave a lab squid a tank floor of black and white sand shaped like country borders; over a month the squid carried and buried the sand until the map dissolved. - How it works: Hawaiian black and white sands are laid out as a world map in an aquarium; the squid's burying and camouflage behaviour is documented over time. - Images: https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/58688c8a6a496327e937e35b/84e3a87b-a9df-41ed-9ef2-7732a42f489b/squid+map+before+after.jpg https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/58688c8a6a496327e937e35b/b889ed3e-4ddd-48f6-95a3-b591ab4a3ce7/jiabao+li+squid+map+2+copy.jpg https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/58688c8a6a496327e937e35b/bad0ea09-91a8-4020-9dbe-a9913c12d00d/IMG_1687+copy.jpg - Project page: https://www.jiabaoli.org/squid-map #### The Algae Society BioArt Design Lab: Exploring Multispecies Entanglements and Making Kin with Algae — Juniper (Jennifer T.) Harrower (2022) - Type: Artwork · Organisms: Algae - Idea: Make kin with algae by working with them as international research partners. - What it is: The founding members of the Algae Society, a global collective of artists, scientists and scholars who treat algae as research partners, introduce the group and a collective collage of their works. - How it works: Members cultivate and image algae in bioart works and reflect on process, materiality and aesthetics. - Paper: https://doi.org/10.1162/leon_a_02184 (Leonardo 2022) - Video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=R7Py_-UmwSA - Images: https://algaesociety.org/wp-content/uploads/2022/01/Algae-Digital-Kaleidoscope-_-Tapestry-2022-Jennifer-Parker-400x400.jpg - Project page: https://algaesociety.org #### Homo Sapiens, Mnesitardigrada Class and Umwelt: A Dialogue on Interspecies Organic Data Flow — Alexandra Dementieva (2021) - Type: Artwork · Organisms: Animals, DNA & molecules - Idea: When sensoria are too different to talk, poetic installations can still share a world. - What it is: Artistic research staged as an imagined dialogue between a human scientist and a human-alien hybrid artist, using tardigrades' organs, molecules and proteins as a model for interspecies communication through immersive installations. - How it works: Draws on tardigrade biology and Umwelt theory to design immersive interactive installations. - Paper: https://doi.org/10.1162/leon_a_01984 (Leonardo 2021) #### The Plant Intelligence Plan — Zhang Tianyi (2021) - Type: Artwork · Organisms: Plants, Animals - Idea: Restore relationships between species, not only habitats. - What it is: An ecological art project that recognises the initiative and rights of plants and uses biotechnology tools to restore relationships between commercially bred crops and animals. - How it works: Based on plant-intelligence research, the work reintroduces signals and materials through which crops and animals interact. - Images: https://ars.electronica.art/starts-prize/files/2022/06/The_Plant_Intelligence_Plan-5-1024x512.jpg https://ars.electronica.art/starts-prize/files/2022/06/The_Plant_Intelligence_Plan-4-1024x512.jpg - Project page: https://ars.electronica.art/starts-prize/en/plant-intelligence-plan/ #### How to Make an Ocean — Kasia Molga (2020) - Type: Artwork · Organisms: Algae, Human body - Idea: Grief can become a habitat for other life. - What it is: An installation and ritual in which the artist's collected tears host tiny marine ecosystems of phytoplankton; visitors can add their own tears with help from an AI "moirologist" bot. - How it works: Tears are collected with custom spoons and vessels, enriched as seawater-like medium and inoculated with marine microalgae, grown under light in small glass containers. - Video: https://vimeo.com/595232480 - Images: https://www.studiomolga.com/art/HTMAO_04.jpg - Project page: https://www.studiomolga.com/art_HTMAO.html #### Intra-Facing: Writing with Dogs — Alinta Krauth (2020) - Type: Paper · Organisms: Animals - Idea: Let an animal's behaviour, not a human plan, lead a creative work. - What it is: A practice-led project in which family dogs co-create works of electronic literature: their interactions with the artist drive a generative writing system. - How it works: Digital interfaces that turn dog–human interactions into inputs for generative text. - Paper: https://doi.org/10.1145/3446002.3446051 (ACI 2020) #### MycoMythologies — Saša Spačal (2020) - Type: Artwork · Organisms: Fungi - Idea: Let fungal ontologies teach inclusion and care. - What it is: A series of biotechnological installations and myths asking how fungal networks can help humans think and practise multispecies survival in capitalist ruins. - How it works: Living mycelium in custom installations (Rupture, Patterning) is coupled with sensors and machines that translate its growth. - Images: https://ars.electronica.art/starts-prize/files/2021/06/MycoMythologies_Rupture_Sasa_Spacal_installation_Photo_KIBLA_Janez_Klenovsek_04-1024x512.jpg - Project page: https://ars.electronica.art/starts-prize/en/mycomythologies/ #### Vegetal Transmutation — Eduardo Navarro (2020) - Type: Artwork · Organisms: Plants - Idea: An artwork can end its life as a seed bed. - What it is: A series of contemplative charcoal drawings of part-human, part-plant beings made with philosopher Michael Marder on biodegradable envelopes holding London plane seeds, which are buried after the exhibition. - How it works: Drawings on handmade biodegradable paper envelopes containing plane-tree seeds; after the show the envelopes are buried so the seeds can germinate. - Images: https://images.prismic.io/wellcomecollection/1d26c04b-589d-42d0-a750-c9962c6793af_EP_001764_018_Large.jpg - Project page: https://wellcomecollection.org/exhibitions/rooted-beings #### Nightingales in Berlin — David Rothenberg (2019) - Type: Artwork · Organisms: Animals - Idea: A city park can be a concert hall shared by humans and birds. - What it is: Over five springs Rothenberg and invited musicians played at night in Berlin parks with singing nightingales; the project became a book, an album and a documentary film. - How it works: Musicians improvise acoustically or with electronics next to wild nightingales during their breeding-season night song, recorded on location. - Video: https://vimeo.com/191341487 - Images: https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5c1fc158266c07c75d04f252/1545854144930-51ZI1VJPD5S4RJ0YVA24/helsinki+nightingale+morning.jpg https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5c1fc158266c07c75d04f252/1545865720868-KZ6W270W12YSVTMPJJE9/david+open+mouth+Hasenheide+ah.png - Project page: https://www.nightingalesinberlin.com/ #### PlantConnect — Carlos Castellanos (2019) - Type: Artwork · Organisms: Plants, Human body - Idea: Breath is a shared medium between people and plants. - What it is: PlantConnect is an installation in which visitors' breathing and plants' bioelectrical and photosynthetic activity are linked through machine learning, so that people and plants affect each other in real time. - How it works: Plant bioelectrical and CO2/photosynthesis sensing are coupled with human breath via a computational model. - Paper: https://doi.org/10.1162/leon_a_02306 (Leonardo 2023) - Images: https://www.ccastellanos.com/wp-content/gallery/plantconnect/PlantConnect-Carlos-Castellanos-Bello-Bello-2019-ACC.ACI-photo-by-Sarah-Kim_1.jpg https://www.ccastellanos.com/wp-content/gallery/plantconnect/PlantConnect-Carlos-Castellanos-Bello-Bello-2019-ACC.ACI-photo-by-Sarah-Kim_2.jpg - Project page: https://ccastellanos.com/projects/plantconnect/ #### Sex Shells — Jonathan Ho (2019) - Type: Artwork · Organisms: Animals - Idea: Another species' biology can widen our imagination of sex and gender. - What it is: An immersive temple-laboratory that makes the hermaphrodite snail a divine icon of gender and sexual fluidity, alternating between myth and biological fact. BAD Award 2019 winner, with snail biologist Joris Koene (VU Amsterdam). - How it works: Installation drawing on research into snail mating (likely including 'love darts'), presented as ritual objects and images. - Images: https://www.badaward.nl/imager/assets/site/8175/2019.11.29-BoudewijnBollmann_Polarities_opening-LORES-104_a5a12f426a1ab11909951db4fe37df8f.jpg https://www.badaward.nl/imager/assets/site/8176/2019.11.29-BoudewijnBollmann_Polarities_opening-LORES-107_a5a12f426a1ab11909951db4fe37df8f.jpg - Project page: https://www.badaward.nl/artists-scientists/jonathan-ho-joris-koene #### For the Love of Corals — Sonia Levy (2018) - Type: Artwork · Organisms: Animals, Ecosystems - Idea: Film laboratory care as intimacy between species, not as control. - What it is: A film made at the Horniman Museum's Project Coral in London, where scientists recreate lunar and seasonal cycles in tanks so that corals spawn in captivity. - How it works: Close macro cinematography of coral spawning in aquariums where light, temperature and moonlight are set by computers. - Video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ntti-BQHBx4 - Images: https://artlaboratory-berlin.org/wp-content/uploads/2021/03/SLIDER__-Levy-2.jpg - Project page: https://artlaboratory-berlin.org/exhibitions/the-camille-diaries/ #### How to Carve a Sculpture — AKI INOMATA (2018) - Type: Artwork · Organisms: Animals - Idea: Question authorship by treating an animal's gnawing as sculpture. - What it is: Beavers in zoos gnaw wooden blocks, and the artist scans the results and has them enlarged and recarved as sculptures, with the sound of chewing. - How it works: Wood gnawed by beavers at several Japanese zoos is 3D-scanned and machine-carved at larger scale in wood, shown with recordings and video. - Video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yVtZkUgYF68 - Images: https://www.aki-inomata.com/shared/img/works/05/05-01.jpg https://www.aki-inomata.com/shared/img/works/05/05-02.jpg - Project page: https://www.aki-inomata.com/works/how_to_make/ #### ON AIR — Tomás Saraceno (2018) - Type: Artwork · Organisms: Animals, Ecosystems - Idea: An exhibition can be a habitat whose inhabitants keep changing it during the show. - What it is: A carte blanche exhibition at the Palais de Tokyo in Paris built as an ecosystem of spider webs, cosmic dust, air and sound, with live spiders among the co-producers. - How it works: Hybrid webs, live spiders, particle and air sensing, and sonified web vibrations are installed across the building as an evolving environment. - Video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X4SqhD-81d8 - Images: https://studiotomassaraceno.org/files/38_18fra_pdt_press_20_ar.jpg - Project page: https://studiotomassaraceno.org/on-air/ #### Project Amoreiras (Mulberry Trees): Autonomy and Artificial Learning in an Urban Environment — Gilbertto Prado (2018) - Type: Artwork · Organisms: Plants, Ecosystems - Idea: Give urban trees a body that reacts to the pollution they live in. - What it is: An urban intervention on Avenida Paulista in São Paulo where mulberry trees in robotic pots sense pollution and pedestrians and move in response. - How it works: Sensors read air quality and presence; the trees' motion follows Conway-style neighbourhood rules and machine learning. - Paper: https://doi.org/10.1162/leon_a_01557 (Leonardo 2018) - Video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6iGPny3BQYs - Project page: https://www.poeticasdigitais.net #### Surrounded: A Series of Sound Installations That Combine Plant Electrophysiology and 3D Sonic Art — Augustine Leudar (2018) - Type: Artwork · Organisms: Plants, Fungi, Ecosystems - Idea: Plant electrical signals can be composed into immersive sound, not just plotted as data. - What it is: A series of sound installations that record electrical action potentials in plants and the mycorrhizal network and spatialise them in 3D audio forest soundscapes. - How it works: Electrodes read plant action potentials, which drive sounds placed around listeners with custom 3D spatialisation. - Paper: https://doi.org/10.1162/leon_a_01338 (Leonardo 2018) - Images: https://figures.semanticscholar.org/474e1e50e6115bf414fab2c8ef122ebc32dc945b/1-Figure1-1.png https://figures.semanticscholar.org/474e1e50e6115bf414fab2c8ef122ebc32dc945b/2-Figure2-1.png #### nimiia cétiï — Jenna Sutela (2018) - Type: Artwork · Organisms: Bacteria & microbes - Idea: Let bacteria and a neural network co-write a language no human speaks. - What it is: An audiovisual work in which a machine-learning model, trained on recordings of a medium channelling a 'Martian' language, writes new language driven by the movements of Bacillus subtilis nattō bacteria under a microscope. - How it works: Recordings of Hélène Smith's 19th-century 'Martian' and the artist's voice train a neural network; microscope video of Bacillus subtilis modulates its output (with Google Arts & Culture Lab). - Video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NaoZV7jPo10 - Images: https://lh3.googleusercontent.com/fYBCrVoUw_bXbUlxfEZSHznVO1q9L6URCgiZydVn9PMobLNY7-SZ8PxplbLnWxvfsapF9-4Uh65vee6DhJhDVRCbM4MM - Project page: https://experiments.withgoogle.com/nimiia-cetii #### After ALife Ahead — Pierre Huyghe (2017) - Type: Artwork · Organisms: Animals, Cells & tissue, Ecosystems - Idea: Let biological growth rates run the exhibition: cell division triggers events in the space. - What it is: For Skulptur Projekte Münster, Huyghe cut open the concrete floor of a former ice rink and created a sloping landscape of soil, water, bees, algae, bacteria and peacock-coloured cone snails, while HeLa cancer cells divided in an incubator and an app showed augmented forms. - How it works: An incubator of HeLa cells linked to sensors drives the opening of ceiling panels and AR pyramids, while a living aquarium and hive evolve on site. - Video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eWre6dlUAbo - Images: https://static-assets.artlogic.net/w_1500,h_1500,c_limit,f_auto,fl_lossy,q_auto:best/ws-estherschipper2/usr/images/artists/hero_image/items/59/597f36d864fd4671b45ac80958164a74/pierre_munster_1377.jpg - Project page: https://www.estherschipper.com/artists/41-pierre-huyghe/ #### Laboratory of Longings — Ani Liu (2017) - Type: Artwork · Organisms: Plants, Human body - Idea: Let plants feed on humans, and the body becomes the crop. - What it is: A living installation in which the sweat of a couple is collected over two days and fed to a field of carnivorous pitcher plants, reversing the usual human–plant relation of agriculture. - How it works: Heat lamps and an enclosure make the couple sweat; 227 cc of sweat is funnelled to Nepenthes x ventrata and Nepenthes sanguinea plants. - Video: https://vimeo.com/317846789 - Images: https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/52cd9799e4b00ae3ac706ed4/1507932062968-EK8XAGDCP1X2MCT8ULE1/image-asset.jpeg https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/52cd9799e4b00ae3ac706ed4/1507932020914-H8PSZO256M8KNSL6VEMY/PRESS_BCA_ROTM17_%28MelissaBlackall%29_-4.jpg https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/52cd9799e4b00ae3ac706ed4/1507933169599-M0TRMOWHIHZHKYW9E2QA/DSCF3745.JPG - Project page: https://ani-liu.com/laboratory-of-longings-longings #### Lygophilia — Robertina Šebjanič (2017) - Type: Artwork · Organisms: Animals - Idea: Learn from animals that thrive in the dark and never leave their juvenile form. - What it is: A series of installations, video and sound works about animals that love darkness, the Mexican axolotl and the European olm, which never grow up and live in places hostile to humans. - How it works: Research in Mexico and Slovenia combining mythology and biology, shown as installation, video essay and sound composition. - Images: https://robertina.net/wp-content/uploads/2025/09/81d51-0ab24554d6e5511e2f6e741ef597cd21-1.jpg - Project page: https://robertina.net/lygophilia/ #### Think Evolution #1: Kiku-ishi (Ammonite) — AKI INOMATA (2017) - Type: Artwork · Organisms: Animals - Idea: A designed object can stage an encounter between a living animal and its extinct relative. - What it is: Inomata reconstructed ammonite shells from CT scans of a fossil, 3D-printed them in resin and offered them to a living octopus, which moved in and used the shell as a home. - How it works: CT data of an ammonite fossil were modelled in 3D CG and printed in transparent resin; the octopus's behaviour with the shell was filmed. - Video: https://vimeo.com/606429490 - Images: https://www.aki-inomata.com/shared/img/works/07/07-01.jpg https://www.aki-inomata.com/shared/img/works/07/07-02.jpg - Project page: https://www.aki-inomata.com/works/kiku-ishi/ #### 02.205 — Christian Brems, Laura Beloff (2016) - Type: Artwork · Organisms: Plants - Idea: Imagine a plant as a listener that follows the sound of water. - What it is: An installation built on bio-acoustic findings that plant roots respond to the sound of running water and emit ultrasonic clicks, speculating on how plants listen. - How it works: Speculative sound and video work based on published root bio-acoustics experiments (likely ultrasonic recordings of roots). - Images: https://hybridmatters-production.s3.eu-central-1.amazonaws.com/photo/image/57320fd83ee3ee43a0f00808/standard_02.225_still_5_.jpg - Project page: https://exhibitions.hybridmatters.net/works/02-dot-205 #### Aquatocene / Subaquatic Quest for Serenity — Robertina Šebjanič (2016) - Type: Artwork · Organisms: Animals, Ecosystems - Idea: Ask how the ocean hears us, not how we hear the ocean. - What it is: Sound compositions built from hydrophone recordings of seas, lakes and rivers that make audible how ships and human noise fill the underwater world where animals rely on sound. - How it works: Long-term hydrophone recording and composition, presented as installation, performance and listening sessions. - Video: https://vimeo.com/215171764 - Images: https://robertina.net/wp-content/uploads/2025/09/cbdc0-aquatocene-by-robertina-sebjanic-new1.jpg - Project page: https://robertina.net/aquatocene/ #### Where Species Meet — Güneş-Hélène Isitan (2016) - Type: Artwork · Organisms: Cells & tissue, Human body - Idea: Use the body's own electricity as a language that single cells can answer. - What it is: An interactive installation where visitors put their hands into a large dish of water with live and projected paramecia; the electrical field of their bodies draws the paramecia towards them. - How it works: Electrically sensitive paramecia under a custom microscope-camera respond to changes in field caused by participants' hands, and their live feed is projected into the basin. - Images: https://biodigitalviz.github.io/images/Where_Species_Meet.png - Project page: https://www.gunesisitan.com/where-species-meet #### Arachnid Orchestra. Jam Sessions — Tomás Saraceno (2015) - Type: Artwork · Organisms: Animals - Idea: A spider lives in a world of vibration, so meet it there: make the web an instrument both sides can play. - What it is: Live spider webs are fitted with vibration sensors and amplified, and musicians improvise with the spiders, responding to and sending vibrations through the silk. - How it works: Contact microphones and laser vibrometry pick up web vibrations from spiders, which are amplified in real time while humans play back into the web. - Video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hIuNu-dcQX8 - Project page: https://studiotomassaraceno.org/arachnid-orchestra-jam-sessions/ #### K-9_topology: Ecce Canis — Maja Smrekar (2014) - Type: Artwork · Organisms: Animals, Human body, DNA & molecules - Idea: Render a human–dog bond as a shared molecule you can smell. - What it is: The first part of the K-9_topology series: serotonin isolated from the blood of the artist and of her border collie Byron is combined into a scent that visitors can smell. - How it works: Serotonin was filtered from blood platelets with protein columns and chemically converted with indole into an odour. - Video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=urSr7dh4l0A - Images: https://artlaboratory-berlin.org/wp-content/uploads/2021/05/K-9_topology_booklet-53.jpg https://artlaboratory-berlin.org/wp-content/uploads/2021/05/SL_IMG_941396.jpg - Project page: https://artlaboratory-berlin.org/exhibitions/nonhuman-subjectivities-on-animals/ #### The Mycological Twist — The Mycological Twist (2014) - Type: Artwork · Organisms: Fungi - Idea: Let the life cycle of fungi set the calendar of an art programme. - What it is: A mushroom garden that began in 2014 as an extension of the Jupiter Woods gallery garden in London and later moved to Athis-Mons near Paris, around which the artists run commissioned works, lectures and performances timed to inoculation, growth and harvest. - How it works: Permacultural cultivation of edible and wild fungi on substrates in and around exhibition spaces; events such as the film Ghost Camp grow out of the garden's cycles. - Video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bM0ce_eLZEw - Project page: http://eloisebonneviot.com/the-mycological-twist/ #### Data Garden Quartet — Data Garden (2012) - Type: Artwork · Organisms: Plants - Idea: Let plants play the instruments and let humans be the audience. - What it is: Four plants in the Philadelphia Museum of Art played synthesizers live, a work the museum called its first bio-reactive, plant-controlled artwork. - How it works: Electrodes on leaves read changes in electrical conductance, which biodata devices built with Sam Cusumano convert into MIDI notes for synthesizers. - Video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Uq0aFi1x_mo - Project page: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ekV1ngd_9GY #### EDEN – Ethics, Durability, Ecology, Nature — Olga Kisseleva (2012) - Type: Artwork · Organisms: Plants, Ecosystems - Idea: Treat a tree as a partner whose survival art and technology can help secure. - What it is: A long-running art and science project with trees that began with the rebirth of the Biscarosse Elm and grew into works on protecting endangered plant species and communication between trees and people. - How it works: Combines plant cloning and propagation with sensors that read trees' physiological signals, in collaboration with botanists and industry. - Images: https://ars.electronica.art/starts-prize/files/2020/06/EDEN10_2000x1000_OlgaKisselevaStudio-1024x512.jpg - Project page: https://ars.electronica.art/starts-prize/en/eden/ #### Untilled — Pierre Huyghe (2012) - Type: Artwork · Organisms: Animals, Insects, Plants - Idea: An artwork can be a site that grows and decays on its own, indifferent to whether anyone is watching. - What it is: A compost site in Kassel's Karlsaue park for dOCUMENTA (13), where a reclining nude sculpture had a live beehive for a head, a white dog with a pink leg roamed, and psychoactive and aphrodisiac plants grew around it. - How it works: The artist set up conditions (sculpture, hive, dog, plants, compost) and left the living elements to interact over the exhibition's 100 days. - Video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mEjEy3RY37o - Images: https://static-assets.artlogic.net/w_1400,h_1400,c_limit,f_auto,fl_lossy,q_auto:best/ws-estherschipper2/usr/exhibitions/images/386/ph_untilled_13.jpg https://static-assets.artlogic.net/w_1400,h_1400,c_limit,f_auto,fl_lossy,q_auto:best/ws-estherschipper2/usr/exhibitions/images/386/ph_untilled_3.jpg https://www.generazionecritica.it/wp-content/uploads/2022/05/UNTILLED_STEREO_PCONTRASTE_RGB-12MODIF.jpg - Project page: https://www.estherschipper.com/exhibitions/386-untilled-pierre-huyghe/ #### girl, girl, girl . . . — AKI INOMATA (2012) - Type: Artwork · Organisms: Insects - Idea: Let an insect's building behaviour become fashion design. - What it is: Bagworm larvae are given scraps of women's clothing and build their protective cases from them, producing tiny garments made by insects. - How it works: Bagworm larvae spin silk to bind fabric scraps into cases, a traditional Japanese children's pastime done with paper strips. - Video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=34AUouBNRZ4 - Images: https://www.aki-inomata.com/shared/img/works/03/03-01.jpg https://www.aki-inomata.com/shared/img/works/03/03-02.jpg - Project page: https://www.aki-inomata.com/works/girl_girl_girl/ #### Bees: new creative agents — Raul Pereira Pinto (2011) - Type: Artwork · Organisms: Insects - Idea: Bees as co-makers: the design sets conditions, the colony finishes the form. - What it is: Sculptural objects whose final form is built by honeybees nesting and making comb on designed structures, proposed as a link between the creative industries and bee decline. - How it works: Structures are placed in hives so that honeybees build comb on and around them (likely); the resulting forms become objects. - Paper: https://doi.org/10.1145/2347504.2347507 (DPPI 2011) - Project page: https://doi.org/10.1145/2347504.2347507 #### Oh!m1gas: Biomimetic Stridulation Environment — Kuai Shen (2011) - Type: Artwork · Organisms: Insects - Idea: Let a colony's collective behaviour become the performer rather than the subject. - What it is: A colony of about 1,000 leafcutter ants lives in a plexiglass nest while their movements drive two turntables, scratching records into a soundscape of the colony's life. - How it works: Camera tracking and contact microphones picked up ant movement and stridulation; the data controlled turntable motors. - Paper: https://doi.org/10.1162/leon_a_00213 (Leonardo 2011) - Images: https://cdn.fact.co.uk/uploads/images/_1200x630_crop_center-center_82_none/Kuai-Shen-Ohm1gas-2012.-Image-by-Rob-Battersby.-Installation-view-at-FACT.-2.jpg.jpg?v=1721756641 https://history.siggraph.org/wp-content/uploads/2017/10/2011_Auson_Ohm1gasbiomieticstridulationenvironment2.jpg - Project page: https://www.fact.co.uk/artwork/ohm1gas #### Zoodram (aquarium series) — Pierre Huyghe (2011) - Type: Artwork · Organisms: Animals, Ecosystems - Idea: Let an animal's own habits decide how an artwork moves and where it is seen. - What it is: A series of living marine aquariums; in the best-known versions a hermit crab lives inside a resin copy of Brancusi's Sleeping Muse, carrying the sculpture as its shell. - How it works: Closed seawater tanks with filtration host hermit crabs, arrow crabs and other species; the crab adopts the sculpture as a shell. - Video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1KTUnlBisVw - Images: https://iiif.micr.io/idjDM/full/1200,/0/default.jpg https://storage.ghost.io/c/51/f8/51f871d8-b6be-4a73-b958-0ca4fff0110a/content/images/hyperallergic-newspack-s3-amazonaws-com/uploads/2015/08/zoodram5_huyghe.jpg - Project page: https://philamuseum.org/collection/object/326218 #### Cry of Nature — Buğra Karabey (2010) - Type: Artwork · Organisms: Plants - Idea: A plant can be its own musical interface. - What it is: A platform that turns a plant's bioelectrical responses to heat, humidity, wind, light and touch into synthesised sound, so the plant 'speaks' through music. - How it works: Electrodes on the plant measure changes in bioelectric potential, which drive a sound synthesis system. - Paper: https://doi.org/10.1162/leon.2010.43.3.310 (Leonardo 2010) - Video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YCT-9vpFYnQ - Project page: https://doi.org/10.1162/leon.2010.43.3.310 #### Microscopic Opera — Matthijs Munnik (2010) - Type: Artwork · Organisms: Animals - Idea: What if we are manipulated by something we cannot see, the way we manipulate worms? - What it is: An audiovisual installation in which C. elegans lab worms, instead of being studied, produce the images and sounds. BAD Award 2010 winner, with the Netherlands Consortium for Systems Biology. - How it works: Worm movement under a microscope is likely tracked by camera and translated into projected images and sound. - Images: https://www.badaward.nl/imager/assets/site/613/MICROSCOPIC-OPERA-1_a5a12f426a1ab11909951db4fe37df8f.jpg https://www.badaward.nl/imager/assets/site/614/MICROSCOPIC-OPERA-2_a5a12f426a1ab11909951db4fe37df8f.jpg - Project page: https://www.badaward.nl/artists-scientists/matthijs-munnik #### Sculpture for Octopuses: Exploring for Their Favorite Colours — Shimabuku (2010) - Type: Artwork · Organisms: Animals - Idea: Make an artwork whose audience, and critic, is an octopus. - What it is: Shimabuku makes small coloured sculptures for octopuses, based on the shells and stones they collect from the sea floor, and places them underwater to see which ones the octopuses choose. - How it works: Hand-made coloured objects are placed in octopus habitat and the animals' choices are documented on video and photographs. - Video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=90ogkcNM_AY - Project page: http://www.shimabuku.net/ #### Why Not Hand Over a "Shelter" to Hermit Crabs? — AKI INOMATA (2009) - Type: Artwork · Organisms: Animals - Idea: Design a home for another species and let the animal decide whether it fits. - What it is: Hermit crabs are offered clear 3D-printed shells topped with miniature city skylines, and choose whether to move in. - How it works: CT scans of abandoned shells give the interior geometry; resin shells with city forms are 3D-printed and placed in the crabs' tank. - Video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4qMrcdjpYEM - Images: https://www.aki-inomata.com/shared/img/works/15/15-01.jpg https://www.aki-inomata.com/shared/img/works/15/15-02.jpg - Project page: https://www.aki-inomata.com/works/hermit_2009/ #### Hybrid Webs — Tomás Saraceno (2008) - Type: Artwork · Organisms: Animals - Idea: Stack the building behaviours of several species in one structure and let the result be co-authored. - What it is: Spiders of different species are introduced one after another into the same frame, and each builds on the previous web, producing hybrid webs that no single species would make. The studio scans them in 3D and shows them as floating sculptures. - How it works: Solitary and social spider species weave in sequence inside rotating carbon-fibre frames; webs are later digitised with laser tomography. - Video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rjVDyxTXGAg - Images: https://studiotomassaraceno.org/files/14DEU_Kolbe_00060-1-1920x1280.jpg https://studiotomassaraceno.org/files/002-1920x1280.jpg - Project page: https://studiotomassaraceno.org/hybrid-webs/ #### Whale Music (Thousand Mile Song) — David Rothenberg (2008) - Type: Artwork · Organisms: Animals - Idea: Treat whale song as music you can join, not only a signal to decode. - What it is: David Rothenberg lowers an underwater speaker off Hawaii and improvises on clarinet with singing humpback whales, listening back through hydrophones to hear whether they answer. - How it works: Clarinet sound is sent into the sea through an underwater speaker and the whales' song is monitored and recorded with hydrophones from a small boat. - Video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=807LSbW28Po - Project page: http://www.davidrothenberg.net/ #### Whispering in the Leaves — Chris Watson (2008) - Type: Artwork · Organisms: Animals, Plants, Ecosystems - Idea: Bring an absent ecosystem into a building through its sound alone. - What it is: A multichannel sound installation that fills a glasshouse with the dawn and dusk choruses of Central and South American rainforests, first shown at AV Festival 2008 and later in the Palm House at Kew Gardens. - How it works: Rainforest recordings diffused through loudspeakers placed among tropical plants, timed to the light of the day. - Video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jxrqHwH1NVE - Project page: https://chriswatson.net #### Yuansu (元塑) — Ren Ri (2008) - Type: Artwork · Organisms: Insects - Idea: The designer controls orientation and timing; the colony controls form. - What it is: A series of beeswax sculptures built by bee colonies: Ren Ri moves and rotates the hive frames or boxes at set intervals, and the bees keep building comb in new directions. - How it works: Queen and colony are placed in wooden frames or acrylic cubes that the artist turns according to rules such as dice rolls or compass directions. - Video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sgT_4EJhi6U - Images: https://www.pearllam.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/03/21ren-ri-b-1984-yuansu-series-i-geometric-series-07-italy-2008-2009-natural-beeswax-wood-wire-73-x-57-x-5-cm.jpg https://www.pearllam.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/03/ren-ri-b1984-yuansu-series-ii6-40-6-402014-15acrylic-box-natural-beeswax-40-x-40-x-40-cm-scaled.jpg - Project page: https://www.pearllam.com/artist/ren-ri/ #### Dawn Chorus — Marcus Coates (2007) - Type: Artwork · Organisms: Animals, Human body - Idea: Slowed down, birdsong fits a human voice; sped up, humans become birds. - What it is: A 14-screen video installation of people in their bathrooms, cars and bedrooms each singing a bird's song; played back at speed, their voices sound almost exactly like a dawn chorus. - How it works: Field recordings of birds were slowed up to about 16 times, learned and sung by volunteers on film, and the video was then sped up by the same factor. - Video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zF1uihdcZmY - Images: https://a75hkzli.twic.pics/marcus-coates/images/_1200x630_crop_center-center_none/fabrica.jpg - Project page: https://marcuscoates.co.uk/projects/68-dawn-chorus #### Host — Nigel Helyer (2003) - Type: Artwork · Organisms: Insects - Idea: Use an animal's nervous system as the microphone and ask what it hears. - What it is: An audience of about 200 live crickets in cages attends a scientific lecture on insect sex; one projection shows the lecturer, the other the oscilloscope trace recorded from the auditory nerve of a cricket listening to the talk. - How it works: Electrodes on the auditory nerve of a cricket recorded its response to the lecture, shown as an oscilloscope image with sound; the lecture was projected through insect cages. - Video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9lJU5zAdOTI - Project page: https://static.weboffice.uwa.edu.au/archive/www.symbiotica.uwa.edu.au/1351970.html #### Weather Report — Chris Watson (2003) - Type: Artwork · Organisms: Ecosystems, Animals - Idea: Compress time, not space: let a place's animals and weather compose. - What it is: An album of three long compositions made from field recordings: a day in a Kenyan game reserve, a season in a Scottish glen, and the slow movement of an Icelandic glacier. - How it works: Long-duration location recordings edited into time-compressed narratives, released by Touch. - Video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uqvkmacBJv8 - Project page: https://chriswatson.net #### Pieces for Plants — Miya Masaoka (2002) - Type: Artwork · Organisms: Plants, Human body - Idea: Treat plants as co-performers whose responses shape the music. - What it is: Compositions in which houseplants are wired with biofeedback electrodes; their electrical responses to light, proximity and touch from visitors and performers are turned into sound. - How it works: Galvanic-response electrodes on leaves feed a computer that maps the plants' signal changes to synthesised sound; in later versions performers' brainwaves were added. - Video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PD1Uf5BnK78 - Images: https://miyamasaoka.com/wp-content/uploads/1999/07/w.jpg - Project page: https://artifact-archive.org/whole-archive #### Honeybee collaborations (Guest Workers) — Aganetha Dyck (1991) - Type: Artwork · Organisms: Insects - Idea: Offer an object to a colony and accept whatever they decide to build. - What it is: Dyck places everyday objects such as figurines, shoes and sports gear into beehives, and the bees slowly cover them in honeycomb over months or years. - How it works: Objects are placed in active hives, sometimes with guide marks or wax, and returned to the colony across seasons while the artist and beekeepers observe. - Video: https://vimeo.com/27487390 - Images: https://fls-a14a5228-3d0a-4d78-a717-99c3c57b4113.laravel.cloud/44285/conversions/honeycomb-bee-art-sculpture-aganetha-dyck-16-content.jpg - Project page: https://www.cbc.ca/arts/aganetha-dyck-reveals-how-she-works-with-bees-to-create-strange-and-wonderful-art-1.4597098 #### Photographic Photosynthesis (grass photographs) — Ackroyd & Harvey (1991) - Type: Artwork · Organisms: Plants - Idea: Photosynthesis is already a photographic process. - What it is: Large portraits that appear in a wall of young grass: where more light fell, the blades are greener, so the grass itself becomes the photograph, and fades as it grows and dies. - How it works: A negative image is projected for days onto grass seedlings grown in darkness; chlorophyll develops in proportion to the light, and a stay-green grass variety slows the fading. - Video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=w67UPDSKc44 - Images: https://clotmag.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/03/4.jpg https://www.ackroydandharvey.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/12/05.-Mother-and-Child-comparative-study-Artists-studio-Dorking-Adj-1-451x360.jpg - Project page: https://www.ackroydandharvey.com/celebrating-30-years-of-photographic-photosynthesis/ #### Trichoptères (Caddisfly Cases) — Hubert Duprat (1980) - Type: Artwork · Organisms: Insects - Idea: Change the materials in an animal's environment and let its instinct do the fabrication. - What it is: Caddisfly larvae, which normally build protective tubes from sand and twigs, are given only gold flakes, pearls and semi-precious stones, and they build jewel-like cases from them. - How it works: Larvae are removed from their original cases and placed in aquariums containing only gold and stones, which they bind with their own silk. - Video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yHqPaDMILHU - Project page: https://www.mam.paris.fr/fr/expositions/exposition-hubert-duprat #### Music of the Plants — Damanhur (1976) - Type: Product & platform · Organisms: Plants - Idea: Give plants a voice in real time, then ask whether they respond to how they are heard. - What it is: Researchers at the Damanhur community built devices that turn a plant's electrical changes into melodies, and hold concerts in which plants and trees "play" alongside musicians. - How it works: Electrodes on a leaf and in the soil measure variations in electrical resistance, which the device converts into MIDI notes; Damanhur claims plants learn to modulate the sound, a claim not scientifically established. - Video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=M-SgriGwu6c - Images: https://www.damanhur.foundation/wp-content/uploads/Bamboo.png - Project page: https://www.damanhur.foundation/project/the-music-of-the-plants/ ### Theory & Methods Frameworks, methods and key papers of more-than-human and posthuman design research. #### Are You Blocking Nonhuman Leadership? Five Questions to Find Out — Stanislav Roudavski (2026) - Type: Paper · Organisms: Animals, Plants, Ecosystems - Idea: Let nonhuman evidence lead design decisions, and check where your process blocks it. - What it is: Five diagnostic questions that help practitioners see where their design process sidelines evidence from nonhuman behaviours, structures and histories. - How it works: A short exploratory paper that distils lessons from habitat-design projects into a checklist for participatory design. - Paper: https://doi.org/10.1145/3789492.3796416 (PDC 2026) #### Colonial Performances in More-than-Human Design — Serina Tarkhanian (2026) - Type: Paper · Organisms: Ecosystems - Idea: More-than-human design must also decolonise, or it risks repeating the harms it criticises. - What it is: Drawing on Indigenous and decolonial critiques of posthumanism, the author analyses her own and others' more-than-human design work to show how the field can repeat colonial patterns. - How it works: Critical self-analysis of design projects through decolonial theory. - Paper: https://doi.org/10.1080/17547075.2026.2648918 (Design and Culture 2026) - Project page: https://doi.org/10.1080/17547075.2026.2648918 #### Exploring the Pluralities of More-than-Human Biographies Through Speculative Maps — Ron Wakkary, Tiffany Wun (2026) - Type: Paper · Organisms: Ecosystems - Idea: A designed thing has many lives beyond the one its designer imagined. - What it is: A pictorial that draws speculative maps of the many possible 'biographies' of a designed thing, the wi-fi-no-wi-fi, including its materials, assemblages and multispecies perspectives. - How it works: Workshops, empirical study and speculation produce three speculative maps of one artifact's biographies. - Paper: https://doi.org/10.1145/3800645.3812827 (DIS 2026) #### In vegetal terms — Clee Zhuo Wang (2026) - Type: Paper · Organisms: Plants - Idea: Design with plants on plant time. - What it is: Proposes six temporal lenses for human-plant interaction design: rhythm, horizon, continuity, duration, genealogy and incompleteness. - How it works: Synthesis of interdisciplinary literature on plant life, connected to human-plant interaction design examples. - Paper: https://doi.org/10.21606/drs.2026.1325 (DRS 2026) - Project page: https://doi.org/10.21606/drs.2026.1325 #### Incommensurable durations: Fungal time and the limits of attunement in multispecies design — Nina Williams (2026) - Type: Paper · Organisms: Fungi - Idea: Multispecies design must accept times it cannot fully share. - What it is: Through encounters with fungal growth, the paper argues that organisms' timeframes are incommensurable with human and capitalist time, which limits how far designers can 'attune'. - How it works: Reflects on a set of experiments with fungi and their growth rhythms. - Paper: https://doi.org/10.21606/drs.2026.1709 (DRS 2026) #### Noticing Where the Forest Folds — Fredrik Bernerstedt (2026) - Type: Paper · Organisms: Fungi, Ecosystems - Idea: Foraging trains the attention that more-than-human design needs. - What it is: Reframes mushroom foraging as a more-than-human design method: two in-the-wild workshops took designers into the forest to notice fungi and their habitats directly. - How it works: In-the-wild design workshops built around mushroom picking in northern forests. - Paper: https://doi.org/10.1145/3772363.3798654 (CHI EA 2026) - Project page: https://doi.org/10.1145/3772363.3798654 #### Open Weaving: Decentering Practice in More-than-Human Relations — Jian Yu, Ron Wakkary (2026) - Type: Paper · Organisms: Human body, Plants - Idea: Decentering is a practice to rehearse with materials, not only a theory to adopt. - What it is: An autoethnography of open weaving with a reflective workbook, showing how the loom, fibres and other nonhumans participate in making and how hard it is for a designer to step back. - How it works: The first author weaves without a fixed plan and records reflections, which are analysed for nonhuman creativity and friction. - Paper: https://doi.org/10.1145/3803784.3816832 (C&C 2026) #### The parliament of things: Shape-changing materials as amplifiers of interspecies relation design — Yi Sui (2026) - Type: Paper · Organisms: Ecosystems - Idea: Responsive materials can speak for other species in a shared parliament. - What it is: Ten design projects that use shape-changing and responsive materials are analysed as 'material diplomats' that mediate between species, technologies and environments. - How it works: Multiple-case study using a five-dimensional framework, drawing on Latour's Parliament of Things. - Paper: https://doi.org/10.21606/drs.2026.2654 (DRS 2026) #### The spectrum of non-human agency: Rethinking participation in multispecies placemaking — Giulia Gualtieri (2026) - Type: Paper · Organisms: Ecosystems, Plants, Animals - Idea: Non-human participation can be planned step by step, like a participation ladder. - What it is: The Spectrum of Non-Human Agency is a framework that places plants, animals and ecosystems at different levels of participation across the phases of an urban design process. - How it works: Built from a qualitative analysis of 38 nature-inclusive design cases and four in-depth case studies. - Paper: https://doi.org/10.1016/j.destud.2026.101422 (Design Studies 2026) - Images: https://ars.els-cdn.com/content/image/1-s2.0-S0142694X2600044X-ga1_lrg.jpg #### Three-Eyed Seeing — Korey Wetherell (2026) - Type: Paper · Organisms: Insects, Ecosystems - Idea: Hold several ways of knowing at once without merging them. - What it is: A framework for regenerative ecological design that puts Western empirical methods, Indigenous relational knowledge and futures thinking into accountable dialogue, grounded in a field encounter with pollinators at Kaʻena Point, Hawaiʻi. - How it works: Autoethnographic field encounter combined with systems-oriented design research. - Paper: https://doi.org/10.21606/drs.2026.1880 (DRS 2026) - Project page: https://doi.org/10.21606/drs.2026.1880 #### Towards More-than-Human Inclusion — Jorge Luis Siesquén Deza (2026) - Type: Paper · Organisms: Ecosystems - Idea: Inclusion of nonhumans starts with cultivated attentiveness. - What it is: Extends inclusive design to nonhuman stakeholders and finds, through interviews and case studies, that designers are open to it but lack practices of attentiveness rather than tools. - How it works: Research-through-design combining literature review, semi-structured interviews and case studies, leading to attentiveness artefacts. - Paper: https://doi.org/10.21606/drs.2026.2198 (DRS 2026) - Project page: https://doi.org/10.21606/drs.2026.2198 #### Towards Positional Citizenship: designing for the More-than-Human Political — Vanessa Monna (2026) - Type: Paper · Organisms: Ecosystems, Human body - Idea: Citizenship can be rethought as relational co-presence rather than a human privilege. - What it is: The paper introduces Positional Citizenship, a notion of citizenship based on Plessner's positionality, so that more-than-human agents shaping collective life can take part in the political. - How it works: A conceptual argument grounded in Latour and Plessner and applied to urban design situations. - Paper: https://doi.org/10.21606/drs.2026.2605 (DRS 2026) #### A Posthuman Vocabulary — Çağdaş Dedeoğlu (2025) - Type: Paper · Organisms: Ecosystems, Human body - Idea: A shared vocabulary helps designers act on posthuman theory. - What it is: Surveys 151 design papers in ACM venues up to 2024 to see how posthumanism is put into practice, and condenses the findings into a posthuman vocabulary of five guiding principles. - How it works: Systematic literature survey of ACM computing and design papers. - Paper: https://doi.org/10.1145/3715335.3735487 (COMPASS 2025) - Project page: https://doi.org/10.1145/3715335.3735487 #### Aesthetics in Designing with the Living — Yuta Ikeya, Bahareh Barati, Stephan Wensveen (2025) - Type: Paper · Organisms: Bacteria & microbes, Plants, Insects - Idea: Aesthetics in designing with the living is not only how an artefact looks to people: it also covers how other beings sense, how we relate to them, and what ethical and political questions the work raises. - What it is: A two-part systematic review: it first distils three orientations of 'critical aesthetics' from 39 texts on more-than-human, posthuman and multispecies aesthetics, then codes 83 HCI and design artefacts made with living organisms against them. - How it works: Study I reviewed Google Scholar literature on critical aesthetics; Study II screened 4,252 ACM DL, DRS and IJDesign articles down to 88 papers and 83 artefact sets, coded for mediation of nonhuman senses (C1), relational engagement (C2) and ethico-political provocation (C3). - Paper: https://doi.org/10.1145/3706598.3713343 (CHI 2025) - Images: https://dl.acm.org/cms/10.1145/3706598.3713343/asset/ecec7548-e785-42f9-82ba-13ffbb2ca2e1/assets/images/large/chi25-260-fig10.jpg https://dl.acm.org/cms/10.1145/3706598.3713343/asset/5ecef5e0-e71f-4b1a-89ae-ce4a2c11b9c6/assets/images/large/chi25-260-fig6.jpg - Project page: https://dl.acm.org/doi/full/10.1145/3706598.3713343 #### Backyard Practices: A Liminal Approach to Designing in More-than-Human Worlds — Ron Wakkary, Doenja Oogjes (2025) - Type: Paper · Organisms: Plants, Insects, Ecosystems - Idea: To design with other species, you need to live next to them for a long time. - What it is: Design researchers moved their work from labs into their own yards and balconies; a collaborative autoethnography describes these 'backyard practices' of designing with plants and animals over time. - How it works: Collaborative autoethnography across several researchers' home sites identifies features (duration, liminality, proximity) and commitments of the practice. - Paper: https://doi.org/10.1145/3706598.3713291 (CHI 2025) #### Co-designing with the abject: integrating Animal Writing to explore more-than-human interactions — Yuyao Lin (2025) - Type: Paper · Organisms: Animals, Insects - Idea: Stop designing only for charismatic species; work with the ones we recoil from. - What it is: A method that uses Animal Writing and autoethnography to design with species that provoke disgust, treating abjection as a productive force rather than an obstacle. - How it works: Integrates Animal Writing with autoethnography into a research-through-design cycle. - Paper: https://doi.org/10.1080/15710882.2025.2563061 (CoDesign 2025) #### Confucian Ritual Space as More-Than-Human Design — Ning Gao (2025) - Type: Paper · Organisms: Ecosystems - Idea: Non-anthropocentric design has long traditions outside Western theory. - What it is: Reads the zaojing, the coffered ceiling in the Forbidden City, as more-than-human design that builds cosmic forces, mythical beings and natural elements into architecture. - How it works: Historical and theoretical analysis bridging Confucian cosmology and posthumanist design theory. - Paper: https://doi.org/10.21606/iasdr.2025.409 (IASDR 2025) - Project page: https://doi.org/10.21606/iasdr.2025.409 #### Entangled Weathers: A Noticing Tactic — Claudia Núñez-Pacheco (2025) - Type: Paper · Organisms: Ecosystems, Human body - Idea: Treat the weather inside and outside the body as one entangled field to notice. - What it is: A pictorial introducing entangled weathers, a tactic for noticing how inner states and outside weather overlap, illustrated with stories from the author's design practice. - How it works: Builds on the feminist concept of weathering and offers five practices: measuring and mapping, space-time reflection, weathering narratives, metaphorising and surrendering. - Paper: https://doi.org/10.1145/3698061.3726955 (C&C 2025) #### Labour Provenance — Yuning Chen, Larissa Pschetz (2025) - Type: Paper · Organisms: Bacteria & microbes, Cells & tissue, Animals - Idea: "Sustainable" biodesign hides a long supply chain of living labour; make it visible. - What it is: A CHI 2025 paper that traces all the organisms behind one biodesign lab experiment, from engineered bacteria to the animals whose bodies supply lab reagents, and maps them as five types of more-than-human labourers. - How it works: Workshop method and an analytical framework grounded in labour theory, applied to a synthetic biology experiment. - Paper: https://doi.org/10.1145/3706598.3713272 (CHI 2025) #### Rethinking Representation in Design: Towards Constructing Parameters for Representation Tools in More-than-Human Design — Berre Su Demir, Aykut Coşkun (2025) - Type: Paper · Organisms: Plants, Animals - Idea: Personas for bees and trees need different design rules than personas for people. - What it is: A review of 40 design studies that use personas and other tools to represent nonhumans, identifying six parameters (such as transferability and depth of representation) for building such tools. - How it works: Systematic review of representation tools in more-than-human design, coding represented nonhumans, modalities and contexts. - Paper: https://doi.org/10.1145/3715336.3735680 (DIS 2025) #### Show Me Your More-Than-Human — Arne Berger (2025) - Type: Paper · Organisms: Ecosystems, Plants, Animals - Idea: Ask people to show, not define, what more-than-human means to them. - What it is: A pictorial of photographic vignettes from walking interviews in which researchers showed the author 'their' more-than-human: boundaries, hidden or forbidden entities, kinships and hybrids. - How it works: Walking interviews with researchers documented as photographs and short texts. - Paper: https://doi.org/10.1145/3715336.3735415 (DIS 2025) - Project page: https://doi.org/10.1145/3715336.3735415 #### The Ladder of Multispecies Participation: Moving Towards a More Convivial Urban Planning — Anniken Førde (2025) - Type: Paper · Organisms: Animals, Plants, Ecosystems - Idea: Grade how far a planning process really lets other species take part. - What it is: The paper adapts Arnstein's ladder of citizen participation into a ladder of multispecies participation for discussing how urban planning can include species with whom we share no language. - How it works: A conceptual tool built on Arnstein's model and multispecies studies, discussed with urban planning cases. - Paper: https://doi.org/10.18261/njus.6.1.1 (Nordic Journal of Urban Studies 2025) #### Articulating Felt Senses for More-Than-Human Design: A Viewpoint for Noticing — Claudia Núñez-Pacheco (2024) - Type: Paper · Organisms: Human body - Idea: Careful description of bodily felt sense makes relations with nonhumans noticeable. - What it is: Two researchers used micro-phenomenological interviews to describe their own felt senses while using a telepresence robot and smartphone photography, and propose this as a way of noticing more-than-human relations. - How it works: Micro-phenomenological interviews elicit pre-reflective bodily experience, which is then analysed for relational qualities. - Paper: https://doi.org/10.1145/3643834.3661554 (DIS 2024) - Images: https://figures.semanticscholar.org/df961775586e2edf641f587ec561e987f9d241c4/8-Figure2-1.png #### Assemblage-based stakeholder analysis in design: a conceptual framework through the lenses of post-anthropocentrism — Hoyoung Youn (2024) - Type: Paper · Organisms: Ecosystems, Human body - Idea: A stakeholder is never only a person; map the assemblage around them. - What it is: The paper proposes assemblage-based stakeholder analysis, in which each stakeholder is an assemblage of human and nonhuman actors, and applies it to a case to reveal nonhumans missed by standard stakeholder maps. - How it works: Framework built on actor-network theory and object-oriented ontology, tested on an empirical study. - Paper: https://doi.org/10.1080/15710882.2024.2358966 (CoDesign 2024) - Project page: https://doi.org/10.1080/15710882.2024.2358966 #### Becoming microbes: An approach to cultivating microbial sensibilities in biodesign — Jiho Kim, Raphael Kim, Elvin Karana (2024) - Type: Paper · Organisms: Bacteria & microbes - Idea: Designing with microbes starts with learning to sense like them. - What it is: The paper proposes 'becoming microbes', a philosophically grounded approach for biodesigners to cultivate sensibilities for microbial temporalities, scales and behaviours. - How it works: Develops the concept from non-anthropocentric philosophy and illustrates it with biodesign practices in the lab. - Paper: https://doi.org/10.21606/drs.2024.950 (DRS 2024) #### Beyond Human Interaction: A Contextual Review of Conversational Agents to Represent More-Than-Human Perspectives — Adrian Wong (2024) - Type: Paper · Organisms: Animals, Plants, Ecosystems - Idea: Chatbots can amplify nonhuman voices, if designed with care about who speaks. - What it is: A review of how conversational agents could represent animals, native flora and fauna and natural systems in HCI, translating ecological data into voices people can engage with. - How it works: A contextual literature review of conversational agents and more-than-human HCI. - Paper: https://doi.org/10.1145/3726986.3727047 (OzCHI 2024) #### Biodegradation as More-than-Human Unmaking — Fiona Bell, Nadia Campo Woytuk, Marie Louise Juul Søndergaard, Mirela Alistar (2024) - Type: Paper · Organisms: Bacteria & microbes, Fungi, Ecosystems - Idea: Designing the end of an object is a collaboration with decomposers. - What it is: A journal paper that frames biodegradation as unmaking done together with microbes, fungi and soil, reading the ReClaym and Biomenstrual projects through each other. - How it works: Diffractive reading of two research-through-design projects yields six themes and suggestions for designing with biodegradation. - Paper: https://doi.org/10.1145/3685526 (TOCHI 2024) #### Caring through — Gizem Oktay, Bahareh Barati, Ron Wakkary (2024) - Type: Paper · Organisms: Fungi, Plants, Ecosystems - Idea: Care with living materials is a practice carried through time, not a single act. - What it is: Proposes a typology of care in more-than-human design (caring for, about and through) based on how care engages time and labour, and adds 'caring through' for care that unfolds over nonhuman timescales. - How it works: Conceptual work grounded in design practice with living and once-living materials. - Paper: https://doi.org/10.1145/3686169.3686211 (Halfway to the Future 2024) - Project page: https://doi.org/10.1145/3686169.3686211 #### Creating with More-than-Humans — Jiabao Li (2024) - Type: Paper · Organisms: Animals, Ecosystems - Idea: Co-creation with other species reshapes what we count as agency, intelligence and creativity. - What it is: A paper reflecting on the artist's co-creation with mice, bats, squid and elephants, and on the ethics and practical methods of making art with and for nonhuman beings. - How it works: Reflective practice paper drawing on a portfolio of installations, XR and performances. - Paper: https://doi.org/10.1145/3686169.3686191 (Halfway to the Future 2024) - Images: https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/58688c8a6a496327e937e35b/12fc6db1-72e8-4935-b468-94ffbd3a11c6/01+Bat+Bridge+small.jpg https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/58688c8a6a496327e937e35b/70159a8b-9fd0-412d-bea1-c9de87b3d004/jiabao+li+squeeker+mouse+coach.jpg #### Design for Temporal Cohabitation — Larissa Pschetz (2024) - Type: Paper · Organisms: Animals, Plants, Ecosystems - Idea: Dominant clock time is designed and imposed; design can take responsibility for how it affects other species. - What it is: A CHI 2024 paper, with Keili Koppel and Michelle Bastian, that proposes designing for the different times of humans and other species together, and critiques the split between "human" and "natural" time. - How it works: Critical essay drawing on temporal theory, decolonial scholarship and examples from ecological design. - Paper: https://doi.org/10.1145/3613905.3644068 (CHI EA 2024) #### Designing Temporal Ecologies: Reframing Multispecies Temporalities Through Design — Larissa Pschetz (2024) - Type: Paper · Organisms: Plants, Animals, Ecosystems - Idea: Biodiversity loss is also a problem of mismatched times; design can re-align them. - What it is: Using design examples from an interdisciplinary workshop, the paper shows how design can reconnect human and other-species timescales and reduce temporal mismatches that drive biodiversity loss. - How it works: Applies the Temporal Design framework to workshop outputs about phenology, seasons and multispecies rhythms. - Paper: https://doi.org/10.21606/drs.2024.1068 (DRS 2024) #### Gaia's Web: How Digital Environmentalism Can Combat Climate Change, Restore Biodiversity, Cultivate Empathy, and Regenerate the Earth — Karen Bakker (2024) - Type: Book & essay · Organisms: Ecosystems - Idea: A planetary sensing network is a political design: decide who it serves before you build it. - What it is: Karen Bakker's last book maps 'digital environmentalism', from sensor networks and satellite tracking to AI, and asks how planetary-scale sensing could serve nature rather than control it. - How it works: A critical survey of environmental monitoring technologies and governance models. - Images: https://covers.openlibrary.org/b/id/14672307-L.jpg - Project page: https://karenbakker.org #### More-than-Human Participatory Approaches for Design: Method and Function in Making Relations — Ann Light (2024) - Type: Paper · Organisms: Ecosystems, Plants, Animals - Idea: Ask what a more-than-human method is for, not only how it represents nonhumans. - What it is: Reviews styles of more-than-human engagement in participatory design, from representing nonhumans to connecting beyond participation. It shows the tensions that appear once relational theories are turned into concrete methods. - How it works: Critical comparison of participatory design methods and cases through the idea of 'connecting beyond participation'. - Paper: https://doi.org/10.1145/3661455.3669862 (PDC 2024) - Project page: https://doi.org/10.1145/3661455.3669862 #### More-than-Human Perspectives in Human-Computer Interaction Research: A Scoping Review — Eva Eriksson (2024) - Type: Paper · Organisms: Ecosystems, Animals, Plants - Idea: A map of what 'more-than-human' currently means in HCI and where design fits in. - What it is: A scoping review of 40 HCI papers that use more-than-human perspectives, summarising their motivations, approaches and practices. - How it works: Systematic search of the ACM Digital Library followed by thematic analysis of the final corpus. - Paper: https://doi.org/10.1145/3679318.3685408 (NordiCHI 2024) - Project page: https://doi.org/10.1145/3679318.3685408 #### More-than-human Design and AI: Exploring the Space between Theory and Practice — Iohanna Nicenboim, Joseph Lindley, Johan Redström (2024) - Type: Paper · Organisms: Ecosystems - Idea: The gap between posthuman theory and design practice can be a place to experiment. - What it is: The authors built two generative AI tools, Oblique and MoTH, that turn more-than-human texts into design strategies, and reflect on using them. - How it works: Two ChatGPT-4-based tools generate design strategies from diverse more-than-human texts. - Paper: https://doi.org/10.21606/drs.2024.948 (DRS 2024) #### One Thousand Years of Infrastructuring Katsuobushi — Edward Masui (2024) - Type: Paper · Organisms: Fungi, Animals - Idea: Infrastructure is built from aligned temporalities of fish, moulds and people. - What it is: Traces a millennium of katsuobushi, dried and mould-fermented bonito, to show how production, transport and local foodscapes form infrastructure that aligns human and nonhuman timescales. - How it works: Historical analysis of katsuobushi production and trade framed by infrastructuring theory from participatory design. - Paper: https://doi.org/10.1145/3661455.3669883 (PDC 2024) - Project page: https://doi.org/10.1145/3661455.3669883 #### Shroom Cards: Playful Exploration of Human Positionalities for More-than-Human Design — Çağlar Genç (2024) - Type: Paper · Organisms: Fungi - Idea: Role-play and competition can make more-than-human theory concrete for designers. - What it is: Shroom Cards is a card deck with structured, game-like activities that help design students take the roles of human and nonhuman entities and reflect on their own position. - How it works: Cards were developed from reflective design studio exercises and tested in an HCI design course. - Paper: https://doi.org/10.1145/3665463.3678784 (CHI PLAY 2024) - Video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3Elop4e9b8g #### The making(s) of more-than-human design: introduction to the special issue on more-than-human design and HCI — Elisa Giaccardi, Johan Redström, Iohanna Nicenboim (2024) - Type: Book & essay · Organisms: Ecosystems, Human body - Idea: Design now decides what counts as human; it should be grounded in more-than-human relations. - What it is: The introduction to a Human–Computer Interaction journal special issue that frames more-than-human design as a response to the limits of human-centred design and maps what the collected papers make. - How it works: An editorial essay that synthesises the special issue's papers into themes of making, agency and relationality. - Paper: https://doi.org/10.1080/07370024.2024.2353357 (HCI Journal 2024) #### The more-than-human turn in human-plant interaction design — Susan Loh, Marcus Foth (2024) - Type: Paper · Organisms: Plants - Idea: Treat the plant as a co-inhabitant, not a sensor or decoration. - What it is: A critical review of two decades of human-plant interaction studies, arguing that pot plants in HCI should move from utilitarian objects to living co-inhabitants with their own agency. - How it works: Theoretical reasoning from posthumanist HCI combined with a methodical review and meta-analysis of human-plant interaction projects. - Paper: https://doi.org/10.1016/j.ijhcs.2023.103128 (IJHCS 2024) - Images: https://ars.els-cdn.com/content/image/1-s2.0-S1071581923001374-gr2_lrg.jpg - Project page: https://doi.org/10.1016/j.ijhcs.2023.103128 #### When a tree says no: Towards a more-than-human consent notion for design — Franca López Barbera (2024) - Type: Paper · Organisms: Plants - Idea: Design that extracts from nature should ask whether nature consents. - What it is: Using the Quebracho Colorado tree of South America as a guiding example, the paper analyses consent from gender and decolonial perspectives and sketches a more-than-human notion of consent for design. - How it works: Gender and decolonial analysis of consent, grounded in the history of an exploited tree species. - Paper: https://doi.org/10.21606/drs.2024.307 (DRS 2024) - Project page: https://doi.org/10.21606/drs.2024.307 #### A planetary turn for design? Speculations on withdrawal and cohabitation — Kristine Samson, Michael Haldrup (2023) - Type: Paper · Organisms: Ecosystems - Idea: Sometimes design for the planet means stepping back and leaving space for other life. - What it is: Drawing on research into urban nature around Copenhagen, the authors outline a 'planetary turn' in design and five propositions centred on withdrawal, in-between spaces and cohabitation. - How it works: Theoretical argument grounded in fieldwork on urban nature, design and planning. - Paper: https://doi.org/10.21606/nordes.2023.81 (Nordes 2023) #### Decentering Through Design: Bridging Posthuman Theory with More-than-Human Design Practices — Iohanna Nicenboim, Doenja Oogjes, Heidi R. Biggs (2023) - Type: Paper · Organisms: Human body, Ecosystems - Idea: Designers do not only apply posthuman theory; through making they produce posthuman knowledge. - What it is: Traces the idea of decentering the human from critical posthumanism into HCI and identifies five dimensions of how designers practise it. - How it works: Review of posthuman theory and more-than-human HCI papers, synthesised into a framework. - Paper: https://doi.org/10.1080/07370024.2023.2283535 (Human-Computer Interaction (journal)) - Project page: https://doi.org/10.1080/07370024.2023.2283535 #### Design For More-Than-Human Futures: Towards Post-Anthropocentric Worlding — Martín Tironi (2023) - Type: Book & essay · Organisms: Ecosystems - Idea: More-than-human design looks different from the Global South; worlding is plural. - What it is: An edited book of essays and projects on post-anthropocentric design, with many contributions from Latin America. - How it works: Collection edited by Martín Tironi, Marcos Chilet, Carola Ureta Marín and Pablo Hermansen. - Paper: https://doi.org/10.4324/9781003319689 (Routledge 2023) - Images: https://images.routledge.com/common/jackets/crclarge/978103233/9781032334394.jpg - Project page: https://www.routledge.com/Design-For-More-Than-Human-Futures-Towards-Post-Anthropocentric-Worlding/Tironi-Chilet-Marin-Hermansen/p/book/9781032334394 #### Designing Posthuman Data: Mapping Relations Between Bodies, Land and Data — Heidi R. Biggs (2023) - Type: Paper · Organisms: Ecosystems, Human body - Idea: Environmental data is also about whose bodies and which lands it touches. - What it is: A doctoral research summary that asks how data mediates relations between bodies and land, using posthuman theory to link sustainable HCI with social justice. - How it works: Case studies and embodied orientations are used to explore posthuman framings of environmental data. - Paper: https://doi.org/10.1145/3563703.3593062 (DIS 2023) #### Doing responsibilities in entangled worlds — Verena Fuchsberger, Christopher Frauenberger (2023) - Type: Paper · Organisms: Human body - Idea: Responsibility in design is something done together by people and things. - What it is: The article reviews ideas of responsibility in philosophy and HCI and argues, using posthuman theory, that responsibility is enacted within human–technology assemblages rather than held by individual designers. - How it works: Conceptual analysis drawing on actor-network theory, agential realism and postphenomenology. - Paper: https://doi.org/10.1080/07370024.2023.2269934 (HCI Journal 2023) #### In Dialogue with the More-than-Human: Affective Prefiguration in Encounters with Others — Ann Light (2023) - Type: Book & essay · Organisms: Ecosystems, Human body - Idea: Encounters with nonhumans can be lived rehearsals of the futures we want. - What it is: An Interactions essay arguing that small, felt encounters with nonhuman others can prefigure more caring futures, much like the 'everyday utopias' of social movements. - How it works: Essay drawing on Davina Cooper's everyday utopias and Graeber and Wengrow's The Dawn of Everything. - Paper: https://doi.org/10.1145/3599956 (Interactions 2023) - Project page: https://doi.org/10.1145/3599956 #### Productive Oscillation as a strategy for doing more-than-human design research — Joseph Lindley, Paul Coulton (2023) - Type: Paper · Organisms: Human body - Idea: You do not have to abandon human-centred design; oscillating between the two views can be productive. - What it is: Proposes that researchers can move back and forth between human-centred and more-than-human framings, reflecting on a project about trust in connected systems. - How it works: Reflective analysis of workshops and artifacts from a research-through-design project on trust. - Paper: https://doi.org/10.1080/07370024.2023.2276393 (Human-Computer Interaction (journal)) - Images: https://designresearch.works/images/productive-oscillation.jpg - Project page: https://designresearch.works/blog/productive-oscillation-as-a-strategy-for-more-than-human-design-research #### The Umwelt-sketch as More-than-human Design Methodology — Bert De Roo (2023) - Type: Paper · Organisms: Animals, Plants, Ecosystems - Idea: Sketching another species' Umwelt is a practical way to decenter a design process. - What it is: A design method in which participants draw the overlapping perceptual worlds (Umwelten) of different species to find moments where the human perspective is decentered. - How it works: Builds on Jakob von Uexküll's Umwelt concept and tests visual sketching in design workshops. - Paper: https://doi.org/10.1145/3563703.3596628 (DIS 2023) - Video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5o22Yf1mxGc - Images: https://i.ytimg.com/vi/5o22Yf1mxGc/maxresdefault.jpg - Project page: https://doi.org/10.1145/3563703.3596628 #### The aesthetics of more-than-human design: speculative energy briefs for the Chthulucene — Alex Wilkie (2023) - Type: Paper · Organisms: Ecosystems, Human body - Idea: Treat design as an event that unfolds among human and nonhuman elements. - What it is: A theoretical paper that uses smart meters and household energy reduction to show how the 'design event' can include nonhuman elements, and proposes speculative energy briefs set in Haraway's Chthulucene. - How it works: Process-philosophical reading of energy-demand design, turned into speculative design briefs. - Paper: https://doi.org/10.1080/07370024.2023.2276392 (HCI Journal 2023) - Project page: https://doi.org/10.1080/07370024.2023.2276392 #### The everyday enactment of interfaces — Evert van Beek, Elisa Giaccardi, Alessandro Bozzon (2023) - Type: Paper · Organisms: Human body - Idea: An interface is what people and devices enact together when things break down. - What it is: An ethnography of 11 households living with smart-home automation that treats the home as a more-than-human setting and shows how interfaces emerge in moments of crisis and conflict. - How it works: Ethnographic fieldwork analysed through the lens of human-technology co-performance. - Paper: https://doi.org/10.1080/07370024.2023.2283536 (HCI Journal 2023) - Project page: https://doi.org/10.1080/07370024.2023.2283536 #### What the Sensor Knows: More-Than-Human Knowledge Co-Production in Wood Carving — Charlotte Nordmoen (2023) - Type: Paper · Organisms: Plants - Idea: Sensor data can tell stories about material encounters, not just numbers. - What it is: Sensors attached to wood carving tools are treated as co-investigators: their signals are read as situated traces of wood, blade and carver rather than as noisy measurements. - How it works: Qualitative reading of sensor signals from wood carving, informed by Barad's agential realism and Harman's tool-being. - Paper: https://doi.org/10.1145/3563657.3596075 (DIS 2023) - Video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n7OupBMq5bA #### ‘Breathing-with’: a design tactic for the more-than-human — Jonas Fritsch (2023) - Type: Paper · Organisms: Human body, Ecosystems - Idea: Breath is a shared medium that can move designers from their own body to the more-than-human. - What it is: The authors analyse three of their projects about breath and breathing and propose breathing-with as a design tactic that extends bodily awareness to material, living and social bodies. - How it works: Comparative analysis of three research-through-design projects that engaged breathing bodies and air. - Paper: https://doi.org/10.1080/07370024.2023.2275760 (HCI Journal 2023) #### A Biocentric Perspective on HCI Design Research Involving Plants — Jan Fell (2022) - Type: Paper · Organisms: Plants - Idea: Research ethics should extend from humans and animals to plants. - What it is: A review of HCI research that uses plants as interfaces or sensors, read through Taylor's Respect for Nature, ending in ethical guidance for research involving living plants. - How it works: A literature review of plant-based HCI projects analysed with biocentric philosophy. - Paper: https://doi.org/10.1145/3512887 (TOCHI 2022) #### Biodesign for a culture of life: Of microbes, ethics, and design — Rachel Armstrong (2022) - Type: Book & essay · Organisms: Bacteria & microbes, Ecosystems - Idea: Our world is microbial; biodesign needs an ethics that follows from that. - What it is: An essay asking what it means to dwell and design in an irreducibly microbial world, and proposing an ethics for biodesign in which microbes are partners in ecologically beneficial design. - How it works: A theoretical argument drawing on the human, built-environment and urban microbiome, illustrated with the author's living architecture work. - Paper: https://doi.org/10.21606/drs.2022.144 (DRS 2022) #### Can Microbes Be Active Participants in Research? Developing a Methodology for Collaborating with Plastic-Eating Microbes — Aaron V. Bradshaw (2022) - Type: Book & essay · Organisms: Bacteria & microbes - Idea: Treat microbes as collaborators in solving pollution, not just as tools. - What it is: The article follows research on Ideonella sakaiensis, a bacterium that digests PET plastic, and develops a methodology for enrolling such microbes as active research participants from the start. - How it works: Environmental-humanities analysis of microbial agency in plastic biodegradation research. - Paper: https://doi.org/10.1215/22011919-9712379 (Environmental Humanities 2022) - Project page: https://doi.org/10.1215/22011919-9712379 #### Feminist Care in the Anthropocene: Packing and Unpacking Tensions in Posthumanist HCI — Cayla Key (2022) - Type: Paper · Organisms: Ecosystems, Human body - Idea: Name the tensions of caring for more-than-humans rather than smoothing them over. - What it is: Results of a workshop with 17 researchers working between care ethics and posthumanism, laying out tensions around representation, legitimacy, unseen labour and materials in more-than-human design. - How it works: Participants packed and unpacked physical 'suitcases' of tensions in a workshop, which the authors analysed thematically. - Paper: https://doi.org/10.1145/3532106.3533540 (DIS 2022) - Video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9L8b3gXBipM #### Iterating through Feeling-with Nonhuman Things — Armi Behzad, Ron Wakkary, Doenja Oogjes (2022) - Type: Paper · Organisms: Human body - Idea: Let the breakdowns of a thing decide how it should be redesigned. - What it is: When some of the Morse Things (networked bowls that talk in Morse code) broke, the designers let the breakage guide the next design iteration, proposing 'feeling-with' as a way for things to take part in design. - How it works: Reflection on four instances of breakage in the Morse Things project, framed by Wakkary's designing-with and repertoires. - Paper: https://doi.org/10.1145/3491101.3519860 (CHI EA 2022) - Video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=L4_5GgX46Hc #### Making space for material entanglements: A diffractive analysis of woodwork and the practice of making an interactive system — Charlotte Nordmoen (2022) - Type: Paper · Organisms: Plants - Idea: The material you work with is a co-author of the system you build. - What it is: The authors read four woodworking and making processes through each other to show how wood, tools and people shape an interactive system together. - How it works: A diffractive analysis based on Karen Barad's agential realism of the process of making a wooden interactive system. - Paper: https://doi.org/10.1145/3532106.3533572 (DIS 2022) - Video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JqSW1nb6NMM #### Making-with the environment through more-than-human design — Berilsu Tarcan, Ferne Edwards (2022) - Type: Paper · Organisms: Ecosystems - Idea: Design beyond 'human progress' by making with the environment. - What it is: Maps post-anthropocentric design approaches and proposes practice-based 'making-with the environment' as an alternative to human-centred design, framing more-than-human thinking as an intruder into design. - How it works: Literature review of more-than-human concepts combined with practice-based studies. - Paper: https://doi.org/10.21606/drs.2022.347 (DRS 2022) - Project page: https://doi.org/10.21606/drs.2022.347 #### Mediating the needs of human and natural nonhuman stakeholders: Towards a design methodological framework — Emilija Veselova, Julia Lohmann (2022) - Type: Paper · Organisms: Ecosystems - Idea: More-than-human design needs tools that fit ordinary design practice. - What it is: Early work from a transdisciplinary consortium toward a design framework that helps practitioners weigh the needs of humans and natural nonhumans in everyday projects. - How it works: Preliminary framework development within a consortium project, based on literature and early insights. - Paper: https://doi.org/10.21606/drs.2022.524 (DRS 2022) #### More-than-Human-Data Interaction — Michael R. Stead, Paul Coulton (2022) - Type: Paper · Organisms: Ecosystems, Human body - Idea: Data has a carbon footprint, so data interaction must consider the planet. - What it is: The paper argues that data from IoT and AI systems has an environmental cost, and proposes 'more-than-human-data interaction' to account for its effects on the planet, not only on users. - How it works: Conceptual framework combining human-data interaction with more-than-human-centred design. - Paper: https://doi.org/10.1145/3569219.3569344 (Mindtrek 2022) - Images: https://figures.semanticscholar.org/4ec5a6e84dce51c2128852e2e24e1bf61fd5a72e/8-Figure6-1.png https://figures.semanticscholar.org/4ec5a6e84dce51c2128852e2e24e1bf61fd5a72e/9-Figure8-1.png - Project page: https://doi.org/10.1145/3569219.3569344 #### More-than-human Concepts, Methodologies, and Practices in HCI — Aykut Coşkun, Nazli Cila, Iohanna Nicenboim, Christopher Frauenberger, Ron Wakkary, Clara Mancini, Elisa Giaccardi (2022) - Type: Paper · Organisms: Ecosystems, Animals, Human body - Idea: More-than-human HCI is a shared field across animal, thing and ecological research. - What it is: A CHI workshop that brought together researchers working with animals, things, AI and ecosystems to map shared concepts and methods of more-than-human HCI. - How it works: Workshop with position papers and group mapping of concepts, methods and practices. - Paper: https://doi.org/10.1145/3491101.3516503 (CHI 2022 Extended Abstracts) - Video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CQDXt7Ph7PE - Project page: https://doi.org/10.1145/3491101.3516503 #### More-than-human fluid speculations — Paulina Yurman (2022) - Type: Paper · Organisms: Human body - Idea: Let the material draw back: fluids co-author what we know. - What it is: Short drawing experiments that use bodily fluids and related liquids both as drawing materials and as subjects, prompting reflection on how knowledge is partial and shaped by nonhuman material agencies. - How it works: Practice-based drawing experiments read through posthumanist theories of material agency. - Paper: https://doi.org/10.21606/drs.2022.418 (DRS 2022) - Project page: https://doi.org/10.21606/drs.2022.418 #### Technological Approach to Mind Everywhere (TAME): an experimentally-grounded framework for understanding diverse bodies and minds — Michael Levin (2022) - Type: Paper · Organisms: Cells & tissue, Animals - Idea: Ask not whether something has a mind, but how large a goal it can pursue and how we can talk to it. - What it is: A theoretical framework that treats cognition as a continuum across cells, tissues, organisms, swarms and hybrids such as Xenobots and cyborgs, judged by what goals a system can pursue. - How it works: Draws on regeneration, bioelectricity and biohybrid experiments to define a scale of 'cognitive light cones' and experimental tests for agency in any substrate. - Paper: https://doi.org/10.3389/fnsys.2022.768201 (Frontiers in Systems Neuroscience) - Video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7FGM33sz25k - Images: https://www.frontiersin.org/api/ipx/w=1200&f=png/https://www.frontiersin.org/files/Articles/768201/fnsys-16-768201-HTML-r1/image_m/fnsys-16-768201-g001.jpg - Project page: https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fnsys.2022.768201/full #### Two Years or More of Co-speculation: Polylogues of Philosophers, Designers, and a Tilting Bowl — Ron Wakkary, Doenja Oogjes (2022) - Type: Paper · Organisms: Human body - Idea: Long-term co-speculation with an odd artifact can generate theory about how we live with things. - What it is: A multi-year conversation among designers, philosophers and the Tilting Bowl that proposes new relations with technological things, including non-anthropocentric care. - How it works: Extends material speculation into 'polylogues': repeated conversations with philosophers who lived with the bowl, analysed together with the artifact's own record. - Paper: https://doi.org/10.1145/3514235 (ACM TOCHI 2022) - Video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=R2aM8ChhSCo - Images: https://i.ytimg.com/vi/R2aM8ChhSCo/maxresdefault.jpg - Project page: http://eds.siat.sfu.ca/?eds_project=tilting-bowl #### Ways of Being: Animals, Plants, Machines: The Search for a Planetary Intelligence — James Bridle (2022) - Type: Book & essay · Organisms: Animals, Plants, Slime mould - Idea: Intelligence is plural and ecological; AI is one more kind among many. - What it is: Bridle surveys the intelligence of octopuses, plants, slime moulds and ecosystems and argues that computing should learn from, and make room for, these other ways of being. - How it works: Essay combining science reporting, computing history and art projects. - Images: https://covers.openlibrary.org/b/id/14435859-L.jpg #### Weaving Stories: Toward Repertoires for Designing Things — Doenja Oogjes, Ron Wakkary (2022) - Type: Paper · Organisms: Human body - Idea: Designers can adopt concrete repertoires, such as noticing and describing the landscape, to let nonhumans take part in design. - What it is: The first author accounts for her own weaving through methods from outside HCI to bring the creative part of looms, yarn and software into design research writing. - How it works: First-person weaving practice documented through landscape description, noticing and translation, then reflected on with posthuman theory. - Paper: https://doi.org/10.1145/3491102.3501901 (CHI 2022) - Video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=W41U-1YB4QI - Images: https://i.ytimg.com/vi/W41U-1YB4QI/maxresdefault.jpg - Project page: https://doi.org/10.1145/3491102.3501901 #### Finding the Mother Tree: Discovering the Wisdom of the Forest — Suzanne Simard (2021) - Type: Book & essay · Organisms: Plants, Fungi, Ecosystems - Idea: A forest is a cooperative network, and managing it means caring for its hubs. - What it is: A memoir and science book in which Simard tells how her experiments showed that trees exchange carbon and signals through mycorrhizal networks, and that old "mother trees" support younger ones. - How it works: Decades of field experiments with isotope labelling of carbon between trees, told as personal narrative. - Images: https://covers.openlibrary.org/b/id/10525226-L.jpg #### Things We Could Design: For More Than Human-Centered Worlds — Ron Wakkary (2021) - Type: Book & essay · Organisms: Ecosystems, Human body - Idea: Design with humility and cohabitation: treat things, materials and species as participants, not resources. - What it is: A book arguing that human-centred design is part of the ecological problem and laying out a posthumanist design practice in which humans share centre stage with nonhumans. - How it works: Draws on posthumanist philosophy and a decade of the author's research-through-design projects to define concepts such as designer-as-assemblage and repertoires. - Paper: https://doi.org/10.7551/mitpress/13649.001.0001 (MIT Press 2021) - Video: https://vimeo.com/512886973 - Images: https://covers.openlibrary.org/b/isbn/9780262542999-L.jpg?default=false - Project page: https://mitpress.mit.edu/9780262542999/things-we-could-design/ #### Tracing Conceptions of the Body in HCI: From User to More-Than-Human — Sarah Homewood (2021) - Type: Paper · Organisms: Human body - Idea: The body in HCI is not a closed human unit; it is entangled with microbes, data and environments. - What it is: A survey that traces how HCI has understood the body, from 'user' to performative, sensing, datafied and intersectional bodies and finally to more-than-human bodies. - How it works: Literature survey and critique of body-centred HCI research, ending with recommendations. - Paper: https://doi.org/10.1145/3411764.3445656 (CHI 2021) - Video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=g4Nrd5mv_Tk #### Wanting To Live Here — Jeffrey Bardzell, Shaowen Bardzell, Ann Light (2021) - Type: Paper · Organisms: Plants, Ecosystems - Idea: Look for post-anthropocentric design in communities already living it, however imperfectly. - What it is: A CHI paper based on fieldwork at an experimental eco-farming community, reading its practices and artefacts as examples of design after anthropocentric functionalism. - How it works: Ethnography and design criticism of farming practices, community building and local repair. - Paper: https://doi.org/10.1145/3411764.3445167 (CHI 2021) #### Entangled Life: How Fungi Make Our Worlds, Change Our Minds & Shape Our Futures — Merlin Sheldrake (2020) - Type: Book & essay · Organisms: Fungi, Plants, Ecosystems - Idea: Fungi show that life is made of relationships more than individuals. - What it is: A book about the fungal kingdom, from mycorrhizal networks and lichens to yeasts and psychedelics, that uses fungi to question ideas of individuality and intelligence. - How it works: Field research, lab science and personal experiment written for a general audience. - Images: https://covers.openlibrary.org/b/id/10152882-L.jpg - Project page: https://www.merlinsheldrake.com/entangled-life #### Expanding Participation to Design with More-Than-Human Concerns — Yoko Akama, Ann Light (2020) - Type: Paper · Organisms: Ecosystems, Plants, Animals - Idea: Participatory design can extend its circle of participants beyond people. - What it is: A PDC paper that asks what participation could mean when plants, animals, rocks, rivers and spirits take part in shaping futures, bringing feminist and Japanese relational philosophy into participatory design. - How it works: Theoretical dialogue between feminist technoscience and Japanese concepts of relationality, with examples from the authors' practice (with Tomomi Kamihira). - Paper: https://doi.org/10.1145/3385010.3385016 (PDC 2020) #### Feral Atlas: The More-Than-Human Anthropocene — Anna Lowenhaupt Tsing, Feifei Zhou (2020) - Type: Book & essay · Organisms: Ecosystems, Animals, Bacteria & microbes - Idea: Map the Anthropocene through nonhuman stories that escape human plans. - What it is: A digital, open-access atlas edited by Anna Tsing, Jennifer Deger, Alder Keleman Saxena and Feifei Zhou, with 79 field reports on the 'feral' ecologies that grow around human infrastructure, from pathogens to invasive species. - How it works: Illustrated interactive web publication linking field reports by scientists, humanists and artists through infrastructure types. - Paper: https://doi.org/10.21627/2020fa (Stanford University Press) - Video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vVMrLLLU630 - Images: https://feralatlas.org/build/sup/assets/img/jpg/fa.jpg - Project page: https://feralatlas.org/ #### More-Than-Human Design and AI: In Conversation with Agents — Iohanna Nicenboim, Elisa Giaccardi, Johan Redström (2020) - Type: Paper · Organisms: Human body - Idea: Treat conversational agents as more-than-human participants, not as neutral assistants. - What it is: A workshop, run in sessions across several world regions, in which participants studied smart speakers and other AI agents from a more-than-human perspective using thing ethnography and material speculation. - How it works: Workshop activities with voice assistants placed in homes, combined with speculative making and collective reflection. - Paper: https://doi.org/10.1145/3393914.3395912 (DIS 2020 Companion) - Video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CJKwKQG_heI - Images: https://payload.cargocollective.com/1/4/137851/14306494/IMG_5103_670.jpg https://payload.cargocollective.com/1/4/137851/14306494/prt_1669881272_2x.gif - Project page: https://iohanna.com/More-than-human-AI #### Multispecies Cohabitation and Future Design — Stanislav Roudavski (2020) - Type: Paper · Organisms: Animals, Plants, Ecosystems - Idea: Nonhuman lifeforms can be design clients, not just context. - What it is: A position paper arguing that designers should treat birds, bats, trees and other lifeforms as informants, co-designers, clients and users, with emancipatory multispecies cohabitation as the goal. - How it works: Translates scholarship in ethics, politics and aesthetics into design terms, drawing on habitat projects for birds, bats and trees. - Paper: https://doi.org/10.21606/drs.2020.402 (DRS 2020) #### Technology and More-Than-Human Design — Elisa Giaccardi, Johan Redström (2020) - Type: Paper · Organisms: Human body, Ecosystems - Idea: Human-centred design is not enough for technologies that act, learn and relate on their own. - What it is: An essay asking what happens when human-centred design can no longer give form to data technologies such as IoT and AI, and pointing to more-than-human design as an alternative. - How it works: Conceptual argument drawing on philosophy of technology and the authors' design research programmes. - Paper: https://doi.org/10.1162/desi_a_00612 (Design Issues 2020) - Video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CIjaBeN-et8 - Project page: https://direct.mit.edu/desi/article/36/4/33/94540/Technology-and-More-Than-Human-Design #### Towards More-than-Human Heritage — Stanislav Roudavski (2020) - Type: Paper · Organisms: Plants, Animals - Idea: Heritage preservation should include what other species inherit. - What it is: An essay, with Julian Rutten, arguing that tree hollows and other habitat features are heritage for the birds, bats and other animals who use and pass them on, not only for people. - How it works: Theoretical argument illustrated with arboreal habitats and artificial replacement habitats. - Paper: https://doi.org/10.1186/s43238-020-00003-9 (Built Heritage 2020) - Images: https://media.springernature.com/m685/springer-static/image/art%3A10.1186%2Fs43238-020-00003-9/MediaObjects/43238_2020_3_Fig1_HTML.png #### Entanglement HCI The Next Wave? — Christopher Frauenberger (2019) - Type: Paper · Organisms: Human body - Idea: Humans and technologies make each other; HCI should design for that entanglement. - What it is: Argues that our entanglement with AI, neuro-implants and cyber-physical systems calls for a new HCI paradigm built on relational ontologies. - How it works: Reviews actor-network theory, postphenomenology, object-oriented ontology and agential realism and their uptake in HCI. - Paper: https://doi.org/10.1145/3364998 (ACM TOCHI 2019) - Video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kXXsQvloZfU - Project page: https://frauenberger.name/research/entanglement-hci #### More-Than Human Centred Design: Considering Other Things — Paul Coulton, Joseph Lindley (2019) - Type: Paper · Organisms: Human body, Ecosystems - Idea: Human-centred design hides the agency of things; more-than-human centred design brings it into view. - What it is: Argues that networked things such as IoT devices have their own agency and that design must consider these other things, not only human users. - How it works: Uses object-oriented ontology and design fiction examples to build the argument. - Paper: https://doi.org/10.1080/14606925.2019.1614320 (The Design Journal 2019) - Video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LlPmeirPep4 - Images: https://i.ytimg.com/vi/LlPmeirPep4/maxresdefault.jpg - Project page: https://designresearch.works/blog/designing-technology-for-more-than-human-futures-book-chapter #### On Critical Activism and Fungal Revolts (Calling for a More-than-Human Politics) — Superflux (2019) - Type: Book & essay · Organisms: Fungi, Ecosystems - Idea: Human-centred design is part of the problem; widen who design serves. - What it is: A talk by Anab Jain at the Tentacular Festival in Madrid arguing that design must move from human-centred to more-than-human-centred and take up a more-than-human politics. - How it works: Lecture drawing on Superflux projects such as Mitigation of Shock, with an edited transcript published by the studio. - Video: https://vimeo.com/395931818 - Images: https://superflux.in/wp-content/uploads/2022/03/More-than-Human-Web-feature.jpg - Project page: https://superflux.in/index.php/work/calling-for-a-more-than-human-politics-a-talk-by-anab-jain-at-tentacular-festival-november-2019/ #### Tools for Multispecies Futures — Donna Haraway (2019) - Type: Book & essay · Organisms: DNA & molecules, Ecosystems - Idea: Biotechnology needs tools shaped by multispecies care, not only by engineering control. - What it is: A published conversation between feminist theorist Donna Haraway and synthetic biologist Drew Endy about engineered biology and what it would take to build tools for living well with other species. - How it works: Edited dialogue between a theorist and a synthetic biologist, published in MIT's Journal of Design and Science. - Paper: https://doi.org/10.21428/7808da6b.05eca6f1 (Journal of Design and Science 2019) - Project page: https://doi.org/10.21428/7808da6b.05eca6f1 #### Designs for the Pluriverse: Radical Interdependence, Autonomy, and the Making of Worlds — Arturo Escobar (2018) - Type: Book & essay · Organisms: Ecosystems - Idea: Design can serve many worlds and the radical interdependence of all beings, not one modern world. - What it is: A book that proposes autonomous, place-based design rooted in relational ontologies and in Indigenous and Afro-descendant struggles in Latin America. - How it works: Theoretical synthesis of ontological design, political ecology and transition discourses. - Paper: https://doi.org/10.1215/9780822371816 (Duke University Press 2018) - Video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8Ouy7aN6XPs - Images: https://assets-us-01.kc-usercontent.com/f7ca9afb-82c2-002a-a423-84e111d5b498/1d132b7d-fc65-4ccc-93a9-bcedfd3d4e4f/978-0-8223-7105-2_pr.jpg - Project page: https://www.dukeupress.edu/designs-for-the-pluriverse #### Philosophers Living with the Tilting Bowl — Ron Wakkary, Doenja Oogjes (2018) - Type: Research prototype · Organisms: Human body - Idea: An artifact with no function beyond its own behaviour can open new relations between people and technology. - What it is: A porcelain bowl that tilts by itself a few times a day for no reason was placed in the homes of philosophers, who reflected on how they lived with it. - How it works: A motorised glazed bowl tilts for a few seconds at random intervals; philosophers kept it for months and were interviewed as co-speculators. - Paper: https://doi.org/10.1145/3173574.3173668 (CHI 2018) - Video: https://vimeo.com/151196220 - Images: https://i.vimeocdn.com/video/541478518-6ff95d5999dfb2566f2f5e28ec9811d4fa50bddd6c8ee46cab84c5b9bd6084d5-d_1280x720.jpg - Project page: http://eds.siat.sfu.ca/?eds_project=tilting-bowl #### Photography as a Design Research Tool into Natureculture — Szu-Yu (Cyn) Liu, Shaowen Bardzell (2018) - Type: Paper · Organisms: Ecosystems, Plants, Animals - Idea: Photographing entanglement trains a designer's eye for design beyond the nature/culture split. - What it is: The authors use their own photographs to build a visual language for natureculture - layers, gatherings and movements where nature and culture mix. - How it works: Iterative practice of taking, editing, organising and reflecting on photographs. - Paper: https://doi.org/10.1145/3196709.3196819 (DIS 2018) - Project page: https://doi.org/10.1145/3196709.3196819 #### Temporal Design: Rethinking time in design — Larissa Pschetz (2018) - Type: Paper · Organisms: Ecosystems, Human body - Idea: Time is a design material: choosing whose rhythms a product follows is a political choice. - What it is: A Design Studies article, with Michelle Bastian, arguing that design always shapes time and that designers should consider plural temporalities, including natural and ecological rhythms, rather than only clock time. - How it works: Conceptual review drawing on time studies and design practice to define temporal design as a field. - Paper: https://doi.org/10.1016/J.DESTUD.2017.10.007 (Design Studies 2018) #### The Life of Plants: A Metaphysics of Mixture — Emanuele Coccia (2018) - Type: Book & essay · Organisms: Plants - Idea: Start from the plant's point of view: to live is to be immersed in and to make a world. - What it is: Coccia argues that plants, through leaves, roots and flowers, make the atmosphere and the world that all other life lives in, and uses them to rethink what a world is. - How it works: Philosophical essay organised around leaf, root and flower; English translation of La vie des plantes (2016). - Images: https://covers.openlibrary.org/b/id/9228061-L.jpg #### Thus Spoke the Plant — Monica Gagliano (2018) - Type: Book & essay · Organisms: Plants - Idea: Plants learn; research can be designed so they are able to show it. - What it is: Gagliano recounts her experiments showing that plants can learn and remember, such as mimosa plants habituating to drops and pea roots finding water by sound, alongside her encounters with plants in Indigenous traditions. - How it works: Behavioural ecology experiments on plant learning and bioacoustics, told as personal narrative. - Images: https://covers.openlibrary.org/b/id/8747734-L.jpg #### Turning Philosophy with a Speculative Lathe: Object-Oriented Ontology, Carpentry, and Design Fiction — Joseph Lindley, Paul Coulton (2018) - Type: Paper · Organisms: Human body - Idea: Philosophy of objects becomes a design tool when you make artifacts that show how things relate to each other. - What it is: Introduces the 'speculative lathe', a way of combining object-oriented ontology, carpentry (making things that express how objects experience the world) and design fiction to address IoT anxieties. - How it works: Combines Ian Bogost's carpentry with design fiction to produce artifacts that reveal network-contingent agency. - Paper: https://doi.org/10.21606/drs.2018.327 (DRS 2018) - Images: https://figures.semanticscholar.org/9952a7109f9177a8ea128f6bd209b02f679d2bf4/9-Figure2-1.png https://figures.semanticscholar.org/9952a7109f9177a8ea128f6bd209b02f679d2bf4/12-Figure6-1.png - Project page: https://dl.designresearchsociety.org/drs-conference-papers/drs2018/researchpapers/20/ #### Design for Existential Crisis in the Anthropocene Age — Ann Light (2017) - Type: Paper · Organisms: Ecosystems, Human body - Idea: Design can help people face the scale of ecological crisis, not just optimise around it. - What it is: A paper, with Alison Powell and Irina Shklovski, arguing that communities and designers need ways to live with the existential threat of ecological collapse, not only technical fixes. - How it works: Position paper drawing on community technology research and care theory. - Paper: https://doi.org/10.1145/3083671.3083688 (C&T 2017) #### Designing for Cohabitation: Naturecultures, Hybrids, and Decentering the Human in Design — Nancy Smith, Shaowen Bardzell (2017) - Type: Paper · Organisms: Plants, Animals, Ecosystems - Idea: Design for cohabitation with nature, not for control over it. - What it is: A study of urban homesteaders who live closely with plants, animals and soil, used to rethink design for cohabitation between humans and nonhumans. - How it works: Ethnographic fieldwork with homesteaders, analysed with Haraway's natureculture concept. - Paper: https://doi.org/10.1145/3025453.3025948 (CHI 2017) - Video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Az3oYUa8eSo - Images: https://i.ytimg.com/vi/Az3oYUa8eSo/maxresdefault.jpg - Project page: https://doi.org/10.1145/3025453.3025948 #### Morse Things: A Design Inquiry into the Gap Between Things and Us — Ron Wakkary, Doenja Oogjes (2017) - Type: Research prototype · Organisms: Human body - Idea: Design things that have their own lives, so people notice the gap between things and us. - What it is: Sets of ceramic cups and bowls that talk to each other in Morse code over the home network, mostly ignoring the people who live with them; designers' households lived with them for months. - How it works: Networked ceramic vessels with embedded electronics exchange beeps and light in Morse code and post to Twitter; studied through long-term home deployments. - Paper: https://doi.org/10.1145/3064663.3064734 (DIS 2017) - Video: https://vimeo.com/182202765 - Images: https://i.vimeocdn.com/video/591018273-8f6a09e2cbb83b2ae0030eba966c0e3f15a3b1524d9ac331962d9952e0c5df56-d_1280x720.jpg https://i.vimeocdn.com/video/591017885-a8d0a26f494d96276a25f7f886243de3ce86c1dc70ed3f2aeef8aa576935275f-d_1280x720.jpg - Project page: http://eds.siat.sfu.ca/?eds_project=morse-things #### Nonhumans in participatory design — Louis Rice (2017) - Type: Paper · Organisms: Ecosystems - Idea: Participation in design is never only human. - What it is: Using an empirical case of an urban design process, the article shows how nonhumans (objects, sites, documents, materials) join networks with people and change who can take part. - How it works: Actor-network theory analysis of a participatory design case study. - Paper: https://doi.org/10.1080/15710882.2017.1316409 (CoDesign 2017) #### Posthumanism and Design — Laura Forlano (2017) - Type: Paper · Organisms: Human body, Ecosystems - Idea: Design needs to move beyond the individual human user towards networks of humans, nonhumans and technologies. - What it is: An overview of how posthumanist theory, from feminist new materialism to STS, challenges human-centred design and what design might do instead. - How it works: Literature synthesis of posthumanist philosophy and its implications for design practice and education. - Paper: https://doi.org/10.1016/j.sheji.2017.08.001 (She Ji 2017) - Project page: https://doi.org/10.1016/j.sheji.2017.08.001 #### Products as Agents: Metaphors for Designing the Products of the IoT Age — Nazli Cila, Elisa Giaccardi (2017) - Type: Paper · Organisms: Human body - Idea: Treat smart products as agents with roles, not as passive tools. - What it is: Proposes three metaphors - products as collectors, actors and creators - for connected products that gather data, act on their own and co-create with people. - How it works: Metaphors derived from design workshops and critical analysis of IoT products. - Paper: https://doi.org/10.1145/3025453.3025797 (CHI 2017) - Images: https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5f6312c65070bb0554a3d6e3/1602250220682-DE0ZFGIJR9K9HJYZT1BS/Smart%2Bsink.jpg - Project page: https://nazlicila.com/projects/human-agent-partnerships #### Speculative prototypes and alien ethnographies: experimenting with relations beyond the human — Tau Ulv Lenskjold, Li Jönsson (2017) - Type: Paper · Organisms: Animals - Idea: Prototypes can be research instruments for relations we cannot fully understand. - What it is: Uses speculative prototypes built for urban animals to develop 'alien ethnography', a way of studying relations with nonhumans without assuming access to their experience. - How it works: Reflects on earlier design experiments using speculative realism and Ian Bogost's alien phenomenology. - Paper: https://doi.org/10.7764/disena.11.134-147 (Diseña 2017) - Project page: http://revistadisena.uc.cl/index.php/Disena/article/view/85 #### Age of Entanglement (Krebs Cycle of Creativity) — Neri Oxman (2016) - Type: Book & essay · Organisms: Ecosystems - Idea: Disciplines are no longer separate; ideas should flow across science, engineering, design and art like energy in a metabolic cycle. - What it is: The opening essay of the Journal of Design and Science, which introduced the Krebs Cycle of Creativity: a map in which science, engineering, design and art feed into each other. - How it works: An essay that maps four modes of creativity onto the Krebs cycle of cellular respiration. - Paper: https://doi.org/10.21428/7e0583ad (Journal of Design and Science 2016) - Project page: https://doi.org/10.21428/7e0583ad #### Animistic design: how to reimagine digital interaction between the human and the nonhuman — Betti Marenko (2016) - Type: Book & essay · Organisms: Human body - Idea: Design smart things as lively others whose behaviour is not fully predictable. - What it is: The article proposes animistic design: treating smart objects as uncertain, lively nonhuman agents rather than cute characters or obedient tools. Co-author Philip van Allen's AniThings prototypes explore the idea. - How it works: Theoretical framework drawing on posthuman philosophy, mediation theory and affect. - Paper: https://doi.org/10.1080/14626268.2016.1145127 (Digital Creativity 2016) - Video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OhuDZ877KIY - Project page: https://doi.org/10.1080/14626268.2016.1145127 #### Becoming response-able stakeholders: participatory design in times of uncertainties — Kristina Lindström, Åsa Ståhl (2016) - Type: Paper · Organisms: Ecosystems - Idea: Participation can start from matter and uncertainty, not from predefined stakeholders. - What it is: Argues for a participatory design space in which people and materials, such as plastics, can become stakeholders in issues that are not yet clearly articulated. - How it works: Draws on their participatory projects with plastics and Haraway's response-ability. - Paper: https://doi.org/10.1145/2948076.2948086 (PDC 2016) - Video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HJO-1qHF74s - Project page: https://doi.org/10.1145/2948076.2948086 #### Decentering the Human in the Design of Collaborative Cities — Laura Forlano (2016) - Type: Paper · Organisms: Ecosystems - Idea: Cities are made by humans, nonhumans and technologies together; design should treat them that way. - What it is: Argues that sensor-rich smart cities are sites where human and nonhuman actors negotiate urban futures, and that designers should decenter the human in them. - How it works: Applies science and technology studies to cases of environmental monitoring and urban data projects. - Paper: https://doi.org/10.1162/desi_a_00398 (Design Issues 2016) - Project page: https://doi.org/10.1162/desi_a_00398 #### Multispecies Studies: Cultivating Arts of Attentiveness — Thom van Dooren (2016) - Type: Book & essay · Organisms: Ecosystems, Animals, Fungi - Idea: Cultivate 'arts of attentiveness' to other species' ways of life. - What it is: An introduction to a special issue that defines multispecies studies: humanities research immersed in the lives of fungi, microbes, animals and plants, and attentive to how species live together. - How it works: Review essay surveying approaches across anthropology, philosophy and environmental humanities. - Paper: https://doi.org/10.1215/22011919-3527695 (Environmental Humanities 2016) - Project page: https://doi.org/10.1215/22011919-3527695 #### Staying with the Trouble: Making Kin in the Chthulucene — Donna Haraway (2016) - Type: Book & essay · Organisms: Animals, Ecosystems - Idea: Make kin, not babies: build responsible relations across species instead of waiting for a technical fix. - What it is: A book on living and dying well with other species in damaged times, with stories of pigeons, corals, lichens and speculative fabulation. - How it works: Philosophical and storytelling work mixing science studies, art projects and speculative fiction (the Camille Stories). - Paper: https://doi.org/10.1215/9780822373780 (Duke University Press 2016) - Video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GrYA7sMQaBQ - Images: https://assets-us-01.kc-usercontent.com/f7ca9afb-82c2-002a-a423-84e111d5b498/2d1641c2-5337-4ad5-b011-7af82dc239c0/978-0-8223-6224-1_pr.jpg - Project page: https://www.dukeupress.edu/staying-with-the-trouble #### Thing Ethnography: Doing Design Research with Non-Humans — Elisa Giaccardi, Nazli Cila (2016) - Type: Paper · Organisms: Human body - Idea: Things can act as co-ethnographers and reveal patterns that people cannot report themselves. - What it is: Cameras attached to everyday objects such as kettles and cups record how the objects are used, giving designers a view of daily life from the things' side. - How it works: Autographer cameras and sensors on household objects captured images and data, which were analysed alongside interviews with the people who used them. - Paper: https://doi.org/10.1145/2901790.2901905 (DIS 2016) - Video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1Z0mVcV1EgA - Images: https://i.ytimg.com/vi/1Z0mVcV1EgA/maxresdefault.jpg - Project page: https://doi.org/10.1145/2901790.2901905 #### What Would Animals Say If We Asked the Right Questions? — Vinciane Despret (2016) - Type: Book & essay · Organisms: Animals - Idea: Animals answer the questions we ask; ask better ones. - What it is: An alphabetical book of short chapters on animal research, showing how experiments shape what animals are able to show and what counts as their intelligence. - How it works: Philosophical and historical reading of ethology and animal-cognition studies, from A to Z. - Images: https://covers.openlibrary.org/b/id/8896337-L.jpg #### Anthropocene, Capitalocene, Plantationocene, Chthulucene: Making Kin — Donna Haraway (2015) - Type: Book & essay · Organisms: Ecosystems, Bacteria & microbes - Idea: Make kin across species instead of centring the human story of the planet. - What it is: An essay that questions the name 'Anthropocene', offers alternatives such as Capitalocene, Plantationocene and Chthulucene, and calls on people to 'make kin, not babies' with other species. - How it works: Speculative feminist essay drawing on biology, multispecies histories and science fiction. - Paper: https://doi.org/10.1215/22011919-3615934 (Environmental Humanities 2015) - Project page: https://doi.org/10.1215/22011919-3615934 #### Material Ecology — Neri Oxman (2015) - Type: Paper · Organisms: Ecosystems - Idea: Design objects the way nature grows them: form, material and environment decided together. - What it is: A paper that defines Material Ecology: an approach in which computation, fabrication and material are designed together with the environment, the way organisms grow their own tissues. - How it works: A position paper drawing on Mediated Matter projects that combine multi-material printing, fibre-based fabrication and biological templates. - Paper: https://doi.org/10.1016/j.cad.2014.05.009 (Computer-Aided Design 2015) - Video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uscqEIRA2Os - Images: https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/7/70/Neri_Oxman_CartesianWax_03.tif/lossy-page1-1280px-Neri_Oxman_CartesianWax_03.tif.jpg - Project page: https://doi.org/10.1016/j.cad.2014.05.009 #### The Mushroom at the End of the World: On the Possibility of Life in Capitalist Ruins — Anna Lowenhaupt Tsing (2015) - Type: Book & essay · Organisms: Fungi, Ecosystems - Idea: Survival is always collaborative, across species and in the ruins we have made. - What it is: An ethnography that follows the matsutake mushroom through forests, foragers and global trade to show how life continues in disturbed landscapes. - How it works: Multi-sited fieldwork in Oregon, Japan, China and Finland combined with forest ecology. - Paper: https://doi.org/10.1515/9781400873548 (Princeton University Press 2015) - Video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f8MhBwsKdJA - Images: https://covers.openlibrary.org/b/isbn/9780691162751-L.jpg?default=false - Project page: https://press.princeton.edu/books/paperback/9780691178325/the-mushroom-at-the-end-of-the-world #### Braiding Sweetgrass: Indigenous Wisdom, Scientific Knowledge and the Teachings of Plants — Robin Wall Kimmerer (2013) - Type: Book & essay · Organisms: Plants, Ecosystems - Idea: Treat plants as teachers and the land as a gift that asks for reciprocity. - What it is: Essays that braid botany with Potawatomi knowledge and stories, proposing reciprocity and gratitude as the basis of human relations with plants and land. - How it works: Essays combining plant science, Indigenous stories and the author's experience as botanist and mother. - Images: https://covers.openlibrary.org/b/id/7281575-L.jpg #### Emergent Media Technologies, Speculation, Expectation, and Human/Nonhuman Relations — Anne Galloway (2013) - Type: Paper · Organisms: Animals, Human body - Idea: Speculation about technology is also speculation about how we will live with animals. - What it is: Examines how speculative design and expectations about new media technologies shape relations between humans and nonhumans, drawing on the author's research with sheep and farming. - How it works: Conceptual paper combining speculative design practice with more-than-human geography and STS. - Paper: https://doi.org/10.1080/08838151.2012.761705 (Journal of Broadcasting & Electronic Media 2013) - Project page: https://doi.org/10.1080/08838151.2012.761705 #### How Forests Think: Toward an Anthropology Beyond the Human — Eduardo Kohn (2013) - Type: Book & essay · Organisms: Plants, Animals, Ecosystems - Idea: Other beings interpret and represent the world too; design can listen to their signs. - What it is: Based on fieldwork with the Runa of Ecuador's Upper Amazon, Kohn argues that forests and animals use signs and that thinking is not only human. - How it works: Ethnography combined with Peircean semiotics. - Images: https://covers.openlibrary.org/b/id/7853496-L.jpg #### Hyperobjects: Philosophy and Ecology after the End of the World — Timothy Morton (2013) - Type: Book & essay · Organisms: Ecosystems - Idea: Some things are too big to see; design has to make them sensible in parts. - What it is: Morton names "hyperobjects", things such as global warming or plutonium that are so spread out in time and space that they cannot be seen whole but affect everything. - How it works: Object-oriented philosophy applied to ecological crisis. - Images: https://covers.openlibrary.org/b/id/7276179-L.jpg #### Unruly Edges: Mushrooms as Companion Species — Anna Lowenhaupt Tsing (2012) - Type: Book & essay · Organisms: Fungi, Plants, Human body - Idea: Human nature is an interspecies relationship; look for it at the unruly edges of empire. - What it is: An essay that follows fungi through ten thousand years of human disturbance history to argue that human nature is an interspecies relationship. - How it works: A feminist multispecies essay that extends Haraway's companion species from pets to mushrooms, cereals and plantations. - Paper: https://doi.org/10.1215/22011919-3610012 (Environmental Humanities 2012) #### Nonanthropocentrism and the Nonhuman in Design: Possibilities for Designing New Forms of Engagement with and through Technology — Carl DiSalvo (2011) - Type: Book & essay · Organisms: Ecosystems, Animals - Idea: Civic and participatory design can include nonhumans as participants. - What it is: A book chapter that asks how design could engage nonhumans, drawing on projects that make animals, plants and environments into participants in civic technology. - How it works: Theoretical essay with case discussions of speculative and participatory design projects. - Paper: https://doi.org/10.7551/mitpress/8744.003.0034 (From Social Butterfly to Engaged Citizen (MIT Press 2011)) - Project page: https://doi.org/10.7551/mitpress/8744.003.0034 #### Vibrant Matter: A Political Ecology of Things — Jane Bennett (2010) - Type: Book & essay · Organisms: Ecosystems, Human body - Idea: Matter is not passive; politics and design should account for the agency of things. - What it is: A book arguing that things - from electricity grids to food and trash - have their own vitality and act within human-nonhuman assemblages. - How it works: Political philosophy drawing on Spinoza, Deleuze and case studies such as the 2003 North American blackout. - Paper: https://doi.org/10.1215/9780822391623 (Duke University Press 2010) - Video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q607Ni23QjA - Images: https://assets-us-01.kc-usercontent.com/f7ca9afb-82c2-002a-a423-84e111d5b498/7d3014c0-1e3d-48eb-a050-b69327d08fd8/978-0-8223-4633-3_pr.jpg - Project page: https://www.dukeupress.edu/vibrant-matter #### When Species Meet — Donna Haraway (2008) - Type: Book & essay · Organisms: Animals - Idea: Species become who they are through encounters with each other. - What it is: Haraway writes about the relations people form with dogs, lab animals and other species, and argues that becoming is always becoming-with. - How it works: Essays drawing on the author's agility training with her dog, science studies and philosophy. - Images: https://covers.openlibrary.org/b/id/2651380-L.jpg #### Ecology without Nature: Rethinking Environmental Aesthetics — Timothy Morton (2007) - Type: Book & essay · Organisms: Ecosystems - Idea: Drop the idealised image of Nature to think ecologically. - What it is: Morton argues that the idea of "Nature" as something out there, separate and pure, gets in the way of ecological thinking and art. - How it works: Literary and aesthetic theory, reading romantic and contemporary art. - Images: https://covers.openlibrary.org/b/id/1336211-L.jpg #### Meeting the Universe Halfway: Quantum Physics and the Entanglement of Matter and Meaning — Karen Barad (2007) - Type: Book & essay · Organisms: Ecosystems, DNA & molecules - Idea: Entities do not precede their relations; design configures intra-actions. - What it is: Barad develops agential realism, in which things and meanings emerge through "intra-actions" rather than pre-existing and then interacting. - How it works: Philosophy of physics building on Niels Bohr, combined with feminist and poststructuralist theory. - Images: https://covers.openlibrary.org/b/id/1559112-L.jpg #### Politics of Nature: How to Bring the Sciences into Democracy — Bruno Latour (2004) - Type: Book & essay · Organisms: Ecosystems - Idea: Abandon "nature" as a separate realm and give nonhumans representation in politics. - What it is: Latour argues that the split between nature and society blocks ecological politics, and proposes a collective in which humans and nonhumans are represented together. - How it works: Philosophical argument drawing on science studies; English translation of Politiques de la nature (1999). - Images: https://covers.openlibrary.org/b/id/412231-L.jpg #### The Companion Species Manifesto: Dogs, People, and Significant Otherness — Donna Haraway (2003) - Type: Book & essay · Organisms: Animals - Idea: Relationships are the smallest unit of analysis, not individuals. - What it is: A short manifesto that uses the co-history of dogs and people to argue that humans and other species make each other through shared histories. - How it works: Essay mixing personal stories, breed histories and theory. - Images: https://covers.openlibrary.org/b/id/737091-L.jpg #### Defuturing: A New Design Philosophy — Tony Fry (1999) - Type: Book & essay · Organisms: Ecosystems - Idea: Every design act either takes futures away or helps sustain them. - What it is: A book arguing that much design 'defutures', taking away futures from humans and nonhuman others, and calling for a philosophy of design as sustainment. - How it works: Philosophical critique of design history and modernity. - Paper: https://doi.org/10.5040/9781350089563 (UNSW Press 1999; Bloomsbury 2020) - Images: https://covers.openlibrary.org/b/id/4540057-L.jpg - Project page: https://www.bloomsbury.com/us/defuturing-9781350089570/ #### We Have Never Been Modern — Bruno Latour (1993) - Type: Book & essay · Organisms: Ecosystems - Idea: Hybrids of nature and culture need a Parliament of Things to represent them. - What it is: Latour argues that modernity pretended to separate nature from culture while producing ever more hybrids of both, and ends by calling for a Parliament of Things. - How it works: Philosophical essay from science and technology studies; English translation of Nous n'avons jamais été modernes (1991). - Images: https://covers.openlibrary.org/b/id/414244-L.jpg ## Bio Design Living organisms as material and collaborator: grown materials, microbial fabrication, living architecture and bio art. ### Mycelium & Fungal Materials Objects, packaging, leather and buildings grown from fungal mycelium. #### Mycelium & Fiber — Judith Antonia Zbanek (2026) - Type: Research prototype · Organisms: Fungi - Idea: Weave a scaffold that tells the fungus where to grow. - What it is: A textile–mycelium composite in which the fungus Trametes hirsuta grows through silk, flax and cotton textile structures that guide its growth into light, stable, biodegradable parts. - How it works: Inoculated textiles are shaped in moulds; mycelium binds the fibres as it colonises them. - Images: https://content.gp-award.com/assets/media/award26/0-mycelium-fiber_1_blogLarge.jpg https://content.gp-award.com/assets/media/award26/2-mycelium-fiber_1_blogLarge.jpg - Project page: https://www.gp-award.com/en/projects/mycelium-fiber #### Living Tex'Celium — Living Tex'Celium team (University of Stuttgart) (2025) - Type: Research prototype · Organisms: Fungi, Plants - Idea: Let the fungus join building parts after they are placed. - What it is: Mycelium grown on agricultural and wood waste around jute textiles forms stronger, recyclable composites; flexible modules are grown and 'bio-welded' on site by the living fungus. - How it works: Jute-reinforced mycelium modules are placed while alive so hyphae grow across joints under digital guidance. - Images: https://content.gp-award.com/assets/media/award25/0-living-tex-celium_blogLarge.jpg https://content.gp-award.com/assets/media/award25/2-living-tex-celium_blogLarge.jpg - Project page: https://www.gp-award.com/en/projects/living-texcelium #### Mycelium Muse — MycoWorks (2025) - Type: Artwork · Organisms: Fungi - Idea: A grown material earns its place in craft through designers' hands. - What it is: Seven French women designers were given carte blanche to make collectible objects with Reishi, MycoWorks' sheet material grown from mycelium. - How it works: Fine Mycelium sheets are grown in trays, tanned and then cut, moulded and assembled by each designer. - Images: https://static.dezeen.com/uploads/2025/07/dezeen-awards-2025-collectible-design-longlist_dezeen_2364_col_0.jpg - Project page: https://www.dezeen.com/awards/2025/shortlists/mycelium-muse/ #### Addressing Uncertainty in Biodesign through Digital Twins: A Case of Biofabrication with Mycelium — Đan Vy Vu, Bahareh Barati (2024) - Type: Paper · Organisms: Fungi - Idea: A continuously updated digital double can help designers live with the uncertainty of growing materials. - What it is: A framework for digital twins in biodesign, demonstrated with a proof-of-concept twin that monitors and models mycelium as it grows into material. - How it works: Sensors on a mycelium growing setup stream data into a model that represents the living process, mapped through a dataflow framework drawn from bio-industries. - Paper: https://doi.org/10.1145/3685271 (ACM TOCHI 2024) - Images: https://dl.acm.org/cms/10.1145/3685271/asset/ade6afb0-1138-461d-af50-28d1977a33db/assets/images/medium/tochi-2023-0198-f04.jpg - Project page: https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3685271 #### HyphaL — Bence Czibik (2024) - Type: Product & platform · Organisms: Fungi - Idea: A grown material can be a precision acoustic component. - What it is: A studio monitor loudspeaker whose enclosure is made entirely of mycelium composite and hemp fibre, apart from screws and driver, using the material's acoustic damping. - How it works: Hemp-fibre substrate is grown with mycelium in a speaker-cabinet mould and heat-treated. - Images: https://content.gp-award.com/assets/media/award24/0-hyphal-mycelium-speaker_blogLarge.jpg - Project page: https://www.gp-award.com/en/projects/hyphal #### Monc mycelium packaging — Monc (2024) - Type: Product & platform · Organisms: Fungi - Idea: Grown packaging is ready for everyday retail. - What it is: Protective product packaging inserts grown from mushroom mycelium on agricultural waste instead of polystyrene, home-compostable after use. - How it works: Mycelium colonises agricultural substrate in moulds shaped around each product and is heat-treated to stop growth. - Images: https://static.dezeen.com/uploads/2024/07/eQUZeF3CcwezfeRsQCxa2DJO9a5NBTEzJNABgDkT_Z33nsize_2048.jpg - Project page: https://www.monc.co/ #### Mycolith — Monika Brandić Lipińska (2024) - Type: Research prototype · Organisms: Fungi - Idea: Grow off-world buildings from local dust and fungi. - What it is: A biofabrication strategy that uses mycelium to bind and stabilise regolith for building habitats in space, reducing the materials shipped from Earth. - How it works: Mycelium is grown through regolith simulant mixed with nutrients to form solid blocks. - Images: https://content.gp-award.com/assets/media/award24/0-mycolith_blogLarge.jpg - Project page: https://www.gp-award.com/en/projects/mycolith #### Mylea mycelium leather — MYCL (Mycotech Lab) (2024) - Type: Product & platform · Organisms: Fungi, Plants - Idea: A material business can fight air pollution by paying for waste. - What it is: Fungal mycelium grown on palm-oil and other agricultural waste is processed into Mylea, a low-carbon leather alternative; buying the waste gives farmers a reason to stop burning it. - How it works: Mycelium sheets grown on lignocellulosic residues are harvested, tanned-like treated and finished. - Video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XRF34tXjrZ0 - Images: https://earthshotprize.org/wp-content/uploads/2024/09/MYCL-Hero-1920x1080-@72DPI.jpg - Project page: https://mycl.bio/ #### Accalmie and Stool 18 — Corentin Mahieu (2023) - Type: Product & platform · Organisms: Fungi - Idea: A piece of furniture can grow part of itself from its own production waste, and stay repairable by the same organism. - What it is: A table and two stools whose beechwood bases were built first; the offcuts from making them then fed mycelium that grew into the tabletop and seats, now dormant but able to be reactivated for repairs. - How it works: Beech sawdust and chips from the base are inoculated with fungal mycelium in moulds; after growth the mycelium is dried to dormancy. - Images: https://designmuseum.org/image/7cc707d8-eb0f-46e1-b07c-de714e9eaabf?width=1200 - Project page: https://designmuseum.org/exhibitions/more-than-human/10-unmissable-highlights-from-more-than-human #### Alchemical Mycology — Jesse Adler (2023) - Type: Research prototype · Organisms: Fungi - Idea: Fungi are a renewable palette. - What it is: Vivid pigments are extracted from wild-harvested and lab-grown fungi and developed into colourants for textiles and paint. - How it works: Fungal pigments are extracted with solvents and fixed with mordants onto fibres or bound into paints. - Images: https://content.gp-award.com/assets/media/award23/0-alchemical-mycology_blogLarge.jpg - Project page: https://www.gp-award.com/en/projects/alchemical-mycology #### BioForms — Natalie Alima (2023) - Type: Research prototype · Organisms: Fungi - Idea: Print the skin, let the fungus grow the core. - What it is: A two-metre wall-panel system whose recycled-plastic skin is 3D printed by a KUKA robot and filled with local waste that mycelium binds into a structural, insulating core. - How it works: An agent-based swarm algorithm arranges scale-like components on the printed PETG shell, which acts as sacrificial formwork for mycelium growing through packed waste substrate. - Paper: https://doi.org/10.1017/btd.2024.9 (Research Directions: Biotechnology Design 2024) - Video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nKJmnH6hews - Images: https://static.cambridge.org/binary/version/id/urn:cambridge.org:id:binary:20241024145041158-0834:S2752945224000098:S2752945224000098_fig4.png?pub-status=live https://static.cambridge.org/binary/version/id/urn:cambridge.org:id:binary:20241024145041158-0834:S2752945224000098:S2752945224000098_fig6.png?pub-status=live #### MyDeCo: MyCological DeComposition — Borough of Manhattan Community College Biodesign Challenge team (2023) - Type: Research prototype · Organisms: Fungi - Idea: Send synthetic clothing to a fungus instead of a landfill. - What it is: A textile-recycling process in which Pestalotiopsis microspora, a fungus able to digest plastic, breaks down synthetic textile waste and its microfibres. - How it works: The fungus is grown on shredded polyester and polyurethane textile waste as its carbon source. - Images: https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/552dc0ffe4b070a9e1a6a215/d076d9bf-c3b9-43b5-839f-475971830e9a/Screenshot+2023-06-27+at+12.16.46+PM.png - Project page: https://www.biodesignchallenge.org/borough-of-manhattan-community-college-2023 #### Phoenix (mycelium acoustic sculpture) — Jonathan Dessi-Olive (2023) - Type: Research prototype · Organisms: Fungi - Idea: Mycelium can be grown flat, then shaped into large three-dimensional forms while it is still alive. - What it is: A room-filling sculpture of winding ribbons made entirely of mycelium composite, installed at the Charlotte Art League in 2023 and analysed as an acoustic retrofit for large rooms. - How it works: Living myco-material is packed into flat formwork on a membrane, grown into flexible sheets, then hung and dried into computed ribbon geometries. - Paper: https://doi.org/10.1017/btd.2024.5 (Research Directions: Biotechnology Design 2024) - Images: https://static.cambridge.org/binary/version/id/urn:cambridge.org:id:binary:20240502112217198-0451:S2752945224000050:S2752945224000050_fig9.png?pub-status=live https://static.cambridge.org/binary/version/id/urn:cambridge.org:id:binary:20240502112217198-0451:S2752945224000050:S2752945224000050_fig7.png?pub-status=live #### The Purhyphae Project — Annah-Ololade Sangosanya (2023) - Type: Research prototype · Organisms: Fungi - Idea: Feed old clothes to fungi and harvest a new material. - What it is: Fungal mycelium is grown on shredded natural and synthetic textile waste, degrading it and forming leather-like mats. - How it works: Textile shreds serve as substrate; mycelium mats are harvested, pressed and finished. - Images: https://content.gp-award.com/assets/media/award23/0-the-purhyphae-project_blogLarge.jpg - Project page: https://www.gp-award.com/en/projects/purhyphae #### Three-dimensional printing of mycelium hydrogels into living complex materials — André R. Studart (2023) - Type: Paper · Organisms: Fungi - Idea: A printed object that stays alive, heals and adapts after it leaves the printer. - What it is: Hydrogels loaded with living Ganoderma mycelium are 3D printed into lattices that keep growing, self-repair after damage and form a robust fungal skin. - How it works: A hydrogel ink containing Ganoderma lucidum mycelium is printed into lattices; hyphae grow through and across the filaments to bridge gaps. - Paper: https://www.nature.com/articles/s41563-022-01429-5 (Nature Materials) - Images: https://media.springernature.com/full/springer-static/image/art%3A10.1038%2Fs41563-022-01429-5/MediaObjects/41563_2022_1429_Fig1_HTML.png - Project page: https://www.nature.com/articles/s41563-022-01429-5 #### Fleather — Phool (2022) - Type: Product & platform · Organisms: Plants, Fungi - Idea: A sacred waste stream can become a material economy that cleans a river. - What it is: Temple flower offerings are collected before they are dumped into the Ganges and turned into incense, packaging foam and Fleather, a plant-based leather alternative. - How it works: Floral waste is composted and processed; Fleather is made from flower biomass bound and grown with microbial and fungal processes (per Phool). - Video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dUCqFEG0JDQ - Images: https://earthshotprize.org/wp-content/uploads/2022/10/Ankit-Agarwal-in-Phool-Fleather-office-with-colleagues.jpg - Project page: https://phool.co/ #### Interactive Mycelium Composites: Material Exploration on Combining Mushroom with Off-the-shelf Electronic Components — Çağlar Genç (2022) - Type: Paper · Organisms: Fungi - Idea: Grow the electronics into the fungus instead of putting them in a plastic case. - What it is: Mycelium was grown around LEDs, optical fibers, motors, thermochromic inks and conductive textiles to make ten interactive samples, then tested with an online survey and two workshops. - How it works: Systematic material exploration combining mycelium composites with input (touch) and output (light, movement, color change) components. - Paper: https://doi.org/10.1145/3546155.3546689 (NordiCHI 2022) - Images: https://figures.semanticscholar.org/f48aea886b2a4299f6449678697ea8bf5dd549b0/5-Figure3-1.png https://figures.semanticscholar.org/f48aea886b2a4299f6449678697ea8bf5dd549b0/4-Figure2-1.png #### MYCOsella — Natalia Piórecka (2022) - Type: Research prototype · Organisms: Fungi - Idea: Design the end of a chair's life together with its making. - What it is: A chair grown from a fully biodegradable mycelium-based material, exploring growth-based production and a life cycle that ends in compost. - How it works: Mycelium substrate is grown in a chair mould and dried. - Images: https://content.gp-award.com/assets/media/award22/0-mycosella_2_blogLarge.jpg - Project page: https://www.gp-award.com/en/projects/mycosella #### Mycomerge — Mycomerge team (Mai Thi Nguyen & Daniela Solueva) (2022) - Type: Research prototype · Organisms: Fungi, Plants - Idea: Grow the whole object, joints included. - What it is: A stool built as a multi-layer bio-based component in which living mycelium binds natural fibres, so every part can be grown. - How it works: Natural-fibre layers are inoculated and stacked so hyphae fuse them into one piece. - Images: https://content.gp-award.com/assets/media/award22/0-mycomerge_2_blogLarge.jpg - Project page: https://www.gp-award.com/en/projects/mycomerge #### Bacterial Cellulose-Reinforced Mycelium Composites — Elise Elsacker (2021) - Type: Paper · Organisms: Fungi, Bacteria & microbes - Idea: Two microbes in one material: one grows the body, the other reinforces it. - What it is: Mycelium composites are grown on substrates mixed with bacterial cellulose, and mechanical testing shows how the added nanofibres change stiffness and strength. - How it works: Fungal mycelium is cultivated on lignocellulosic substrates supplemented with bacterial cellulose from Komagataeibacter cultures; samples are dried and tested in compression and bending. - Paper: https://doi.org/10.1186/s40694-021-00125-4 (Fungal Biology and Biotechnology) - Video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JrpbduZ6cWY - Project page: https://doi.org/10.1186/s40694-021-00125-4 #### MyBacon (MyForest Foods) — Ecovative (2021) - Type: Product & platform · Organisms: Fungi - Idea: Grow the whole cut instead of assembling it, and the fungus supplies the fibre structure. - What it is: Slabs of pure mycelium grown in vertical farms are cured and sliced into bacon strips, sold in supermarkets as a whole-cut meat alternative with no extrusion. - How it works: Ecovative's aerial mycelium process grows dense mats of Ostreatus mycelium on a nutrient tray in days; the mats are cured with salt and coconut fat and cut across the grain. - Video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cEuIyYnyGv0 - Project page: https://myforestfoods.com/ #### PermaPak — School of the Art Institute of Chicago Biodesign Challenge team (2021) - Type: Research prototype · Organisms: Fungi, Insects - Idea: Combine a fungal and an insect by-product into a film that composts. - What it is: A minimally processed biopolymer packaging made from mycelial chitosan and sericin, the protein in silkworm cocoons, designed to biodegrade into a regenerative life cycle. - How it works: Chitosan extracted from mycelium is blended with sericin from silk processing and cast into films and pouches. - Images: https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/552dc0ffe4b070a9e1a6a215/1626983904360-EWDLCJTQNZSQB68N6JS9/PermaPak+2.jpg https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/552dc0ffe4b070a9e1a6a215/1626983905615-N4JIYHD6TKWEGXWV4A6Z/PermaPak+biopackaging.jpg - Project page: https://www.biodesignchallenge.org/saic-2021 #### Protomycokion — Ana Goidea (2021) - Type: Research prototype · Organisms: Fungi - Idea: Print the form, then let the fungus finish the structure. - What it is: A building column 3D-printed from living mycelium and waste fibres following an algorithmic design and then grown to solidity: structural, water-resistant and sound-absorbing. - How it works: A living mycelium–fibre paste is extruded in layers; colonisation fuses them before drying. - Images: https://content.gp-award.com/assets/media/gpa-gca-submissions2021/0-protomycokion_blogLarge.jpg - Project page: https://www.gp-award.com/en/projects/protomycokion #### Sylvania for the Hermès Victoria bag — MycoWorks (2021) - Type: Product & platform · Organisms: Fungi - Idea: Grown materials can meet the standards of luxury craft, not only of eco products. - What it is: A version of Hermès' Victoria travel bag with panels of Sylvania, a mycelium material grown by MycoWorks and tanned in Hermès' French tanneries. - How it works: Fine Mycelium sheets grown in California were tanned and finished by Hermès artisans, then assembled with calfskin trim. - Images: https://www.designboom.com/twitterimages/uploads/2021/03/hermes-mushroom-leather-mycoworks-designboom-FB.jpg - Project page: https://www.designboom.com/design/hermes-mycoworks-mushroom-leather-bag-fine-mycelium-03-11-2021/ #### Tree Column — Blast Studio (2021) - Type: Research prototype · Organisms: Fungi - Idea: Architecture printed from city waste that feeds people before it holds up a roof. - What it is: A two-metre column 3D printed from living mycelium mixed with pulped paper coffee cups; it fruits edible mushrooms before being dried into a load-bearing element. - How it works: A custom cold extruder prints modules of mycelium and paper-cup feedstock along an algorithmically designed profile; the fungus colonises and binds the printed layers. - Images: https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/6807b75e7d058a08ac560f59/0ca8cfed-cf27-4b54-b745-19bb0244966b/Blast+Studio_Tree+Column%2C+3d+printed+mycelium+column+made+from+used+coffee+cups_1.jpg https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/6807b75e7d058a08ac560f59/4f7e1ad0-1228-4301-91a6-5bfa6ced0c16/Tree+Column+in+Waste+Age+Hong+Kong+-+Blast+Studio.jpg - Project page: https://www.blast-studio.com/tree-column #### Loop Living Cocoon — Bob Hendrikx (2020) - Type: Product & platform · Organisms: Fungi, Human body - Idea: Design the last object of a life so that the body feeds new life. - What it is: A coffin grown in about seven days from mycelium and hemp, lined with moss; in the ground it breaks down within weeks and helps compost the body. - How it works: Mycelium and hemp substrate grow in a coffin-shaped mould, are dried, and reactivate in moist soil to decompose. - Video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uQXOls5Mefs - Images: https://s3files.core77.com/blog/images/lead_n_spotlight/1780348_lead_400_139559_.jpg https://s3files.core77.com/blog/images/1780350_81_139559_PjL8Bg8YY.jpeg - Project page: https://www.core77.com/posts/139559/The-Loop-Living-Cocoon-A-Mushroom-Based-Coffin-Grown-in-Seven-Days #### Myx Sail — Jonas Edvard (2020) - Type: Research prototype · Organisms: Fungi, Plants - Idea: Grow sound absorbers from fungus and farm fibres instead of foam. - What it is: A large suspended acoustic sail of mycelium-textile panels installed in the Danish Design Museum in 2020; acoustic tests showed it lowered reverberation and improved speech clarity in the hall. - How it works: Mycelium is grown through layered woven jute, hemp mat and wood wool in moulds, bonding the fibres into light panels that are dried and hung on a cable frame. - Paper: https://doi.org/10.1017/btd.2024.2 (Research Directions: Biotechnology Design 2024) - Images: https://static.cambridge.org/binary/version/id/urn:cambridge.org:id:binary:20240515185243026-0155:S2752945224000025:S2752945224000025_fig1.png?pub-status=live https://static.cambridge.org/binary/version/id/urn:cambridge.org:id:binary:20240515185243026-0155:S2752945224000025:S2752945224000025_fig2.png?pub-status=live #### Reishi Fine Mycelium — MycoWorks, Phil Ross (2020) - Type: Product & platform · Organisms: Fungi - Idea: Grow the fibre structure of leather instead of raising an animal for it. - What it is: A leather-like sheet material grown from mycelium in trays, then tanned and finished in traditional tanneries for shoes, bags and furniture. - How it works: Fine Mycelium is grown so that the hyphae interlock densely, then treated with tanning and finishing processes similar to hide leather. - Video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vcrKZrNFVDA - Project page: https://www.mycoworks.com/ #### Mycelium Artifacts: Exploring Shapeable and Accessible Biofabrication — Stacey Kuznetsov (2019) - Type: Paper · Organisms: Fungi - Idea: Mycelium can be an everyday prototyping material for designers, not only a lab material. - What it is: An HCI study of a year of growing 3D forms from mycelium, proposing it as a low-cost prototyping material for enclosures, hand-sculpted forms and replicas of 3D models. - How it works: Mycelium was grown on substrate in moulds made from everyday materials and, for replicas, likely from 3D-printed negatives, then dried. - Paper: https://doi.org/10.1145/3301019.3325156 (DIS 2019 Companion) - Images: https://figures.semanticscholar.org/e218967af5c512308ff34f92e6cd1ca4fe3d1d2a/2-Figure1-1.png https://figures.semanticscholar.org/e218967af5c512308ff34f92e6cd1ca4fe3d1d2a/3-Figure2-1.png - Project page: https://sandsystems.org/wp-content/uploads/2019/04/DIS-mycelium.pdf #### Myco-accessories: Sustainable Wearables with Biodegradable Materials — Eldy S. Lazaro Vasquez, Katia Vega (2019) - Type: Paper · Organisms: Fungi - Idea: Wearable electronics can be housed in a material that composts. - What it is: Wearable accessories with embedded electronics made from laminated sheets of grown mycelium skin, as a biodegradable alternative to plastic housings. - How it works: Circuits are laminated between two layers of mycelium skin using a cornstarch glue and stitching. - Paper: https://doi.org/10.1145/3341163.3346938 (ISWC 2019) - Images: https://figures.semanticscholar.org/018f8fb3526a93a583853f261fb029610c529ede/4-Figure7-1.png https://figures.semanticscholar.org/018f8fb3526a93a583853f261fb029610c529ede/4-Figure6-1.png - Project page: https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3341163.3346938 #### The Growing Pavilion — Pascal Leboucq, Studio Klarenbeek & Dros (2019) - Type: Research prototype · Organisms: Fungi - Idea: A public building whose skin was grown in weeks and can go back to the soil. - What it is: A drum-shaped events pavilion at Dutch Design Week clad in mycelium panels on a timber frame, with cattail, hemp and other biobased materials inside. - How it works: Mycelium panels grown by Krown Design were mounted on a wooden frame and coated with a biobased protective finish. - Video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3IMXhMnLG8Y - Images: https://thegrowingpavilion.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/12/The-Growing-Pavilion-DDW-2019_c-Oscar-Vinck_20191025165306136_DSC1029-min-768x512.jpg - Project page: https://thegrowingpavilion.com/dutch-design-week-2019/ #### Hack the Root — Mae-ling Lokko (2018) - Type: Artwork · Organisms: Fungi, Plants - Idea: Agricultural by-products and fungi can become a local, low-carbon building material. - What it is: An architectural structure of mycelium panels grown on agricultural waste, commissioned for RIBA North in Liverpool with an exhibition and events programme, later shown at Somerset House. - How it works: Fungal mycelium is grown through agro-waste substrates in moulds, forming rigid bio-composite panels that are dried and assembled into the structure. - Video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Vx4uoBAPHBU - Project page: https://www.maelokko.com/Exhibitions #### Leaves Biocoffin — Shaina Garfield (2018) - Type: Product & platform · Organisms: Fungi, Human body - Idea: A funeral can be a collaboration with decomposer fungi. - What it is: A burial shroud-coffin of biodegradable, reclaimed materials whose rope is coated with a dye containing fungal spores that grow after burial to decompose the body and neutralise toxins. - How it works: Spore-laden dye is applied to the lattice rope; moisture in soil triggers fungal growth. - Images: https://web.archive.org/web/20181208142943im_/http://www.globalgradshow.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/10/LEAVES-BIOCOFFIN_880-x-598-1-Rotated.jpg - Project page: https://web.archive.org/web/20181208142943/https://www.globalgradshow.com/projects/leaves-biocoffin/ #### MYCOmmunity Toilet — University of British Columbia Biodesign Challenge team (2018) - Type: Research prototype · Organisms: Fungi, Human body - Idea: Sanitation can be a growth cycle rather than a waste-disposal problem. - What it is: A low-cost, waterless, off-grid toilet for under-resourced communities in which fungal mycelium decomposes human waste; when full, the unit is composted and used to grow trees, grasses and crops. - How it works: Fungal mycelium colonises a biodegradable container and breaks down solid waste into fertiliser without water or power. - Images: https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/552dc0ffe4b070a9e1a6a215/1530287942037-TTPLUOFD82ZLC7X8UEDX/Screen+Shot+2018-06-29+at+11.57.37+AM.png https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/552dc0ffe4b070a9e1a6a215/1530287940399-4NWK48DJO2UO654KO4A3/Screen+Shot+2018-06-29+at+11.57.46+AM.png - Project page: https://www.biodesignchallenge.org/university-british-columbia #### Mylo mycelium leather — Bolt Threads (2018) - Type: Product & platform · Organisms: Fungi - Idea: A fungal mat, grown in days in vertical farms, can be finished into a material that behaves like leather. - What it is: A leather alternative made from mycelium grown on beds of sawdust, used by Stella McCartney for the Frayme Mylo bag and by other brands. - How it works: Mycelium grows as a foam-like mat on organic substrate in controlled rooms, is harvested, compressed, tanned and embossed. - Video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AAyy8v_5Ox8 - Project page: https://www.stellamccartney.com/us/en/stellas-world/frayme-mylo-mycelium-bag.html #### Advanced Materials From Fungal Mycelium: Fabrication and Tuning of Physical Properties — Athanassia Athanassiou (2017) - Type: Paper · Organisms: Fungi - Idea: What you feed the fungus decides the material you get. - What it is: A materials-science study showing that pure mycelium films grown on different substrates have different stiffness, elasticity and surface properties. - How it works: Ganoderma lucidum and Pleurotus ostreatus were grown on cellulose or cellulose/potato-dextrose; harder-to-digest substrates gave more chitin and stiffer material. - Paper: https://www.nature.com/articles/srep41292 (Scientific Reports) - Images: https://media.springernature.com/full/springer-static/image/art%3A10.1038%2Fsrep41292/MediaObjects/41598_2017_Article_BFsrep41292_Fig1_HTML.jpg - Project page: https://www.nature.com/articles/srep41292 #### Grown Structures — Aleksi Vesaluoma (2017) - Type: Research prototype · Organisms: Fungi - Idea: The formwork is also the fungus's food, so the structure stiffens as it is eaten. - What it is: Hand-wrapped cardboard tubes are soaked with mycelium and bundled into tree-like frames; as the fungus digests the cardboard the bundles stiffen into a self-supporting structure. - How it works: Cardboard strips are inoculated with mushroom mycelium, wrapped by hand around tubular forms and grown in humid conditions until hyphae bond the layers, then dried to stop growth. - Video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9MNfBdy2IVo - Project page: https://www.dezeen.com/2017/07/18/aleksi-vesaluoma-grown-structures-mushroom-mycelium-cardboard-design/ #### Mycelium + Timber — Sebastian Cox, Ninela Ivanova (2017) - Type: Research prototype · Organisms: Fungi, Plants - Idea: Let a woodland fungus finish the furniture that woodland waste starts. - What it is: Stools and lampshades grown from coppiced hazel and willow offcuts bound by the mycelium of the tinder fungus, around handmade timber frames. - How it works: Fresh wood shavings are inoculated with Fomes fomentarius and packed around frames, where the mycelium grows into a suede-like, solid composite. - Images: https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5e2aee099a01410615e245ef/1581419003285-B4CAY9DDGSCQXSANEP8K/Sebastian+Cox_Ninela+Ivanova_Mycelium%2BTimber_Petr+Krejci+Photography_26.jpg https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5e2aee099a01410615e245ef/1581418480406-QDW6WNBPEA6MORD676N3/19.jpg - Project page: https://www.sebastiancox.co.uk/news/mycelium-timber-exploring-biofacture-in-a-new-collection-of-grown-furniture #### MycoTree — Dirk Hebel, Block Research Group (2017) - Type: Research prototype · Organisms: Fungi - Idea: A weak grown material can carry loads if the geometry keeps it in pure compression. - What it is: A self-supporting, tree-shaped spatial structure of load-bearing mycelium components, shown at the Seoul Biennale of Architecture and Urbanism. - How it works: Mycelium components were grown in moulds from agricultural waste and assembled into a branching form found with 3D graphic statics, so every part works in compression. - Images: https://world-architects.com/images/CmsPageElementImage/19/12/30/59aeaff69c4c4023a14052adac10015c/59aeaff69c4c4023a14052adac10015c.f5fb7444.JPG https://world-architects.com/images/CmsPageElementImage/98/51/42/59aeb072bdd4446a86565733ac10015c/59aeb072bdd4446a86565733ac10015c.f5fb7444.JPG - Project page: https://world-architects.com/en/architecture-news/works/mycotree #### Biohm mycelium insulation and Orb — Biohm (2016) - Type: Product & platform · Organisms: Fungi - Idea: Buildings can be insulated with a material that is grown from waste and composts at end of life. - What it is: Thermal and acoustic insulation panels grown from mycelium, and Orb, a board material made from food and industrial by-products. - How it works: Mycelium is grown through agricultural and industrial waste in panel moulds, then dried and compressed. - Video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9bh3B1QdY3g - Project page: https://www.biohm.co.uk/ #### Fungal Futures – Growing Domestic Bio-Landscapes — Maurizio Montalti (2016) - Type: Speculative design · Organisms: Fungi - Idea: Imagine the home as a landscape of materials grown with fungi rather than bought. - What it is: An exhibition and publication, made with Utrecht University, of domestic objects, surfaces and materials grown from fungi, presented as a possible future home. - How it works: Mycelium composites and pure fungal skins were grown in the lab and shaped into furniture, tableware and textiles for the exhibition. - Video: https://vimeo.com/161762670 - Images: https://www.corpuscoli.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/03/detail-publication-FF-Officina-Corpuscoli_Maurizio-Montalti.jpg - Project page: https://www.corpuscoli.com/fungal-futures-growing-domestic-bio-landscapes/ #### Growing Shoes — Kristel Peters (2016) - Type: Research prototype · Organisms: Fungi - Idea: A shoe can be grown to shape rather than cut, stitched and glued. - What it is: Shoe prototypes grown from fungal mycelium, made for the Fungal Futures exhibition by Officina Corpuscoli and Utrecht University and later shown at Somerset House. - How it works: Mycelium is grown on agricultural substrate inside shoe-shaped moulds, then heat-dried to stop growth; tested for different parts of the shoe. - Video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Z8Lu6SN6ly4 - Project page: https://www.somersethouse.org.uk/press/mushrooms-art-design-and-future-fungi-goes-online-first-time #### Mogu Acoustic and Mogu Floor — Mogu, Maurizio Montalti (2015) - Type: Product & platform · Organisms: Fungi - Idea: Mycelium can pass fire and acoustic tests and become an ordinary catalogue product. - What it is: Sound-absorbing wall panels and resilient floor tiles grown from fungal mycelium and textile or agricultural residues, sold for offices, shops and homes. - How it works: Selected fungal strains are fermented on pre-consumer residues in moulds, then dried and, for floors, coated with a biobased resin. - Video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BayiRYtsPZg - Images: https://mogu.bio/wp-content/uploads/2021/10/12_Wave_doppia-V1-scaled-e1633957545909.jpg - Project page: https://mogu.bio/mycelium-acoustic-panels/ #### Fungi Mutarium — Livin Studio (2014) - Type: Speculative design · Organisms: Fungi - Idea: Close the loop between plastic waste and food with a fungus in the kitchen. - What it is: A prototype incubator in which edible fungi grow on UV-treated plastic inside agar pods, digesting the plastic into edible mycelium. - How it works: Plastic is pre-degraded with UV light and placed in agar pods seeded with Pleurotus ostreatus or Schizophyllum commune, developed with Utrecht University. - Video: https://vimeo.com/113942952 - Images: https://thisismold.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/01/FungiMutarium-prototype.jpg - Project page: https://katharinaunger.com/fungi-mutarium #### MushLume Lighting — Danielle Trofe (2014) - Type: Product & platform · Organisms: Fungi - Idea: A lamp shade can be grown to shape in a few days and composted afterwards. - What it is: A collection of pendant lamps and sconces whose shades are grown from mycelium and hemp in custom moulds. - How it works: Hemp hurd and liquid mycelium culture (Ecovative's process) fill moulds for several days, then the shades are dried and heat-treated. - Video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OPRqoedPm9A - Images: https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/696ad21a1652bf2f2b937b65/4e9d732f-1a4f-4978-b0cd-1c48001e576f/MushLumeTerracePendant.jpg - Project page: https://danielletrofe.com/the-work #### Pendant Lights — Milo Dool (2014) - Type: Product & platform · Organisms: Fungi, Plants - Idea: Fungal decay can be a finish rather than a defect. - What it is: Lamps made from beech wood infected by white-rot fungi, normally chipped as waste; the fungal decay makes the wood more translucent and other fungi leave coloured patterns. - How it works: Spalted wood is turned thin so light passes through fungus-altered cell walls. - Images: https://new-material-award.nl/wp-content/uploads/2021/11/72dpi_Nr.1_Pendant-Lights_Milo-Dool-1024x682.jpg https://new-material-award.nl/wp-content/uploads/2021/11/Blua-stained-pine_close-up-1024x682.jpg - Project page: https://new-material-award.nl/en/pendant-lights/ #### Mushroom Tiny House — Ecovative (2013) - Type: Research prototype · Organisms: Fungi - Idea: A wall can be grown in place: fill the frame, wait, and the fungus makes the insulation. - What it is: A small timber-framed house whose wall cavities were filled with mycelium insulation that grew in place inside the frame. - How it works: Mycelium-inoculated substrate was packed between wooden forms and left to grow into a solid, insulating block before drying. - Video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BUxael8qV78 - Images: https://ecovative.com/images/process.jpg - Project page: https://ecovative.com/ #### Mycelium Chair — Studio Klarenbeek & Dros (2013) - Type: Research prototype · Organisms: Fungi - Idea: Print with a living material and let the organism complete the structure after printing. - What it is: A chair 3D printed from a paste of straw, water and living mycelium, which grew through the print to make it solid; mushrooms sprouted on its surface before it was dried. - How it works: Yellow oyster mushroom mycelium in a straw substrate was extruded with Wageningen University and sealed in a thin printed bioplastic skin while it grew. - Video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dGXV2CVrSvk - Images: https://d1tm14lrsghf7q.cloudfront.net/public/media/5366/conversions/193101-thumb.jpg - Project page: https://frameweb.com/article/mycelium-chair-by-eric-klarenbeek #### Myx lamp — Jonas Edvard (2013) - Type: Research prototype · Organisms: Fungi, Plants - Idea: One growth cycle yields two products: food and a lamp. - What it is: Lampshades grown from oyster-mushroom mycelium and hemp fibre in three weeks; edible mushrooms are harvested during growth before the shade is dried. - How it works: Spent substrate from a mushroom farm is mixed with hemp fibre, moulded over a form and colonised by Pleurotus mycelium, then dried to stop growth. - Images: https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/61289154ff90172fbe9bf970/c62d12ad-11d4-408b-8418-052d908a0e1b/Myxlamp_frontview_light%28JO%29.jpg https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/61289154ff90172fbe9bf970/b5f37880-6ae8-4fcd-95b1-5382279aaba6/myx_hanging_growing_lamp_3+weeks%28JO%29.jpg - Project page: https://www.jonasedvard.com/myx/project-one-s3btt #### Organofoam — iGEM Team Cornell (2013) - Type: Research prototype · Organisms: Fungi, DNA & molecules - Idea: Genetic tools can extend what grown materials can do. - What it is: Inspired by Ecovative's mycelium packaging, a standardised toolkit for genetically engineering lignin-degrading fungi, for example to protect mycelium materials from mould. - How it works: Transformation vectors and parts were built for basidiomycete fungi used in mycelium composites. - Video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dvBgyJckozs - Images: https://static.igem.org/mediawiki/2013/1/1c/CornellOrganofoamBadge.png - Project page: https://2013.igem.org/Team:Cornell #### The Growing Lab – Mycelia — Maurizio Montalti (2013) - Type: Research prototype · Organisms: Fungi - Idea: Replace production with cultivation: products grow on waste, like a slow natural 3D print. - What it is: An ongoing research project with Utrecht University that grows bowls, containers and panels from fungal mycelium on straw, cotton and hemp residues. - How it works: Selected fungal strains colonise low-value agricultural or textile residues in moulds and bind them into solid objects. - Video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Un5Qnobb_F8 - Images: https://www.corpuscoli.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/06/Officina-Corpuscoli_Maurizio-MontaltiMycelium-Binder-Growing-Objects.jpg - Project page: https://www.corpuscoli.com/projects/the-growing-lab/ #### Gen2Seat: Genetic Generation Seat — Terreform ONE (2012) - Type: Research prototype · Organisms: Fungi, Bacteria & microbes - Idea: Household products can be grown in parametric moulds and composted after use. - What it is: A full-scale segmented chair whose modules were grown in the Genspace community lab from Reishi mycelium inside computationally designed moulds, skinned with bacterial cellulose. - How it works: Ganoderma lucidum mycelium grows through wood chips, gypsum and oat bran in the moulds; an Acetobacter cellulose skin fuses with it into a hard biopolymer. - Images: https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/61bd9bc5da6b0336a4d44519/ef9219dc-1ff4-4840-bade-7c7e13850a03/Gen2_Seat_05%2B06-header.jpg http://thisisalive.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/04/MIA_and_CHAIR_ALL_01.jpg - Project page: https://www.terreform.org/gen2seat #### Yamanaka Furniture — Phil Ross (2012) - Type: Research prototype · Organisms: Fungi - Idea: Furniture can be cast by letting a fungus grow into a mould. - What it is: A set of chairs and tools grown from fungal mycelium bound into sawdust, made during a residency at The Workshop Residence in San Francisco. - How it works: Live fungal cells are mixed into pulverised cellulose; within about a week the mycelium binds the aggregate into the mould's shape, and drying stops growth and hardens it. - Images: http://thisisalive.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/04/6phil_ross.jpg http://thisisalive.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/09/000626-760x1140.jpg - Project page: http://thisisalive.com/yamanaka-furniture/ #### Infinity Burial Suit — Jae Rhim Lee (2011) - Type: Product & platform · Organisms: Fungi, Human body - Idea: Burial can be designed as a partnership with fungi that returns the body to the soil. - What it is: A cotton burial suit embedded with mushroom spores and other microorganisms, meant to help a buried body decompose and to reduce the toxins it releases into the soil. - How it works: Organic cotton suit threaded with a biomix of fungal spores and microbes, first developed by training mushrooms on the artist's own hair, skin and nails. - Video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_7rS_d1fiUc - Project page: https://www.ted.com/talks/jae_rhim_lee_my_mushroom_burial_suit #### Mycotecture (Mycotectural Alpha) — Phil Ross (2009) - Type: Artwork · Organisms: Fungi - Idea: A building material that is also a medicine and a drink, and returns to the soil. - What it is: A small tea house built from bricks of grown reishi mycelium at Kunsthalle Düsseldorf; at the end of the show pieces of the bricks were brewed into tea for visitors. - How it works: Ganoderma lucidum mycelium was grown on pasteurised sawdust in brick moulds, dried and stacked into an arch. - Video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7q5i9poYc3w - Images: https://www.archpaper.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/10/Mycotecture_1.jpeg https://ww2.kqed.org/app/uploads/sites/39/2014/06/Phil-Ross-Feature-Image-640x360-Katie-McKracken-Workshop-Residence.jpg - Project page: https://www.archpaper.com/2012/10/mycotecture-exploring-the-potential-materiality-of-mushrooms/ #### Made in Transit (Mushroom Growth Packaging) — Agata Jaworska (2007) - Type: Speculative design · Organisms: Fungi - Idea: A supply chain can be designed around growth instead of preservation. - What it is: Packaging for specialty oyster mushrooms that keeps them growing during transport, so they are ready to harvest when they reach the shop: a shift from 'best before' to 'ready by'. - How it works: PET containers with a foam growth pad and inoculated substrate let mushroom fruiting bodies develop in transit; the consumer harvests just before eating. - Video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7aVSMA1rylY - Images: https://www.moma.org/interactives/exhibitions/2008/elasticmind/assets/images/MushroomGrowthPackaging/mitpinkyellowoysters2.jpg https://www.moma.org/interactives/exhibitions/2008/elasticmind/assets/images/MushroomGrowthPackaging/mityellowoystersside.jpg - Project page: https://www.moma.org/interactives/exhibitions/2008/elasticmind/ #### Mushroom Packaging (MycoComposite) — Ecovative (2007) - Type: Product & platform · Organisms: Fungi - Idea: Instead of moulding foam from oil, let a fungus glue crop waste into the shape you need. - What it is: Protective packaging grown in moulds from hemp hurd or other farm waste bound together by fungal mycelium, used as a compostable replacement for polystyrene foam. - How it works: Pasteurised agricultural residue is inoculated with mycelium, packed into moulds for several days of growth, then heat-dried to stop growth. - Video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zw2O1PhrzA0 - Images: https://thumb.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/1/14/Material_by_Ecovative.jpg/250px-Material_by_Ecovative.jpg - Project page: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ecovative_Design ### Microbial Fabrication Bacteria and yeast that make pigments, cellulose, cement and other materials. #### AstroFeast — Joanna Cheng (2026) - Type: Speculative design · Organisms: Bacteria & microbes - Idea: Food on a spaceship can be alive and changing. - What it is: Dried nutritional sheets of living yeast for long space missions, rehydrated with water only and kept in containers where the food keeps evolving. - How it works: Yeast cultures are dried into sheets and revived in nature-inspired vessels. - Images: https://content.gp-award.com/assets/media/award26/2-astrofeast_blogLarge.jpg https://content.gp-award.com/assets/media/award26/1-astrofeast_blogLarge.jpg - Project page: https://www.gp-award.com/en/projects/astrofeast #### Bacterial Cellulose Foam — Foamlab, Elvin Karana (2026) - Type: Product & platform · Organisms: Bacteria & microbes - Idea: Grow foam instead of blowing it from oil. - What it is: A lightweight, fire-resistant, compostable foam made by bacteria that grow cellulose networks from renewable feedstocks, aimed at packaging, insulation, furniture and apparel. - How it works: Bacteria produce cellulose in a foamed medium; the structure is stabilised in a low-energy process. - Images: https://content.gp-award.com/assets/media/award26/0-bacterial-cellulose-foam_blogLarge.jpg https://content.gp-award.com/assets/media/award26/3-bacterial-cellulose-foam_blogLarge.jpg - Project page: https://www.gp-award.com/en/projects/bacterial-cellulose-foam #### Breaking the Wall of Lithium Recovery with Bacteria — Isidora Correa (2026) - Type: Artwork · Organisms: Bacteria & microbes - Idea: Microbes could replace extraction with recovery. - What it is: An artistic research project in which extremophile bacteria from lithium-rich environments recover lithium from discarded batteries instead of it being extracted from Atacama salt flats. - How it works: Fieldwork collects bacteria from salt flats; lab collaborations test bioleaching of battery waste; results are shown as installation. - Images: https://falling-walls.com/sites/default/files/styles/content/public/medien/250/bilder/credit_adriano_ferreira_borges_26_scsu_as_isidora_correa_project_photo.jpg?h=49c2a0f5&itok=o5gNutq4 - Project page: https://falling-walls.com/breakthroughs/finalists-interviews/isidora-correa #### GROWinK — Peerasin Punxh Hutaphaet (2026) - Type: Research prototype · Organisms: Fungi, Bacteria & microbes - Idea: A print can be alive for a while and then return to soil. - What it is: A regenerative printing system that runs CMYK inkjet printing with fungal pigments and dormant bacterial spores instead of petroleum inks, so prints become living, temporary media. - How it works: Fungal pigment inks and spore suspensions are formulated for inkjet heads. - Images: https://content.gp-award.com/assets/media/award26/1-growink_blogLarge.jpg https://content.gp-award.com/assets/media/award26/3-growink_blogLarge.jpg - Project page: https://www.gp-award.com/en/projects/growink #### MicroBlue — Microbeworks (2026) - Type: Product & platform · Organisms: Bacteria & microbes - Idea: Biotech colour only scales if mills can use it tomorrow. - What it is: A biodegradable textile dye brewed by microbial fermentation and formulated to run in existing dyeing machinery. - How it works: Microbes ferment sugars into blue pigment molecules that are concentrated into a drop-in dye. - Video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p9bJbxbPoMQ - Images: https://hmfoundation.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/06/MicroBlue_2026_GCA_winner-1.jpg - Project page: https://www.microbeworksscientific.com/ #### ECO-SKIN — Jonah Goodman (2025) - Type: Research prototype · Organisms: Bacteria & microbes, Human body - Idea: A home fermentation culture can grow a low-cost medical material. - What it is: A bioactive wound dressing made from bacterial cellulose grown by kombucha SCOBY fermentation and enhanced with Manuka honey and acetic acid. - How it works: Komagataeibacter xylinus forms a dense, hydrated pellicle that is cleaned, infused and packaged as a moisture-retaining bandage. - Images: https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/552dc0ffe4b070a9e1a6a215/1751486084412-USV0BWV9UUX5AK571OSN/ECO-SKIN+Application+-+Forearm.jpg https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/552dc0ffe4b070a9e1a6a215/1751486092754-UM63PISSKK1USITPQO86/ECO-SKIN+Removed+From+Pacakge.jpg - Project page: https://www.biodesignchallenge.org/parsons-2025 #### Hydra — Markos Georgiou (2025) - Type: Research prototype · Organisms: Bacteria & microbes - Idea: Grow the final shape instead of cutting it from a flat sheet. - What it is: A modular bioreactor that grows three-dimensional bacterial-cellulose forms directly from waste feedstock, producing wound dressings, biocomposites and textiles such as a grown shoe upper. - How it works: Cellulose-producing bacteria grow at air–liquid interfaces shaped by the reactor's modular moulds. - Video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zZHPcDz6BLY - Images: https://www.jamesdysonaward.org/Document/98007d0b-a748-447b-a6fa-c985c8cdcdec/hydra-hero.jpg https://www.jamesdysonaward.org/Document/4ad80a73-4cc5-4f44-b3f2-fa29026fb446/hydra-bacterial-cellulose-shoe.jpg - Project page: https://www.jamesdysonaward.org/en-GB/2025/project/hydra/ #### Living Records — Maryland Institute College of Art Biodesign Challenge team (2025) - Type: Speculative design · Organisms: Bacteria & microbes - Idea: Whose memory gets recorded is a design choice, even in the material of the medium. - What it is: Biologically fabricated records — bacterial-cellulose cassette tapes and biofabricated memory circuits — that hold the forgotten histories and unacknowledged labour behind the moon landing. - How it works: Bacterial cellulose sheets are grown, dried and formed into cassette-tape and circuit-like objects. - Video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hz_jl2QqiVQ - Images: https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/552dc0ffe4b070a9e1a6a215/1751485898645-4ARDJI0J8CI0QZ3BA7TC/LivingRecords_MICABDC2025_01.png https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/552dc0ffe4b070a9e1a6a215/1751485895117-M972CFYBM6VOU8JLLIVR/LivingRecords_MICABDC2025_02.jpg - Project page: https://www.biodesignchallenge.org/maryland-institute-college-of-art-2025 #### Quorum — Natsai Audrey Chieza (2025) - Type: Research prototype · Organisms: Bacteria & microbes - Idea: Design the microbial community and the waste stream together, not the organism alone. - What it is: Faber Futures and Evolutor evolve mixed microbial communities that eat food-industry waste — oat milk residue, restaurant waste — and return high-performance textile pigments. - How it works: Streptomyces consortia are directed-evolved to digest complex sugars from specific waste streams; pigment output is characterised for textile dyeing and documented as a regenerative production system. - Images: https://faberfutures.com/wp-content/uploads/2025/05/Faber-Futures_QUORUM_4-768x1024.jpeg - Project page: https://faberfutures.com/projects/quorum/ #### AIPER — Ailton Pereira (2024) - Type: Product & platform · Organisms: Bacteria & microbes, Fungi - Idea: Colour can come from microbes fed on farm waste. - What it is: A start-up producing microbial biopigments for textiles and cosmetics by fermentation, feeding the microbes on agricultural waste. - How it works: Pigment-producing strains ferment agro-residues; pigments are extracted and formulated. - Images: https://content.gp-award.com/assets/media/award24/0-aiper_blogLarge.jpg - Project page: https://www.gp-award.com/en/projects/aiper #### Carbon Polymerizing System — Carbon Polymerizing System team (Mahidol University) (2024) - Type: Research prototype · Organisms: Bacteria & microbes - Idea: Captured carbon can become a material instead of being buried. - What it is: An automated system that captures carbon and feeds it to bacteria that ferment it into polyhydroxybutyrate (PHB), a biodegradable plastic. - How it works: A capture unit supplies carbon to a bioreactor where PHB-accumulating bacteria grow; the polymer is then extracted. - Video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FUlJ8WdIYHE - Images: https://www.jamesdysonaward.org/Document/1f2dacee-7db2-472e-934a-77a33e3d5c78/system.jpg https://www.jamesdysonaward.org/Document/916dcbcd-15b2-45c9-8d8d-62dd20133a11/phb1-large.jpeg - Project page: https://www.jamesdysonaward.org/en-GB/2024/project/carbon-polymerizing-system/ #### Ferment'Up — Green Spot Technologies (2024) - Type: Product & platform · Organisms: Fungi, Bacteria & microbes, Plants - Idea: Fermentation can turn by-products back into food. - What it is: Fruit and vegetable skins and seeds from food processing are upcycled by solid-state (dry) fermentation into nutritious food ingredients. - How it works: Selected microorganisms ferment damp plant residues, raising protein and fibre quality. - Video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VQzYd9CyKLA - Images: https://earthshotprize.org/wp-content/uploads/2024/09/FermentUp-Hero-1920x1080-@72DPI.jpg - Project page: https://earthshotprize.org/winners-finalists/ferment-up/ #### O° — OXMAN, Neri Oxman (2024) - Type: Research prototype · Organisms: Bacteria & microbes - Idea: Design a product's decomposition as carefully as its use. - What it is: Shoes and textiles made from a single bacterially produced bioplastic (PHA), designed so each product can decompose back into its ecosystem at end of life. - How it works: Polyhydroxyalkanoates made by bacteria were processed by 3D printing, hot-melt spinning and knitting into a mono-material product family. - Images: https://cdn.prod.website-files.com/690e0b6e2e2a0cbc45ab116e/69762cd6a2f86f21e1b44867_OG%20Image%20O0.jpg - Project page: https://www.oxman.com/projects/o0 #### PlantPoxy — PlantPoxy team (KMUTT) (2024) - Type: Research prototype · Organisms: Fungi, Plants - Idea: Deliver a living ally with the seed. - What it is: A glue-like culture medium carrying pest-controlling fungi that is coated onto seeds or stems, replacing chemical pesticides with a living biocontrol agent. - How it works: Entomopathogenic fungi are embedded in an adhesive nutrient matrix applied as a seed coating. - Video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=J6CL43yFfsU - Images: https://www.jamesdysonaward.org/Document/7540d90d-b224-4586-ba2d-a88971977309/img6021.png - Project page: https://www.jamesdysonaward.org/en-GB/2024/project/plantpoxy/ #### pHen — Moholy-Nagy University of Art and Design Biodesign Challenge team (2024) - Type: Product & platform · Organisms: Bacteria & microbes, Plants - Idea: One bio-ink, many colours: let chemistry replace a box of single-use markers. - What it is: A refillable, 3D-printable marker whose ink changes colour with pH, using pigments from bacteria and vegetables such as actinorhodin from Streptomyces coelicolor and anthocyanins from red cabbage. - How it works: pH-responsive natural pigments are loaded into an open-source printable pen body with interchangeable tips. - Video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AW1ucms2g-c - Images: https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/552dc0ffe4b070a9e1a6a215/1718647551297-GQ61ZCCUFHRI94QQQPIZ/BDC_HERO_V01_0233.png https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/552dc0ffe4b070a9e1a6a215/1718647541823-TYQRD9I7G10UKQ9SJWK9/DSC07963.JPG - Project page: https://www.biodesignchallenge.org/mome-2024 #### ALT TEX — ALT TEX (2023) - Type: Product & platform · Organisms: Bacteria & microbes - Idea: Replace fossil polyester with a fermented, compostable one. - What it is: Food waste is fermented into biopolymers that are melt-spun into yarn and woven into a biodegradable alternative to polyester. - How it works: Microbial fermentation converts food-waste sugars into a polyester-like polymer suitable for melt spinning. - Video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NG2bi-YqwKQ - Images: https://hmfoundation.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/05/Large_Print-ALT-TEX-.jpeg - Project page: https://thealttex.com/ #### BacTerra: Designing Across Scales — California College of the Arts, Architecture Biodesign Challenge team (2023) - Type: Research prototype · Organisms: Bacteria & microbes, Animals - Idea: Borrow the shell-building chemistry of animals to bind building materials at room temperature. - What it is: A research project on biomaterials that cut building-industry carbon: inspired by plankton, molluscs and birds that make shells, the team combined clay, Bacillus subtilis and sea-urchin shells in a biomineralisation process. - How it works: Bacillus subtilis precipitates calcium carbonate that binds clay with crushed sea-urchin shell. - Images: https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/552dc0ffe4b070a9e1a6a215/1687881104599-I9QD05VS578F6YLYF3I1/CCA_Architecture_Image01.jpg https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/552dc0ffe4b070a9e1a6a215/1687881107345-R516Q6N8DRMKFCYJEMAA/CCA_Architecture_Image02.jpg - Project page: https://www.biodesignchallenge.org/cca-architecture-2023 #### Biocement Chair (The Essence of Biocement) — Friedrich Gerlach (2023) - Type: Research prototype · Organisms: Bacteria & microbes - Idea: Research materials reach people when they become furniture. - What it is: Seating cast from recycled brick aggregate bound by bacterially precipitated calcium carbonate, with no firing, made to communicate biocement research through a usable object. - How it works: Sporosarcina pasteurii bacteria precipitate calcite (MICP) through a cast aggregate in successive treatment cycles. - Video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vNFfUw-JWW8 - Images: https://www.jamesdysonaward.org/Document/3d109486-e0c8-4528-b041-3eddba2db81e/01biocementgerlachhuhnholzlq08.jpg https://www.jamesdysonaward.org/Document/7663292b-0318-48af-83fb-afaf52a827d5/02biocementgerlachhuhnholz.jpg - Project page: https://www.friedrichgerlach.de/the-essence-of-biocement #### Great Wrap — Great Wrap (2023) - Type: Product & platform · Organisms: Plants, Bacteria & microbes - Idea: Replace a ubiquitous plastic with one fermented from food waste. - What it is: A compostable stretch and cling wrap made from potato waste fermented into a bioplastic that performs like conventional film and breaks down without microplastics. - How it works: Potato-waste starches are fermented into a biopolymer (PHA-type) blend and blown into film. - Video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ybQ94S1-sc4 - Project page: https://greatwrap.com.au/ #### KBCols Sciences microbial colours — KBCols Sciences (2023) - Type: Product & platform · Organisms: Bacteria & microbes - Idea: A country's microbial diversity is a colour library. - What it is: Non-GMO natural textile colourants produced by bacteria isolated from India's biodiversity and grown by fermentation instead of petrochemical synthesis. - How it works: Pigment-producing bacterial strains are fermented and the pigments extracted for dyeing. - Video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WeNLSr_HSlA - Images: https://hmfoundation.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/05/Large_Print-KBCols-Sciences.jpeg - Project page: https://www.kbcolssciences.com/ #### METABOLICA — Thomas Feuerstein (2023) - Type: Artwork · Organisms: Bacteria & microbes, Algae - Idea: Living organisms can be both the quarry and the chisel of sculpture. - What it is: An exhibition in five chapters in which algae and bacteria make, digest and remake sculptures from PHB bioplastic, telling a story from whaling and oil to future biochemistry. - How it works: Bacteria metabolise fatty acids from algae into polyhydroxybutyrate (PHB), which is cast into sculptures that other microbes later degrade. - Images: https://ars.electronica.art/starts-prize/files/2024/06/metabolica-5-c-atelier-thomas-feuerstein-1024x576.jpg - Project page: https://thomasfeuerstein.net #### Mr. Kombucha's Lab — Xuewei Zhao (2023) - Type: Product & platform · Organisms: Bacteria & microbes, Fungi - Idea: Material innovation can be shared as recipes anyone can grow. - What it is: An open-source platform that teaches people to grow kombucha SCOBY and turn it into leather- and plastic-like everyday objects. - How it works: Guides cover breeding cultures, drying pellicles and forming objects, with a sharing community. - Images: https://content.gp-award.com/assets/media/award23/0-mr-kombuchas-lab_blogLarge.jpg - Project page: https://www.gp-award.com/en/projects/mr-kombuchas-lab #### CyanoFabbrica — Cinzia Ferrari (2022) - Type: Research prototype · Organisms: Bacteria & microbes - Idea: Share authorship of form with a microbe. - What it is: Cyanobacteria's ability to biomineralise is used to bind substrates into objects, making the organism a co-producer whose binding determines each unique form. - How it works: Cyanobacteria precipitate calcium carbonate among granular material in moulds under light. - Images: https://content.gp-award.com/assets/media/award22/0-cyanofabbrica_2_blogLarge.jpg - Project page: https://www.gp-award.com/en/projects/cyanofabbrica #### LanzaTech gas fermentation — LanzaTech (2022) - Type: Product & platform · Organisms: Bacteria & microbes - Idea: Pollution can be the diet of a microbe that makes materials. - What it is: Carbon-rich industrial off-gases are fed to anaerobic bacteria (Clostridium autoethanogenum) that ferment them into ethanol, used to make fuels, polyester and other products. - How it works: Steel-mill gases (CO, CO2, H2) are bubbled through bioreactors of gas-fermenting bacteria. - Video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_tD8pmuP3SU - Images: https://earthshotprize.org/wp-content/uploads/2022/11/LanzaTech-CEO-Dr-Jennifer-Holmgren-with-beaker-1024x576.jpg - Project page: https://lanzatech.com/ #### Living Materials Made by 3D Printing Cellulose-Producing Bacteria in Granular Gels — André R. Studart (2022) - Type: Paper · Organisms: Bacteria & microbes - Idea: Let the bacteria finish the object after the nozzle has left. - What it is: Cellulose-producing bacteria are written into a granular support gel, where they keep growing after printing and fuse the printed paths into a coherent, tough cellulose object. - How it works: A granular gel bath holds extruded bacteria-laden filaments in place during days of culture; the cellulose the bacteria secrete bridges neighbouring filaments and sets the final mechanics. - Paper: https://doi.org/10.1016/j.bioadv.2022.213095 (Biomaterials Advances) - Images: https://ars.els-cdn.com/content/image/1-s2.0-S2772950822003727-gr3_lrg.jpg https://ars.els-cdn.com/content/image/1-s2.0-S2772950822003727-gr1_lrg.jpg - Project page: https://complexmaterials.ethz.ch/ #### Papier Plume (ImpressioVivo) — Aurélie Mosse (2022) - Type: Research prototype · Organisms: Bacteria & microbes - Idea: Let soil bacteria mineralise waste paper into a stone-like foam. - What it is: A lightweight foam made from paper waste that is hardened and made more fire-resistant by bacteria that grow calcite crystals through it, part of the ImpressioVivo research on 3D-printed, bacterially calcified materials. - How it works: Paper-waste foam is immersed in or sprayed with urease-producing bacteria and a calcium-urea solution in one or several steps, so calcite precipitates on the fibres. - Paper: https://doi.org/10.1017/btd.2023.11 (Research Directions: Biotechnology Design 2024) - Images: https://static.cambridge.org/binary/version/id/urn:cambridge.org:id:binary:20240207172918972-0330:S2752945223000110:S2752945223000110_fig3.png?pub-status=live https://static.cambridge.org/binary/version/id/urn:cambridge.org:id:binary:20240207172918972-0330:S2752945223000110:S2752945223000110_fig2.png?pub-status=live #### Prometheus Materials bio-concrete blocks — Prometheus Materials, Wil V. Srubar III (2022) - Type: Product & platform · Organisms: Bacteria & microbes, Algae - Idea: Let photosynthetic microbes grow the binder of concrete and store carbon in it. - What it is: Masonry blocks made with a bio-cement produced by microalgae instead of Portland cement, tested with the architecture firm SOM. - How it works: Biomineralising cyanobacteria grown with sunlight, seawater and CO2 produce a calcium-carbonate binder that is mixed with aggregate and cured into blocks. - Images: https://www.som.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/11/2U9A2252-A_large-1667592938-scaled.jpg - Project page: https://www.som.com/research/bio-concrete/ #### Vivomer packaging — Shellworks (2022) - Type: Product & platform · Organisms: Bacteria & microbes - Idea: Make packaging from something microbes both make and eat. - What it is: Packaging made from Vivomer, a PHA biopolymer produced by microorganisms through fermentation; soil and ocean bacteria recognise it as food, so it biodegrades without industrial composting. - How it works: Microbes accumulate PHA granules when fed; the extracted polymer is moulded into jars and closures. - Images: https://rca-media2.rca.ac.uk/images/Copy-of-Jars-in-blue-hues-2021--.2e16d0ba.fill-1200x1200.jpg - Project page: https://www.shellworks.com #### Living materials with programmable functionalities grown from engineered microbial co-cultures — Tom Ellis (2021) - Type: Paper · Organisms: Bacteria & microbes - Idea: Program the material while it grows by engineering the microbes that make it. - What it is: A kombucha-like co-culture of cellulose-making bacteria and engineered yeast grows bacterial cellulose that can sense and respond to chemicals and light. - How it works: Komagataeibacter rhaeticus produces cellulose while engineered Saccharomyces cerevisiae secretes enzymes into it or lives inside it as a sensor. - Paper: https://www.nature.com/articles/s41563-020-00857-5 (Nature Materials) - Images: https://media.springernature.com/full/springer-static/image/art%3A10.1038%2Fs41563-020-00857-5/MediaObjects/41563_2020_857_Fig1_HTML.png - Project page: https://www.nature.com/articles/s41563-020-00857-5 #### Pyrus — Gabe Tavas (2021) - Type: Research prototype · Organisms: Bacteria & microbes - Idea: A brewery by-product can stand in for tropical timber. - What it is: A petroleum-free, wood-like material made from bacterial cellulose left over from kombucha brewing, which can be laser-cut, CNC-machined and sanded like exotic hardwoods. - How it works: Kombucha SCOBY pellicles are layered, pressed and cured into dense blocks with wood-like grain. - Video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FKqc90syidU - Images: https://www.jamesdysonaward.org/Document/20e1597c-a17d-48d6-a4f5-2689d7a99b9b/img5065.jpg https://www.jamesdysonaward.org/Document/afd79e14-8c91-419b-b042-50783488d30a/image-from-ios-2.jpg - Project page: https://www.jamesdysonaward.org/en-GB/2021/project/pyrus/ #### Scobio — Fergus Telfer (2021) - Type: Research prototype · Organisms: Bacteria & microbes - Idea: A distillery's waste can grow packaging. - What it is: A colourless, biodegradable film grown by microbes from Scottish gin-distillery waste to replace plastic packaging film; it is also antimicrobial and water-retentive. - How it works: Bacterial cellulose is grown on spent distillery liquid and processed into clear sheets. - Images: https://web.archive.org/web/20211129114907im_/https://www.globalgradshow.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/11/more-wow-min-square-600x600.jpg - Project page: https://web.archive.org/web/20211129114907/https://www.globalgradshow.com/project/scobio/ #### A Lighter Delicacy — Sorawut Kittibanthorn (2020) - Type: Research prototype · Organisms: Animals, DNA & molecules - Idea: Question what counts as food by treating slaughter waste as an ingredient. - What it is: A proposal to turn chicken-feather waste from slaughterhouses into a new edible product, since feathers are about 91% keratin protein. - How it works: Feathers are hydrolysed to break keratin into digestible peptides and amino acids, then formed into a food product. - Images: https://ars.electronica.art/starts-prize/files/2021/06/Hidden-value-of-waste-feathers-Credit-Pichaya-Sampanvejsobha-and-Varinthorn-Deprasertwong-1024x512.jpg - Project page: https://ars.electronica.art/starts-prize/en/a-lighter-delicacy/ #### Biomineralization and Successive Regeneration of Engineered Living Building Materials — Wil V. Srubar III (2020) - Type: Paper · Organisms: Bacteria & microbes - Idea: A building material that can reproduce itself. - What it is: Sand-hydrogel bricks mineralised by photosynthetic cyanobacteria that stay alive; splitting one brick and adding fresh sand, gel and nutrients grows new bricks. - How it works: Synechococcus sp. cyanobacteria precipitate calcium carbonate in a gelatin-sand scaffold; temperature and humidity switch the bacteria between growth and dormancy. - Paper: https://doi.org/10.1016/j.matt.2019.11.016 (Matter) - Images: https://ars.els-cdn.com/content/image/1-s2.0-S2590238519303911-gr1_lrg.jpg https://ars.els-cdn.com/content/image/1-s2.0-S2590238519303911-gr2_lrg.jpg - Project page: https://www.colorado.edu/lab/srubar/ #### Linneo, Nourishing Beauty — Universidad de los Andes Biodesign Challenge team (2020) - Type: Research prototype · Organisms: Fungi - Idea: Colour in cosmetics can come from fungal metabolism instead of mined minerals. - What it is: Cosmetic pigments sourced from fungi to replace ingredients such as heavy metals, parabens and phthalates with biological alternatives that nourish and protect the skin. - How it works: Pigment-producing fungal strains are cultured and their pigments extracted into a make-up palette. - Video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cqJm9gxBifc - Images: https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/552dc0ffe4b070a9e1a6a215/1595284288770-2Z96KKKKVJUUO0RRJWF6/Linneo.JPG https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/552dc0ffe4b070a9e1a6a215/1595284359633-YW8NNGB1AADP8RDCZ7N8/LINNEO_Palette_3.jpg - Project page: https://www.biodesignchallenge.org/universidad-de-los-andes-2020 #### Microbial Memories — NYU Integrated Design & Media Biodesign Challenge team (2020) - Type: Speculative design · Organisms: Bacteria & microbes - Idea: A place's taste lives in its microbes, so microbes can carry memories of places. - What it is: The project traces links between microbiomes and terroir in wine and other foods and imagines capturing the flavours and scents of a place through its microorganisms. - How it works: Combines microbiome sampling of food environments with speculative preservation and tasting experiences. - Video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u3onQ7ogZgM - Project page: http://www.timeplaceculture.com/ #### Microbial Weaving — Modern Synthesis, Amy Congdon (2020) - Type: Product & platform · Organisms: Bacteria & microbes - Idea: Design the scaffold and let the bacteria do the weaving. - What it is: Bacteria grow nanocellulose onto a designed textile scaffold, fusing yarn and microbial material into a single sheet used for shoes, bags and garment panels. - How it works: Komagataeibacter cultures are fed sugar and grow cellulose around a knitted or laid yarn template; the composite is then dried, finished and dyed, with pattern and thickness set by the template. - Video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jEIq_SZG1xE - Images: https://admin.modernsynthesis.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/07/Homepage-Header-High.png - Project page: https://www.modernsynthesis.com/ #### OFlow — OFlow team (Shawn Navarednam, Kai Jie Chow, Frederick Wong) (2020) - Type: Research prototype · Organisms: Bacteria & microbes - Idea: A bacterial biofilm's stickiness can be the filter. - What it is: A biofilter for wastewater treatment plants that uses biodegradable scaffolds coated with Pseudomonas fluorescens biofilms to trap small microplastics before effluent reaches rivers. - How it works: Biofilm-coated scaffolds slot into existing treatment stages and capture particles by adhesion. - Video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kYT9eXGxDH4 - Images: https://www.jamesdysonaward.org/Document/f2afbbec-08e9-472a-bc95-b8b515c73d20/whole-system.png https://www.jamesdysonaward.org/Document/47255153-073f-41c8-a615-08bc955c79e7/image-of-scaled-down-model.jpg - Project page: https://www.jamesdysonaward.org/en-GB/2020/project/oflow/ #### Celium — Polybion (2019) - Type: Product & platform · Organisms: Bacteria & microbes - Idea: Let bacteria weave the sheet, and use fruit waste as their food. - What it is: A leather-like material grown by bacteria as thick sheets of cellulose on a feedstock of fruit waste, then tanned-free finished for fashion, footwear and interiors. - How it works: Cellulose-producing bacteria ferment sugars from mango and other fruit waste in trays, forming a mat that is harvested, dried and finished. - Video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=k6FvZ_jHsV0 - Images: https://images.prismic.io/polybion/aZ8p2MFoBIGEgyhY_2LandingPage-NewCelium%E2%84%A2Sheets.jpg?auto=format,compress&rect=0,0,4000,2254&w=4000&h=2254 https://images.prismic.io/polybion/aUCkd3NYClf9oPLO_1LandingPage-PolybionBacterialCellulose.jpg?auto=format,compress&rect=0,0,2000,2021&w=2000&h=2021 - Project page: https://www.polybion.bio #### Electric Life — Teresa van Dongen (2019) - Type: Artwork · Organisms: Bacteria & microbes - Idea: A lamp that only shines if you look after the microbes that power it. - What it is: A light installation powered entirely by electroactive microorganisms from river and lake mud; its owner must feed it a little tap water, nutrients and vinegar each week. - How it works: Microbial fuel cells harvest electrons that mud bacteria release as metabolic waste; developed with CMET at Ghent University and VITO and shown at Centre Pompidou. - Paper: https://doi.org/10.1145/3546155.3547285 (NordiCHI 2022) - Images: https://payload.cargocollective.com/1/16/540742/13689755/Electric-Life-2.0.01_1250.jpg - Project page: https://artifact-archive.org/whole-archive #### Enzer — RMIT University Biodesign Challenge team (2019) - Type: Research prototype · Organisms: Bacteria & microbes, DNA & molecules - Idea: Catch synthetic fibres at home and let a bacterial enzyme digest them. - What it is: A microplastic filter that can be retrofitted to existing washing machines, combining fine filters with a powder that breaks plastic fibres down with enzymes from the bacterium Ideonella sakaiensis. - How it works: PETase-type enzymes from Ideonella sakaiensis hydrolyse PET microfibres captured by the filter. - Video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eu2UlP6V8cM - Images: https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/552dc0ffe4b070a9e1a6a215/1561582038059-VSTURWUDLBXA4CHUBPE3/BDC+2019+RMIT+Finalist+Team+ENZER+_+Image+1.jpg - Project page: https://www.biodesignchallenge.org/rmit #### Fungkee | Fungal Supercoatings — Emma van der Leest (2019) - Type: Research prototype · Organisms: Bacteria & microbes, Fungi - Idea: A harmful fungus can lend a useful property to a microbe-grown material. - What it is: With Aneta Schaap-Oziemlak and Radboudumc, the team developed a water-repellent fungal coating for bacterial-cellulose leather, using a fungus isolated from a human patient. BAD Award 2019 winner. - How it works: Hydrophobin-like water-repellent properties of fungi (likely) are applied as a spray to bacterial cellulose leather. - Images: https://www.badaward.nl/imager/assets/site/8180/2019.11.29-BoudewijnBollmann_Polarities_opening-LORES-137_a5a12f426a1ab11909951db4fe37df8f.jpg https://www.badaward.nl/imager/assets/site/8182/2019.11.29-BoudewijnBollmann_Polarities_opening-LORES-123_a5a12f426a1ab11909951db4fe37df8f.jpg - Project page: https://www.badaward.nl/artists-scientists/emma-van-der-leest-aneta-schaap-oziemlak-with-paul-verweij-sybren-de-hoog-radboudumc-cwz #### GIY Bio Buddies — Nest Makerspace Biodesign Challenge team (2019) - Type: Product & platform · Organisms: Bacteria & microbes, Fungi - Idea: Children can learn material culture by growing their toys instead of buying them. - What it is: A kit that lets children grow and design their own toys from kombucha leather and mycelium, as an alternative to plastic toys. - How it works: Kombucha SCOBY cellulose is dried into leather-like sheets and mycelium is grown in moulds; the kit packages recipes and templates. - Video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-zT7OKeApNA - Images: https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/552dc0ffe4b070a9e1a6a215/1561580295993-BWM6RO002JMJ8FCRYF4E/Final+GIY+Bio+Buddies+kit.jpg https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/552dc0ffe4b070a9e1a6a215/1561580298990-R6SNAG2Y2B0A1C1AO2TR/GIY+Bio+Buddies+Project+final+images.jpg - Project page: https://giybiobuddies.weebly.com/ #### Huue Biosynthetic Indigo — Huue (2019) - Type: Product & platform · Organisms: Bacteria & microbes - Idea: Redesign the synthesis route and a polluting colour becomes a fermentation product. - What it is: Engineered bacteria make indigo dye through an enzyme pathway, so denim can be dyed without the cyanide, formaldehyde and harsh reducing agents of synthetic indigo. - How it works: Enzymes from indigo-producing plants are expressed in bacteria that convert a sugar feedstock into indican and then indigo, dyeing fabric in a mild aqueous process. - Video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2t_hg33RtQI - Project page: https://www.huue.bio/ #### Le Qara lab leather — Le Qara (2019) - Type: Product & platform · Organisms: Bacteria & microbes, Plants - Idea: Program a material's properties by how you feed the microbes that grow it. - What it is: Microorganisms fed on Peruvian flower and fruit waste grow a biodegradable leather-like material whose texture, colour and thickness can be tuned during growth. - How it works: Microbial cellulose grows in trays of waste-based medium and is finished like leather. - Video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j_q9SYeZr-Q - Images: https://hmfoundation.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/06/Large-Le-Qara-684x1024.jpg - Project page: https://hmfoundation.com/gca/winner/le-qara/ #### NUATAN — crafting plastics! studio (2019) - Type: Product & platform · Organisms: Plants, Bacteria & microbes - Idea: Design a material's lifespan as deliberately as its form. - What it is: An oil-free bioplastic blend made entirely from renewable resources that withstands over 100 °C, has a designed lifespan of 1–50 years and composts industrially. - How it works: Blends of PLA (from plant starch) and PHA (from bacterial fermentation) are tuned with the Slovak University of Technology and Panara. - Images: https://designmuseum.org/image/52577a1c-ac48-4d67-8dc1-9f4d76b281cf?width=1600 - Project page: https://www.crafting-plastics.com/ #### PseudoFreeze — Universidad de los Andes Biodesign Challenge team (2019) - Type: Research prototype · Organisms: Bacteria & microbes, DNA & molecules - Idea: A bacterium's trick for freezing leaves can become cold-chain infrastructure. - What it is: A battery-free cooling system for transporting vaccines that uses the ice-nucleating protein of the bacterium Pseudomonas syringae. - How it works: The INA (ice nucleation active) protein makes water freeze at higher temperatures; the team built a carrier bag and lab tests around it to keep vials cold without power. - Video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mwUVBkoInTY - Images: https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/552dc0ffe4b070a9e1a6a215/1561579829697-3QCPAY4U6F198SLVEZD4/PSEUDOFREEZE+BAG.jpg https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/552dc0ffe4b070a9e1a6a215/1561579824228-INMOFWBBHXXHJ50URMTP/PSEUDOFREEZE+LAB.jpg - Project page: https://www.pseudofreeze.com/ #### Solein — Solar Foods (2019) - Type: Product & platform · Organisms: Bacteria & microbes - Idea: Food can be made from air and electricity. - What it is: A protein-rich food ingredient made by growing hydrogen-oxidising bacteria on CO2, hydrogen from electrolysis and minerals, without farmland. - How it works: Gas fermentation of a hydrogen-oxidising bacterium produces single-cell biomass that is dried into a powder. - Video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=z8zuqR95fqA - Project page: https://solarfoods.com/ #### Malai coconut-water biocomposite — Malai (2018) - Type: Product & platform · Organisms: Bacteria & microbes, Plants - Idea: A by-product that is poured away in coconut processing becomes the growth medium for a material. - What it is: A flexible, leather-like material made from bacterial cellulose grown on waste coconut water and reinforced with plant fibres such as banana, sisal or hemp; used for bags, wallets and shoes. - How it works: Coconut water is fermented by bacteria that form cellulose mats; the mats are harvested, combined with natural fibres and dyed with natural pigments. - Video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qr897rb64Rc - Images: https://malai.eco/cdn/shop/products/DSC02210.jpg?height=4240&v=1658490088 https://malai.eco/cdn/shop/files/CB219488-5C8B-4E6E-A989-ACB8D6787EDA.jpg?v=1635226380 - Project page: https://www.malai.eco #### Programmable and Printable Bacillus subtilis Biofilms as Engineered Living Materials — Chao Zhong (2018) - Type: Paper · Organisms: Bacteria & microbes - Idea: Program what the biofilm secretes, and the material grows itself with the function built in. - What it is: Engineered Bacillus subtilis secretes a protein matrix carrying chosen functional domains, and the biofilm can be printed or cast into patterned living coatings. - How it works: The TasA matrix protein is fused to functional peptides and enzymes; secreted fibres self-assemble into a biofilm that can template nanoparticles, immobilise enzymes or adhere to surfaces. - Paper: https://www.nature.com/articles/s41589-018-0169-2 (Nature Chemical Biology) - Images: https://media.springernature.com/full/springer-static/image/art%3A10.1038%2Fs41589-018-0169-2/MediaObjects/41589_2018_169_Figa_HTML.png - Project page: https://www.nature.com/articles/s41589-018-0169-2 #### Sorbit — University of California, Davis Biodesign Challenge team (2018) - Type: Research prototype · Organisms: Bacteria & microbes - Idea: Grow a disposable product from waste so it can return to soil instead of landfill. - What it is: A fully biodegradable diaper made of bacterial cellulose grown on citrus agricultural waste: soft, water-repellent outside and absorbent inside. - How it works: Cellulose-producing bacteria were cultured on citrus waste, then the cellulose sheets were processed into layered diaper components. - Video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1fLnemtiFTg - Images: https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/552dc0ffe4b070a9e1a6a215/1530282557415-L1VRZOFIT4QN69Q488DJ/Copy+of+UC+Davis+Winning+Team+4+Sorbet+Diaper+Folded+as+Worn.jpg - Project page: https://www.biodesignchallenge.org/uc-davis #### Mother's Hand Taste (Son-mat) — Jiwon Woo (2017) - Type: Artwork · Organisms: Bacteria & microbes, Fungi - Idea: The taste of a family's cooking may be a microbial inheritance. - What it is: The artist collected yeasts and bacteria from the hands of family members across generations in four cities to test whether the Korean idea of 'son-mat' (the taste of the hand) is carried by microbes into fermented food. BAD Award 2017 winner. - How it works: Hand swabs from Philadelphia, Utrecht, Seoul and Tokyo were cultured and used to ferment food, with Prof. Han Wösten (Utrecht University). - Images: https://www.badaward.nl/imager/assets/site/1133/Jiwon-Hanneke-Wetzer-6_a5a12f426a1ab11909951db4fe37df8f.jpg https://www.badaward.nl/imager/assets/site/1132/Jiwon-Hanneke-Wetzer-4_a5a12f426a1ab11909951db4fe37df8f.jpg - Project page: https://www.badaward.nl/artists-scientists/jiwon-woo-with-han-w%C3%B6sten #### Zoa biofabricated leather — Modern Meadow, Suzanne Lee (2017) - Type: Product & platform · Organisms: Bacteria & microbes, DNA & molecules - Idea: Make the protein that gives leather its structure, without the animal, and shape it as a liquid. - What it is: A leather-like material made from collagen protein produced by engineered microbes, first shown as a T-shirt in MoMA's 'Items: Is Fashion Modern?' and acquired by the museum. - How it works: Engineered microbes (likely yeast) ferment collagen protein, which is purified and assembled into a fibrous material that can be cast, printed or bonded to fabric. - Images: https://3dprintingindustry.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/10/zoa-home-swatches.jpg - Project page: https://3dprintingindustry.com/news/modern-meadow-launches-zoa-worlds-first-biofabricated-leather-122023/ #### Not a Matter of Taste — Maija Järviniemi & Outi Mustonen (2016) - Type: Research prototype · Organisms: Bacteria & microbes, Plants - Idea: Revive a neglected food as biodegradable tableware. - What it is: Edible bowls made by combining bacterially grown cellulose with pettu, a pine-inner-bark flour used in wartime Finland. - How it works: Bacterial cellulose sheets are moulded with pettu flour and dried into bowls. - Video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kMgYwCRI-dg - Project page: https://web.archive.org/web/20210623043930/https://www.globalgradshow.com/project/not-a-matter-of-taste-researching-edible-cellulose-2/ #### Spark of Life — Teresa van Dongen (2016) - Type: Research prototype · Organisms: Bacteria & microbes - Idea: A lamp you keep alive by feeding it, like a pet. - What it is: A pendant lamp powered by electroactive bacteria in four compartments; their metabolism produces a small current that lights LEDs, as long as they are fed acetate. - How it works: Geobacter bacteria from river mud form microbial fuel cells that pass electrons to electrodes; developed with Ghent University. - Images: https://payload.cargocollective.com/1/16/540742/12090344/Spark_Of_Life_05b_1250.jpg - Project page: https://www.teresavandongen.com/Spark-of-Life #### Habitáculos Orgánicos — Gabriela Munguía (2015) - Type: Artwork · Organisms: Bacteria & microbes, Fungi - Idea: Design housing for microbes to see the city as a living organisation. - What it is: A series of printed micro-architectures for microorganisms, colonised by microbes collected in public space, with measuring devices that record how they inhabit and transform the structures. - How it works: Culture media are formulated as printable material and extruded into small architectural forms, then inoculated with urban microorganisms and monitored with custom electronics. - Video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qasR0oHCRwA - Project page: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qasR0oHCRwA #### Microbial Design Studio — Biorealize, Orkan Telhan (2015) - Type: Product & platform · Organisms: Bacteria & microbes - Idea: Give designers a machine that treats living cultures like a job queue. - What it is: A desktop appliance that automates culturing, sampling and harvesting of microbes, with cartridges so a designer can run parallel experiments on pigments, scents or flavours. - How it works: Small bioreactor chambers with controlled temperature, agitation and dosing run programmed protocols; an interface schedules growth, induction and harvesting without manual pipetting. - Video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=c7KR1K9lIVs - Images: https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5258ba2be4b0804fa254bd19/1677190447163-6BHWAZ2LD0HDQOH9TGAZ/microbial_kit.jpg - Project page: https://www.biorealize.com/ #### Pili Biofabricated Dyes and Inks — Pili (2015) - Type: Product & platform · Organisms: Bacteria & microbes - Idea: Colour can be grown and then taken through the same industrial chemistry as any dye. - What it is: A project that began as growing ink from bacteria in a Paris community lab now ferments and finishes bio-based dyes and pigments for textiles and printing. - How it works: Microbial fermentation produces aromatic precursor molecules that are chemically finished into dyes and pigments, avoiding petrochemical feedstocks while matching industrial colour standards. - Video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iscwuujSr_8 - Images: https://www.pili.bio/wp-content/uploads/2024/10/e4fc3802-0167-4461-bc3f-6954387fbeb1-773d8194-918d-4f56-b738-21759f9465df-pili-hero2.webp - Project page: https://www.pili.bio/ #### Post/Biotics — Vidhi Mehta (2015) - Type: Research prototype · Organisms: Bacteria & microbes, Plants - Idea: Antibiotic discovery can happen in classrooms, not only in pharma labs. - What it is: A citizen-science toolkit and pop-up lab with which students test local plants and soils for antimicrobial compounds, proposing open-source antibiotic discovery. - How it works: Soil and plant extracts are tested against harmless bacteria on agar plates; results are shared online. - Video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vl6fVplJTcc - Project page: https://web.archive.org/web/20210614220054/https://www.globalgradshow.com/project/post-biotics/ #### Aqualose — iGEM Team Imperial College London (2014) - Type: Research prototype · Organisms: Bacteria & microbes - Idea: Grow a water filter with bacteria. - What it is: Customisable ultrafiltration membranes made from bacterial cellulose for low-cost water purification, including cellulose production in E. coli and an art-and-design strand prototyping uses. - How it works: Gluconacetobacter cellulose was functionalised with binding domains; E. coli was engineered to secrete cellulose. - Video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cRoI-lS_F9E - Images: https://static.igem.org/mediawiki/2014/d/de/IC14-banner-cellulose3.JPG - Project page: https://2014.igem.org/Team:Imperial #### Glowee bioluminescent lighting — Glowee (2014) - Type: Product & platform · Organisms: Bacteria & microbes - Idea: Light that is grown and fed rather than wired. - What it is: Transparent vessels and panels filled with a nutrient liquid of bioluminescent marine bacteria that glow blue-green, used for shop windows, events and street-light trials. - How it works: Bioluminescent bacteria related to squid symbionts (likely Aliivibrio fischeri; early versions used engineered E. coli) are kept alive in a nutrient medium and emit light while oxygenated. - Video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=C26teAbSH1k - Project page: https://www.glowee.com/ #### Living Pixels — Ingrid Nijhoff (2014) - Type: Research prototype · Organisms: Bacteria & microbes - Idea: Grow a colour palette instead of synthesising it. - What it is: An 'ink nursery' in which pigment-producing bacteria from soil, skin, plants and mouths are cultured to grow a full colour spectrum, processed into inks for printing and painting. - How it works: Pigmented bacterial biomass is harvested and processed into liquid inks. - Images: https://new-material-award.nl/wp-content/uploads/2021/11/Levende-Pixels-Inktkwekerij-INgrid-Nijhoff-1024x599.jpg https://new-material-award.nl/wp-content/uploads/2021/11/IMG_4489-1024x1024.jpg - Project page: https://new-material-award.nl/en/living-pixels/ #### Aseatobacter — iGEM Team NYU Gallatin (2012) - Type: Speculative design · Organisms: Bacteria & microbes - Idea: Engineer the organism to build material properties in, not add them later. - What it is: Work with the cellulose-making bacterium Acetobacter xylinum aiming to engineer grown material with colour, strength and water resistance, including designs for a bacterial-cellulose chair. - How it works: Genetic parts for pigment and binding proteins were planned for the cellulose producer. - Images: https://static.igem.org/mediawiki/2012/3/34/Aseatobacter-IMAGES-Chair_Diagrams.png - Project page: https://2012.igem.org/Team:NYU_Gallatin #### Bio Computation — The Living (2012) - Type: Research prototype · Organisms: Bacteria & microbes - Idea: Couple a living fabrication process with design optimisation: search the biology, not just the geometry. - What it is: Two strains of genetically modified bacteria are grown together in a dish to produce flat composite sheets with rigid and flexible regions, and the process is modelled in software to design panels for an aircraft envelope. - How it works: One strain makes a fabric-like substance and the other a brick-like one; their growth patterns are simulated in Autodesk Maya with custom plug-ins to explore thousands of variants. - Video: https://vimeo.com/45504767 - Images: http://thisisalive.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/04/06-The-Living-Bio-Computation.jpg http://thisisalive.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/04/04-The-Living-Bio-Computation-760x499.jpg - Project page: http://thisisalive.com/bio-computation/ #### Biomason biocement bricks and tiles — Biomason (2012) - Type: Product & platform · Organisms: Bacteria & microbes - Idea: Make bricks the way corals and shells make stone. - What it is: Masonry units grown at room temperature in about three days, as bacteria precipitate calcium carbonate between grains of sand, with no kiln firing. - How it works: Sand in moulds is repeatedly irrigated with Sporosarcina pasteurii bacteria, urea and calcium chloride; microbially induced calcite precipitation binds the grains. - Video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6BqoM4am8kw - Images: https://www.designindaba.com/sites/default/files/node/news/24118/bmwebsiteupdate0618005-1-960x525c.jpeg - Project page: https://www.designindaba.com/articles/creative-work/biomason-grows-bricks-without-using-any-heat #### Microbial Home — Philips Design (2011) - Type: Speculative design · Organisms: Bacteria & microbes, Ecosystems - Idea: Design the home as a biological machine where one appliance's waste is another's food. - What it is: A concept home at Dutch Design Week in which a methane digester, a bioluminescent bacteria wall light, a larder and a fungal plastic-recycling unit pass waste and energy to each other. - How it works: Speculative appliances connect bacterial digestion, bioluminescent cultures fed with digester output, and fungal composting into one domestic loop. - Video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qWisAEmqCp0 - Images: https://ifdalivestorage.blob.core.windows.net/user-uploads/5738/86665/00000000-0000-0000-0000-000000000000/01_1-Microbial_Home_large.jpg - Project page: https://ifdesign.com/en/winner-ranking/project/microbial-home/86665 #### Self-healing bioconcrete — Henk Jonkers (2010) - Type: Research prototype · Organisms: Bacteria & microbes - Idea: Put a repair crew of bacteria inside the material, asleep until damage appears. - What it is: Concrete mixed with dormant bacterial spores and their food; when a crack lets in water, the bacteria wake up and fill the crack with limestone. - How it works: Alkali-resistant Bacillus spores and calcium lactate are encapsulated in the mix; water ingress triggers germination and calcium carbonate precipitation. - Paper: https://doi.org/10.1016/j.ecoleng.2008.12.036 (Ecological Engineering) - Video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OXkW1q9HpFA - Images: https://t.e7096c671.entry.domains/SMxQ_AxRXE3Oq18kVrs1NmEc0lk=/fit-in/640x373/filters:strip_exif()/https%3A%2F%2Ffilelist.tudelft.nl%2Fuser_upload%2FGreen%2520Basilisk%25201.jpg%3Fhash%3Db1841649b6 - Project page: https://www.tudelft.nl/en/innovation-impact/pioneering-tech/articles/the-enormous-potential-of-self-healing-bio-concrete #### System Synthetics — Maurizio Montalti (2010) - Type: Speculative design · Organisms: Fungi - Idea: Pair two fungi so that waste plastic becomes fuel. - What it is: A scenario and lab research with Utrecht University in which one fungus breaks down plastic waste and a yeast turns the products into bio-ethanol. BAD Award 2010 winner. - How it works: A filamentous fungus degrades plastic; yeast ferments the resulting compounds into ethanol, researched with Prof. Han Wösten. - Images: https://www.badaward.nl/imager/assets/site/595/SYSTEM-SYNTHETICS-1_a5a12f426a1ab11909951db4fe37df8f.jpg https://www.badaward.nl/imager/assets/site/596/SYSTEM-SYNTHETICS-2_a5a12f426a1ab11909951db4fe37df8f.jpg - Project page: https://www.badaward.nl/artists-scientists/maurizio-montalti ### Algae & Photosynthesis Algae and photosynthetic organisms in products, facades and energy systems. #### Algae Harvester — Julian Yasin Buchgraber (2026) - Type: Speculative design · Organisms: Algae - Idea: Appliances can host food organisms using the energy they waste. - What it is: A household fridge with an integrated photobioreactor that reuses the fridge's waste heat to grow edible spirulina for a small daily harvest. - How it works: Heat from the compressor warms an illuminated algae chamber built into the fridge body. - Images: https://content.gp-award.com/assets/media/award26/0-algae-harvester_blogLarge.jpg https://content.gp-award.com/assets/media/award26/3-algae-harvester_blogLarge.jpg - Project page: https://www.gp-award.com/en/projects/algae-harvester #### Keltex — Keltex (2026) - Type: Product & platform · Organisms: Algae - Idea: Raise the value of a crop farmed by coastal women. - What it is: Biodegradable leather alternatives made from seaweed farmed along the Tanzanian coast, combining AI-optimised farming with biopolymer extraction. - How it works: Seaweed polysaccharides are extracted and formulated into flexible, leather-like sheets. - Images: https://hmfoundation.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/06/Keltex_2026_GCA_winner-1.jpg https://hmfoundation.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/06/2000x1250_KelTex-1280x800.jpg - Project page: https://keltexleather.com #### Sealeo biodegradable thermal packaging — Sealeo (Diana Epel & Emanuele Griccioli) (2026) - Type: Product & platform · Organisms: Algae - Idea: Replace foam boxes and gel packs with materials from the sea. - What it is: Thermal packaging for pharmaceutical cold chains that combines a seaweed biofoam with a seaweed hydrogel coolant, keeping contents cool up to 2.5 times longer and fully compostable. - How it works: Seaweed polymers are foamed into insulating panels and gelled into refreezable coolant packs. - Images: https://content.gp-award.com/assets/media/award26/w-biodegradable-thermal-material_blogLarge.jpg - Project page: https://www.gp-award.com/en/projects/Biodegradable-thermal-packaging #### Tera Mira — Tera Mira (2026) - Type: Product & platform · Organisms: Algae - Idea: Replace the one ingredient that makes clothes unrecyclable. - What it is: Seaweed is wet-spun at low temperature and without solvents into a stretch fibre designed to replace elastane, which blocks garment recycling. - How it works: Seaweed-derived polymers are wet-spun into elastic filaments. - Video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Qm0VFX2qpZA - Images: https://hmfoundation.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/06/Tera-Mira_2026_GCA_winner-1.jpg - Project page: https://teramira.com #### Brilliant Dyes — Brilliant Dyes (2025) - Type: Product & platform · Organisms: Algae, Bacteria & microbes - Idea: Blue, the hardest natural colour, can be grown by microbes. - What it is: Phycocyanin and other pigments extracted from cyanobacteria through a low-energy biorefinery, as biodegradable colours for textiles, cosmetics and food. - How it works: Spirulina-type cyanobacteria are cultivated and their pigment-protein complexes extracted and stabilised. - Images: https://hmfoundation.com/wp-content/uploads/2025/05/Medium_Screen-Brilliant-Dyes-%E2%80%93-GCA-winner-2025.jpg - Project page: https://hmfoundation.com/gca/winner/brilliant-dyes/ #### JiTiBa algae wastewater treatment — Bas Emaus (2025) - Type: Product & platform · Organisms: Algae - Idea: Algae can make wastewater a nutrient source for the city. - What it is: Wastewater treatment in which microalgae immobilised in gel beads clean sewage while recovering nutrients. - How it works: Algae-laden beads are held in reactors where they take up nitrogen and phosphorus and are easily separated. - Images: https://www.dutchdesignawards.nl/wp-content/uploads/2025/10/WhatsApp-Image-2025-08-01-at-221408-00e80c9f-1500x882.jpg - Project page: https://www.dutchdesignawards.nl/en/gallery/bas-emaus/ #### Kelp Council — Julia Lohmann (2025) - Type: Artwork · Organisms: Algae, Ecosystems - Idea: Ask what seaweed needs from us before asking what material it can give us. - What it is: An immersive installation of large seaweed forms, gathered from species in Europe and East Asia and set in a soundscape of rising and falling tide, inviting visitors into a 'council' with kelp. - How it works: Dried and treated kelp is formed over armatures into sculptural bodies; the soundscape was composed with Ville Aslak Raasakka from tidal recordings. - Images: https://designmuseum.org/image/a2c2789e-dd51-4f82-b4c8-a2b5a2a5dd9e?width=1200 - Project page: https://designmuseum.org/exhibitions/more-than-human/10-unmissable-highlights-from-more-than-human #### Kelpi high-barrier coating — Kelpi (2025) - Type: Product & platform · Organisms: Algae - Idea: A thin seaweed layer can remove plastic from paper packaging. - What it is: Seaweed-derived coatings for paper and card that match the barrier performance of plastic films, letting fibre packaging replace single-use plastics. - How it works: Seaweed polysaccharides are formulated into barrier coatings applied on paper lines. - Images: https://content.gp-award.com/assets/media/award25/0-kelpi_blogLarge.jpg https://content.gp-award.com/assets/media/award25/1-kelpi_blogLarge.jpg - Project page: https://www.kelpi.net #### Sea Glass — Paolina Kühr (2025) - Type: Research prototype · Organisms: Algae - Idea: Glass could be grown by microalgae instead of mined. - What it is: Glass made from diatoms, microalgae that pull silicon from seawater to build silica cell walls, so silica can be grown and CO2 captured instead of mining sand. - How it works: Diatom biomass is cultured, the organic matter removed and the silica frustules melted into glass. - Images: https://content.gp-award.com/assets/media/award25/0-sea-glass_blogLarge.jpg https://content.gp-award.com/assets/media/award25/2-sea-glass_blogLarge.jpg - Project page: https://www.gp-award.com/en/projects/sea-glass #### ALGBIO — ALGBIO (Selen Şenal & Ceyda Güneş) (2024) - Type: Research prototype · Organisms: Algae - Idea: Treat wastewater as a growth medium rather than a disposal problem. - What it is: A system that grows microalgae on wastewater and captured CO2, cleaning the water while producing biomass that becomes biofuels, bioplastics and other bioproducts. - How it works: Photobioreactors fed with wastewater and flue CO2 produce algal biomass for downstream conversion. - Video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7VWf7Sn6qYE - Images: https://www.jamesdysonaward.org/Document/d91e569e-8f53-4dd8-bfb5-7ff679ef4e9b/36879fb1-0c0c-4362-92d5-b61111eb49fa.jpg https://www.jamesdysonaward.org/Document/711bc085-289b-41fc-b489-a1f4e88ede12/algbio-bioplastics.png - Project page: https://www.jamesdysonaward.org/en-GB/2024/project/algbio/ #### Carbon Farm — Jiabao Li (2024) - Type: Artwork · Organisms: Algae - Idea: Make the carbon in your words into something you can hold. - What it is: Visitors breathe or speak into a CO2 collector; the captured carbon feeds algae cultures that are turned into a bioplastic made from their breath. - How it works: A direct-air-capture sorbent bed traps CO2, which is released by heating and bubbled into algae photobioreactors; algae biomass is processed into bioplastic. - Paper: https://doi.org/10.1145/3689050.3707686 (TEI 2025) - Images: https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/58688c8a6a496327e937e35b/e65b77d1-2a95-476a-91e1-7041d8ba550b/Jiabao+Li+Duende+51.jpg https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/58688c8a6a496327e937e35b/1737387933851-A6BH4ZMGGF7QQ2T4RA2C/jiabao+li+carbon+farm+16.jpg https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/58688c8a6a496327e937e35b/1737387934713-OHYCTHLHX28WEVSZ8YPC/jiabao+li+carbon+farm+17.jpg - Project page: https://www.jiabaoli.org/carbon-farm #### Cyanoskin — Emma Money (2024) - Type: Research prototype · Organisms: Bacteria & microbes, Algae - Idea: Paint a wall with something that breathes. - What it is: A living paint containing cyanobacteria that turns building façades into surfaces that absorb pollution and fix CO2, thickening over time as the microbes photosynthesise. - How it works: Cyanobacteria are embedded in a breathable binder that keeps them alive on outdoor surfaces. - Video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9V_4S3d89r0 - Images: https://content.gp-award.com/assets/media/award24/0-cyanoskin_blogLarge.jpg - Project page: https://www.gp-award.com/en/projects/cyanoskin #### Kelserra — McGill University Biodesign Challenge team (2024) - Type: Research prototype · Organisms: Algae, Human body - Idea: A seaweed's wet-grip chemistry can become a medical glue. - What it is: A surgical adhesive modelled on how the brown alga Fucus serratus sticks to wet rocks, aimed at closing internal wounds faster in minimally invasive gynaecological surgery. - How it works: The formula was tuned for wet adhesion strength, short curing time and biocompatibility. - Video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=W9txOGTM4pE - Project page: https://www.biodesignchallenge.org/mcgill-university-2024 #### Lucid Life | Marama Ora — Christopher Bellamy (2024) - Type: Artwork · Organisms: Algae - Idea: A living material can bring biotechnology out of the lab and into traditional craft. - What it is: A living material that encapsulates bioluminescent microalgae, glows when touched and survives on sunlight for at least six months; artefacts were co-created with Polynesian artisans. - How it works: Dinoflagellates are embedded in a hydrogel matrix inspired by coral–algae symbiosis; mechanical stress triggers their bioluminescence. - Video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1Icf_g_lJYI - Images: https://ars.electronica.art/starts-prize/files/2025/06/lucid-life-c-ben-turner-2-1024x576.jpg - Project page: https://biocrafted.com/lucid-life #### MiAlgae — MiAlgae (2024) - Type: Product & platform · Organisms: Algae - Idea: Feed farmed fish without catching wild fish. - What it is: Omega-3-rich microalgae grown by fermentation on whisky-distillery by-products, replacing fish oil in aquaculture feed. - How it works: Heterotrophic microalgae ferment distillery co-products in tanks and are dried into feed ingredients. - Video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0wpUg9cntME - Images: https://earthshotprize.org/wp-content/uploads/2024/09/Mialgae-Support-Hero-1920x1080_0000_20240820_SGerrard_MiAlgae_DSC2064-1024x576.jpg - Project page: https://www.mialgae.com/ #### Ouroboros (algae bioplastic LP records) — Fara Peluso, Kat Austen (2024) - Type: Research prototype · Organisms: Algae - Idea: A music medium can be grown instead of made from oil. - What it is: Circular LP records pressed from algae-based bioplastic, with Kat Austen's album about the Lusatia coal region as prototype; the research covers material, manufacture and sound. - How it works: Algae-derived bioplastic is formulated for record pressing and tested for groove fidelity. - Video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xG_av2V6_LE - Images: https://falling-walls.com/sites/default/files/styles/content/public/medien/28/bilder/fw24-science-summit-as-fara-peluso-6.jpeg?h=08b866d1&itok=lmbWHF8H - Project page: https://falling-walls.com/echoes-sustainability-fara-pelusos-ouroboros-sound-art-revolution #### Avocado Seed Brick — Fragmentario (María-Elena Pombo) (2023) - Type: Research prototype · Organisms: Plants, Algae - Idea: Two nuisances can become one material. - What it is: A brick made from discarded avocado seeds bound with a binder produced from Sargassum seaweed, combining two waste streams into a building material. - How it works: Ground avocado seed is bound with alginate-type binder from Sargassum and moulded. - Images: https://www.salonemilano.it/sites/default/files/styles/libero/public/2023-06/Fragmentario-Avocado%20Seed%20Brick-salone%20milano.jpg.webp?itok=wbU44Shi - Project page: https://www.salonemilano.it/en/articles/latest-design-challenges-salonesatellite-award-2023 #### O-GA — O-GA team (Silpakorn University) (2023) - Type: Speculative design · Organisms: Algae - Idea: Rural landscapes could farm fuel in water rather than dig it from the ground. - What it is: Product-design proposal for algae cultivation units in a future renewable-energy countryside, where the algae are processed into bio-oil for vehicles. - How it works: Modular photobioreactor units grow algae whose lipids are converted to bio-oil. - Images: https://www.jamesdysonaward.org/Document/dd76504a-337f-4501-b946-1ebdcf847e96/71.jpg https://www.jamesdysonaward.org/Document/604dd5a3-e7cd-4f23-84f4-e13a785422fd/90.jpg - Project page: https://www.jamesdysonaward.org/en-GB/2023/project/o-ga/ #### Sea Forest Asparagopsis — Sea Forest (2023) - Type: Product & platform · Organisms: Algae, Animals - Idea: A seaweed can change the climate footprint of another species' digestion. - What it is: The red seaweed Asparagopsis is farmed and processed into a livestock-feed supplement whose bromoform-rich compounds sharply cut the methane cattle produce. - How it works: Asparagopsis compounds inhibit methanogenic archaea in the rumen. - Video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jjkOLvxPqqs - Images: https://earthshotprize.org/wp-content/uploads/2023/09/JN0044-Sized-Assets-SEAFORESTPAGE-Carousel-01-16_9.jpg - Project page: https://www.seaforest.com.au/ #### Zero Bag — Kyeongho Park (2023) - Type: Product & platform · Organisms: Algae - Idea: Design packaging that becomes part of how the product is used. - What it is: A water-soluble package made of alginate from seaweed with a film of paper detergent or baking soda attached; the bag dissolves in the wash, leaving no plastic. - How it works: Sodium alginate film is cast and heat-sealed into bags that dissolve in water. - Video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ej2T958I28s - Project page: https://discoverlexus.com/stories/lexus-design-award-2023/program-details/zero-bag #### Kudarat Bioleather — Divya Verma (2022) - Type: Research prototype · Organisms: Algae, Plants - Idea: A leather can be made without animals or petrochemicals. - What it is: A compostable leather alternative made from algae combined with food and fibre waste, designed to be waterproof with good tensile strength. - How it works: Algal biomass is mixed with waste fibres and plasticised, cast and finished into sheets. - Images: https://www.jamesdysonaward.org/Document/bea3a03b-b045-428d-9c4e-7232d85df92f/1.png https://www.jamesdysonaward.org/Document/ae2fcd9a-d4fd-4131-94b0-99744134085d/2.png - Project page: https://www.jamesdysonaward.org/en-GB/2022/project/kudarat-bioleather/ #### Notpla Seaweed Paper — Notpla (2022) - Type: Product & platform · Organisms: Algae - Idea: Seaweed can reduce the trees in paper. - What it is: Paper for packaging in which part of the virgin wood pulp is replaced with seaweed by-products from Notpla's other processes, reaching 30% seaweed on industrial lines. - How it works: Seaweed fibre residues are blended into pulp and run on conventional paper machines. - Images: https://rca-media2.rca.ac.uk/images/Notpla_Paper__Sheets.2e16d0ba.fill-829x585.jpg - Project page: https://www.rca.ac.uk/business/terra-carta-design-lab-projects/notpla-seaweed-paper #### OXYLON — BIOTEOS (Romain Dhenin) (2022) - Type: Product & platform · Organisms: Algae - Idea: Pollution can be food for a living filter. - What it is: An indoor air purifier for public spaces that passes air through a microalgae culture, which takes up pollutants such as CO2 and nitrogen oxides as nutrients. - How it works: A photobioreactor column bubbles room air through an illuminated algae culture. - Video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=K7lUgf0hiuI - Images: https://www.jamesdysonaward.org/Document/97d7a58d-9ad3-4887-8bf0-9e79c344ac45/oxylon.jpg https://www.jamesdysonaward.org/Document/97ed376a-1936-4574-90d6-acce788ba2bb/technology.jpg - Project page: https://www.jamesdysonaward.org/en-GB/2022/project/oxylon/ #### Primordial — Primordial (RCA team) (2022) - Type: Research prototype · Organisms: Algae - Idea: Cheap vessels are what let algae carbon capture spread. - What it is: Scalable, low-cost photobioreactor technology for cultivating microalgae that capture CO2 while producing biomass. - How it works: Simplified reactor geometries and materials reduce the cost of lighting, mixing and harvesting. - Images: https://rca-media2.rca.ac.uk/images/Screenshot_2022-01-20_at_17.39.0.2e16d0ba.fill-1200x1200.png - Project page: https://www.rca.ac.uk/business/terra-carta-design-lab-projects/primordial #### DipWrap — Aalto University Biodesign Challenge team (2021) - Type: Research prototype · Organisms: Algae, Plants - Idea: Make packaging a coating you dip, not a film you wrap. - What it is: A replacement for plastic shrink wrap on supermarket produce: fruit and vegetables are dipped in a solution that dries into a peelable, biodegradable film. - How it works: The dip combines agar from red algae, cellulose nanocrystals and carnauba wax. - Images: https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/552dc0ffe4b070a9e1a6a215/1626287025248-ZVGV0A2X46W2LFS0RF3V/AALTO+DipWrap+2.jpg https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/552dc0ffe4b070a9e1a6a215/1626287006965-75D90FEFR36TARV4W4BH/AALTO+DipWrap+5.jpg - Project page: https://www.biodesignchallenge.org/aalto-university-2021 #### NLC – The New Life Capsule — Izabela Świca (2021) - Type: Research prototype · Organisms: Algae, Fungi, Ecosystems - Idea: Microbial partnerships can restart soil life in deserts. - What it is: A capsule that co-cultivates microalgae and fungi, releasing a biofertiliser rich in nutrients to boost humus formation and plant growth in arid and degraded soils. - How it works: An algae–fungi consortium grows inside a capsule whose outflow drips into the root zone. - Images: https://www.jamesdysonaward.org/Document/694ed1df-5c14-411b-b2a0-01802f27e27d/img20210324161938easy-resizecom.jpg https://www.jamesdysonaward.org/Document/a3672ee2-7057-469b-8291-13a2e627de10/schemat-i-opis10241.jpg - Project page: https://www.jamesdysonaward.org/en-GB/2021/project/nlc-the-new-life-capsule/ #### The Algae Grower — Maurizio Vrenna (2021) - Type: Product & platform · Organisms: Algae - Idea: Make microalgae a fresh home-grown food. - What it is: A home photobioreactor for growing and harvesting fresh spirulina, about 5 g a day, the recommended adult intake. - How it works: An illuminated culture vessel with a harvesting filter lets users collect biomass daily. - Images: https://web.archive.org/web/20211110011503im_/https://globalgradshow.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/11/2-600x403.jpg - Project page: https://web.archive.org/web/20211110011503/https://www.globalgradshow.com/project/the-algae-grower/ #### Zeefier seaweed dyes — Zeefier, Nienke Hoogvliet (2021) - Type: Product & platform · Organisms: Algae - Idea: Seaweed needs no farmland or fresh water, and it can colour textiles. - What it is: Natural textile dyes made entirely from seaweed such as bladderwrack and from seaweed waste streams, shown on scarves and rugs at Dutch Design Week 2021. - How it works: Pigments are extracted from harvested seaweed and seaweed residues and applied to natural fibres with mordants, likely also derived from seaweed. - Video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GJDCtMw7WI8 - Images: https://ddw.ams3.cdn.digitaloceanspaces.com/thumbs/bladderwrack-scarf-zeefier-klein_1633185309_1200x630.jpg https://ddw.ams3.cdn.digitaloceanspaces.com/thumbs/bladderwrack-scarf-zeefier-close-up-klein_1633185399_1440x720.jpg - Project page: https://site.ddw.nl/en/programme/6817/zeefier-natural-dyes-made-from-seaweed #### Algae Filters for Reusable Masks — Camila Wandemberg (2020) - Type: Research prototype · Organisms: Algae, Human body - Idea: In a crisis, a biomaterial recipe people can make at home is itself a design. - What it is: In response to shortages of protective equipment in Ecuador, the designer developed a low-cost method for making effective home-made Covid masks with an algae-based filter. - How it works: An algae-derived filter layer is cast and inserted into a reusable fabric mask. - Video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YYlKUX1nloI - Images: https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/552dc0ffe4b070a9e1a6a215/1594838094196-DWN0PQAOKBEEY80D77P7/Copy+of+FILTER+ON+WOMAN+WITH+AVERAGE+FACEMASK.JPG - Project page: https://www.biodesignchallenge.org/cca-design #### Coral — Hyunseok An (2020) - Type: Product & platform · Organisms: Algae - Idea: Make microalgae a domestic crop you can see growing on the wall. - What it is: A modular, wall-mounted photobioreactor kit for growing edible microalgae at home as easily as potted herbs; its changing greens make cultivation visible. - How it works: Transparent modules hold spirulina-type cultures lit by daylight; users harvest biomass as it thickens. - Video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ysVNFNH8DXQ - Project page: http://web.archive.org/web/2021/https://discoverlexus.com/experiences/lexus-design-award-2020/coral #### Malgae — Tecnológico de Monterrey Biodesign Challenge team (2020) - Type: Product & platform · Organisms: Algae, Plants - Idea: A coastal nuisance becomes a biodegradable container that feeds the plant. - What it is: Planters made from sargassum, an invasive seaweed washing up on Caribbean beaches, that can be put straight into the soil where they act as fertiliser; sold as learning kits. - How it works: Dried sargassum is processed into a mouldable material and pressed into planter forms. - Video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fbLwNWgHDIk - Images: https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/552dc0ffe4b070a9e1a6a215/1596238223209-C94JP54VRVRBQSCADCC1/1.jpg - Project page: https://www.biodesignchallenge.org/tecnologico-de-monterrey #### After Ancient Sunlight — Charlotte McCurdy (2019) - Type: Speculative design · Organisms: Algae - Idea: Swap materials made from ancient sunlight (fossil fuels) for materials made from today's sunlight. - What it is: A translucent raincoat made from a bioplastic of marine macroalgae, shown in the Cooper Hewitt Design Triennial as a carbon-negative alternative to oil-based plastic. - How it works: Biopolymers derived from seaweed are cast into a water-resistant film and sewn with algae-based sequins. - Images: https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/68fbbc1b54d7213899866bb4/34015ad0-8da0-4fb2-8155-e467fdca2705/Algae%2BRaincoat%281%29.jpg - Project page: https://www.charlottemccurdy.com/afterancientsunlight #### Algae Ink — Living Ink Technologies (2019) - Type: Product & platform · Organisms: Algae - Idea: Swapping the source of one industrial pigment changes the footprint of everything printed with it. - What it is: A black pigment made from algae biomass replaces petroleum carbon black in screen printing and packaging inks, and is used on apparel by Patagonia and Nike. - How it works: Spent algae biomass from other industries is carbonised and milled into a dispersible black pigment that drops into existing ink formulations without new printing equipment. - Video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=85T_T9Ot-E0 - Images: https://static1.squarespace.com/static/65662abc8bc75834d74f34c2/t/673cd312b414ac2a24a82a3b/1732039460395/P%2BC-Living+Ink-316.jpg?format=1500w - Project page: https://www.livingink.co/ #### Indus — Shneel Malik, Marcos Cruz (2019) - Type: Research prototype · Organisms: Algae - Idea: A decorative craft surface can be a living water-treatment system. - What it is: A wall of modular ceramic tiles with leaf-vein channels filled with microalgae in a seaweed-based hydrogel; as wastewater flows over, the algae absorb heavy metals so artisan communities can reuse water. - How it works: Microalgae immobilised in alginate hydrogel sit in vein channels designed for flow and contact time. - Video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cKwEjWvOqz8 - Images: https://designmuseum.org/image/470ef110-a780-43c4-a3f8-6624e6bfc0b7?width=1600 https://designmuseum.org/image/1224fa00-b56a-471b-94b9-dae818a770f1?width=1600 - Project page: https://designmuseum.org/exhibitions/beazley-designs-of-the-year/product/indus #### MarinaTex — Lucy Hughes (2019) - Type: Research prototype · Organisms: Algae, Animals - Idea: Waste from fish processing plus seaweed can do the job of a plastic bag. - What it is: A translucent, home-compostable film made from fish scales and skins bound with red algae, proposed as a replacement for single-use plastic bags and packaging; it was shown in the Biofabricate 2019 Design Lab. - How it works: Proteins extracted from fish scales and skin are mixed with agar from red algae as a binder, cast into sheets and dried at low temperature. - Video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YJ7esQeh-Cw - Project page: https://marinatex.co.uk #### Algae Lab (Atelier LUMA) — Studio Klarenbeek & Dros (2017) - Type: Research prototype · Organisms: Algae - Idea: Build a local material economy on algae that grow by absorbing CO2. - What it is: An open lab in Arles that cultivates local microalgae and seaweed and turns them into a bioplastic for 3D printing vessels, tableware and replicas of historic glassware. - How it works: Dried algae biomass is combined with potato starch into a biopolymer (developed with Wageningen University) and extruded as 3D-printing filament. - Video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t9sNeReXkSg - Images: https://new-material-award.nl/wp-content/uploads/2021/11/DSC03346_053_AntoinRaabLUMA-1024x683.jpg https://media.materialdistrict.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/12/reproducing-historical-glassware-with-3d-printed-algae-01.jpg - Project page: https://new-material-award.nl/en/algae-lab/ #### AlgiKnit / Kelsun kelp yarn — Keel Labs (formerly AlgiKnit) (2017) - Type: Product & platform · Organisms: Algae - Idea: Grow textile fibre in the sea, where kelp grows fast without land, fresh water or fertiliser. - What it is: A yarn made from alginate extracted from kelp, extruded into fibre and knitted into textiles that can biodegrade. - How it works: Alginate from brown kelp is dissolved, extruded into a calcium bath where it gels into filaments, then processed into yarn. - Video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3QXk0kk544w - Project page: https://www.keellabs.com/ #### Exhale: Bionic Chandelier — Julian Melchiorri (2017) - Type: Artwork · Organisms: Algae - Idea: A light fixture that exhales, turning decoration into a small metabolism. - What it is: A chandelier of 70 glass leaves, each a bioreactor of living microalgae, hangs at the V&A; the algae photosynthesise under the light and release oxygen into the room. - How it works: Hand-blown glass leaf units hold microalgae in a nutrient medium connected by tubing; LED light drives photosynthesis and oxygen is vented into the gallery air. - Video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Lxd43iH-CX0 - Project page: https://www.vam.ac.uk/ #### The Algae Dome — SPACE10 (2017) - Type: Research prototype · Organisms: Algae - Idea: A building skin can be a farm. - What it is: A four-metre pavilion in Copenhagen wrapped in 320 metres of tubing where microalgae grew in sunlight, proposing buildings that produce food for their residents. - How it works: Microalgae (spirulina and chlorella, likely) circulate through a coiled tube photobioreactor fixed to a timber dome, fed by sunlight and CO2. - Video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xFt4Mjna2dk - Project page: https://space10.com/projects/algae-dome/ #### Agar Plasticity — AMAM (2016) - Type: Research prototype · Organisms: Algae - Idea: A food ingredient from seaweed can protect goods and then return to soil or sea. - What it is: Agar, a gelatinous substance from red seaweed, was dried and foamed into sheets and shock-absorbing forms as a biodegradable replacement for plastic packaging; a perfume bottle was shipped from Tokyo to Milan in an agar box. - How it works: Agar gel is freeze-dried or foamed and moulded; the material biodegrades and can even be used as a soil conditioner. - Video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QJHUsmCFbPU - Images: https://static.dezeen.com/uploads/2016/02/agar-plasticity_amam_dezeen.jpg - Project page: https://www.dezeen.com/2016/04/19/eco-friendly-packaging-concept-agar-plasticity-seaweed-wins-lexus-design-award-milan-deisgn-week/ #### Living Things — Living Things (Jacob Douenias & Ethan Frier) (2015) - Type: Speculative design · Organisms: Algae - Idea: Furniture as a farm: the home produces food and light from algae. - What it is: An installation at Pittsburgh's Mattress Factory of three furnished rooms whose glass bioreactors grow edible spirulina and double as lamps and heaters. - How it works: Hand-blown vessels connected by pumps and tubing keep Arthrospira (spirulina) cultures growing under light; the harvest can be eaten. - Video: https://vimeo.com/128654962 - Images: https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/556fd511e4b06084871e33e5/1433699029590-JL00Y23DXYE8VMC8XU31/Living+Things+1.jpg - Project page: http://www.ethanfrier.com/living-things #### Algaemy — Blond & Bieber (2014) - Type: Research prototype · Organisms: Algae - Idea: A living colour palette: the textile keeps changing because the pigment does. - What it is: A hand-operated textile printer that prints with dyes extracted from microalgae; the prints keep changing colour in sunlight after they are made. - How it works: Pigments from blue, green, red and brown microalgae, developed with Fraunhofer IGB, are extracted and thickened into printing pastes. - Video: https://vimeo.com/88760027 - Images: http://www.archipanic.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/09/Algaemi-01.jpg - Project page: https://www.archipanic.com/algaemy/ #### Ooho — Notpla (2014) - Type: Product & platform · Organisms: Algae - Idea: The packaging disappears: you eat it, or it composts in weeks. - What it is: Edible, flexible pods of water or juice wrapped in a seaweed membrane, used for example to hand out drinks at the London Marathon. - How it works: Liquid with calcium lactate is dropped into a sodium alginate bath from brown seaweed, forming a gel skin by spherification. - Video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EzlpCjh8nBU - Project page: https://www.notpla.com/ooho #### SEA ME — Nienke Hoogvliet (2014) - Type: Artwork · Organisms: Algae - Idea: A material story: the same object shows the sea as a source and as a dump. - What it is: A rug of green seaweed yarn hand-knotted into an old fishing net, setting what the sea offers against the plastic waste we put into it. - How it works: Yarn is spun from cellulose extracted from kelp, dip-dyed on the cone for a gradient, and knotted into a discarded net. - Images: https://www.nienkehoogvliet.nl/wp-content/uploads/2015/05/SEAME_01.jpg - Project page: https://www.nienkehoogvliet.nl/portfolio/seame/ #### Silk Leaf — Julian Melchiorri (2014) - Type: Research prototype · Organisms: Plants, Cells & tissue - Idea: Take photosynthesis out of the plant and make it a material you can shape. - What it is: Chloroplasts extracted from plant cells are suspended in silk protein and cast into a thin leaf-like membrane that photosynthesises when given light and water. - How it works: Chloroplasts are isolated from plant tissue and embedded in a silk fibroin matrix, which stabilises the organelles while remaining permeable to water, carbon dioxide and light. - Video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LM_jruaJmNw - Project page: https://www.julianmelchiorri.com/ #### Algaerium Bioprinter — Marin Sawa (2013) - Type: Research prototype · Organisms: Algae - Idea: Algae farming can shrink to a kitchen appliance that prints food on demand. - What it is: A domestic prototype that cultivates Chlorella, Spirulina and Haematococcus in glass reservoirs and inkjet-prints the living microalgae as coloured, edible patterns of health food. - How it works: Microalgae cultures act as ink cartridges for an inkjet process adapted with Imperial College London; the colour of each species also signals its nutrients. - Images: http://thisisalive.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/04/marin_sawa.jpg http://thisisalive.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/04/AlgaeBioreactors.jpg - Project page: http://thisisalive.com/algaerium-bioprinter/ #### Department of Seaweed — Julia Lohmann (2013) - Type: Artwork · Organisms: Algae, Ecosystems - Idea: Learn a material together with the ecosystem it comes from, not only as a resource. - What it is: A transdisciplinary community practice that treats kelp as a leather-like design material, leading to lamps, objects and the kelp pavilion Hidaka Ohmu. - How it works: Dried kelp is rehydrated, treated with glycerine to stay flexible, then stretched, stitched and shaped over frames like leather. - Video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8RWcmw8fHGY - Project page: https://www.julialohmann.co.uk/ #### HORTUS.PARIS: The Machinic Harvest — ecoLogicStudio (2013) - Type: Artwork · Organisms: Algae - Idea: A garden can be a feedback loop between organisms, visitors and data. - What it is: A cyber-garden of photobioreactors hosting micro- and macroalgae from Paris ponds, which visitors kept alive for four months by pumping air in and posting tweets that grew a virtual garden. - How it works: Visitors activate air pumps that feed CO2 to the algae, the harvested biomass percolates onto a filtering surface, and sensor data and tweets feed a smartphone-accessible virtual garden. - Images: http://thisisalive.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/09/000553.jpg http://thisisalive.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/09/0009832.jpg - Project page: http://thisisalive.com/hortus-paris-the-machinic-harvest/ #### Biophotovoltaic Moss Table — Carlos Peralta, Paolo Bombelli (2011) - Type: Speculative design · Organisms: Plants, Bacteria & microbes - Idea: Photosynthesis in a houseplant could become a small domestic power source. - What it is: A concept table whose top is a grid of potted mosses wired as biophotovoltaic cells, proposing a lamp powered by photosynthesis. - How it works: In biophotovoltaic devices, electrons released by photosynthesis and by microbes around the moss roots reach an anode; today this can run a clock, not yet the lamp. - Images: http://thisisalive.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/04/mosstable-760x1055.jpg http://thisisalive.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/04/Mosstesting.jpg - Project page: http://thisisalive.com/biophotovoltaic-moss-table/ #### Algaculture — Burton Nitta (Michael Burton & Michiko Nitta) (2010) - Type: Speculative design · Organisms: Algae, Human body - Idea: Design the human into the food chain rather than at the end of it. - What it is: A wearable symbiosis suit of glass tubes lets a person grow and drink algae fed by their own exhaled breath and sunlight, proposing partly photosynthetic humans. - How it works: Blown-glass vessels worn on the body circulate a microalgae culture that takes in exhaled carbon dioxide and light; the wearer drinks the culture, a scenario developed with algae researchers. - Images: https://www.burtonnitta.co.uk/Algaculture/AlgacultureBurtonNitta.jpg https://www.burtonnitta.co.uk/Algaculture/AlgacultureBurtonNitta3.jpg - Project page: https://www.burtonnitta.co.uk/algaculture.html #### Latro algae lamp — Mike Thompson (2010) - Type: Speculative design · Organisms: Algae - Idea: Energy as a relationship of care between a person and an organism. - What it is: A concept lamp that draws power from living algae in its chamber; the owner must give it sunlight, water and CO2 to keep the algae, and the light, alive. - How it works: Based on research into harvesting photosynthetic current from algal chloroplasts; a battery stores the energy and a light sensor limits use so the algae are not exhausted. - Video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IoMWCaTmrbQ - Images: https://makezine.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/06/ltr1.jpg - Project page: https://nextnature.org/en/magazine/story/2012/latro-algae-lamp #### O (Oxygen Generator), from the Elements project — Mathieu Lehanneur (2006) - Type: Research prototype · Organisms: Algae - Idea: A microalgae culture can be treated as a household appliance that responds to the room's needs. - What it is: A glass vessel of water and Spirulina algae that monitors the oxygen level of a room and, when it drops, switches on light so the algae photosynthesise and release more oxygen. - How it works: An oxymetric probe triggers white LEDs and a magnetic stirrer that keep a Spirulina culture photosynthesising inside a glass and aluminium body. - Images: https://www.moma.org/interactives/exhibitions/2008/elasticmind/assets/images/OOxygenGenerator/OhiRes.jpg - Project page: https://www.moma.org/interactives/exhibitions/2008/elasticmind/ ### Grown Objects & Plant Craft Guiding roots, trees and plants to grow into furniture, textiles and structures. #### BagasSeries — University of Pennsylvania Biodesign Challenge team (2025) - Type: Product & platform · Organisms: Plants - Idea: Hyperlocal organic waste can supply the objects a community needs on site. - What it is: A catalogue of biocomposite products made from the sugarcane bagasse thrown away daily by juice stands at Philadelphia's FDR Park Southeast Asian Market, developed with vendors and park users. - How it works: Bagasse fibres are combined with non-toxic binders and pressed with low-energy methods into signs and useful objects. - Video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KQRt5ttcNS8 - Project page: https://www.biodesignchallenge.org/university-of-pennsylvania-2025 #### Grow Your Own Home: hemp corrugated panels — Margent Farm (2025) - Type: Product & platform · Organisms: Plants - Idea: Grow the roof on the same land the building stands on. - What it is: Hemp grown on the farm is combined with a plant-derived bio-resin to make corrugated roofing and cladding panels that replace fibre-cement and plastic sheets. - How it works: Hemp fibre mats are impregnated with a bio-resin and pressed in corrugated moulds. - Video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=c2RJ1asZGWo - Images: https://static.dezeen.com/uploads/2025/07/Grow-your-own-home-Hero-Image-Material-Longlist_dezeen_2364_col_0.jpg - Project page: https://www.margentfarm.com/ #### BIOmatrix: Weaving Sustainability – Reflejos Marinos — EASD Castelló Biodesign Challenge team (2024) - Type: Research prototype · Organisms: Plants, Ecosystems - Idea: A beach 'waste' made by a seagrass meadow can become a local craft material. - What it is: Products and materials made from 'Neptune balls', fibre balls formed by the Mediterranean seagrass Posidonia oceanica that wash up on beaches. - How it works: Beach-cast Posidonia fibres are cleaned, felted and bound into sheets and objects. - Video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u0fWnQlkJqs - Images: https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/552dc0ffe4b070a9e1a6a215/1718648310269-NDYUXE887R0M8SL6OUFJ/01.jpg https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/552dc0ffe4b070a9e1a6a215/1718648311676-HTB48H4WQV1YDOB801WN/18.jpg - Project page: https://www.biodesignchallenge.org/easd-castello-2024 #### Shellf Life — RISD Terra Carta teams (2024) - Type: Product & platform · Organisms: Animals - Idea: Seafood waste is a biogenic stone. - What it is: Discarded mollusc shells from the seafood industry are turned into a biomaterial for products and architectural surfaces. - How it works: Calcium-carbonate shells are cleaned, ground and bound into castable composites. - Images: https://img2.storyblok.com/960x0/smart/filters:format(jpeg)/f/109506/576x720/ddbe68f3e1/shellf-life.png - Project page: https://www.sustainable-markets.org/tcdl/2024-terra-carta-design-lab-winners/ #### Biofabrication with cuia fruits — Andrea Bandoni (2023) - Type: Research prototype · Organisms: Plants - Idea: Biofabrication can start from ancestral craft: the tree grows the object, the designer guides it. - What it is: A design study that shapes objects while they grow on the calabash tree (Crescentia cujete), whose fruits Amazonian artisans have long turned into bowls called cuias. - How it works: Historical research, interviews with traditional artisans and hands-on trials with living cuieira trees in a bioeconomy setting, shaping fruits during growth. - Paper: https://doi.org/10.21606/iasdr.2023.156 (IASDR 2023) - Project page: https://dl.designresearchsociety.org/iasdr/iasdr2023/fullpapers/19 #### Worm Stool — Fernando Galdon (2023) - Type: Research prototype · Organisms: Insects - Idea: Let animal behaviour carve the form, then scale it up: the object records how the insects responded. - What it is: A stool by William Eliot cast from the tunnels that mealworms eat through polystyrene; sugar water injected into the block steers where they chew. - How it works: Mealworms eat through polystyrene guided by sugar-water injections; the paths are cast in wax and scaled up to a full-size stool. - Paper: https://doi.org/10.21606/iasdr.2023.202 (IASDR 2023) - Project page: https://dl.designresearchsociety.org/iasdr/iasdr2023/fullpapers/44 #### Agro Biomaterials — Berta Daina (2022) - Type: Product & platform · Organisms: Plants - Idea: Material production can be a domestic craft like cooking. - What it is: A kit of ingredients and instructions for making bioplastics at home from organic food waste. - How it works: Recipes combine food-waste powders with binders such as starch or gelatin, cast and dried into sheets. - Video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xAAT7Ot2Afc - Images: https://www.jamesdysonaward.org/Document/ee45ff47-ba4d-452f-bf3c-ea585c5cec0e/1agro.jpg https://www.jamesdysonaward.org/Document/ba8c30b3-b07f-46e7-a3e8-79acadd348de/2agro.jpg - Project page: https://www.jamesdysonaward.org/en-GB/2022/project/agro-biomaterials/ #### Home Grown — Home Grown (RCA team) (2022) - Type: Research prototype · Organisms: Plants, Fungi - Idea: Electronics can be clad in grown, local materials. - What it is: A touchpad whose casing and components are made from bio-based, locally sourced materials and crafts, as an alternative to plastic electronics. - How it works: Bio-based casings are made with local crafts around standard electronic internals. - Video: https://vimeo.com/666548887 - Images: https://rca-media2.rca.ac.uk/images/Home_Grown_2.2e16d0ba.fill-1200x1200.jpg - Project page: https://www.rca.ac.uk/business/terra-carta-design-lab-projects/home-grown #### MUS(T)GO — Universidad de los Andes Biodesign Challenge team (2022) - Type: Research prototype · Organisms: Plants, Bacteria & microbes - Idea: A humble plant's structure can do the work of an industrial filter. - What it is: A moss-based water filter that removes harmful microorganisms and retains microplastics from water. - How it works: Moss tissue traps particles and microplastics in its dense leaflets while its surface chemistry inhibits microbes (as tested by the team). - Video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=m14cJUp08dI - Project page: https://www.biodesignchallenge.org/universidad-de-los-andes-2022 #### Citra, The Bio Leather — Menlin Ng (2021) - Type: Research prototype · Organisms: Plants - Idea: Fruit peel can become a premium packaging material. - What it is: A biodegradable leather-like material made from citrus-peel waste, applied as packaging for a skincare kit. - How it works: Citrus peel is ground and bound with natural binders, cast into sheets and dried. - Video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zkWPwevwHe4 - Images: https://www.jamesdysonaward.org/Document/3645e1aa-c613-454c-b3af-88a6cfc2b9b7/1-01.png https://www.jamesdysonaward.org/Document/456969f4-436b-44ea-a1c1-85536069a51b/7-02.png - Project page: https://www.jamesdysonaward.org/en-GB/2021/project/citra-the-bio-leather/ #### AuREUS — Carvey Ehren Maigue (2020) - Type: Research prototype · Organisms: Plants, DNA & molecules - Idea: Crops lost to disasters can become windows that generate electricity. - What it is: A translucent panel material with luminescent particles extracted from upcycled fruit and vegetable crop waste, which absorb stray UV light and re-emit visible light onto solar cells at the panel edges. - How it works: Bio-luminescent compounds from crushed crops are suspended in resin; edge-mounted PV cells collect the re-emitted light. - Video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=41BsHWhU8SM - Images: https://www.jamesdysonaward.org/Document/423769c8-8f23-41d9-ad68-67078e17747f/img20200715121623.jpg https://www.jamesdysonaward.org/Document/06e5abae-0a5c-4a64-b922-715ce2f1370e/info-graph.png - Project page: https://www.jamesdysonaward.org/en-GB/2020/project/aureus-aurora-renewable-energy-uv-sequestration/ #### Remix el Barrio, Food Waste Biomaterial Makers — Fab Lab Barcelona (2020) - Type: Research prototype · Organisms: Plants, Bacteria & microbes - Idea: A neighbourhood's food waste can feed a local craft economy. - What it is: A pilot programme in Barcelona's Poblenou district in which designers learned to turn neighbourhood food scraps into biomaterials, using artisanal techniques and digital fabrication. - How it works: Peer-learning sessions at Fab Lab Barcelona developed recipes (bioplastics, composites, bacterial cellulose) from local food waste and shared them openly. - Images: https://ars.electronica.art/starts-prize/files/2021/06/Remix-6-1024x512.jpg https://ars.electronica.art/starts-prize/files/2021/06/Remix-3-1024x512.jpg - Project page: https://ars.electronica.art/starts-prize/en/remix-el-barrio/ #### HyO-Cup (The Gourd Project) — Crème (Jun Aizaki) (2019) - Type: Product & platform · Organisms: Plants - Idea: Let the plant do the manufacturing. - What it is: Drinking cups grown by letting bottle-gourd fruits swell inside 3D-printed moulds on the vine and then drying them, so the plant manufactures compostable cups. - How it works: Young Lagenaria siceraria fruits are enclosed in moulds; mature gourds are harvested, dried and cut. - Video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oqsW0buX088 - Images: https://static.dezeen.com/uploads/2019/09/dezeen-awards-the-gourd-project-sq.jpg - Project page: https://www.cremedesign.com/ #### KADO (Angle) — Kazuhito Takadoi (2019) - Type: Artwork · Organisms: Plants - Idea: Craft can begin by growing the material yourself. - What it is: A woven sculpture made entirely of grasses, branches and reeds that the artist grows in his garden, stitched with thread; it keeps changing shape and colour as the plants dry. - How it works: Garden-grown plant stems are harvested, dried and stitched into an angular woven form. - Video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9zlBZ3J8yy0 - Images: https://craftprize.loewe.com/on/demandware.static/-/Sites-LOE_CP-Library/default/dw77e39eab/CRAFT%20PRIZE%202019%20%20CONTENT/CP_ARTWORKS_WEB_25.jpg - Project page: https://craftprize.loewe.com/en/craftprize2019#winner2019-archive #### Living bridges using aerial roots of ficus elastica – an interdisciplinary perspective — Ferdinand Ludwig, Khasi and Jaintia communities of Meghalaya (2019) - Type: Paper · Organisms: Plants - Idea: Vernacular living structures are data for designing with growth. - What it is: A field study that inventories living root bridges in Meghalaya and measures how the roots grow, fuse and form stable structures, to learn from them for architecture. - How it works: Survey of bridge location, age and length plus measurements of root cross-sections and inosculations; the TUM team modelled the structural logic. - Paper: https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-019-48652-w (Scientific Reports) - Images: https://media.springernature.com/full/springer-static/image/art%3A10.1038%2Fs41598-019-48652-w/MediaObjects/41598_2019_48652_Fig1_HTML.jpg - Project page: https://www.arc.ed.tum.de/en/gtla/research/living-root-bridges/ #### Care for Milk — Ekaterina Semenova (2018) - Type: Research prototype · Organisms: Animals, DNA & molecules - Idea: A kitchen waste can waterproof a vessel. - What it is: Leftover milk collected from neighbourhood households becomes a casein bioplastic glaze for ceramics, forming a waterproof layer whose colour varies with the milk. - How it works: Milk penetrates the pores of fired clay and is heat-cured into a casein film. - Images: https://new-material-award.nl/wp-content/uploads/2021/11/Care-for-Milk_high-resolution-680x1024.jpg - Project page: https://new-material-award.nl/en/care-for-milk/ #### Printable Hydroponics — Yuichiro Takeuchi (2018) - Type: Research prototype · Organisms: Plants - Idea: Print ecological systems, not only objects. - What it is: A technique that 3D prints a plastic landscape and places seeds at set positions on it, so that with water, light and nutrients it grows into a hydroponic garden. - How it works: Multi-material printing produces porous plastic structures with seed pockets that wick nutrient solution; plants germinate and grow on the print. - Paper: https://doi.org/10.1145/3279778.3279929 (ISS 2018) - Images: https://figures.semanticscholar.org/17b5eeb4ebad32b8e7af0c631c18c5a31f0cc2be/500px/3-Figure1-1.png - Project page: https://doi.org/10.1145/3279778.3279929 #### Rootfull — Zena Holloway (2018) - Type: Product & platform · Organisms: Plants - Idea: A textile made only from seed and water, woven by the root. - What it is: Lampshades, wall hangings and garment pieces grown from wheatgrass roots in carved beeswax templates in about twelve days. - How it works: Wheatgrass is sown over beeswax moulds carved from 3D-printed patterns; roots fill the channels, and the mat is cut away from the shoots and dried. - Video: https://vimeo.com/694327629 - Images: https://www.designboom.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/10/zena-holloway-rootfull-designboom-1800.jpg - Project page: https://www.designboom.com/design/zena-holloway-rootfull-collection-london-design-festival-10-04-2022/ #### FluidSolids — FluidSolids (2017) - Type: Product & platform · Organisms: Plants - Idea: A bio-based material only scales if it fits existing factories. - What it is: A biocomposite made from by-products of renewable raw materials that can replace plastic, metal or wood and be processed with standard mass-production techniques. - How it works: Organic residues that do not compete with food supply are bound into a composite and moulded or extruded industrially. - Images: https://ars.electronica.art/starts-prize/files/2018/06/FluidSolids.jpg - Project page: https://ars.electronica.art/starts-prize/en/fluidsolids/ #### Totomoxtle — Fernando Laposse (2017) - Type: Product & platform · Organisms: Plants - Idea: A material project can keep a crop's genetic diversity and a community's livelihood alive. - What it is: A veneer for furniture and wall panels made from the purple, red and cream husks of native Mexican corn, grown by a farming community in Tonahuixtla, Puebla, that restores heirloom seed varieties. - How it works: Heirloom corn is replanted with local farmers; the husks are flattened, ironed onto a textile or paper backing and hand-cut into marquetry. - Video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0r08iXfJ-CM - Project page: https://www.fernandolaposse.com/ #### Bio-Vide — Takuma Yamazaki (2016) - Type: Research prototype · Organisms: Plants - Idea: What a tree sheds every autumn can be a material harvest. - What it is: Products made from a material formed by pressing and binding layers of fallen leaves, treating seasonal leaf litter as a renewable, biodegradable resource. - How it works: Leaves are layered with a binder and pressed into sheets and forms. - Images: https://static.dezeen.com/uploads/2016/02/lexus-design-awards-2016-primary-images_dezeen_936_5.jpg - Project page: https://www.dezeen.com/2016/02/23/lexus-design-award-2016-finalists-four-prototypes-milan-design-week-exhibition/ #### Flax Chair — Christien Meindertsma (2016) - Type: Product & platform · Organisms: Plants - Idea: Design from the whole flax plant, using as much of it as possible. - What it is: A chair made from a biodegradable composite of flax fibre and PLA: needle-punched flax-PLA felt is cut and heat-pressed so the PLA melts and binds the fibres into shell and legs. - How it works: Developed with Label/Breed and Enkev; rectangles of felt are pressed into folded forms without waste. - Images: https://www.dutchdesignawards.nl/wp-content/uploads/2016/05/flax-chair_0-750x442.jpg https://new-material-award.nl/wp-content/uploads/2021/11/1-766-LabelBreed41185-3-724x1024.jpg - Project page: https://www.dutchdesignawards.nl/en/gallery/flax-chair/ #### Forest Wool — Tamara Orjola (2016) - Type: Research prototype · Organisms: Plants - Idea: The part of the tree we throw away can become a fibre industry. - What it is: Stools, carpets, textiles and paper made from pine needles, the 20–30 percent of a pine tree's mass that forestry discards; developed as Orjola's Design Academy Eindhoven graduation project (2016). - How it works: Needles are crushed, soaked, steamed, carded and bound or pressed with standard techniques, producing fibre, composite panels and paper while extracting essential oil and dye along the way. - Video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Y5-l9RP0cYM - Images: https://impro.usercontent.one/appid/oneComWsb/domain/tamaraorjola.com/media/tamaraorjola.com/onewebmedia/02Tamara_Orjola_stool1.jpg?etag=%223041b8-581cf138%22&sourceContentType=image%2Fjpeg&ignoreAspectRatio&resize=223%2B336&extract=0%2B0%2B222%2B336&quality=85 https://impro.usercontent.one/appid/oneComWsb/domain/tamaraorjola.com/media/tamaraorjola.com/onewebmedia/Tamara%20Orjola_pinetrees.jpg?etag=W%2F%2220ac85-581cf3f8%22&sourceContentType=image%2Fjpeg&ignoreAspectRatio&resize=504%2B715&extract=0%2B0%2B504%2B715&quality=85 - Project page: https://tamaraorjola.com #### Interwoven — Diana Scherer (2016) - Type: Artwork · Organisms: Plants - Idea: Domesticate the root system: the root follows the template and weaves itself. - What it is: Textile-like panels and garments made by growing wheat and other grass roots against carved underground templates so that the roots form lace and hexagon patterns. - How it works: Seeds are sown over 3D-printed or carved bioplastic templates in soil; after weeks of growth the root mat is harvested and dried. - Video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9be4A9vvo3c - Images: https://cmsfiles.nieuweinstituut.nl/diana_scherer_interwoven01_85de138ea3.jpg - Project page: https://nieuweinstituut.nl/en/projects/new-material-award/diana-scherer #### Coleoptera — Aagje Hoekstra (2014) - Type: Research prototype · Organisms: Insects - Idea: Insect farming waste is a source of plastic-like material. - What it is: A bioplastic made from the wing cases of mealworm beetles discarded by insect farms, converted into chitin and chitosan and pressed into sheets; over 2,500 beetles make one small sheet. - How it works: Elytra are demineralised and deacetylated to chitosan, cast and pressed. - Images: https://new-material-award.nl/wp-content/uploads/2021/11/Coleoptera8-1024x768.jpg https://new-material-award.nl/wp-content/uploads/2021/11/2013-10-13-1024x765.jpg - Project page: https://new-material-award.nl/en/coleoptera/ #### No-ink — Tjeerd Veenhoven (2014) - Type: Research prototype · Organisms: Plants - Idea: A flower industry's waste petals can be a colour and a material. - What it is: Discarded tulip heads from North Holland bulb fields are dried and their petals laminated with compostable PLA into a sheet material; pigments are also extracted from the petals. - How it works: Dried petals are laminated in PLA film; spent petals are processed for dye extraction. - Images: https://new-material-award.nl/wp-content/uploads/2021/11/No-ink-1024x768.jpg https://new-material-award.nl/wp-content/uploads/2021/11/colourscaleWEB-589x1024.jpg - Project page: https://new-material-award.nl/en/no-ink/ #### Botanical Factory — Carole Collet (2013) - Type: Research prototype · Organisms: Plants - Idea: Produce without altering genes: steer plant growth and follow the seasons instead. - What it is: A design and botany workshop between ENSCI Les Ateliers and Central Saint Martins that grew product parts from plants, shown as a production chain of electronic objects with bodies moulded from gourds. - How it works: Horticultural techniques such as growing gourds inside moulds shape the plant into a housing, harvested by season and fitted with electronics. - Images: http://thisisalive.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/04/BotanicalFabrication_Electronic-Products.jpg - Project page: http://thisisalive.com/botanical-factory-design-and-botany-workshop/ #### Agricola — Gionata Gatto (2012) - Type: Product & platform · Organisms: Plants - Idea: Crop waste burned for energy can instead become light fittings. - What it is: Lamps made from fibrous agricultural by-products of fruit, vegetables and cereals, normally burned for biofuel, bound with natural agents such as latex, dammar gum and gamboge. - How it works: Fibres are moulded with natural resins and gums into translucent shades. - Images: https://new-material-award.nl/wp-content/uploads/2021/11/sfondo-Agricola-1-1024x705.jpg - Project page: https://new-material-award.nl/en/agricola/ #### Biolace — Carole Collet (2012) - Type: Speculative design · Organisms: Plants, DNA & molecules - Idea: One plant, two harvests: food above, textile below. - What it is: A speculative series of engineered plants, such as 'Strawberry Noir', that produce food above ground and lace from their roots below ground. - How it works: Imagines reprogramming plant morphogenesis with synthetic biology so roots grow into lace patterns; presented as images and a film. - Video: https://vimeo.com/52477313 - Images: https://freight.cargo.site/w/1200/i/11fc0c17ebdb5e94695fcc0034573ff12244b0c51ae109b8be45509836465fef/01_Biolace_Carole_Collet_IMMATTERS_2012_HD.jpg - Project page: https://immatters.com/Carole-Collet-Biolace #### Chair Farm — Werner Aisslinger (2012) - Type: Speculative design · Organisms: Plants - Idea: Furniture harvested locally from product plantations instead of shipped globally. - What it is: Chairs grown by training fast-growing plants through steel corsets in a greenhouse; when the mould is removed a grown seat remains. - How it works: Steel moulds guide plant stems into the shape of a chair over one or more growing seasons; the plant is then dried and cut free. - Video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UEX9H2H5NwQ - Images: https://aisslinger.de/wp-content/uploads/2018/01/chairfarm_credits_studio-aisslinger_02-1800x1050.jpg - Project page: https://aisslinger.de/project/chair-farm/ #### Plane-Tree-Cube Nagold — Ferdinand Ludwig (2012) - Type: Research prototype · Organisms: Plants - Idea: A building that becomes stronger and more alive as it ages. - What it is: A six-level cube in Nagold whose walls are London plane trees planted in stacked planters and grafted together, supported by steel scaffolding that will be removed as the trees grow. - How it works: Plant-addition: young trees are placed in pots at several heights and grafted into one connected living network that gradually takes over the load. - Video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QijxrrnsZoA - Images: https://thumb.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/5/52/Plane_tree_cube.jpg/1280px-Plane_tree_cube.jpg https://images.adsttc.com/media/images/583b/672b/e58e/cebc/9300/010e/large_jpg/after_completion.jpg?1480288036 - Project page: https://www.archdaily.com/800294/platanenkubus-nagold-ludwichoenle #### Botanica — Formafantasma (2011) - Type: Artwork · Organisms: Plants, Insects, Animals - Idea: Look back to natural polymers to imagine design after oil. - What it is: Vessels and objects imagining design as if the oil age never happened, made from pre-Bakelite natural polymers: plant gums, resins, rubber, shellac and animal blood. - How it works: Historical recipes for natural plastics were re-created and cast into vessels. - Images: https://new-material-award.nl/wp-content/uploads/2021/11/botanica_01-1024x682.jpg https://new-material-award.nl/wp-content/uploads/2021/11/botanica_03-1024x598.jpg - Project page: https://new-material-award.nl/en/botanica/ #### PalmLeather — Tjeerd Veenhoven (2011) - Type: Research prototype · Organisms: Plants - Idea: Restore a dead leaf's living properties instead of adding plastic. - What it is: Dry, brittle leaf sheaths of the areca palm are soaked in a biological softening solution that restores the toughness and flexibility of the living leaf, giving a leather-like sheet. - How it works: A plant-based softener penetrates the cell walls, then sheets are embossed and cut into slippers. - Images: https://new-material-award.nl/wp-content/uploads/2021/11/13.-TjeerdVeenhoven-1800x1197-1-1024x681.jpg - Project page: https://new-material-award.nl/en/palmleather/ #### Vessel #1 (The Honeycomb Vase) — Tomáš Gabzdil Libertíny (2011) - Type: Artwork · Organisms: Insects - Idea: Slow prototyping: the designer sets the form, the colony builds the object. - What it is: A vase of pure beeswax built by about 60,000 honeybees over two months on a skeleton placed inside a hive. - How it works: An engineered form is placed in a prepared hive; the designer monitors the comb and occasionally intervenes to guide it, much like shaping a bonsai. - Video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gziMMzIcIK8 - Images: http://thisisalive.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/04/beevase-760x558.jpg http://thisisalive.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/09/000635.jpg - Project page: http://thisisalive.com/vessel-1/ #### Fab Tree Hab — Terreform ONE (2008) - Type: Speculative design · Organisms: Plants - Idea: Grow a house rather than build it, and let it keep serving other species. - What it is: A proposed home grown from native trees trained over removable CNC scaffolds, with living walls of vines and soil pockets, so that the house becomes part of the local ecosystem. - How it works: Pleaching (grafting and training living branches) over prefabricated plywood scaffolds that are removed once the trees hold their shape. - Video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l9A0qeZ8BDE - Images: https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/61bd9bc5da6b0336a4d44519/2bb510c9-839b-4983-b5b9-1f364425202c/fab-tree-hab-terreform-greenweb.jpg - Project page: https://www.terreform.org/fab-tree-hab #### Tree of 40 Fruit — Sam Van Aken (2008) - Type: Artwork · Organisms: Plants - Idea: An orchard's diversity can be compressed into one living sculpture that also preserves rare varieties. - What it is: Single trees grafted with up to 40 varieties of stone fruit, many of them heirloom or rare, so that one tree blossoms in a gradient of white, pink and crimson and bears plums, peaches, apricots, cherries and nectarines. - How it works: Chip grafting of scion wood onto a host tree over several years, planned with hand-drawn graft maps that set where each variety blossoms. - Video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=z7Idwk13RwQ - Images: https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/d/df/Tree_of_40_Fruit_at_Syracuse_University.jpg/1280px-Tree_of_40_Fruit_at_Syracuse_University.jpg - Project page: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tree_of_40_Fruit #### Full Grown chairs — Gavin Munro (2006) - Type: Product & platform · Organisms: Plants - Idea: Grow the tree into the object directly, a kind of slow 3D printing. - What it is: Chairs, lamps and tables grown from living willow, ash, sycamore and other trees trained over frames in a Derbyshire field, then harvested whole. - How it works: Young trees are pruned, bent and grafted over moulds for six to nine years, then cut and dried for about a year. - Video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=89jZhzU8_rk - Project page: https://fullgrown.co.uk/ #### Bios Urn — Bios Urn (Gerard Moliné & Martín Ruiz de Azúa) (2005) - Type: Product & platform · Organisms: Plants - Idea: Turn a burial into the start of a tree's life. - What it is: A biodegradable urn of compacted coconut shell, peat and cellulose that holds cremated ashes together with a tree seed; planted in the ground, it decomposes and the tree grows. - How it works: The upper capsule holds seed and growth medium; the lower chamber holds ashes, separated until roots reach them. - Video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o-xw-DSUMRg - Images: https://urnabios.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/08/New-Bios-Urn-People%C2%AE-5.png - Project page: https://urnabios.com/ #### Pooktre tree shaping — Pooktre (1995) - Type: Artwork · Organisms: Plants - Idea: Design with a tree's 'shaping zone': guide only the newest growth. - What it is: Living trees gradually guided into chairs, human figures, mirrors and other designed shapes over years of growth. - How it works: Young, flexible growth is bent along a planned design and held with ties and frames, then trimmed and grafted so the tree fills out the form. - Video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7wkJBCAC7yk - Images: https://www.pooktre.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/03/pooktre-00001-03-300x256.jpg - Project page: https://www.pooktre.com/ #### The Tree Circus — Axel Erlandson (1947) - Type: Artwork · Organisms: Plants - Idea: Self-grafting between branches can be used as a joinery technique. - What it is: A roadside attraction of trees grafted and bent into baskets, arches, ladders and spirals; about twenty survive at Gilroy Gardens in California. - How it works: Sycamore, box elder and other trees were planted in patterns, topped, bent and approach-grafted together following drawings. - Video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OWEK1pNgTDA - Images: https://www.gilroygardens.org/wp-content/uploads/2025/01/VisitGilroy_Gilroy_Gardens_Basket-Tree_01_2560x1257-1024x503.jpg https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/3/3e/Twolegtree.jpg - Project page: https://www.gilroygardens.org/circus-trees/ #### Wachsende Häuser aus lebenden Bäumen entstehend (Growing Houses from Living Trees) — Arthur Wiechula (1926) - Type: Book & essay · Organisms: Plants - Idea: Architecture could be planted and grafted instead of built. - What it is: A book with drawings and techniques for growing walls, houses and fences from rows of living trees grafted into a continuous lattice. - How it works: Proposes planting young trees close together and grafting their branches into a dense self-supporting wall that thickens over years. - Images: https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/5/58/Wiechula_grafted_branches.gif - Project page: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arthur_Wiechula #### Living root bridges of Meghalaya — Khasi and Jaintia communities of Meghalaya (1844) - Type: Research prototype · Organisms: Plants, Ecosystems - Idea: Infrastructure grown and maintained across generations, which gets stronger with age. - What it is: Footbridges up to about 50 metres long grown over generations by guiding the aerial roots of rubber fig trees across streams; some are centuries old. - How it works: Roots of Ficus elastica are wrapped around bamboo or areca-palm guides; they thicken and fuse (inosculate) into a load-bearing network. Year is the first written European record. - Video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l1RupS_jZNg - Images: https://thumb.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/5/51/Living_root_bridges%2C_Nongriat_village%2C_Meghalaya2.jpg/1280px-Living_root_bridges%2C_Nongriat_village%2C_Meghalaya2.jpg - Project page: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Living_root_bridge ### Bio-textiles & Fashion Garments and textiles dyed, grown or animated by living organisms. #### Kerra — Stanford University Biodesign Challenge team (2025) - Type: Research prototype · Organisms: Animals, DNA & molecules - Idea: Reconnect material innovation with farms, animals and land. - What it is: A biodegradable, high-performance textile made from keratin extracted from the large share of wool that farms cannot sell, developed with Bay Area farmers. - How it works: Green-chemistry processing dissolves wool keratin and re-forms it into elastic fibres and films. - Video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o8TdxBGzE2E - Project page: https://www.biodesignchallenge.org/stanford-university-2025 #### LivingLoom: Investigating Human-Plant Symbiosis Through Integrating Living Plants Into (E-)Textiles — Jingwen Zhu (2025) - Type: Research prototype · Organisms: Plants - Idea: Weave living plants into cloth instead of turning plants into fibre. - What it is: LivingLoom wet-spins biodegradable yarns that carry microgreen seeds, so woven textiles sprout and grow over about ten days while their wearers water and care for them. - How it works: Seed-embedded wet-spun yarns, a design space for plant textiles, and a three-day wear-and-care user study. - Paper: https://doi.org/10.1145/3706598.3713156 (CHI 2025) - Video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XggQrs19dls - Project page: https://doi.org/10.1145/3706598.3713156 #### Risou (理藻) — Keio University Graduate School of Media Design Biodesign Challenge team (2025) - Type: Speculative design · Organisms: Algae - Idea: Clothes could be a visible record of how we treat the sea. - What it is: Drawing on Japan's cultural bond with seaweed, Risou proposes symbiotic seaweed-based textiles that change with the wearer and show their environmental impact — vibrant when ecological duties are met. - How it works: Seaweed-derived threads are spun, 3D-modelled and woven into speculative garments. - Video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GwqCnpRZukw - Images: https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/552dc0ffe4b070a9e1a6a215/1751485030500-NOK4KAM1588WV69TSWRU/weave.png https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/552dc0ffe4b070a9e1a6a215/1751485025506-70G3HCO80FQ7KD76VK19/experiment.jpg - Project page: https://www.biodesignchallenge.org/keio-university-2025 #### Fermenting Knits — Carolina De Lara (2024) - Type: Research prototype · Organisms: Bacteria & microbes - Idea: Bacterial cellulose can be treated as a fibre to rebuild with knitting, not only as a grown sheet. - What it is: Knitted and crocheted samples fused with bacterial cellulose that has been broken down into fibres and re-formed around the stitches, producing textile biocomposites. - How it works: Bacterial cellulose pellicles are blended into a pulp, re-sheeted onto knit structures of different stitch and yarn types, and dried under controlled moisture. - Paper: https://doi.org/10.1017/btd.2024.3 (Research Directions: Biotechnology Design 2024) - Images: https://static.cambridge.org/binary/version/id/urn:cambridge.org:id:binary:20240417060640777-0701:S2752945224000037:S2752945224000037_fig6.png?pub-status=live https://static.cambridge.org/binary/version/id/urn:cambridge.org:id:binary:20240417060640777-0701:S2752945224000037:S2752945224000037_fig1.png?pub-status=live #### GROWN BLUR — Boqun Huang (2024) - Type: Research prototype · Organisms: Algae - Idea: Pair a traditional textile technique with a grown dye. - What it is: Ikat textiles dyed with cultivated microalgae pigments instead of synthetic dyes, adapting ikat's resist-dye-before-weaving logic to algae dyeing. - How it works: Warp threads are resist-tied and dipped in microalgae pigment baths before weaving. - Images: https://content.gp-award.com/assets/media/award24/0-grown-blur_blogLarge.jpg https://content.gp-award.com/assets/media/award24/2-grown-blur_blogLarge.jpg - Project page: https://www.gp-award.com/en/projects/grown-blur #### MIRUM — Natural Fiber Welding (2024) - Type: Product & platform · Organisms: Plants - Idea: A bio-based material should be bio-based all the way through, including the binder. - What it is: A plastic-free leather alternative bound with natural rubber and plant oils instead of polyurethane, from a company whose welding process also fuses natural fibres such as cotton. - How it works: Natural rubber, plant oils, cork and fillers are compounded and cured on a natural-fibre backing. - Video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oSTdvj_J8NY - Images: https://earthshotprize.org/wp-content/uploads/2024/09/NFW-thread.jpg https://earthshotprize.org/wp-content/uploads/2024/09/NFW-trainers-soles.jpg - Project page: https://www.nfw.earth/ #### Printing Herbarium — Paula Andrea Molina (2024) - Type: Artwork · Organisms: Plants - Idea: Let a plant be the printing medium. - What it is: Living moss is applied to textile surfaces to create textures instead of water-intensive screen printing, co-creating a collection with the plants. - How it works: Moss fragments in a growth medium are applied through stencils and cultivated on fabric. - Images: https://content.gp-award.com/assets/media/award24/0-printing-herbarium_blogLarge.jpg https://content.gp-award.com/assets/media/award24/2-printing-herbarium_blogLarge.jpg - Project page: https://www.gp-award.com/en/projects/printing-herbarium #### Self-pigmenting textiles grown from cellulose-producing bacteria with engineered tyrosinase expression — Tom Ellis, Jen Keane (2024) - Type: Paper · Organisms: Bacteria & microbes - Idea: A material that grows and dyes itself in one step. - What it is: Bacteria engineered to make melanin grow a black, self-dyed cellulose material, used to make a shoe upper and a wallet. - How it works: Komagataeibacter rhaeticus expressing a recombinant tyrosinase grows bacterial cellulose, then is triggered to produce eumelanin throughout it. - Paper: https://www.nature.com/articles/s41587-024-02194-3 (Nature Biotechnology) - Images: https://media.springernature.com/full/springer-static/image/art%3A10.1038%2Fs41587-024-02194-3/MediaObjects/41587_2024_2194_Fig1_HTML.png - Project page: https://www.nature.com/articles/s41587-024-02194-3 #### Whispers from Silken Margins — Siyu Yao (2024) - Type: Artwork · Organisms: Insects - Idea: Flat cocoons keep the silkworm alive and open a new spatial vocabulary for silk. - What it is: A gallery installation of flat silk sheets spun by silkworms, reviving a Showa-era technique in which the worm spins a plane instead of a cocoon, arranged after Archimedean solids. - How it works: Silkworms spin on flat frames producing sheets of 16 different textures and fibre structures, which are assembled into polyhedral forms. - Paper: https://doi.org/10.1145/3623509.3635317 (TEI 2024) - Project page: https://doi.org/10.1145/3623509.3635317 #### Cellsense — Cellsense team (Georgia Tech) (2023) - Type: Research prototype · Organisms: Algae, Plants - Idea: Even decoration can be biodegradable. - What it is: Garment embellishments such as sequins made from algae and regenerated cellulose, including bioluminescent versions, to replace microplastic sequins and glitter. - How it works: Algae and cellulose films are cast, cut and coated to produce sparkle and glow. - Video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bynUOWm7rlg - Images: https://www.jamesdysonaward.org/Document/56b37502-f8b6-4372-9705-d03d2f459004/jd-final-option.jpg https://www.jamesdysonaward.org/Document/cee1e933-66a8-4802-b565-a320be9e5499/jd-option-4.jpg - Project page: https://www.jamesdysonaward.org/en-GB/2023/project/cellsense-1/ #### Fungi Fabrics and Living Colors: Toward Ecocentric Biodesign? — Lianne Toussaint (2023) - Type: Book & essay · Organisms: Fungi, Bacteria & microbes - Idea: Biodesign is not automatically ecological; it has to decenter the human. - What it is: The article analyses mycelium-based garments and bacterial textile dyes to argue for clothing biodesign that grows, regenerates and collaborates with nature instead of treating it as a resource. - How it works: Critical analysis of two biodesign cases through biomimicry, biodesign and more-than-human theory. - Paper: https://doi.org/10.1162/desi_a_00746 (Design Issues 2023) #### Growing Patterns — Julia Moser (2023) - Type: Research prototype · Organisms: Bacteria & microbes - Idea: Pattern design with bacteria: control where they grow, not the colour itself. - What it is: Forty textile samples dyed by living Janthinobacterium lividum, whose violet pigment is steered into intentional patterns by fibre choice, 3D printing, jacquard weaving and other surface techniques. - How it works: Bacteria are grown directly on textiles combined with 3D-printed barriers, jacquard structures and other fibre manipulations that guide pigment deposition. - Paper: https://doi.org/10.21606/ti-2023/109 (Textile Intersections 2023) - Video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3lKQnyqlS0c - Project page: https://dl.designresearchsociety.org/textileintersections/textileintersections2023/researchpapers/9 #### PhycoLabs seaweed fibres — PhycoLabs (2023) - Type: Research prototype · Organisms: Algae - Idea: The ocean can supply fibre without competing with food crops. - What it is: Textile fibres developed from marine algae to replace fossil-based and land-intensive fibres. - How it works: Algal polysaccharides are extracted and spun into fibres (process details not public). - Images: https://hmfoundation.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/06/Medium_Screen-PhycoLabs.jpeg - Project page: https://www.phycolabs.com/ #### Yearning for Colour — Julia Moser (2023) - Type: Research prototype · Organisms: Bacteria & microbes - Idea: Let bacteria co-design the pattern as well as the colour. - What it is: Discarded hospital fabrics are dyed with pigments grown by bacteria sourced from nature, using little water and no harmful chemicals; the bacteria's growth patterns shape the garments. - How it works: Fabrics are inoculated with pigment-producing bacteria and incubated so colour spreads as the colonies grow. - Images: https://content.gp-award.com/assets/media/award23/0-yearning-for-colour_blogLarge.jpg - Project page: https://www.gp-award.com/en/projects/yearning-for-colour #### BioPuff — Ponda (2022) - Type: Product & platform · Organisms: Plants, Ecosystems - Idea: Farm a wetland plant so that growing fashion fibre also restores peat. - What it is: A fibre filler for insulated clothing made from Typha (bulrush) grown on rewetted peatlands, replacing down and polyester fill while restoring carbon-sinking wetlands. - How it works: Typha seed-head fibres are harvested and processed into lofty insulation batts. - Video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n2XnsdXfc7o - Images: https://hmfoundation.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/04/Large_Print-saltyco.jpeg https://hmfoundation.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/03/Medium_Screen-BioPuff%C2%AE-5-1024x553.jpeg - Project page: https://ponda.bio/ #### Human Material Loop — Zsofia Kollar (2022) - Type: Product & platform · Organisms: Human body - Idea: The most abundant fibre may be growing on our own heads. - What it is: Discarded human hair — a keratin fibre chemically similar to wool — is turned into yarns, textiles and garments; about 72 million kg of hair is wasted in Europe each year. - How it works: Hair collected from salons is cleaned, carded and spun, then knitted or woven. - Images: https://www.dutchdesignawards.nl/wp-content/uploads/2022/06/1HUMAN-MATERIAL-LOOP-PHOTO-MEDINA-RESIC-2-1500x882.jpg https://www.dutchdesignawards.nl/wp-content/uploads/2022/06/2HUMAN-MATERIAL-LOOP-PHOTO-KWADWO-AMFO-5-1500x882.jpg - Project page: https://www.dutchdesignawards.nl/en/gallery/human-material-loop/ #### Mosquitoes and Lemons — Zahra Jajarmikhayat (2022) - Type: Research prototype · Organisms: Plants, Insects - Idea: The repellent can be part of the material rather than a chemical coating. - What it is: Mosquito nets made from lemon rinds, replacing nets treated with chemical insecticides. - How it works: Lemon rind, rich in naturally repellent citrus oils, is processed into a flexible biomaterial mesh. - Video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BQWK-F-gFqc - Project page: https://www.biodesignchallenge.org/cca-design-2022 #### Squitex — Tandem Repeat (2021) - Type: Product & platform · Organisms: DNA & molecules, Bacteria & microbes - Idea: Copy a molecular trick from a squid to make textiles that repair themselves and shed no plastic microfibres. - What it is: A protein fibre and textile coating modelled on the proteins in squid ring teeth; the material can heal small tears when wet and biodegrades, and was presented at Biofabricate 2022. - How it works: Protein sequences with repeating blocks inspired by squid ring teeth are produced by microbial fermentation and spun or coated onto fabric. - Video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZPTjFOwPdg0 - Images: https://www.tandemrepeat.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/02/leather-1.jpg - Project page: https://www.tandemrepeat.com #### Stress Monitor — Gerd Geleff Nielsen (2021) - Type: Speculative design · Organisms: Bacteria & microbes, Plants, Human body - Idea: A stress tracker that works through shared biology instead of numbers. - What it is: A living wearable whose organisms react to the wearer's stress hormones, so looking after the living material also means looking after oneself. - How it works: Speculative bracelet and shoulder pieces hosting moss and microbes that respond to bodily fluids; a counter-design to data-driven stress trackers. - Paper: https://doi.org/10.1145/3483529.3483726 (ARTECH 2021) - Images: https://figures.semanticscholar.org/301eab72e3210f1db24aa3eebf40d33ba5959b05/3-Figure2-1.png - Project page: https://artifact-archive.org/whole-archive #### Symbiotic Breather — Gerd Geleff Nielsen (2021) - Type: Speculative design · Organisms: Bacteria & microbes, Fungi, Human body - Idea: Protection as mutual care: the mask that shields you is also fed by you. - What it is: A face mask of grown biomaterial protects the wearer from airborne viruses and bacteria while living microbes in it feed on the moist air the wearer breathes out. - How it works: Speculative wearable made from microbially grown material (likely kombucha-type cellulose), designed around the immune system and chronic stress. - Paper: https://doi.org/10.1145/3483529.3483726 (ARTECH 2021) - Images: https://figures.semanticscholar.org/301eab72e3210f1db24aa3eebf40d33ba5959b05/3-Figure1-1.png - Project page: https://artifact-archive.org/whole-archive #### TômTex leather alternative — TômTex (2021) - Type: Product & platform · Organisms: Fungi, Animals - Idea: Shells from dinner plates and scraps from mushroom farms can replace plastic in synthetic leather. - What it is: A leather-like sheet made from chitosan taken from shrimp and crab shells and from mushroom waste, textured by embossing and finished without plastic coatings. - How it works: Chitosan from seafood shells and fungal chitin is dissolved, cast into sheets with natural plasticisers and pigments, then embossed and dried. - Video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kt6jFgMVbwQ - Images: https://www.tomtex.com/assets/images/technology/facility.png - Project page: https://www.tomtex.com #### BIO Plexis — Nikoletta Karastathi (2020) - Type: Research prototype · Organisms: Algae, Human body - Idea: A garment can be cared for like a living thing, with a lifespan designed in. - What it is: A knitted wearable made from home-made bio-yarns infused with bioactive marine algae, meant to nourish the skin and stay 'alive' for a set period; shown at Dutch Design Week 2020. - How it works: An algae-laden biopolymer is extruded into yarn-like strands and hand-knitted into a garment that is kept hydrated to keep the algae active. - Images: https://ddw.ams3.cdn.digitaloceanspaces.com/thumbs/cover_1602840410_1200x630.jpg https://ddw.ams3.cdn.digitaloceanspaces.com/thumbs/picture_1602840417_1200x600.jpg - Project page: https://site.ddw.nl/en/programme/5147/bio-plexis-by-nikoletta-karastathi #### Bacterial Dye – the Pigment of the Future — Monica Louise Hartvigsen (2020) - Type: Research prototype · Organisms: Bacteria & microbes - Idea: Bacterial dyeing can be scaled for industry. - What it is: Textiles dyed directly by pigment-producing bacteria, developed with DTU laboratories and Gabriel Textile, reaching bright colours with little water and no toxic chemicals. - How it works: Fabric is inoculated with pigment bacteria and incubated; process parameters are tuned for scale. - Video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Hgx4UC32mqE - Project page: https://web.archive.org/web/20210416022133/https://www.globalgradshow.com/project/bacterial-dye-the-pigment-of-the-future/ #### BioBlack — Kent State University Biodesign Challenge team (2020) - Type: Research prototype · Organisms: Bacteria & microbes - Idea: The darkest, most polluting dye colour can be grown by a microbe. - What it is: A natural black textile dye made by the bacterium Janthinobacterium to replace synthetic black dyes, with pop-up shops where customers see garments being dyed. - How it works: Janthinobacterium produces the dark pigment violacein-related compounds on textiles incubated with the culture. - Video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=duRbE2ts_-o - Project page: https://www.bioblack.co/ #### Fur_tilize — Dasha Tsapenko (2020) - Type: Speculative design · Organisms: Fungi, Plants - Idea: A garment can gain value over time by hosting other species. - What it is: Five grown fur coats show five life cycles of one garment: hemp reinforced by fungus, a mycelium coat, edible mushrooms, a legume 'fur', and finally fertile ground for crops. BAD Award 2020 winner, with Han Wösten. - How it works: Schizophyllum commune strains of opposite mating types colonise a hemp mat; the composite then fruits and is seeded with legumes that fix nitrogen. - Video: https://vimeo.com/490808883 - Images: https://www.badaward.nl/imager/assets/site/3414/MU-Evolutionaries-Hanneke-Wetzer-118_a5a12f426a1ab11909951db4fe37df8f.jpg https://www.badaward.nl/imager/assets/site/3415/MU-Evolutionaries-Hanneke-Wetzer-114_a5a12f426a1ab11909951db4fe37df8f.jpg - Project page: https://www.badaward.nl/artists-scientists/dasha-tsapenko-with-han-w%C3%B6sten #### Galy lab-grown cotton — Galy (2020) - Type: Product & platform · Organisms: Plants, Cells & tissue - Idea: A plant product can be grown without growing the whole plant. - What it is: Cotton fibre grown from cotton plant cells in bioreactors instead of fields, aiming to cut water, land use and emissions. - How it works: Cotton cells are cultured in bioreactors and induced to elongate into cellulose fibres. - Video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TJQKsL-ObJ8 - Images: https://hmfoundation.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/06/Large-GALY-lab-1024x683.jpg https://hmfoundation.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/06/cotton-1024x683.jpg - Project page: https://www.galy.co/ #### Werewool DNA-designed fibres — Werewool (2020) - Type: Product & platform · Organisms: DNA & molecules, Bacteria & microbes - Idea: Pick the property you want from nature's protein library and grow it into the fibre. - What it is: Textile fibres made from proteins whose sequences are borrowed from nature, for example a coral protein that gives colour without dye; the fibres are produced by engineered microbes and spun into yarn. - How it works: Selected protein sequences are expressed in microbes by fermentation, purified and spun into fibres whose colour and texture come from the protein itself. - Video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zKigW6hDEcE - Images: https://www.werewool.bio/uploads/22_eeac3db53f.webp - Project page: https://www.werewool.bio #### Bio Iridescent Sequin — Elissa Brunato (2019) - Type: Research prototype · Organisms: Plants - Idea: Borrow the way beetles and butterflies make colour, and apply it to plant cellulose. - What it is: Sequins made from wood-derived cellulose that shimmer through structural colour, with no pigment or plastic coating; shown in the Biofabricate 2019 Design Lab and at Dutch Design Week 2020. - How it works: Cellulose nanocrystals in suspension self-assemble into helical layers as they dry, reflecting specific wavelengths of light; the films are then cut into sequins. - Video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IphNwwjsTb0 - Project page: https://site.ddw.nl/en/programme/5011/bio-iridescent-sequin #### Biogarmentry — Roya Aghighi (2019) - Type: Speculative design · Organisms: Algae - Idea: If clothes are alive, we have to care for them, and may keep them longer. - What it is: A living, photosynthetic textile of single-cell algae that must be watered occasionally and lives for weeks, proposed as clothing that turns CO2 into oxygen. - How it works: Chlamydomonas reinhardtii algae are spun together with a nanopolymer into a non-woven sheet, developed with UBC's AMPEL and botany labs. - Video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eWX_KvpaFak - Images: https://s3files.core77.com/blog/images/876970_66863_83837_Co6IzY2hw.jpg - Project page: https://designawards.core77.com/personal-accessory/83837/Biogarmentry-Living-and-Photosynthetic-Textile #### Flora Fur — Fashion Institute of Technology Biodesign Challenge team (2019) - Type: Research prototype · Organisms: Plants, Insects - Idea: Choose a fibre crop that also feeds a threatened pollinator. - What it is: A biodegradable, animal-free fur made from the hollow seed fibres of milkweed bound with linen; milkweed and flax grown together also create habitat for monarch butterflies. - How it works: Milkweed seed floss is insulating and water-repellent; it is layered onto a linen base to make a fur-like pile. - Images: https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/552dc0ffe4b070a9e1a6a215/1561582601681-1ZN4ITZ13YCM2YII6KJ6/IMG_5539.jpeg https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/552dc0ffe4b070a9e1a6a215/1561582469961-LKESDG5HCACT14LV4KD8/flora+cycle.png - Project page: https://www.florafur.com/ #### Photosynthetic Coating — Post Carbon Lab (2019) - Type: Research prototype · Organisms: Algae, Bacteria & microbes - Idea: Clothing that has to be kept alive, so care becomes visible as colour. - What it is: Garments are coated with live algae and cyanobacteria so the fabric photosynthesises; the colour fades if the wearer does not give the clothes light and moisture. - How it works: Textiles receive a coating carrying photosynthetic microorganisms in a protective matrix; the studio publishes care regimes of light exposure and misting instead of washing instructions. - Images: https://static.wixstatic.com/media/70c204_6a4d0b040fe24dc5a75336f369903530~mv2_d_2560_1396_s_2.png/v1/fill/w_2560,h_1396,al_c/70c204_6a4d0b040fe24dc5a75336f369903530~mv2_d_2560_1396_s_2.png - Project page: https://postcarbonlab.com/ #### Plant and Algae T-Shirt — Vollebak (2019) - Type: Product & platform · Organisms: Algae, Plants - Idea: Design clothing whose end of life is compost. - What it is: A T-shirt made from wood-pulp cellulose fibres and printed with algae-based ink, designed so the whole garment biodegrades in soil or compost. - How it works: Eucalyptus/beech pulp fibres are knitted; algae grown in bioreactors are turned into ink for the print. - Video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=czEMS-rrAp4 - Project page: https://www.vollebak.com #### Sustainable Sting — Green Nettle Textile (2019) - Type: Product & platform · Organisms: Plants - Idea: A wild, drought-tolerant plant can be a textile crop for smallholders. - What it is: The hardy, low-water Kenyan giant nettle is cultivated and its stalks processed into a linen-like fabric, with leftovers used for paper and dyes. - How it works: Stalks are retted and decorticated to extract bast fibres, then spun and woven. - Video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zsUfKXHienc - Images: https://hmfoundation.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/06/Large-Green-Nettle-Textiles-1024x683.jpg - Project page: https://greennettletextiles.com/ #### THE NORTH FACE Moon Parka (Brewed Protein) — Spiber (2019) - Type: Product & platform · Organisms: Bacteria & microbes, DNA & molecules - Idea: Design the protein first, then let microbes brew it into a fibre. - What it is: A down parka made with Goldwin whose outer shell is woven from Brewed Protein, a structural protein fibre produced by microbial fermentation. - How it works: Engineered microbes ferment sugar and nutrients into designed protein polymers in tanks; the protein is spun into multifilament yarn and woven. - Images: https://about.goldwin.co.jp/eng/cms/wp-content/uploads/2019/09/190829_1230_01.jpg - Project page: https://about.goldwin.co.jp/eng/news/page-10045 #### The Silkworm Project — Vivian Xu (2019) - Type: Artwork · Organisms: Insects - Idea: Use insect behaviour, not a loom, as the logic of a fabrication machine. - What it is: A series of hybrid machines in which live silkworms spin self-organised 2D and 3D silk structures inside computer-controlled environments. - How it works: Bombyx mori larvae spin on stacked shelves and surfaces whose tilt, light and heat are adjusted by electronics in a feedback loop. - Video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=k8g7DlDpeic - Images: https://artlaboratory-berlin.org/wp-content/uploads/2021/04/SL_201914Jul_ArtLab__0028.jpg - Project page: https://artlaboratory-berlin.org/exhibitions/the-silkworm-project/ #### Agraloop — Circular Systems (2018) - Type: Product & platform · Organisms: Plants - Idea: Harvest a second crop — fibre — from what farms currently burn. - What it is: A process that turns food-crop residues such as banana trunks, pineapple leaves, rice straw and oilseed hemp or flax stalks into natural textile fibres. - How it works: Residues are processed with a low-impact biorefinery into spinnable fibre. - Video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=e7JEqSzVWUg - Images: https://hmfoundation.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/06/Circular-Systems-GCA-winners-2018-1024x768.jpg - Project page: https://circularsystems.com/ #### Algaeing — Algaeing (2018) - Type: Product & platform · Organisms: Algae - Idea: Algae can colour and form fabric at once. - What it is: Algae biomass formulated into bio-based fibres and textile dyes, with fabrics that the team says release nutrients onto the skin. - How it works: Algae are grown in closed systems and processed into dye formulations and fibre additives. - Video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HElJjYer2Bo - Images: https://hmfoundation.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/06/Algaeing-GCA-Winners-2018-2.jpg - Project page: https://www.algaeing.com/ #### Kaumera Kimono — Nienke Hoogvliet (2018) - Type: Artwork · Organisms: Bacteria & microbes - Idea: Wastewater treatment can supply both the finish and the colour of a garment meant to last generations. - What it is: A kimono whose textile is treated with Kaumera, a biopolymer recovered from sewage-treatment bacteria, and dyed with colours from the same wastewater; shown at Dutch Design Week 2018. - How it works: Kaumera is extracted from the granular sludge bacteria of Dutch water boards; it helps fabric absorb dye, and pigments from anammox bacteria and vivianite are used for colour. - Video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gKdn9Xh5mYo - Images: https://www.nienkehoogvliet.nl/wp-content/uploads/2021/08/KaumeraKimonoExp.jpg https://www.nienkehoogvliet.nl/wp-content/uploads/2021/08/KaumeraKimono3Exp-1024x682.jpg - Project page: https://www.nienkehoogvliet.nl/portfolio/kaumera-kimono/ #### The New Age of Trichology — Sanne Visser (2018) - Type: Research prototype · Organisms: Human body - Idea: Hair waste is strong enough to hold a person. - What it is: Human hair collected from salons is spun into yarn and rope with traditional rope makers; Visser has made climbing ropes, bags and swings from it. - How it works: Hair is washed, carded and spun, then laid into rope on traditional rope walks. - Images: https://new-material-award.nl/wp-content/uploads/2021/11/03_Sanne-Visser-The-New-age-of-Trichology-photography-credit-Tom-Mannion-683x1024.jpg - Project page: https://new-material-award.nl/en/the-new-age-of-trichology/ #### This is Grown. — Jen Keane (2018) - Type: Research prototype · Organisms: Bacteria & microbes - Idea: Share the loom with bacteria, so the product is grown to shape with no offcuts. - What it is: A shoe upper grown in one piece by 'microbial weaving': the designer weaves the warp threads and bacteria grow the weft of cellulose around them. - How it works: Komagataeibacter rhaeticus grows nanocellulose onto a biodegradable yarn framework in a nutrient bath, producing a strong, light composite. - Video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j_xlKpcNjI8 - Images: https://ars.electronica.art/starts-prize/files/2019/05/Thisisgrown_2000x1000_c_Vita_Larvo-1024x512.jpg https://media.materialdistrict.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/11/shoe-grown-microbial-weaving-materialdistrict-2.jpg - Project page: https://starts-prize.aec.at/en/this-is-grown/ #### Woocoa — Universidad de los Andes Biodesign Challenge team (2018) - Type: Research prototype · Organisms: Fungi, Plants - Idea: Fungal enzymes can do the finishing work that harsh chemicals do in textile mills. - What it is: A biodegradable wool-like textile made from unused Colombian hemp and coconut fibres, softened and bleached with lignin-degrading compounds extracted from oyster mushrooms. - How it works: Enzymes from Pleurotus ostreatus break down lignin in the plant fibres, making them softer and lighter in colour. - Video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dZJaLyFQ1yg - Project page: https://www.biodesignchallenge.org/universidad-de-los-andes-2018 #### Mestic — Jalila Essaïdi (2017) - Type: Research prototype · Organisms: Animals, Plants - Idea: A dairy farm's pollutant can be a fibre feedstock pre-processed by the cow. - What it is: Cellulose is extracted from cow manure — already broken down by the cow's digestive enzymes — and processed into bio-based textiles and bioplastics. - How it works: Manure is separated, cellulose purified and dissolved, then spun or cast. - Video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OuhMIMs1gJs - Images: https://hmfoundation.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/06/Mestic-GCA-Winner-2017-3-1024x682.jpg https://hmfoundation.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/06/Mestic-GCA-Winner-2017-4-683x1024.jpg - Project page: https://www.jalilaessaidi.com/ #### Microsilk dress with Stella McCartney — Bolt Threads (2017) - Type: Research prototype · Organisms: Bacteria & microbes, DNA & molecules - Idea: Brew a spider's silk protein in yeast instead of farming spiders. - What it is: A gold knitted shift dress made from yeast-fermented spider-silk protein, shown in MoMA's 'Items: Is Fashion Modern?'. - How it works: Yeast carrying spider-silk-inspired genes ferments sugar into protein, which is purified, wet-spun into yarn and knitted. - Video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u8fS6aR2_6g - Project page: https://www.stellamccartney.com/us/en/sustainability/silk.html #### Silk fabricator — Riku Iwasaki, Yoichi Ochiai (2017) - Type: Research prototype · Organisms: Insects - Idea: Use silkworms as 3D printers: the fabrication step is the animal's own spinning. - What it is: Silkworms placed on computer-designed 3D frames spin flat silk sheets over them instead of cocoons, producing shells such as a silk sphere or bunny. - How it works: Frames are designed and fabricated from 3D models; silkworms spinning on them lay down silk sheets that take the frame's shape. - Paper: https://doi.org/10.1145/3145690.3145704 (SIGGRAPH Asia 2017 Posters) - Images: https://figures.semanticscholar.org/c4924751933ab12927d97d0cc643a51b85b5e8d0/500px/2-Figure5-1.png https://figures.semanticscholar.org/c4924751933ab12927d97d0cc643a51b85b5e8d0/500px/1-Figure1-1.png - Project page: https://doi.org/10.1145/3145690.3145704 #### VEGEA grape leather — VEGEA (2017) - Type: Product & platform · Organisms: Plants - Idea: Wine's waste can dress the people who drink it. - What it is: A leather alternative made from grape marc — skins, stalks and seeds discarded in winemaking — processed into coated textiles without heavy metals or toxic solvents. - How it works: Grape-marc fibres and oils are processed into a bio-based coating on a textile backing. - Video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ww8m8Mm5GMY - Images: https://hmfoundation.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/06/VEGEA-GCA-Winner-2017-3.jpg - Project page: https://www.vegeacompany.com/ #### Algae Fabrics — Tjeerd Veenhoven (2016) - Type: Research prototype · Organisms: Algae - Idea: Beach-cast seaweed can be a textile crop that needs no land. - What it is: Cellulose is extracted from the cell walls of seaweed that washes up in excess on coasts and spun into a textile yarn, without farmland or irrigation. - How it works: Seaweed cellulose fibres are aligned in a liquid bath and spun into yarn. - Video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tePbmFIWxrY - Images: https://hmfoundation.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/06/Tjeerd-Veenhoven-Algae-Fabrics-GCA-Winner-2016-2.jpg https://hmfoundation.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/06/Tjeerd-Veenhoven-Algae-Fabrics-GCA-Winner-2016-4-1024x683.jpg - Project page: https://hmfoundation.com/gca/winner/algae-fabrics/ #### Biomaterials & Music (silk violin) — Luca Alessandrini (2016) - Type: Research prototype · Organisms: Insects, Animals - Idea: Tune sound by choosing which animal's fibre to use. - What it is: A violin made from a composite of silkworm silk and spider silk with a binder, whose fibre mix tunes the instrument's acoustics. - How it works: Silk fibre layers are laminated with resin in varying ratios to tune stiffness and damping. - Video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=URe1jw-brWw - Project page: https://web.archive.org/web/20210623063045/https://www.globalgradshow.com/project/biomaterials-music/ #### Colorifix microbial dyeing — Colorifix (2016) - Type: Product & platform · Organisms: Bacteria & microbes - Idea: Swap the chemistry of dyeing for fermentation, while keeping the existing factory. - What it is: A dyeing process in which engineered bacteria produce pigments and deposit them on fabric inside standard dyeing machines, used in pilots with H&M and Pangaia. - How it works: Colour-producing genes found in nature are put into bacteria that are grown on sugar and plant by-products; the culture is added to the dye bath and heat releases and fixes the colour. - Video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7Xndlq9-JXk - Images: https://www.discover.ukri.org/colorifix/assets/wmCG6YgEnk/casestudy-colorific-1019x1019.jpg - Project page: https://colorifix.com/ #### Living Colour — Living Colour (2016) - Type: Research prototype · Organisms: Bacteria & microbes - Idea: The life cycle of the bacteria becomes the print. - What it is: Textiles dyed by culturing pigment-producing bacteria directly on the fabric, including experiments that shaped growth patterns with sound. - How it works: Bacteria that produce carotenoids or violacein ferment nutrients into pigment while growing on the fabric; each batch leaves a unique growth pattern. - Video: https://vimeo.com/294452499 - Images: https://livingcolour.eu/wp-content/uploads/2017/09/LC-Slider-1.png https://livingcolour.eu/wp-content/uploads/2016/09/Living-Colour-2.jpg - Project page: https://livingcolour.eu/ #### Living Colours — Buro Belén (2016) - Type: Research prototype · Organisms: Plants - Idea: Design with fading instead of fighting it. - What it is: A textile research project that embraces the fading of plant-based dyes, charting how natural colours change over time so textiles become living surfaces. - How it works: Fabrics and papers dyed with plant dyes are exposed to light and catalogued as they discolour. - Images: https://new-material-award.nl/wp-content/uploads/2021/11/12-1024x685.jpg - Project page: https://new-material-award.nl/en/living-colours/ #### MycoTEX (Neffa dress) — Aniela Hoitink (2016) - Type: Research prototype · Organisms: Fungi - Idea: Clothes can be grown to the wearer's measurements and composted when worn out. - What it is: A dress assembled from round modules of pure mycelium moulded around a body form, the start of a method for growing seamless, made-to-measure clothes. - How it works: Mycelium is grown into flexible sheets or modules in moulds, which fuse together as they grow over a 3D body shape. - Video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HFwvYkJyaRg - Images: https://media.materialdistrict.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/04/mycotex-textile-made-from-mushroom-mycelium-01.jpg - Project page: https://materialdistrict.com/article/mycotex-textile-mushroom-mycelium/ #### Orange Fiber — Orange Fiber (2016) - Type: Product & platform · Organisms: Plants - Idea: Juice-industry waste can become a luxury textile. - What it is: A silk-like, biodegradable fibre made from cellulose extracted from the peel and pulp left over from Sicilian citrus-juice production. - How it works: Citrus cellulose is extracted and spun into acetate-type yarn, developed with Politecnico di Milano. - Video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CYtTQBydg8w - Images: https://hmfoundation.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/06/Orange-Fiber-GCA-Winners-2016-5.jpg https://hmfoundation.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/06/Orange-Fiber-GCA-Winners-2016-3-1024x683.jpg - Project page: https://orangefiber.it/ #### adidas Futurecraft Biofabric — AMSilk (2016) - Type: Product & platform · Organisms: Bacteria & microbes - Idea: A mass-market shoe whose material can be dissolved on purpose at the end of its life. - What it is: A running shoe prototype whose upper is knitted from AMSilk's Biosteel fibre, a fermented silk protein, presented as fully biodegradable in a protease solution. - How it works: Spider-silk-like proteins produced by fermenting engineered bacteria are spun into Biosteel fibre, knitted into an upper that degrades when exposed to the enzyme proteinase. - Video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_RchPGsnHx8 - Images: https://www.amsilk.com/app/uploads/AMSilk_employees-inspecting-a-biotech-silk-protein-fiber-spool-_fotocredit_@AMSilk-1024x683.jpg - Project page: https://www.amsilk.com/ #### Tissue Engineered Textiles — Amy Congdon (2015) - Type: Research prototype · Organisms: Cells & tissue - Idea: Bring the craft methods of textile design — sampling, stitching, archives — into the cell lab. - What it is: A working research practice in which embroidered scaffolds are seeded with cells in a tissue-culture lab, producing sample books of textiles that were grown in place. - How it works: Scaffolds embroidered from silk and degradable threads are sterilised, seeded with fibroblasts or osteoblasts and cultured; stitch density and thread choice control where tissue forms. - Video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PVEoXq_QwmU - Images: https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/52ffae96e4b01936eeb0e979/1472064691139-LJTNQHX7PPFW9RPGEYF9/Amy+Congdon_Biological+Atelier+AW+2082_3.jpg - Project page: https://www.amycongdon.com/tissue-engineered-textiles #### Biological Atelier — Amy Congdon (2013) - Type: Speculative design · Organisms: Cells & tissue - Idea: If materials are grown, luxury can use ivory and skin without any animal. - What it is: A fictional couture house whose collections are grown rather than sewn: ivory jewellery, shark-tooth pieces and skin textiles cultured from cells on embroidered scaffolds. - How it works: Digitally embroidered scaffolds are seeded with cells in a lab, and the resulting samples are presented as seasonal collections with fabricated brand and process documentation. - Video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CGo91FB1zKg - Images: https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/52ffae96e4b01936eeb0e979/1472064587398-1OCH4P0T9SPZH2ZL2Z7O/Amy+Congdon_Biological+Atelier_1.jpg - Project page: https://www.amycongdon.com/biological-atelier-ss-2082-extinct #### Project Coelicolor — Natsai Audrey Chieza (2011) - Type: Research prototype · Organisms: Bacteria & microbes - Idea: Let bacteria dye the cloth: the pattern records where and how they grew. - What it is: Silk scarves and garments dyed by growing the soil bacterium Streptomyces coelicolor directly on the fabric, producing blue, pink and purple patterns. - How it works: The bacterium secretes the pH-sensitive pigment actinorhodin, which binds to textile fibres without mordants and with far less water than industrial dyeing. - Video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ciAPl7FLdMY - Images: https://faberfutures.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/12/Project_ASSEMBLAGE002-2019_%C2%A9-FaberFutures_050919_4-1024x683.png - Project page: https://faberfutures.com/projects/project-coelicolor/ #### BioCouture — Suzanne Lee (2010) - Type: Research prototype · Organisms: Bacteria & microbes - Idea: Grow a garment in a vat of liquid instead of weaving and cutting cloth. - What it is: Jackets, dresses and shoes made from sheets of bacterial cellulose grown in bathtubs of sweetened green tea, then dried, shaped and dyed with fruit and vegetable pigments. - How it works: A kombucha culture (symbiotic bacteria and yeast) spins cellulose nanofibres into a floating mat, which is harvested wet and moulded or seamed while drying. - Video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3p3-vl9VFYU - Project page: https://www.ted.com/talks/suzanne_lee_grow_your_own_clothes #### Waste Materials — Claudy Jongstra (2010) - Type: Artwork · Organisms: Animals, Plants - Idea: Art can be one link in a farm's living cycle. - What it is: A felted wall hanging made from merino wool, raw silk and leftover wool from Jongstra's own flock of Drenthe Heath sheep, coloured with weld grown in her dye garden. - How it works: Hand-felting combines farm wools and silk; plant dyes come from the artist's botanical garden. - Images: https://new-material-award.nl/wp-content/uploads/2021/11/2010-29.-Claudy-Jongstra-1-724x1024.jpg - Project page: https://new-material-award.nl/en/waste-materials/ ### Bio-responsive Materials Materials that move, change colour or shape using living cells or biological mechanisms. #### Autonomous Self-Burying Seed Carriers for Aerial Seeding (E-seed) — Lining Yao (2023) - Type: Paper · Organisms: Plants - Idea: A hygroscopic shape change can replace the machinery of planting. - What it is: Wood-veneer carriers copied from the self-drilling Erodium seed coil and uncoil with humidity, drilling a dropped seed into the soil without any machine. - How it works: Anisotropic wood veneer is laser-cut and moisture-programmed into a three-tailed coil; day-night humidity cycles turn the coil, and the tails anchor against the ground so the tip screws downward. - Paper: https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-022-05656-3 (Nature) - Images: https://media.springernature.com/full/springer-static/image/art%3A10.1038%2Fs41586-022-05656-3/MediaObjects/41586_2022_5656_Fig1_HTML.png - Project page: https://morphingmatter.cs.cmu.edu/ #### Mother Nacre — Maryland Institute College of Art Biodesign Challenge team (2023) - Type: Speculative design · Organisms: Animals, DNA & molecules - Idea: Treat plastic the way an oyster treats grit: seal it and make it precious. - What it is: A 'plastic heirloom' that encases sentimental plastic objects in biomimetic nacre (mother of pearl), the coating molluscs use to seal off irritants. - How it works: Layers of calcium carbonate and organic binder are built up around the object to imitate nacre (process likely lab-based mineralisation). - Images: https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/552dc0ffe4b070a9e1a6a215/1687816179457-3NAUX3EW5FN8ED4C8BPC/mother+nacre+1.jpg https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/552dc0ffe4b070a9e1a6a215/1687816178536-ZKU8J72L65QSSCBRJCXM/nacre+ring-2.jpg https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/552dc0ffe4b070a9e1a6a215/1687816181683-ORNWLFXQGYTDWMO909QA/pearl-Recovered.jpg - Project page: https://www.biodesignchallenge.org/mica-2023 #### PUMA Biodesign: Breathing Shoe — MIT Design Lab (2018) - Type: Research prototype · Organisms: Bacteria & microbes - Idea: A product that adapts to one body because living cells respond to that body's heat. - What it is: A shoe upper with cavities of bacteria and gel that respond to the heat of the foot and open personalised ventilation channels over time. - How it works: Bacteria in a gelatinous matrix consume it where the foot is warmest, altering the upper's surface; made with PUMA and the start-up Biorealize. - Video: https://vimeo.com/265128805 - Images: https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5f45797044d9a24b866b9afd/1610232507163-UR8Y2MG44PM574ZV3QU2/Breathing+Shoe_04.jpg - Project page: https://design-lab.mit.edu/projects/puma-biodesign #### Biomimetic 4D Printing — Jennifer A. Lewis (2016) - Type: Paper · Organisms: Plants - Idea: Encode the final shape in the print path, and let water do the shaping. - What it is: Hydrogel composites printed with aligned cellulose fibrils swell anisotropically in water and fold into orchid- and flower-like forms predicted by the print path. - How it works: Cellulose fibrils in a hydrogel ink align with the nozzle direction, setting local swelling anisotropy; a mathematical model inverts a target surface into printing paths, following the hygroscopic movement of plant tissue. - Paper: https://www.nature.com/articles/nmat4544 (Nature Materials) - Video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-Bwane5xhbE - Images: https://media.springernature.com/full/springer-static/image/art%3A10.1038%2Fnmat4544/MediaObjects/41563_2016_Article_BFnmat4544_Fig1_HTML.jpg - Project page: https://www.nature.com/articles/nmat4544 #### bioLogic — Lining Yao (2015) - Type: Paper · Organisms: Bacteria & microbes - Idea: Living cells as the actuator: the garment reacts to the body because the bacteria react to moisture. - What it is: Natto bacteria cells printed onto thin films expand and contract with humidity, so a sportswear garment opens flaps over the skin when the wearer sweats and closes them as it dries. - How it works: Bacillus subtilis natto cells are bio-printed on a latex layer; the cell layer absorbs and loses water much faster than latex, so the bilayer bends reversibly with relative humidity. - Paper: https://doi.org/10.1145/2702123.2702611 (CHI 2015) - Images: https://tmg-external.s3.amazonaws.com/public/Projects/349-biologic/flowerleaf.gif https://tmg-external.s3.amazonaws.com/public/Projects/349-biologic/cell-zoom.gif - Project page: https://tangible.media.mit.edu/project/biologic/ #### Ambio — Teresa van Dongen (2014) - Type: Research prototype · Organisms: Bacteria & microbes - Idea: Touch and motion become the light switch because the organism needs oxygen to shine. - What it is: A balanced lamp with a glass tube of seawater and bioluminescent bacteria; a gentle push rocks the tube, mixes in oxygen and makes the bacteria glow. - How it works: Bioluminescent bacteria taken from octopus skin live in seawater in a sealed tube; movement aerates the liquid and triggers luciferase light. - Video: https://vimeo.com/105638791 - Images: https://payload.cargocollective.com/1/16/540742/8522001/AMBIO_01AA_1250.jpg - Project page: https://www.teresavandongen.com/Ambio #### Amoeba (Protocell Trainer) — Shamees Aden (2013) - Type: Speculative design · Organisms: DNA & molecules - Idea: A shoe could be a living, reconfigurable layer that adapts to one runner. - What it is: A concept running shoe for 2050 made of a protocell 'skin' that forms around the foot, adds support where impact is high and is revived in a nutrient bath after each run. - How it works: Proposes 3D-printed protocells, lifelike chemical droplets that respond to pressure and heat, developed in conversation with protocell scientist Martin Hanczyc. - Video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Pim77yCOwX4 - Images: http://thisisalive.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/04/ShameesAden1.jpg http://thisisalive.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/04/ShameesAden-760x506.jpg - Project page: http://thisisalive.com/amoeba-shoe/ #### HygroSkin: Meteorosensitive Pavilion — Achim Menges, ICD/ITKE University of Stuttgart (2013) - Type: Research prototype · Organisms: Plants - Idea: The material itself can be the sensor, the motor and the controller. - What it is: A pavilion whose apertures, made of thin wood veneer, open and close on their own as air humidity changes, with no sensors or motors. - How it works: Wood veneer–composite bilayers bend as wood fibres swell and shrink with moisture; robotically fabricated panels hold the apertures. - Paper: https://doi.org/10.1016/j.cad.2014.02.010 (Computer-Aided Design 2015) - Video: https://vimeo.com/73727749 - Images: https://www.icd.uni-stuttgart.de/img/icd-imagedb/Web_HygroSkin_Main.jpg - Project page: https://www.icd.uni-stuttgart.de/projects/hygroskin-meteorosensitive-pavilion/ #### eSkin — Jenny E. Sabin (2013) - Type: Research prototype · Organisms: Cells & tissue - Idea: Cell behaviour can be a model for building skins that adapt without much energy. - What it is: A research project designing responsive building-skin materials and sensors from the way human cells sense and remodel their surroundings, shown as petri-dish material prototypes and a lab installation. - How it works: An NSF-funded collaboration between Cornell and the University of Pennsylvania combining cell-matrix biology, nanoscale materials by Shu Yang and electrical engineering to make optically responsive surfaces. - Images: http://thisisalive.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/04/eskin.jpg - Project page: http://thisisalive.com/eskin/ #### HygroScope: Meteorosensitive Morphology — Achim Menges (2012) - Type: Artwork · Organisms: Plants - Idea: Program behaviour into the material, like a pine cone, instead of adding machines. - What it is: A wooden surface in a climate-controlled glass case at the Centre Pompidou that opens and closes its thousands of scales as humidity changes, with no motors or electronics. - How it works: Thin maple veneer laminated to a synthetic layer bends as the wood absorbs or releases moisture; computational design sets fibre direction and geometry. - Video: https://vimeo.com/55938597 - Project page: https://www.achimmenges.net/project/hygroscope-meteorosensitive-morphology-2/ #### Hylozoic Ground — Philip Beesley, Rachel Armstrong (2010) - Type: Artwork · Organisms: DNA & molecules - Idea: A building could behave like a living being: sensing, breathing and slowly metabolising its surroundings. - What it is: An immersive forest of tens of thousands of acrylic fronds, whiskers and filters in the Canada Pavilion at the Venice Architecture Biennale, moving in response to visitors and hosting flasks of protocell chemistry. - How it works: Meshed microcontrollers and sensors drive shape-memory-alloy actuators; Rachel Armstrong's flasks of oils, minerals and canal water form a chemical 'lymphatic' system. - Paper: https://doi.org/10.21312/978-1-926724-99-7 (Living Architecture Systems Group monograph 2016) - Video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jgL2ppDmNtA - Images: https://www.philipbeesleystudioinc.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/06/banner-39.jpg - Project page: https://www.philipbeesleystudioinc.com/sculpture/hylozoic-ground-venice-biennale/ ### Living Architecture Buildings and structures that grow, breathe, repair or host life. #### SHORE thing — California College of the Arts, Architecture Biodesign Challenge team (2025) - Type: Research prototype · Organisms: Bacteria & microbes, Ecosystems - Idea: Coastal defence can be grown from local sand and degrade when its job is done. - What it is: Bio-beach rocks for the Maldives: one-metre geometric shells of coral sand, coconut coir and a safe bacterium, placed in the intertidal zone to slow currents and let sand build up on eroding beaches. - How it works: Microbially induced calcite binds sand and coir in a sand-casting technique that island communities can run themselves. - Video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=L0Ka7DgOzAQ - Images: https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/552dc0ffe4b070a9e1a6a215/1751486478758-4ZGTL0KWSNEFUX4PRW1V/BDC_Shorething_AerialRender.jpeg.jpg https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/552dc0ffe4b070a9e1a6a215/1751486476180-HZTMB1UHBJFYTGC7N321/SHORE+thing+design.jpg - Project page: https://www.biodesignchallenge.org/cca-arch-ucsf-maldives-2025 #### MARS II — Reef Design Lab (2024) - Type: Product & platform · Organisms: Ecosystems, Animals - Idea: Iterate habitat design like a product line, with each generation testing a new geometry. - What it is: A second generation of the modular reef system with revised geometry and casting process, shown above water at MPavilion in Melbourne before deployment. - How it works: Updated 3D-printed moulds cast ceramic modules with larger internal voids and simpler assembly; the exhibition version let visitors see the interlocking logic normally hidden underwater. - Video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vzoowZzFZJs - Project page: https://reefdesignlab.com/ #### Shell We Dance? — California College of the Arts, Architecture Biodesign Challenge team (2024) - Type: Research prototype · Organisms: Animals, DNA & molecules - Idea: A city's food waste can be its next building stone. - What it is: Urban waste from eaten eggs and shellfish is turned into a biomaterial and a component-based building system, with moldable blocks and a matching adhesive tested at several scales. - How it works: Shells are harvested, ground and bound into blocks; chemical and structural tests guide formulations and reinforcement. - Images: https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/552dc0ffe4b070a9e1a6a215/1718643016018-KUBYAPOMRLROO3TRIC4G/Shell+we+dance__Bio-Block+Module+and+Mock-Up.jpeg https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/552dc0ffe4b070a9e1a6a215/1718643017978-OGBKMHU4R9BZ7BSAPWJH/Shell+we+Dance_Pavilion+1.png - Project page: https://www.biodesignchallenge.org/cca-ucsf-2024 #### Cyanobacterial co-fabrication for architecture — Perla Armaly (2023) - Type: Research prototype · Organisms: Bacteria & microbes - Idea: The robot lays down the shape; the bacteria finish the material. - What it is: A robotic fabrication workflow in which sand-based mixtures containing living cyanobacteria are deposited layer by layer and then hardened as the bacteria precipitate calcium carbonate. - How it works: Synechococcus and Synechocystis strains are grown in sand–agar biomixtures, extruded by a robot into light-optimised geometries, and induce carbonate precipitation that binds the sand. - Paper: https://doi.org/10.1017/btd.2023.5 (Research Directions: Biotechnology Design 2023) - Images: https://static.cambridge.org/binary/version/id/urn:cambridge.org:id:binary:20230821111301711-0820:S2752945223000055:S2752945223000055_fig5.png?pub-status=live https://static.cambridge.org/binary/version/id/urn:cambridge.org:id:binary:20230821111301711-0820:S2752945223000055:S2752945223000055_fig2.png?pub-status=live #### ExoGarden: 3D-Printed Modular Eco-Habitats for Earth and Space — Anna Vershinina (2023) - Type: Research prototype · Organisms: Plants - Idea: Architecture that is also a garden can sustain life where little grows. - What it is: A 3D-printed modular habitat that grows shelter and food together and bioremediates its surroundings, designed for resource-poor places on Earth and in space. BAD Award 2023 winner, with Wieger Wamelink (Wageningen University). - How it works: Printed modules host plants, likely grown on Mars and Moon regolith simulants, drawing on Wamelink's space-farming experiments. - Video: https://vimeo.com/894970437 - Images: https://www.badaward.nl/imager/assets/site/6435/ExoGARDEN_Installation_small_a5a12f426a1ab11909951db4fe37df8f.jpg - Project page: https://www.badaward.nl/artists-scientists/anna-vershinina-with-wieger-wamelink #### 3D Printed Clay Reef, San Andrés — rrreefs (2022) - Type: Product & platform · Organisms: Ecosystems, Animals - Idea: Use a ceramic brick, not concrete, so the reef can be built and repaired by hand. - What it is: Interlocking clay bricks printed and fired on land are carried down by divers and stacked into reef walls whose cavities shelter fish while corals settle on the surfaces. - How it works: Clay is extrusion-printed into bricks with rough, porous surfaces and internal channels, fired, then dry-stacked underwater into walls seeded by natural coral recruitment. - Video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=L0WvFJz0CDQ - Project page: https://rrreefs.com/ #### Bio-Brick — MicroBuild Masonry (Adrian Simone & Rania Al-Sheikhly) (2022) - Type: Research prototype · Organisms: Bacteria & microbes - Idea: Let bacteria do the binding that kilns and cement do today. - What it is: Masonry units made by binding recycled aggregate with microbially induced calcite precipitation at ambient temperature, without firing or cement. - How it works: Urease-producing bacteria and a calcium solution are pumped through moulds of aggregate, precipitating calcite that hardens the brick. - Images: https://www.jamesdysonaward.org/Document/917ac406-c5bf-4ad8-a3d9-7e517c17ca3d/20220516153750.jpg https://www.jamesdysonaward.org/Document/ee05d77b-3373-4fa7-92f8-c530e4601938/20220628110858.jpg - Project page: https://www.jamesdysonaward.org/en-GB/2022/project/bio-brick/ #### Respyre bioreceptive moss concrete — Auke Bleij (2022) - Type: Product & platform · Organisms: Plants - Idea: Design the surface so another species wants to live on it. - What it is: A bioreceptive concrete that moss colonises spontaneously, turning walls and urban surfaces into air-filtering, cooling green infrastructure; it can be applied as a layer or cast into new elements. - How it works: A porous, water-retaining concrete mix with up to 70% recycled cement is seeded with moss. - Images: https://www.dutchdesignawards.nl/wp-content/uploads/2024/07/Picture-of-Adil-at-green-wall-1500x882.jpg https://www.dutchdesignawards.nl/wp-content/uploads/2024/07/Auke-Bleij-Venray-nieuwbouw-vergroend-DDA24-1100x647.jpg - Project page: https://www.respyre.com #### The Exploded View Beyond Building — Pascal Leboucq (2022) - Type: Research prototype · Organisms: Fungi, Plants - Idea: A whole house could be built from grown materials — show every layer. - What it is: A pavilion at Dutch Design Week built as an exploded view of a house, showing over 100 bio-based building materials such as mycelium, hemp, reed and straw layer by layer. - How it works: Material samples from producers are mounted in their construction order in a timber frame. - Video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dLcS2hJVxm4 - Images: https://static.dezeen.com/uploads/2022/07/v2xdbNZVOpbPYCSGm7rXjVfKW48XqUsCxcxC5vPB_Z33nsize_2048.jpeg - Project page: https://biobasedcreations.com/ #### AirBubble — ecoLogicStudio (2021) - Type: Research prototype · Organisms: Algae - Idea: Make air purification a visible, playful activity shared with microorganisms. - What it is: A children's playground in Warsaw built around an algae bioreactor that filters and cleans the air while children play. - How it works: Air is drawn through a transparent bioreactor with Chlorella microalgae that absorb pollutants and CO₂ and release oxygen. - Video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZjA4uTlW1EE - Project page: https://www.ecologicstudio.com/projects/air-bubble-air-purifying-eco-machine #### Alive: A New Spatial Contract for Multi-Species Architecture — The Living (2021) - Type: Research prototype · Organisms: Bacteria & microbes - Idea: Design building surfaces for microbial diversity, a probiotic architecture. - What it is: A walk-in room of textured, porous organic material designed to host many microclimates for microbes, with spaces for humans and micro-spaces for microbial communities side by side. - How it works: Texture, light and air flow of the organic panels are calibrated to create varied microhabitats, with sampling of microbial communities. - Video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2jqxx2R1Z4s - Images: https://static.labiennale.org/files/styles/seo_thumbnail/public/architettura/2021/600x600/the_living_biennale_architettura_2021_.jpg?itok=SCsQmvHh - Project page: https://www.labiennale.org/en/architecture/2021/among-diverse-beings/living #### BIT.BIO.BOT — ecoLogicStudio (2021) - Type: Artwork · Organisms: Algae - Idea: Cohabitation with microalgae can be part of how we eat and breathe at home. - What it is: An installation at the Venice Architecture Biennale 2021 that turned a room into a domestic bio-digital garden, where visitors saw spirulina grown in photobioreactors and processed into food. - How it works: Spirulina was cultured in custom bioreactors fed with the room's air and harvested into edible product. - Video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GS4pcdIVajc - Images: https://admin.ecologicstudio.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/05/MRC1818-Modifica-scaled.jpg - Project page: https://www.ecologicstudio.com/projects/bitbiobot #### Man-Nahata — OXMAN, Neri Oxman (2021) - Type: Speculative design · Organisms: Ecosystems - Idea: Use a place's lost ecology as the brief for its future city. - What it is: A study of Manhattan's future as an interface between built and grown environments, starting from the island's pre-1600 ecology; made for Francis Ford Coppola's film Megalopolis and shown at SFMOMA. - How it works: Ecological data on Mannahatta's 55 historical ecological communities informed a bottom-up, growth-based urban model; the method is likely computational simulation. - Images: https://cdn.prod.website-files.com/690e0b6e2e2a0cbc45ab116e/69723d6bb41c87fed446c09a_imgi_1_67bd9f3dc5a230660b0d2179_mglps-header.avif - Project page: https://www.oxman.com/projects/man-nahata #### Silk Pavilion II — Neri Oxman, Mediated Matter Group (MIT Media Lab) (2020) - Type: Research prototype · Organisms: Insects - Idea: Tune a structure's geometry and motion so another species builds the envelope for you. - What it is: A large knitted scaffold was slowly rotated on a jig while about 17,000 silkworms spun over it, producing a silk-covered pavilion shown at MoMA. - How it works: A robotically knitted fibre scaffold on a rotating jig steered silkworm spinning; silkworms came from a farm and completed metamorphosis afterwards. - Video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MUVv4wtyMPE - Images: https://cdn.prod.website-files.com/690e0b6e2e2a0cbc45ab116e/69762cd8c2e76f1573d4d8e6_OG%20Image%20SILK%20PAVILION%20II.jpg https://dam-prod.media.mit.edu/thumb/2020/03/05/05-Fabric_Detail_With_Silkworms_0J2id9g.jpg.1400x1400.jpg - Project page: https://www.oxman.com/projects/silk-pavillion-ii #### BUGA Wood Pavilion — Achim Menges, ICD/ITKE University of Stuttgart (2019) - Type: Research prototype · Organisms: Animals - Idea: Sea urchin plates show how many small segments can form a strong, light shell. - What it is: A 30-metre timber shell for the Bundesgartenschau Heilbronn made of 376 hollow wooden segments, whose layout follows the plate skeleton of sea urchins. - How it works: Computational design translated sea-urchin plate principles into segments; robots machined and assembled the hollow wood cassettes. - Video: https://vimeo.com/372594657 - Images: https://www.icd.uni-stuttgart.de/img/icd-imagedb/ICD_Projects_19_BUGA-2019_Wood.jpg - Project page: https://www.icd.uni-stuttgart.de/projects/buga-wood-pavilion-2019/ #### H.O.R.T.U.S. XL Astaxanthin.g — ecoLogicStudio (2019) - Type: Artwork · Organisms: Algae, Bacteria & microbes - Idea: Printing the substrate for a colony lets digital geometry and biological growth co-author a form. - What it is: A large 3D-printed lattice, shown at the Centre Pompidou, whose triangular cells hold a biogel inoculated with photosynthetic cyanobacteria that grow into a green pattern. - How it works: Digitally designed, coral-like geometry was printed as hexagonal-triangular modules; cyanobacteria were deposited in biogel on each cell. - Images: https://admin.ecologicstudio.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/02/MG_0470-scaled.jpg - Project page: https://www.ecologicstudio.com/projects/h-o-r-t-u-s-xl-astaxanthin-g #### Monarch Sanctuary — Terreform ONE (2019) - Type: Speculative design · Organisms: Insects, Plants - Idea: Treat a building envelope as habitat for a declining species. - What it is: A design for an eight-storey commercial building in New York whose façade, roof and atrium are breeding habitat for monarch butterflies, shown at the Cooper Hewitt Design Triennial. - How it works: A double-skin façade planted with milkweed and nectar plants is designed to support the whole monarch life cycle inside the building envelope. - Images: https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/61bd9bc5da6b0336a4d44519/f424be44-cdb2-408b-877b-6bdb6f22f5d4/terreform-butterfly-main-aaa-web.jpg - Project page: https://www.terreform.org/monarch-sanctuary #### Mycokarst — Anna Budnikova (2019) - Type: Speculative design · Organisms: Fungi, Ecosystems - Idea: Let fungi rebuild the rock that water dissolves. - What it is: For a karst ravine in Kazan, Russia, the project proposes fungi that mineralise calcite into limestone to reinforce the soil and reduce the collapse of roads and houses into sinkholes. - How it works: Based on fungal biomineralisation of calcium carbonate; the design maps sites and prototypes fungal-reinforced soil forms. - Video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UEjUS4o1LHA - Images: https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/552dc0ffe4b070a9e1a6a215/1561580924834-52ZEVBX9E609LDT5PO39/Mycokarst+ravine_prototype_2.jpg https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/552dc0ffe4b070a9e1a6a215/1561580915326-9RYKVPSECTJCX1OXLCWA/Archetype_3.jpg - Project page: https://www.biodesignchallenge.org/hse #### Totems — Neri Oxman, Mediated Matter Group (MIT Media Lab) (2019) - Type: Artwork · Organisms: DNA & molecules, Animals - Idea: Borrow a molecule that evolved to protect living bodies and scale it to protect buildings. - What it is: Tall 3D-printed columns channel melanin, the pigment found across the tree of life, testing it as a material for architectural surfaces; shown at the XXII Triennale di Milano. - How it works: Melanin extracted from bird feathers and cuttlefish ink or synthesised in the lab was flowed through multi-material printed vessels. - Images: https://cdn.prod.website-files.com/690e0b6e2e2a0cbc45ab116e/69762cd72f1a7d5708e90d4e_OG%20Image%20TOTEMS.jpg https://cdn.prod.website-files.com/690e0b6e2e2a0cbc45ab116e/697388ddafbca67a84260e2f_imgi_2_67d49fc7ff773f00ece0a803_totems-04.jpg - Project page: https://www.oxman.com/projects/totems #### Urbach Tower — Achim Menges, ICD/ITKE University of Stuttgart (2019) - Type: Research prototype · Organisms: Plants - Idea: Program the wood's growth structure so drying does the shaping work. - What it is: A 14-metre tower made of curved timber panels that were not bent by machines: flat bilayer boards curled into shape by themselves as the wood dried. - How it works: Spruce bilayers with different grain orientations and moisture contents curve predictably on drying; curved parts were laminated into CLT and robotically machined. - Paper: https://doi.org/10.1126/sciadv.aax1311 (Science Advances 2019) - Video: https://vimeo.com/419050044 - Images: https://www.icd.uni-stuttgart.de/img/icd-imagedb/ICD_Web_UrbachTower.jpg - Project page: https://www.icd.uni-stuttgart.de/projects/remstal-gartenschau-2019-urbach-turm/ #### Aguahoja — Neri Oxman, Mediated Matter Group (MIT Media Lab) (2018) - Type: Research prototype · Organisms: Plants, Animals - Idea: Design the material's end of life at the same time as its form: things made of water-based biopolymers can return to the ecosystem. - What it is: A pavilion and artefacts robotically printed from the most abundant biopolymers on Earth — cellulose, chitosan and pectin — whose skins stiffen, flex or dissolve depending on their composition. - How it works: A water-based robotic extrusion platform printed functionally graded biocomposites of chitosan (from shrimp shells), cellulose and pectin. - Paper: https://doi.org/10.1089/3dp.2014.0014 (3D Printing and Additive Manufacturing 2014) - Video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=14flotuAzfY - Images: https://cdn.prod.website-files.com/690e0b6e2e2a0cbc45ab116e/69762cd725bf83d73fcebe7b_OG%20Image%20AGUAHOJA.jpg https://dam-prod.media.mit.edu/thumb/2019/03/18/Structure_1.jpg.1400x1400.jpg - Project page: https://www.oxman.com/projects/aguahoja #### MARS: Modular Artificial Reef Structure — Reef Design Lab (2018) - Type: Product & platform · Organisms: Ecosystems, Animals - Idea: Design the flat-packed, diver-assembled habitat, not the sculpture. - What it is: Ceramic reef modules cast from 3D-printed moulds interlock on a steel spine, are assembled by divers underwater, and are seeded with coral fragments that grow over the structure. - How it works: 3D-printed moulds produce cast ceramic and concrete units with coral-friendly surface texture and internal voids; modules thread onto a rebar spine so they can be transported flat and built up on site. - Video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BMCfiLnncg8 - Images: https://static1.squarespace.com/static/648fefcad6448545d11043fd/t/64a22f46a64c476f109c18e9/1728881186769/RDL+MARS+SHARING+IMAGE.jpg?format=1500w - Project page: https://reefdesignlab.com/mars #### Photo.Synth.Etica — ecoLogicStudio (2018) - Type: Research prototype · Organisms: Algae - Idea: A façade can be a thin, living layer that breathes for the city. - What it is: An 'urban curtain' of bioplastic modules filled with microalgae hung on a building façade in Dublin, where the algae capture CO₂ from passing air and grow in daylight. - How it works: Air is pumped through serpentine channels in welded bioplastic panels where microalgae photosynthesise; excess biomass can be harvested. - Images: https://admin.ecologicstudio.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/01/01_UrbanAlgaeCurtain.jpg https://admin.ecologicstudio.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/01/PhotoSynthEtica@DublinCastleMontage-scaled.jpg - Project page: https://www.ecologicstudio.com/projects/photo-synth-etica #### BioTechHut — ecoLogicStudio (2017) - Type: Research prototype · Organisms: Algae - Idea: Let the home host a photosynthetic organism as a working part of daily life. - What it is: A prototype house for Astana Expo 2017 whose spaces are organised around algae photobioreactors that grow food and capture CO₂ from the air. - How it works: Glass photobioreactors cultured spirulina and other microalgae, fed by air pumped from the interior. - Video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X4BoZwM3idc - Images: https://admin.ecologicstudio.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/03/3-Cells-of-body-orizontal-scaled.jpg - Project page: https://www.ecologicstudio.com/projects/biotechhut #### Bioreceptive Concrete Panels — Marcos Cruz (2016) - Type: Research prototype · Organisms: Algae, Plants - Idea: Design the surface so life can move in, instead of planting and maintaining a green wall. - What it is: Concrete façade panels milled with fissures and pockets so that mosses, lichens and algae colonise them by themselves, without irrigation; piloted on a London Underground retaining wall. - How it works: Low-pH, water-retaining concrete mixes were CNC-milled with geometries that hold moisture for poikilohydric cryptogams. - Paper: https://doi.org/10.1017/s1359135516000130 (Architectural Research Quarterly 2016) - Images: https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjMiZnrdmylfd-vR_8XljSOM_6iWJSxK2iiYIRK6WehTvb_Y1M3R6t6B98KtbCp0VrYUwWaGxK5J7iAq0aPbGEU1iSvJgrVSqxrmfMewz7oCB0acsxlpLyd9n3wdZoTZfbDvkP9HB4EfV8/w1200-h630-p-k-no-nu/BiotALab_BioreceptivePanels-on-site_Copyright-PaulSmoothy3.jpg - Project page: http://marcoscruzarchitect.blogspot.com/2017/10/bioreceptive-concrete-facades-design.html #### Cricket Shelter: Modular Edible Insect Farm — Terreform ONE (2016) - Type: Research prototype · Organisms: Insects - Idea: Combine shelter and food production in one structure that houses another species. - What it is: A small pavilion that is both an emergency shelter and a farm for crickets, testing insect protein as a low-footprint food in cities. - How it works: Modular, likely digitally fabricated units form both the cricket habitat and the structure; shown at Art Basel Miami. - Images: https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/61bd9bc5da6b0336a4d44519/a4119b5e-7f32-4fbb-9b34-0f5797f435a6/Cricket_Shelter_25.png - Project page: https://www.terreform.org/cricket-shelter #### Elytra Filament Pavilion — Achim Menges, ICD/ITKE University of Stuttgart (2016) - Type: Research prototype · Organisms: Insects - Idea: A beetle's wing shows how to put fibres only where loads need them. - What it is: A canopy of robotically wound glass- and carbon-fibre cells, based on the fibrous structure of beetle forewings (elytra), installed at the V&A; sensors in the fibres recorded how visitors used it. - How it works: Fibre layouts derived from elytra were wound by a robot on a reconfigurable frame; resin-impregnated fibres cured into hexagonal cells. - Video: https://vimeo.com/168351499 - Images: https://www.icd.uni-stuttgart.de/img/icd-imagedb/Web_ICD_VA3.jpg - Project page: https://www.icd.uni-stuttgart.de/projects/elytra-filament-pavilion/ #### Living Architecture (LIAR) — Rachel Armstrong (2016) - Type: Research prototype · Organisms: Bacteria & microbes - Idea: A wall can be a digestive organ for the building: it metabolises waste into power and clean water. - What it is: An EU research project building a modular bioreactor wall whose bricks contain microbial fuel cells that clean greywater, generate electricity and can report how 'happy' their microbes are. - How it works: Microbial fuel cells with engineered and natural consortia sit in modular bricks; sensors powered by the MFCs monitor microbial activity. - Paper: https://doi.org/10.1515/9783035608922-022 (Cultivated Building Materials (Birkhäuser) 2017) - Images: https://livingarchitecture-h2020.eu/wp-content/uploads/2016/07/liar-news-4-1024x512.jpg - Project page: https://livingarchitecture-h2020.eu/ #### Synthetic Apiary — Neri Oxman, Mediated Matter Group (MIT Media Lab) (2016) - Type: Research prototype · Organisms: Insects - Idea: Architecture can be designed as habitat for another species, not only for humans. - What it is: An indoor environment that keeps honeybees in a permanent spring, with controlled light, humidity and temperature and synthetic pollen, so colonies can live year-round inside a building. - How it works: Researchers measured honeybee needs and engineered a sealed room simulating spring conditions; the team recorded the first documented bee birth in a synthetic environment. - Video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n4dRPsbwhlQ - Images: https://cdn.prod.website-files.com/690e0b6e2e2a0cbc45ab116e/69762cd74676be92e261c43c_OG%20Image%20SYNTHETIC%20APIARY.jpg https://cdn.prod.website-files.com/690e0b6e2e2a0cbc45ab116e/697384d671e19de3b135573b_imgi_2_67d49a9ce07e57c6908416d9_mediated-matter-synthetic-apiary-10.jpg - Project page: https://www.oxman.com/projects/synthetic-apiary #### Bamboo Theatre — DnA_Design and Architecture (2015) - Type: Research prototype · Organisms: Plants - Idea: A building can be a living plant structure that the community keeps growing. - What it is: An open-air theatre in Hengkeng Village, Zhejiang, made by bending and tying living bamboo stalks into a dome; villagers maintain it by removing dead stalks and weaving in new shoots. - How it works: Existing bamboo in a grove is bent inward and bound at the top to form a vault, with no foundations or cut timber; the structure renews itself as bamboo grows. - Video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2DoxcOrexJA - Project page: https://collection.cooperhewitt.org/exhibitions/2318794480/ #### ICD/ITKE Research Pavilion 2014–15 — Achim Menges, ICD/ITKE University of Stuttgart (2015) - Type: Research prototype · Organisms: Insects - Idea: Borrow a construction sequence from an animal, not only its final form. - What it is: Inspired by the diving bell water spider, which reinforces an underwater air bubble with silk, a robot inside an inflated membrane laid carbon fibres to stiffen it into a permanent shell. - How it works: An industrial robot placed carbon fibre on the inside of a pneumatic ETFE membrane, guided by sensor feedback; biological model: Argyroneta aquatica. - Paper: https://doi.org/10.1002/ad.1955 (Architectural Design 2015) - Video: https://vimeo.com/132910518 - Images: https://www.icd.uni-stuttgart.de/img/icd-imagedb/Web_RP14_Main.jpg - Project page: https://www.icd.uni-stuttgart.de/projects/icditke-research-pavilion-2014-15/ #### Urban Algae Canopy — ecoLogicStudio (2015) - Type: Research prototype · Organisms: Algae - Idea: Let a building skin be a living, digitally tuned photosynthetic system. - What it is: A pavilion canopy at Expo Milano 2015 whose ETFE cushions hold living Spirulina; the algae grow faster on sunny days and shade visitors, while visitors' presence triggers the digital control of flow and growth. - How it works: Spirulina circulates through a modified ETFE cladding system; sensors and pumps regulate flow, oxygenation and density in response to sun and people. - Video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bC7yLdYbnkU - Images: https://admin.ecologicstudio.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/03/EXPO2015-74m.jpg https://admin.ecologicstudio.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/03/WP_20150527_21_18_22_Pro__highres-scaled.jpg - Project page: https://www.ecologicstudio.com/projects/expo-milano-2015-urban-algae-folly #### Hy-Fi — The Living (2014) - Type: Research prototype · Organisms: Fungi - Idea: A building can be grown, used for a summer and returned to soil with almost no waste. - What it is: A 12-metre tower of three branching cylinders built from about 10,000 bricks of mycelium grown on corn stalks, the winner of MoMA PS1's Young Architects Program; the bricks were composted afterwards. - How it works: With Ecovative, chopped corn stalks and mycelium grew into bricks in moulds; reflective 3M film trays used as moulds became the top bricks. - Video: https://vimeo.com/85426618 - Images: https://images.adsttc.com/media/images/53ad/5f8f/c07a/8021/be00/0039/large_jpg/5302011be8e44e1589000253_behind-hy-fi-the-entirely-organic-compostable-tower-that-won-moma-ps1-young-architect-s-program-2014_ps1_cov.jpg?1403871114 - Project page: https://www.archdaily.com/521266/hy-fi-the-organic-mushroom-brick-tower-opens-at-moma-s-ps1-courtyard #### BIQ House and SolarLeaf façade — Arup (2013) - Type: Research prototype · Organisms: Algae - Idea: A façade can be a working farm that produces energy and shade at the same time. - What it is: A four-storey apartment building in Hamburg with 129 flat glass bioreactors on its sunny faces, where microalgae grow to shade the building and provide biomass and heat. - How it works: Microalgae circulate in 2.5 × 0.7 m photobioreactor panels; biomass is harvested for biogas and solar heat is recovered via heat exchangers. - Video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t3OddaOgo5Q - Images: https://www.arup.com/globalassets/images/projects/s/solarleaf/front-view-of-the-biq-house-teaser.jpg - Project page: https://www.arup.com/projects/solarleaf #### Silk Pavilion — Neri Oxman, Mediated Matter Group (MIT Media Lab) (2013) - Type: Research prototype · Organisms: Insects - Idea: Let a robot lay the coarse structure and let living organisms finish it. - What it is: A dome of 26 polygonal panels was first wound with silk thread by a robot; then 6,500 live silkworms were released onto it and spun a dense silk layer over the scaffold. - How it works: CNC-wound silk thread on a steel frame guided Bombyx mori silkworms, whose spinning responds to light, heat and geometry, to add a non-woven silk infill. - Paper: https://doi.org/10.2307/j.ctt1tp3c5w.34 (Fabricate 2014) - Video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tnH1C5rJ94k - Images: https://dam-prod.media.mit.edu/thumb/2017/10/13/silkPavilion_4.jpg.1400x1400.jpg https://dam-prod.media.mit.edu/thumb/2017/10/13/01silk.jpg.1400x1400.jpg - Project page: https://www.media.mit.edu/projects/silk-pavilion/overview/ #### Synthetic Biology: Living Quarters — Rachel Armstrong (2010) - Type: Book & essay · Organisms: DNA & molecules, Bacteria & microbes - Idea: Architecture could move from inert materials to materials with metabolism. - What it is: A short Nature commentary with Neil Spiller arguing that architecture should use protocells and synthetic biology to make buildings that grow, repair and interact with their environment. - How it works: A position piece drawing on protocell chemistry and early synthetic biology. - Paper: https://doi.org/10.1038/467916a (Nature 2010) - Project page: https://doi.org/10.1038/467916a #### Future Venice — Rachel Armstrong (2009) - Type: Speculative design · Organisms: DNA & molecules, Ecosystems - Idea: Instead of building a foundation, program a chemical 'organism' to grow one where it is needed. - What it is: A proposal to grow an artificial limestone-like reef under Venice with protocells that swim away from light towards the city's dark foundations and deposit mineral there, slowing the city's sinking. - How it works: Oil-in-water protocells (non-living chemical droplets with life-like behaviour) designed to be photophobic and to precipitate carbonate from dissolved minerals and CO₂. - Video: https://vimeo.com/96792142 - Project page: https://www.dezeen.com/2014/05/30/movie-rachel-armstrong-future-venice-growing-giant-artificial-reef/ #### Dune: Arenaceous Anti-Desertification Architecture — Magnus Larsson (2008) - Type: Speculative design · Organisms: Bacteria & microbes - Idea: Let microbes do the construction at landscape scale, using the material already on site. - What it is: A proposal for a 6,000-km wall across the Sahara made by solidifying sand dunes into sandstone with bacteria, creating shelter and a barrier against the spreading desert. - How it works: Microbially induced calcite precipitation: Sporosarcina (Bacillus) pasteurii injected into sand binds grains into sandstone. - Paper: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-14779-1_20 (Environmental Science and Engineering (Springer) 2010) - Images: https://www.designboom.com/twitterimages/uploads/2013/06/dune_01.jpg - Project page: https://www.designboom.com/architecture/magnus-larsson-sculpts-the-saharan-desert-with-bacteria/ ### Bioprinting & Biofabrication 3D printing and robotic fabrication with living cells, hydrogels and biological materials. #### Algee — Alejandro Alfaro Enguídanos (2026) - Type: Research prototype · Organisms: Bacteria & microbes, Algae - Idea: Furniture can be printed from a plastic grown by microbes. - What it is: A modular soft-seating system shaped after algae forms and 3D printed from PHB, a biodegradable plastic produced by cyanobacteria, so the furniture can 'grow' by adding modules. - How it works: Cyanobacterial PHB filament is printed into lattice modules. - Images: https://content.gp-award.com/assets/media/award26/7-algee_blogLarge.jpg https://content.gp-award.com/assets/media/award26/0-algee_blogLarge.jpg - Project page: https://www.gp-award.com/en/projects/algee #### Bioreactors as Additive Manufacturing Environments — Orkan Telhan (2025) - Type: Paper · Organisms: Fungi, Bacteria & microbes - Idea: If the organism builds the object, the machine's job is to shape its environment. - What it is: A framework and set of prototypes treating the bioreactor itself as the printer: growth conditions, not a nozzle path, define the geometry of the fabricated object. - How it works: Chambers control nutrient gradients, gas exchange, temperature and light so microbial and fungal growth deposits material in designed patterns, with fabrication parameters logged like print settings. - Paper: https://doi.org/10.1089/3dp.2024.0023 (3D Printing and Additive Manufacturing) - Images: https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5258ba2be4b0804fa254bd19/c64c93ee-247d-4869-a501-a2afd3d92b76/hyphal_chip_v1.jpg - Project page: https://www.orkantelhan.com/engineering #### Dual Carbon Sequestration with Photosynthetic Living Materials — Kunal Masania, Andrea Shin Ling (2025) - Type: Paper · Organisms: Bacteria & microbes, Algae - Idea: A printed material that keeps taking carbon out of the air as long as it is kept alive. - What it is: Printed hydrogel structures seeded with cyanobacteria both store carbon as biomass and precipitate it as mineral carbonate inside the material, staying active for over a year. - How it works: Cyanobacteria are embedded in a printable hydrogel with a nutrient supply and high surface-to-volume geometry; photosynthesis raises local pH so carbonate minerals precipitate in the matrix. - Paper: https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-025-58761-y (Nature Communications) - Images: https://media.springernature.com/full/springer-static/image/art%3A10.1038%2Fs41467-025-58761-y/MediaObjects/41467_2025_58761_Fig1_HTML.png - Project page: https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-025-58761-y #### Picoplanktonics (Canada Pavilion, Venice Architecture Biennale 2025) — Andrea Shin Ling (2025) - Type: Artwork · Organisms: Bacteria & microbes - Idea: An exhibition where the building material is a culture that needs daily care. - What it is: Two large printed structures seeded with carbon-sequestering cyanobacteria fill the Canada Pavilion; a team of caretakers waters, feeds and monitors them for the length of the Biennale. - How it works: Sand-based hydrogel structures printed with a robotic arm carry Synechococcus cyanobacteria; a controlled humidity, light and nutrient regime keeps them photosynthesising and mineralising carbon on site. - Video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Z0LymYR0-Cg - Project page: https://www.canadacouncil.ca/initiatives/venice-biennale #### ReConstruct: 3D Bioprinted Vascularized Fat Tissue — Jennifer A. Lewis (2023) - Type: Research prototype · Organisms: Cells & tissue - Idea: Design the replacement for soft tissue, not just the structural parts of the body. - What it is: Printed vascularised fat tissue is developed as a soft-tissue graft for breast reconstruction after mastectomy, built from a patient's own cells. - How it works: Adipose-derived stem cells and endothelial cells are printed as organ building blocks with embedded vascular channels, then perfused so the graft survives at clinically useful volumes. - Video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=g12qpAAqg6o - Project page: https://wyss.harvard.edu/ #### Tatami ReFab — Honoka (2023) - Type: Product & platform · Organisms: Plants - Idea: A traditional plant material can be reborn through digital fabrication. - What it is: A furniture collection 3D-printed from a composite of biodegradable resin and igusa rush grass, the plant used for tatami mats, reviving a vanishing tradition. - How it works: Igusa fibres are compounded with bio-resin and printed on a large-format printer (with ExtraBold). - Images: https://www.salonemilano.it/sites/default/files/styles/libero/public/images/articles/2023-06/Tatami-Refab-salonemilano.jpg.webp?itok=jrTYNcJB - Project page: https://www.salonemilano.it/en/articles/latest-design-challenges-salonesatellite-award-2023 #### Urban Stomach — Blast Studio (2023) - Type: Research prototype · Organisms: Fungi - Idea: A city's waste stream can be printed and then digested into structure by a fungus. - What it is: Discarded coffee cups collected around London are pulped into a paste, 3D printed into columns and vessels, and colonised by oyster mycelium that binds and fruits on the objects. - How it works: Paper cups are shredded and mixed into a printable cellulose paste; printed forms are inoculated with Pleurotus mycelium, incubated to bind the substrate, and harvested for mushrooms before drying. - Video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sQPFRRDt25E - Project page: https://www.blast-studio.com/ #### AuriNovo: 3D Printed Living Ear Implant — 3DBio Therapeutics (2022) - Type: Product & platform · Organisms: Cells & tissue - Idea: A printed living body part left the lab and entered a clinical trial. - What it is: An ear implant printed from a patient's own cartilage cells in a collagen-based bioink was implanted in a woman with microtia in the first trial of its kind. - How it works: Chondrocytes from a biopsy of the patient's remaining ear are expanded, mixed into a collagen bioink and printed to the mirrored geometry of the other ear, then implanted under skin to mature. - Video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=INm3Q0xVWrQ - Project page: https://www.3dbiocorp.com/ #### AeR — Shonali Shetty (2021) - Type: Speculative design · Organisms: Bacteria & microbes, Fungi, Algae - Idea: Print a living wall the way you choose paint. - What it is: A system that bioprints photosynthetic microorganisms such as cyanobacteria and lichens into modular wall surfaces, with users choosing bio-inks and scaffolds to tune their indoor microclimate. - How it works: Bio-inks carrying living cells are extruded onto printed scaffolds that are mounted indoors. - Images: https://content.gp-award.com/assets/media/gpa-gca-submissions2021/0-aer_blogLarge.jpg - Project page: https://www.gp-award.com/en/projects/aer #### Cultivated Ribeye Steak by 3D Bioprinting — Aleph Farms (2021) - Type: Product & platform · Organisms: Cells & tissue - Idea: Once meat is printed, marbling becomes a layout decision. - What it is: A cultivated steak printed from cow muscle, fat and blood vessel cells on a plant-based scaffold, with marbling arranged so that it cooks and cuts like a ribeye. - How it works: Bovine cells are grown in bioreactors and printed with Aleph Farms' partner technology onto a plant-protein scaffold that gives the cut its fibre direction and internal fat distribution. - Video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1id1EQwQvE0 - Project page: https://www.aleph-farms.com/ #### Magic Queen — MAEID (2021) - Type: Research prototype · Organisms: Fungi, Plants, Ecosystems - Idea: Make a robot the gardener of a living, printed architecture. - What it is: A robotic garden of 3D-printed soil in which a robot arm tends fungal flora and plants, guided by sensors and machine learning; the plants and soil depend on the robot and vice versa. - How it works: Biodegradable soil structures were printed by an ABB IRB 2600 robot and tended by a second robot responding to sensor data. - Video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xQReQhF4Gvc - Images: https://static.labiennale.org/files/styles/seo_thumbnail/public/architettura/2021/600x600/maeid_biennale_architettura_2021.jpg?itok=MRSeTRk2 - Project page: https://www.labiennale.org/en/architecture/2021/among-diverse-beings/maeid-b%C3%BCro-f%C3%BCr-architektur-und-transmediale-kunst #### Biocraft — Paul & Garrett Sutherlin Santo (2020) - Type: Research prototype · Organisms: Plants, DNA & molecules - Idea: A printed object can be designed to do ecological work during and after its life. - What it is: 3D-printed bio-gel scales made from natural biopolymers that absorb CO2 from the air and release nutrients into the soil as they degrade. - How it works: Biopolymer gels are extruded by a printer into scale-like tiles tuned for porosity and degradation. - Video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XmgJzfTfA_c - Project page: https://sutherlinsanto.com/ #### Bionic 3D Printed Corals — Daniel Wangpraseurt (2020) - Type: Paper · Organisms: Algae, Animals - Idea: Copy the optical geometry of coral and photosynthesis gets more efficient. - What it is: Coral-inspired hydrogel structures printed at cellular resolution scatter light the way coral tissue does, and grow microalgae at densities far above conventional photobioreactors. - How it works: Rapid 3D bioprinting combines a cellulose-derived scaffold with an algae-laden hydrogel; the printed micro-geometry redistributes light internally, mimicking coral skeleton and tissue optics. - Paper: https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-020-15486-4 (Nature Communications) - Images: https://media.springernature.com/full/springer-static/image/art%3A10.1038%2Fs41467-020-15486-4/MediaObjects/41467_2020_15486_Fig1_HTML.png - Project page: https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-020-15486-4 #### Redefine Meat New-Meat Printed Whole Cuts — Redefine Meat (2020) - Type: Product & platform · Organisms: Plants - Idea: Printing food at production scale turns a recipe into a digital file and a supply chain. - What it is: Industrial printers deposit separate muscle, fat and blood analogue inks into whole cuts, produced at tonnes per month and sold to restaurants across Europe. - How it works: Three ink types — soy and pea protein muscle, fat and a beet-based blood analogue — are printed in parallel by multi-nozzle industrial machines against digitally described cut structures. - Video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gbfsOHk6smg - Project page: https://www.redefinemeat.com/ #### 3D Bioprinting of Collagen to Rebuild Components of the Human Heart — Adam Feinberg (2019) - Type: Paper · Organisms: Cells & tissue - Idea: Collagen — the body's own building material — can be printed at the resolution organs need. - What it is: FRESH printing at 20-micron resolution produces collagen heart valves, small vessels and a beating ventricle seeded with human stem-cell-derived heart muscle. - How it works: Acidified collagen is extruded into a buffered gelatin support bath where it neutralises and gels in place; printed ventricles seeded with human cardiomyocytes contract and pump. - Paper: https://doi.org/10.1126/science.aav9051 (Science) - Video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ivWJOVRA8CQ - Project page: https://www.cmu.edu/bme/Feinberg-Lab/ #### 3D Printing of Personalized Thick and Perfusable Cardiac Patches and Hearts — Tal Dvir (2019) - Type: Paper · Organisms: Cells & tissue - Idea: Both the cells and the gel can come from the same person, so nothing is foreign. - What it is: A patient's omental tissue is turned into a personalised hydrogel and their own reprogrammed cells into cardiac and endothelial cells, printed as a vascularised patch and a small whole heart. - How it works: Omentum is decellularised into a personalised extracellular-matrix ink; iPSCs from the same biopsy are differentiated into cardiomyocytes and endothelial cells and printed with CT-derived vessel geometry. - Paper: https://doi.org/10.1002/advs.201900344 (Advanced Science) - Video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SA3B8IOYI9s - Project page: https://doi.org/10.1002/advs.201900344 #### Hybrid Living Materials (HLM) — Neri Oxman (2019) - Type: Paper · Organisms: Bacteria & microbes - Idea: Print a chemical landscape and let engineered bacteria draw on it. - What it is: Multi-material printed surfaces are inoculated with engineered E. coli that respond to chemicals in the substrate, so patterns of colour and fluorescence appear along the printed gradients. - How it works: A digital workflow assigns local concentrations of nutrients and inducers in a multi-material print; a hydrogel layer carrying sensor strains of E. coli is applied, and expression maps the printed chemistry. - Paper: https://doi.org/10.1002/adfm.201907401 (Advanced Functional Materials) - Video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gL_KuEu9ABQ - Images: https://dam-prod.media.mit.edu/thumb/2020/01/22/gradients2.png.1400x1400.png https://dam-prod.media.mit.edu/thumb/2020/01/22/morecolors_tlb8mEq.jpg.1400x1400.jpg - Project page: https://www.media.mit.edu/projects/hybrid-living-materials/overview/ #### In Situ Bioprinting of Autologous Skin Cells — Anthony Atala (2019) - Type: Paper · Organisms: Cells & tissue - Idea: Bring the printer to the body instead of printing a part and implanting it. - What it is: A wheeled bedside printer scans a wound, then deposits the patient's own skin cells directly into it, closing large full-thickness wounds faster than grafts. - How it works: A hand-held laser scanner builds a 3D map of the wound; the cartridge system prints fibroblasts and keratinocytes in fibrin and collagen along the mapped topography in a single pass. - Paper: https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-018-38366-w (Scientific Reports) - Video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ftoOT5f7jkE - Images: https://media.springernature.com/full/springer-static/image/art%3A10.1038%2Fs41598-018-38366-w/MediaObjects/41598_2018_38366_Fig1_HTML.png - Project page: https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-018-38366-w #### Lovely Trash — Blast Studio (2019) - Type: Research prototype · Organisms: Fungi - Idea: Printed geometry is a growth instruction for the fungus, not just a shape. - What it is: An early series of 3D-printed objects made from waste paste and colonised by mycelium, testing how printed geometry guides fungal growth and final strength. - How it works: Waste cellulose is mixed into a printable paste, printed as open lattices and ribbed vessels, inoculated with mycelium and incubated so hyphae bridge the printed gaps. - Video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=W8tpiWSZfm0 - Project page: https://www.blast-studio.com/ #### Multivascular Networks and Functional Intravascular Topologies within Biocompatible Hydrogels — Jordan Miller (2019) - Type: Paper · Organisms: Cells & tissue - Idea: Two separate circulations can be woven into one printed block, like lung and blood. - What it is: Open-source stereolithography prints hydrogels containing entangled, separate vessel networks, including an air sac that oxygenates flowing red blood cells as it inflates and deflates. - How it works: Food-dye photoabsorbers let projection stereolithography cure thin layers of PEGDA hydrogel with sharp z-resolution; the printer, resins and design files were released openly. - Paper: https://doi.org/10.1126/science.aav9750 (Science) - Video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GqJYMgAcc0Q - Project page: https://millerlab.rice.edu/ #### SWIFT: Sacrificial Writing Into Functional Tissue — Jennifer A. Lewis (2019) - Type: Paper · Organisms: Cells & tissue - Idea: Make the tissue the print bed, and print only the channels that keep it alive. - What it is: Instead of printing cells into a gel, a nozzle writes vascular channels directly inside a dense matrix of organ building blocks made of hundreds of thousands of organoids. - How it works: Compacted organoid slurry behaves as a self-healing support; a gelatin ink is written into it at low temperature, then melted out at 37 °C to leave perfusable channels. - Paper: https://doi.org/10.1126/sciadv.aaw2459 (Science Advances) - Video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eAnrfy96j9E - Project page: https://doi.org/10.1126/sciadv.aaw2459 #### Tissue Printing (multivascular networks) — Nervous System (2019) - Type: Paper · Organisms: Cells & tissue - Idea: Algorithms that grow forms like nature can give engineered tissue the complex plumbing it needs. - What it is: Generative designs of intertwined airway and blood-vessel networks printed in soft hydrogels, including a lung-like air sac that oxygenates red blood cells as it breathes. - How it works: Projection stereolithography with food-dye photoabsorbers prints entangled vascular architectures in biocompatible PEGDA hydrogels; network topologies were generated by Nervous System with Jordan Miller's lab at Rice University. - Paper: https://doi.org/10.1126/science.aav9750 (Science 2019) - Video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bm1JzokM2Rk - Project page: https://n-e-r-v-o-u-s.com/ #### Volumetric Bioprinting of Complex Living-Tissue Constructs within Seconds — Riccardo Levato (2019) - Type: Paper · Organisms: Cells & tissue - Idea: Cure the whole volume at once and printing time stops depending on object size. - What it is: Light patterns projected into a rotating vial of cell-laden resin build a whole centimetre-scale construct in tens of seconds, with no layers. - How it works: Tomographic back-projection: a sequence of computed light patterns is projected from many angles into a rotating GelMA suspension of cells, accumulating dose where the object should solidify. - Paper: https://doi.org/10.1002/adma.201904209 (Advanced Materials) - Video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=93__9ZFI4yI - Project page: https://www.levatolab.com/ #### Bacterial Nanobionics via 3D Printing — Michael McAlpine (2018) - Type: Paper · Organisms: Bacteria & microbes - Idea: A living energy device can be printed directly onto the surface it will sit on. - What it is: Live cyanobacteria are printed in a hydrogel together with graphene electrodes onto a curved surface, including a fingertip, forming a living bio-photovoltaic patch. - How it works: Multi-nozzle printing combines a cyanobacteria-laden hydrogel with graphene nanoribbon electrodes, adapted in real time to the 3D geometry of the substrate. - Paper: https://doi.org/10.1021/acs.nanolett.8b02642 (Nano Letters) - Project page: https://mcalpinegroup.umn.edu/ #### Design by Decay, Decay by Design — Andrea Shin Ling (2018) - Type: Research prototype · Organisms: Fungi, Bacteria & microbes - Idea: Decomposition is a fabrication tool, not the end of the object. - What it is: A biofabrication method that uses controlled rot: chitosan and cellulose components are grown, colonised and partly decomposed by fungi and bacteria as part of the making process. - How it works: Cast and printed biopolymer substrates are inoculated with fungal and bacterial cultures under controlled humidity, so growth and decay together shape density, colour and strength. - Video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9qDmvXTiVlA - Project page: https://www.andrealing.com/ #### Holographic Printing of Capillary Networks and Lymph Node Organoids — Prellis Biologics (2018) - Type: Product & platform · Organisms: Cells & tissue - Idea: Print at the scale of capillaries and thick tissue can finally be fed. - What it is: Holographic light fields cure photopolymer at capillary scale, producing vessel networks a few microns wide and printed lymph-node organoids used to produce human antibodies. - How it works: A spatial light modulator projects holograms into a photosensitive resin so many voxels polymerise at once, reaching micron features fast enough for cell-safe exposure times. - Images: https://cdn.sanity.io/images/km3brrze/production/7c3deebab6b574ce1b0943968cacc7c22cf94f20-1200x630.jpg - Project page: https://www.prellisbio.com/ #### Novameat 3D Printed Whole-Cut Meat Analogue — Novameat (2018) - Type: Product & platform · Organisms: Plants - Idea: Texture, not flavour, is what a printer contributes to meat. - What it is: Plant proteins are extruded into bundles of micro-fibres tens of microns across, reproducing the grain of muscle in a printed steak that can also carry cultivated fat cells. - How it works: A micro-extrusion printhead adapted from tissue-engineering scaffolds lays down pea and rice protein filaments with controlled anisotropy, later combined with cultivated adipose cells. - Video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UA73qYxxNew - Project page: https://novameat.com/ #### A Bioprosthetic Ovary Created Using 3D Printed Microporous Scaffolds — Monica Laronda (2017) - Type: Paper · Organisms: Cells & tissue - Idea: The geometry of the scaffold, not the material, decides whether the follicles survive. - What it is: A gelatin lattice printed at specific strut angles holds ovarian follicles in place; implanted in sterilised mice, it restored hormone cycles and produced healthy pups. - How it works: Gelatin ink is printed as 30°, 60° or 90° strut lattices; the 30/60° geometry gives follicles multiple contact points, and implanted scaffolds vascularise and ovulate. - Paper: https://www.nature.com/articles/ncomms15261 (Nature Communications) - Images: https://media.springernature.com/full/springer-static/image/art%3A10.1038%2Fncomms15261/MediaObjects/41467_2017_Article_BFncomms15261_Fig1_HTML.jpg - Project page: https://www.nature.com/articles/ncomms15261 #### BIO X Desktop Bioprinter and Universal Bioink — CELLINK (2017) - Type: Product & platform · Organisms: Cells & tissue - Idea: Packaging bioprinting as an appliance is what let non-specialists start printing cells. - What it is: A bench-top bioprinter with swappable printheads, clean-chamber lighting and a touch interface, sold together with ready-made cellulose and gelatin bioinks. - How it works: Pneumatic and thermoplastic printheads extrude commercial bioinks inside a HEPA-filtered chamber with UV sterilisation, controlled through a preset-driven touchscreen. - Video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4x8rBzCMuCo - Images: https://www.cellink.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/10/BIO-X.02.jpg - Project page: https://www.cellink.com/bioprinting/bio-x/ #### Flink: 3D Printing of Bacteria into Functional Complex Materials — André R. Studart (2017) - Type: Paper · Organisms: Bacteria & microbes - Idea: Choose which bacterium goes where, and the printed object does biological work. - What it is: A hydrogel ink carrying live bacteria is printed in chosen patterns so that one species secretes cellulose for a skin graft scaffold while another degrades pollutants. - How it works: Bacteria are suspended in a biocompatible hyaluronic acid, fumed silica and κ-carrageenan ink that is shear-thinning enough to print and stiff enough to hold shape while the cells stay viable. - Paper: https://doi.org/10.1126/sciadv.aao6804 (Science Advances) - Video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=W2piUVYukyA - Project page: https://complexmaterials.ethz.ch/ #### Integrated Tissue and Organ Printing (ITOP) — Anthony Atala (2016) - Type: Paper · Organisms: Cells & tissue - Idea: Print the support structure and the cells at the same time, and size stops being the limit. - What it is: A printer that combines cell-laden hydrogel with a stiff biodegradable polymer lattice, producing human-scale ears, jaw bone and muscle that survive implantation in animals. - How it works: Multiple nozzles print PCL polymer lattices, cell-laden hydrogels and sacrificial Pluronic F-127 in one build, with microchannels left open so nutrients reach the interior. - Paper: https://www.nature.com/articles/nbt.3413 (Nature Biotechnology) - Images: https://media.springernature.com/full/springer-static/image/art%3A10.1038%2Fnbt.3413/MediaObjects/41587_2016_Article_BFnbt3413_Fig1_HTML.jpg - Project page: https://www.nature.com/articles/nbt.3413 #### Lab-on-a-Printer Microfluidic Bioprinting — Aspect Biosystems (2016) - Type: Product & platform · Organisms: Cells & tissue - Idea: Move the mixing into the nozzle and the material becomes programmable along the filament. - What it is: A printhead that is itself a microfluidic chip: cells, hydrogel and cross-linker meet inside the nozzle, so the fibre composition can change while printing. - How it works: Coaxial microfluidic channels sheath a cell-laden ink with cross-linking solution, gelling each filament on the fly and allowing switching between inks mid-print. - Images: https://aspectbiosystems.com/_images/banners/2026-Gem-2.png - Project page: https://aspectbiosystems.com/ #### Three-Dimensional Bioprinting of Thick Vascularized Tissues — Jennifer A. Lewis (2016) - Type: Paper · Organisms: Cells & tissue - Idea: Thickness is a plumbing problem, and printed plumbing plus perfusion solves it. - What it is: Printed tissue more than a centimetre thick is kept alive for six weeks by perfusing its printed vascular network on a chip, with bone cells maturing inside. - How it works: Cell-laden inks, extracellular matrix and a fugitive ink are co-printed inside a perfusion chip; after the fugitive ink is removed, endothelial cells line the channels and medium is pumped for weeks. - Paper: https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.1521342113 (PNAS) - Video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gzupnyzXdcs - Images: https://figures.semanticscholar.org/86e1896c51ac34da19a5429fb827ad0644dc2811/4-Figure3-1.png - Project page: https://lewisgroup.seas.harvard.edu/ #### FRESH: Freeform Reversible Embedding of Suspended Hydrogels — Adam Feinberg (2015) - Type: Paper · Organisms: Cells & tissue - Idea: Print soft material by printing inside something soft that lets go afterwards. - What it is: Very soft biological inks are extruded inside a bath of gelatin microparticles that holds each filament in place until the print is finished and the bath is melted away. - How it works: A slurry of gelatin microparticles acts as a Bingham plastic support bath: the nozzle moves through it freely while extruded collagen, alginate or fibrin stays put; heating to 37 °C releases the object. - Paper: https://doi.org/10.1126/sciadv.1500758 (Science Advances) - Video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SDV0thJFnpQ - Project page: https://www.cmu.edu/bme/Feinberg-Lab/ #### 3D Bioprinting of Tissues and Organs — Anthony Atala (2014) - Type: Paper · Organisms: Cells & tissue - Idea: One paper that tells a designer what bioprinting can and cannot do, and why. - What it is: The reference review of bioprinting for non-specialists: printer types, bioink requirements, resolution limits and the vascularisation problem, laid out as a design brief. - How it works: A systematic comparison of inkjet, microextrusion and laser-assisted bioprinting against the requirements of cell viability, resolution, mechanical strength and nutrient transport. - Paper: https://doi.org/10.1038/nbt.2958 (Nature Biotechnology) - Images: https://figures.semanticscholar.org/a1e8c96869c3f732aa82d2d1dd35564e2c152f77/2-Figure1-1.png - Project page: https://doi.org/10.1038/nbt.2958 #### 3D Bioprinting of Vascularized, Heterogeneous Cell-Laden Tissue Constructs — Jennifer A. Lewis (2014) - Type: Paper · Organisms: Cells & tissue - Idea: Print the plumbing first as a sacrificial ink, then wash it out to leave channels. - What it is: Several inks — cell-laden gels, an extracellular matrix and a fugitive ink that melts away — are printed together, leaving an open vascular network inside a block of living tissue. - How it works: A custom multi-material printer extrudes Pluronic F-127 fugitive ink, GelMA and cell-laden inks; cooling liquefies the fugitive ink so it can be evacuated and the channels lined with endothelial cells. - Paper: https://doi.org/10.1002/adma.201305506 (Advanced Materials) - Video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gzupnyzXdcs - Project page: https://lewisgroup.seas.harvard.edu/ #### Apple Derived Cellulose Scaffolds for 3D Mammalian Cell Culture — Andrew Pelling (2014) - Type: Paper · Organisms: Cells & tissue, Plants - Idea: A supermarket apple is a free, open-source tissue scaffold. - What it is: Apple slices are stripped of their own cells with soap and water, leaving a cellulose skeleton that human cells colonise; carved into an ear shape it grows into cartilage-like tissue. - How it works: Hypocotyl and apple tissue is decellularised in sodium dodecyl sulphate, sterilised and seeded with mammalian cells, which attach to the remaining cellulose architecture and proliferate. - Paper: https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0097835 (PLOS ONE) - Video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7LPJrzZaoZg - Images: https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article/figure/image?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0097835.g006&size=inline - Project page: https://www.pellinglab.net/ #### Bistro In Vitro — Next Nature Network (2014) - Type: Speculative design · Organisms: Cells & tissue, Animals - Idea: Design the menu before the technology arrives, so people can decide what they want from it. - What it is: A fictional restaurant and online documentary serving imagined lab-grown meat dishes, such as knitted steak, to open a public debate on in-vitro meat before it reaches the market. - How it works: Speculative dishes and a cookbook built on cultured-meat research (muscle cells grown in bioreactors), produced with Submarine Channel. - Video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9yy4EWbRO3E - Project page: https://www.biology-design.com/risd #### Water-Based Robotic Fabrication — Neri Oxman (2014) - Type: Paper · Organisms: Cells & tissue, DNA & molecules - Idea: Water, not heat, is the medium: material properties are tuned by concentration along the path. - What it is: A robotic arm extrudes chitosan and other biopolymers dissolved in water at architectural scale, varying stiffness, transparency and degradation along a single continuous print. - How it works: A multi-chamber extrusion system on a six-axis robot mixes biopolymer solutions of different concentrations on the fly, depositing functionally graded hydrogel composites that dry into rigid shells. - Paper: https://doi.org/10.1089/3dp.2014.0014 (3D Printing and Additive Manufacturing) - Images: https://figures.semanticscholar.org/f2fba0733bd2daac20ff52239f569cf82aab9d69/10-Figure5-1.png https://figures.semanticscholar.org/f2fba0733bd2daac20ff52239f569cf82aab9d69/9-Figure4-1.png - Project page: https://doi.org/10.1089/3dp.2014.0014 #### Water-based Digital Fabrication Platform — Neri Oxman, Mediated Matter Group (MIT Media Lab) (2014) - Type: Research prototype · Organisms: Animals, DNA & molecules - Idea: Use water as nature does: as the medium that builds, shapes and later dissolves structure. - What it is: A robotic platform that extrudes water-based composites of chitosan, a crustacean-derived polymer, with graded mechanical and optical properties that shape themselves as they dry. - How it works: A multi-chamber extrusion system deposits chitosan-based gels with varying concentration; hydration differences guide self-assembly. - Images: https://ars.electronica.art/starts-prize/files/2016/06/waterbased.jpg https://ars.electronica.art/starts-prize/files/2016/06/waterbased2.jpg - Project page: https://ars.electronica.art/starts-prize/en/water-based-digital-fabrication-platform/ #### exVive3D Human Liver Tissue — Organovo (2014) - Type: Product & platform · Organisms: Cells & tissue - Idea: The first commercial product made of printed living human tissue was a test object, not an implant. - What it is: Organovo printed human liver and kidney tissue from spheroids of primary cells and sold it as a service for testing drug toxicity over weeks rather than hours. - How it works: The NovoGen MMX bioprinter deposits multicellular spheroids that fuse into tissue without a scaffold, following Gabor Forgacs's principle of tissue self-assembly. - Video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=h_Sdu5pfUTI - Project page: https://organovo.com/ #### 3D Printed Bionic Ears — Michael McAlpine (2013) - Type: Paper · Organisms: Cells & tissue - Idea: Print tissue and electronics as one object instead of implanting a device into tissue. - What it is: An ear-shaped alginate scaffold with calf cartilage cells is printed around a coil of silver nanoparticle ink, producing a grown ear that picks up radio frequencies. - How it works: A 3D printer alternates a chondrocyte-laden alginate hydrogel and a silver nanoparticle ink to form an inductive coil inside the cartilage; the construct is cultured for ten weeks. - Paper: https://doi.org/10.1021/nl4007744 (Nano Letters) - Video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jjuhkpBR4bI - Project page: https://mcalpinegroup.umn.edu/ #### Circumventive Organs — Agi Haines (2013) - Type: Speculative design · Organisms: Cells & tissue, Animals - Idea: If organs can be printed from mixed cells, medicine starts designing new organs, not repairing old ones. - What it is: Three fictional organs printed from a mix of cells taken from different species and body parts, each designed to pre-empt a specific medical emergency. - How it works: Each proposal recombines known cell behaviours — electric eel electrocytes, rattlesnake muscle, tracheal cilia — into a printable organ, realised as a detailed physical model. - Images: https://static.wixstatic.com/media/82b477_fa6dda32e4534e318d9ff2b0a52f76b0.jpg/v1/fit/w_2500,h_1330,al_c/82b477_fa6dda32e4534e318d9ff2b0a52f76b0.jpg - Project page: https://www.agihaines.com/circumventive-organs #### High-Fidelity Tissue Engineering of Patient-Specific Auricles — Lawrence Bonassar (2013) - Type: Paper · Organisms: Cells & tissue - Idea: Scan the patient, print the mould, grow the part — a repeatable pipeline from body to implant. - What it is: A child's ear is 3D scanned, mirrored and printed as a mould; collagen hydrogel with cartilage cells is injected into it and cultured into an ear with the right shape and stiffness. - How it works: A 3D laser scan of the contralateral ear becomes a printed negative mould; collagen type I with bovine or human chondrocytes is injected, cross-linked and cultured up to three months. - Paper: https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0056506 (PLOS ONE) - Video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-RgI_bcETkM - Images: https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article/figure/image?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0056506.g008&size=inline - Project page: https://bonassar.research.engineering.cornell.edu/ #### Printing a Human Kidney (TED 2011) — Anthony Atala (2011) - Type: Research prototype · Organisms: Cells & tissue - Idea: Showing an organ come out of a printer changed what the public believed was buildable. - What it is: On stage at TED, Atala's team prints a kidney-shaped scaffold of cells layer by layer and he lifts the wet, finished prototype out of the printer. - How it works: A gantry bioprinter deposited layers of hydrogel and human kidney cells from a CT-derived model; the object shown was a prototype scaffold, not a transplantable kidney. - Video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9RMx31GnNXY - Project page: https://www.ted.com/talks/anthony_atala_printing_a_human_kidney #### Capacity for (Urban Eden, Human Error) — Allison Kudla (2010) - Type: Artwork · Organisms: Plants, Cells & tissue - Idea: Printing living cells hands the final form over to growth, and to error. - What it is: A robotic bioprinter that deposits living plant tissue in patterns based on urban forms, run live during the exhibition so the printed patterns grow and change daily. - How it works: A custom robotic printer lays down plant cells (likely moss or tobacco culture) in a nutrient gel along computed patterns; the cultures then grow in a sealed chamber. - Video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kpr7QXN5vyA - Project page: https://clotmag.com/biomedia/exhibition-la-fabrique-du-vivant-at-centre-pompidou-paris #### Cell and Organ Printing 1: Protein and Cell Printers — Thomas Boland (2003) - Type: Paper · Organisms: Cells & tissue - Idea: An office printer, with the ink swapped for cells, is enough to start printing tissue. - What it is: A modified Hewlett-Packard inkjet printer deposits protein and living cell suspensions in patterns, and the cells survive the printing process. - How it works: Commercial thermal inkjet cartridges were emptied and refilled with protein solutions and cell suspensions, which were printed onto gel substrates and then cultured. - Paper: https://doi.org/10.1002/ar.a.10057 (The Anatomical Record Part A) - Images: https://figures.semanticscholar.org/bf78f4fff14e17a4b294d9a98eecfdcbc9a86ef0/2-Figure1-1.png - Project page: https://doi.org/10.1002/ar.a.10057 ### Genetic & Synthetic Biology Design Designers working with genetically modified and engineered organisms: glowing plants, edited microbes, new species and their speculative futures. #### ArtSilk — ArtSilk (2026) - Type: Product & platform · Organisms: Bacteria & microbes, DNA & molecules - Idea: Copy how spiders spin, not only what they spin. - What it is: Microorganisms produce spider-silk-inspired proteins that are spun into a high-performance fibre without heat, pressure or harsh chemicals. - How it works: Recombinant spidroin proteins are expressed in microbes and spun in aqueous conditions mimicking the spider's gland. - Images: https://hmfoundation.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/06/ArtSilk_2026_GCA_winner-1.jpg https://hmfoundation.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/06/2000x1250_ArtSilk-1280x800.jpg - Project page: https://hmfoundation.com/gca/winner/artsilk/ #### BioMandate 2045 — Macromedia University Biodesign Challenge team (2025) - Type: Speculative design · Organisms: DNA & molecules, Human body - Idea: Governance, not only invention, shapes biotech futures — and it can be played. - What it is: A narrative strategy game in which the player directs a Global Biotech Regulation Agency and decides which innovations — gene editing, synthetic organisms, neural implants — get approved. - How it works: Players manage limited resources, investigate risks and balance governments, corporations and the public; each choice shifts global trust. - Video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kP2Ldarnptw - Images: https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/552dc0ffe4b070a9e1a6a215/1751485204815-VYYAXEZV2MTG757HJCZX/BDC25_Biomandate_2045_Trailer_4.png - Project page: https://zapuffi.itch.io/biomandate-2045 #### LAMP-PCR Biosensor for Heavy Metal Detection — Karolina Sulich (2025) - Type: Research prototype · Organisms: Bacteria & microbes, DNA & molecules - Idea: The microbes already living in polluted water can report on the pollution. - What it is: A portable, low-cost biosensor for citizen scientists that detects heavy-metal contamination in urban waterways such as Brooklyn's Gowanus Canal by looking for microbial genes linked to bioremediation. - How it works: Loop-mediated isothermal amplification (LAMP) amplifies target genes from environmental DNA without lab equipment. - Images: https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/552dc0ffe4b070a9e1a6a215/1751487349599-N7JCB6HB3QS641UFHXXR/PCR_March_2025.jpg https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/552dc0ffe4b070a9e1a6a215/1751487345476-6WVUWRBO3H9BM9CGJFF1/PCR+reaction-2.png - Project page: https://www.biodesignchallenge.org/new-york-university-idm-2025 #### Consume Our Consumption (Plascetamol) — Jiabao Li (2024) - Type: Speculative design · Organisms: Insects, Bacteria & microbes - Idea: If worms' microbes can digest plastic, could we borrow them? - What it is: A speculative pill, 'Plascetamol', made from the gut microbes of plastic-eating superworms, served in food performances that invite people to 'eat plastic'. Made with Anya Koehne and Annan Zuo. - How it works: Frass from Zophobas morio is cultured in carbon-free media with plastic nurdles as the only carbon source to select plastic-degrading bacteria. - Images: https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/58688c8a6a496327e937e35b/1758161729163-75WICKEV1ZTKHI3VQHBI/DSC01532.jpg https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/58688c8a6a496327e937e35b/1758161738235-KPDR7LQV4IP11S861W0I/DSC01535.jpg - Project page: https://www.jiabaoli.org/consume #### Firefly Petunia — Light Bio, Karen Sarkisyan (2024) - Type: Product & platform · Organisms: Plants - Idea: A genetically engineered organism sold for beauty, not utility, and kept on a windowsill. - What it is: A white petunia carrying a fungal bioluminescence pathway glows greenish-white from its buds and flowers, and was sold to US households as an ordinary houseplant. - How it works: Four genes of the fungus Neonothopanus nambi are inserted so the plant recycles caffeic acid into luciferin and back, producing continuous light without added chemicals. - Images: https://light.bio/cdn/shop/files/Light_Bio_-_Firefly_Petunia_photo_3_in_the_dark_-_credit_to_Light_Bio_Inc.jpg?v=1730398670&width=2000 https://light.bio/cdn/shop/files/Light_Bio_-_Firefly_Petunia_photo_3_in_daylight_-_credit_to_Light_Bio_Inc.jpg?v=1730398671&width=2000 - Project page: https://light.bio/products/firefly-petunia #### BIOMILQ — BIOMILQ (2023) - Type: Product & platform · Organisms: Cells & tissue, Human body - Idea: Separate a body function from the body and design new forms of care. - What it is: Human mammary epithelial cells are cultured in bioreactors to secrete components of human milk outside the body, as an infant-nutrition option closer to breast milk than formula. - How it works: Primary mammary cells grow on scaffolds in bioreactors and secrete milk into a collection chamber. - Video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=emaNqen1Qlg - Project page: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Index_Project #### Hybrid — Heather Dewey-Hagborg (2023) - Type: Artwork · Organisms: Animals, Human body - Idea: Interspecies genetic engineering needs public debate that includes the animals. - What it is: A documentary artwork on xenotransplantation research in which pigs are gene-edited with CRISPR to become organ donors for humans, taking viewers into the lab and to the animals. - How it works: Film and installation based on access to xenotransplant labs and interviews with scientists. - Images: https://falling-walls.com/sites/default/files/styles/slider/public/medien/4/bilder/fw23_art_and_science_mu4-edited-heather-dewey-hagborg.jpg?h=a1e1a043&itok=ZO-V9wZD - Project page: https://falling-walls.com/navigating-genetic-frontiers-heather-dewey-hagborgs-insights-xenotransplantation #### Normal Phenomena of Life — Natsai Audrey Chieza, Ginkgo Bioworks (2023) - Type: Product & platform · Organisms: Bacteria & microbes - Idea: Biotechnology needs a retail language before it becomes part of daily life. - What it is: A consumer brand built by Faber Futures with Ginkgo Bioworks that sells biodesign products — microbially dyed garments, prints, skincare — as ordinary retail rather than lab demonstrations. - How it works: The brand commissions and curates products made with biological processes — Streptomyces pigment dyeing among them — and publishes the provenance of each organism and process alongside the product. - Video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oIzinzHQcWg - Images: https://faberfutures.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/11/FF_NPOL_Website-Feature_Listing-Page_03.jpg - Project page: https://faberfutures.com/projects/normal-phenomena-of-life/ #### PLSTC — PLSTC (2022) - Type: Research prototype · Organisms: Bacteria & microbes - Idea: Plastic clothing could end its life as food. - What it is: Naturally occurring bacteria are bio-engineered to digest polyester and other plastic textile waste into its building blocks and then convert them into edible biomass. - How it works: Engineered microbes depolymerise PET and use the monomers as carbon for growth. - Images: https://hmfoundation.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/05/PLSTC1B-768x1024.jpg https://hmfoundation.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/04/PLSTC-team.jpg - Project page: https://fashiontofood.com/ #### Rubi — Rubi Laboratories (2022) - Type: Product & platform · Organisms: DNA & molecules - Idea: Make a tree's product without the tree. - What it is: Industrial CO2 is captured in a cell-free bioreactor where stabilised enzymes turn it into cellulose, which is spun into viscose- and lyocell-type fibres without wood pulp. - How it works: An enzymatic cascade inspired by plant photosynthesis builds cellulose from carbon captured at factories. - Video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rUxl6Fz-MXY - Images: https://hmfoundation.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/04/Large_Print-Rubi.jpeg https://hmfoundation.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/03/Rubi-Cellulose-Samples-578x1024.jpg - Project page: https://rubi.earth/ #### Sista-Sis Biodoula Services — Robeson High School + Aula Future + FirstHand Biodesign Challenge team (2022) - Type: Speculative design · Organisms: Human body, DNA & molecules - Idea: Biotech futures should be designed with and for the communities most failed by medicine. - What it is: In response to high maternal mortality among African-American women, high-school students imagined a community-supported doula service that includes mRNA therapies. - How it works: Speculative service design: brand, service blueprint and video around mRNA-based care. - Video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zcfsdPZ1B_8 - Project page: https://www.biodesignchallenge.org/paulrobeson-aula-firsthand-2022 #### Carbios enzymatic recycling — Carbios (2021) - Type: Product & platform · Organisms: DNA & molecules, Bacteria & microbes - Idea: An engineered enzyme can make plastic endlessly recyclable. - What it is: An optimised enzyme, derived from one found in compost, breaks PET plastic and polyester textiles down into monomers that can be repolymerised into virgin-quality PET. - How it works: A leaf-branch compost cutinase was engineered for thermostability and activity on PET. - Video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Usq7r5krxYc - Project page: https://www.carbios.com/ #### Quorum Sensing: Skin Flora Signal System — Helena Nikonole (2021) - Type: Research prototype · Organisms: Bacteria & microbes, Human body, Plants - Idea: The skin microbiome can be a terminal that smells when something is wrong. - What it is: DIY methods for modifying the skin microbiome so that bacteria produce flower scents when triggered by disease or fever, turning the skin into a diagnostic interface. - How it works: Skin bacteria are engineered with plant scent genes under disease-responsive promoters (quorum-sensing logic). - Images: https://ars.electronica.art/starts-prize/files/2022/06/quorum-1024x512.jpg - Project page: https://nikonole.com/quorumsensing #### Raaz — Foad Hamidi (2021) - Type: Artwork · Organisms: Fungi, DNA & molecules - Idea: Synthetic biology can carry culture: the work brings Islamic and Persian associations of wine into a Western-dominated bioart field. - What it is: A bioart project that encoded a Persian Sufi poem by Hafez into the DNA of living yeast and used the yeast to brew 'poetry-infused wine'. - How it works: The poem was converted to Morse code and then to DNA sequences, inserted into yeast cells and fermented; the paper pairs this with interviews with expert bioartists. - Paper: https://doi.org/10.1145/3411764.3445408 (CHI 2021) - Video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tYwyQ9cMDmk - Project page: https://doi.org/10.1145/3411764.3445408 #### Culina — Hub for Biotechnology in the Built Environment Biodesign Challenge team (2020) - Type: Speculative design · Organisms: Bacteria & microbes, Plants - Idea: The kitchen becomes a small biofactory shared by residents. - What it is: A future kitchen for apartment towers that combines traditional farming and cooking techniques with synthetic biology, including bioreactors and hydroponics built into the home. - How it works: Architectural scenarios place microbial bioreactors, fermentation rooms and hydroponic walls into a tower block. - Video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dtmQO7tlYiA - Images: https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/552dc0ffe4b070a9e1a6a215/1596228104189-LD314OZZ4EHJ1GV6HTTF/Copy+of+BIOREACTOR+1.jpeg https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/552dc0ffe4b070a9e1a6a215/1596228125618-0VK2C8CSNAJME7JVGFU4/Copy+of+Dining+Room.jpeg - Project page: http://bbe.ac.uk/index.php/culina/ #### Plants with Genetically Encoded Autoluminescence — Karen Sarkisyan (2020) - Type: Paper · Organisms: Plants - Idea: Self-sustaining plant light needs no chemical feeding, only the plant's own metabolism. - What it is: Tobacco plants given the fungal bioluminescence pathway emit light bright enough to see by eye, with the glow strongest in young leaves and flowers. - How it works: The caffeic acid cycle of Neonothopanus nambi — four enzymes that convert caffeic acid to luciferin, oxidise it and recycle the product — is expressed in Nicotiana tabacum. - Paper: https://www.nature.com/articles/s41587-020-0500-9 (Nature Biotechnology) - Images: https://media.springernature.com/full/springer-static/image/art%3A10.1038%2Fs41587-020-0500-9/MediaObjects/41587_2020_500_Fig1_HTML.png - Project page: https://www.nature.com/articles/s41587-020-0500-9 #### Death on Mars — University of Technology Sydney Biodesign Challenge team (2019) - Type: Speculative design · Organisms: Plants, DNA & molecules - Idea: A plant can become an archive and a grave at once. - What it is: A proposal for living memorials on a future Mars colony: plants whose genomes store photos, videos, recipes and stories of the dead, released when people interact with the plant. - How it works: Imagines genome editing plus a synthetic chromosome that encodes computer data in DNA. - Video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pBIPYySoRuc - Project page: https://www.biodesignchallenge.org/university-of-tech-sydney #### Resurrecting the Sublime — Alexandra Daisy Ginsberg, Christina Agapakis, Sissel Tolaas (2019) - Type: Artwork · Organisms: Plants, DNA & molecules - Idea: Bring back an extinct species not as a living organism but as a partial, uncertain sensory trace. - What it is: Installations let visitors smell flowers that humans made extinct, reconstructed from DNA in herbarium specimens, while standing among the rocks where the plants once grew. - How it works: Ginkgo Bioworks extracted DNA from herbarium samples, predicted scent-producing genes and resynthesised candidate molecules; Tolaas recombined them into smells. - Video: https://vimeo.com/326304593 - Images: https://www.daisyginsberg.com/img/work/sublime-gallery-4.jpg https://www.daisyginsberg.com/img/work/mzo_agapakis_-_daisy_ginsberg_-_tolaas__1547.jpg - Project page: https://www.daisyginsberg.com/work/resurrecting-the-sublime #### The Surrogacy (Bodies Are Not Factories) — Ani Liu (2019) - Type: Speculative design · Organisms: Animals, Cells & tissue - Idea: Reproductive technology that frees some bodies may exploit others, human or animal. - What it is: Sculptures of a pig — and later a pig uterus — pregnant with human fetuses, imagining a future in which engineered livestock incubate human children. - How it works: Based on research into interspecific pregnancy for endangered species and pig-to-human organ transplants; made as 3D-printed resin sculptures. - Images: https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/52cd9799e4b00ae3ac706ed4/c6af31d9-48d4-4f81-a240-02a444e0dfcc/DSCF0020.JPG https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/52cd9799e4b00ae3ac706ed4/1c36b796-575b-43ac-9931-c5aa4ebb7552/B745CFFD-958C-4EE7-B234-84A76A9E0BEF.JPG https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/52cd9799e4b00ae3ac706ed4/52611f4e-4d70-4516-aee0-08011085b728/Ani+Liu+Uterus+3d+print.jpg - Project page: https://ani-liu.com/the-surrogacy-pig #### BLP-2000D (Black List Printer) — BCL (Georg Tremmel & Shiho Fukuhara) (2018) - Type: Artwork · Organisms: DNA & molecules - Idea: Who is allowed to write DNA is a question of access and censorship, not only of safety. - What it is: A DIY DNA synthesiser built to print only the DNA sequences on the unofficial 'black list' that commercial synthesis companies refuse to make. - How it works: Low-cost microfluidics make DNA synthesis possible outside industry; the error-prone output produces mutated, harmless versions of blacklisted sequences. - Images: https://ars.electronica.art/starts-prize/files/2019/05/BLP_2000x1000-1024x512.jpg - Project page: https://ars.electronica.art/starts-prize/en/blp-2000-black-list-printer/ #### Other Biological Futures — Alexandra Daisy Ginsberg (2018) - Type: Book & essay · Organisms: Ecosystems - Idea: There is more than one future for biology; design can help imagine the ones industry leaves out. - What it is: A special issue of the Journal of Design and Science, co-edited with Natsai Audrey Chieza, that gathers views on biodesign beyond the promises of the biotechnology industry. - How it works: An editorial framing a collection of essays by designers, scientists and theorists. - Paper: https://doi.org/10.21428/566868b5 (Journal of Design and Science 2018) - Project page: https://doi.org/10.21428/566868b5 #### Pink Chicken Project — Nonhuman Nonsense (2018) - Type: Speculative design · Organisms: Animals, DNA & molecules - Idea: Gene editing could be used for a geological-scale protest gesture. - What it is: A proposal to genetically modify the world's chickens to have pink bones and feathers, so that the fossil marker of the Anthropocene left by 60 billion slaughtered chickens a year would be rewritten. - How it works: Proposes inserting a cochineal-derived pigment gene whose product binds with bone calcium and fossilises, spread through the population (likely via a gene drive). - Video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Xcdx2R9iS5M - Project page: https://www.biology-design.com/risd #### Spirit Molecule I — Heather Dewey-Hagborg (2018) - Type: Speculative design · Organisms: Plants, Human body, DNA & molecules - Idea: Biotechnology could become a material for grief, not only for health or profit. - What it is: A greenhouse of legal psychoactive plants and a four-channel video imagine a future ritual of mourning in which a dead person's DNA is engineered into a plant that the bereaved then consume. - How it works: Speculative narrative video and a living greenhouse installation; the engineering of human DNA into the plants is proposed, not performed; with Phillip Andrew Lewis. - Video: https://vimeo.com/293012939 - Images: https://deweyhagborg.com/media/pages/projects/spirit-molecule/38614c2a12-1643025321/img_2580crop@0-25x.jpg - Project page: https://deweyhagborg.com/projects/spirit-molecule #### Beecosystem — NYU ITP Biodesign Challenge team (2017) - Type: Speculative design · Organisms: Bacteria & microbes, Insects - Idea: One engineered microbe can serve two industries and a third species at once. - What it is: A proposal that links brewing and beekeeping: genetically modified brewer's yeast makes hop beta acids during fermentation, which can flavour beer and also protect honeybees from parasitic Varroa mites. - How it works: Brewer's yeast would be engineered with the hop pathway for beta acids, known miticides used by beekeepers. - Images: https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/552dc0ffe4b070a9e1a6a215/1498341442238-BDC145GQB2XQW508E4IJ/Screen+Shot+2017-06-24+at+5.56.37+PM.png https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/552dc0ffe4b070a9e1a6a215/1597795537044-50XZ9EINBS3KMQZ8J84H/download+%282%29.png - Project page: https://www.biodesignchallenge.org/nyu-itp #### Quantworm Mine — Liv Bargman, Nina Cutler (2017) - Type: Speculative design · Organisms: Animals, Ecosystems - Idea: A post-industrial landscape can be healed by animals that also become its new industry. - What it is: Quantworm Industries is a fictional nanotech wormery on former coal-mining sites in South Wales, where earthworms clean contaminated soil and turn heavy metals into quantum dots for solar panels. - How it works: Builds on research showing that earthworms biosynthesise cadmium telluride quantum dots from metals in soil; the project designs worm miners' tools, starter kits and a speculative supply chain. - Video: https://vimeo.com/219922957 - Images: https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/552dc0ffe4b070a9e1a6a215/1498340842422-B3HKU265C726R8752I55/Worm_miner_in_the_extracting_QD_from_hybrid_worm.jpg https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/552dc0ffe4b070a9e1a6a215/1498340886242-UM22WQBJWM3OJ7DIFUB8/Quantworm_Industries_with_QDPhotovoltaic_flags.jpg - Project page: https://www.biodesignchallenge.org/central-saint-martins #### UK 2029 — University of Edinburgh Biodesign Challenge team (2017) - Type: Speculative design · Organisms: Bacteria & microbes, Human body - Idea: Speculating on biotech is also speculating on politics: who regulates, who profits, who is left out. - What it is: A set of artefacts, photographs and texts that imagine the United Kingdom in 2029, when biotechnology has become ordinary and is shaped by the country's politics after Brexit. - How it works: Design fiction: the team produced props and scenarios for everyday biotech products in a near-future Britain. - Video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EfS-wU84WN4 - Project page: https://biodesign.eca.ed.ac.uk/ukew-2029/ #### Bento Lab — Bento Lab (2016) - Type: Product & platform · Organisms: DNA & molecules - Idea: Industrial design turns a room full of equipment into a piece of luggage. - What it is: A laptop-sized case holding a centrifuge, PCR thermocycler and blue-light gel imager, designed so DNA analysis can be done in a classroom, a field station or a kitchen. - How it works: Three miniaturised instruments share one enclosure and power supply, with a simplified interface and consumables sized for small sample numbers. - Video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-Tlq-BTE0FE - Images: https://cdn.bento.bio/app/uploads/bento_lab_product_picture-white.jpg - Project page: https://bento.bio/product/bento-lab/ #### DIY CRISPR Bacterial Gene Engineering Kit — The ODIN (2016) - Type: Product & platform · Organisms: Bacteria & microbes - Idea: Gene editing as a shelf product, which makes access — not capability — the design question. - What it is: A boxed kit with plasmids, competent E. coli, plates and reagents that lets anyone edit a bacterial gene at a kitchen table for about the price of a phone accessory. - How it works: The kit supplies a CRISPR plasmid and template DNA to change a single base in the E. coli rpsL gene, conferring streptomycin resistance as a visible selection, with protocols written for beginners. - Video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4vmHweDC5SY - Images: https://cdn11.bigcommerce.com/s-89v4ku3/products/195/images/1226/ChatGPT_Image_Mar_5_2026_02_50_27_PM__46930.1775622209.400.559.png?c=2 - Project page: https://www.the-odin.com/diy-crispr-kit/ #### Designs for Flies — Frank Kolkman (2016) - Type: Research prototype · Organisms: Insects, DNA & molecules - Idea: Research on orphan diseases could move from pharma labs into patients' homes, with flies as partners. - What it is: A DIY toolkit, developed with the Kyoto Institute of Technology's insect centre, that lets patients with rare diseases breed genetically modelled fruit flies and screen candidate drugs on them at home. - How it works: Drosophila lines carrying human disease genes are bred in custom boxes; behaviour changes under candidate compounds are recorded. - Images: https://www.dutchdesignawards.nl/wp-content/uploads/2016/05/designs-for-flies_0-1000x647.jpeg https://www.dutchdesignawards.nl/wp-content/uploads/2016/05/designs-for-flies_1-750x442.jpeg - Project page: https://www.dutchdesignawards.nl/en/gallery/designs-for-flies/ #### Forget Me Not (Biotic Yearnings) — Ani Liu (2016) - Type: Speculative design · Organisms: Plants, DNA & molecules - Idea: Instead of wearing flower scents, engineer a flower that smells like someone you lost. - What it is: A speculative synthetic-biology plant engineered to emit the body odour of a person who has died, proposing new rituals of mourning. - How it works: A design proposal: a person's scent profile would likely be analysed and matched to plant fragrance pathways that could, in theory, be engineered. - Images: https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/52cd9799e4b00ae3ac706ed4/1573146810619-22XBUHBEI37ERSDO4PVT/1.jpg https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/52cd9799e4b00ae3ac706ed4/1573146821569-KQGLR05LMJ4KLHTGXYB1/1-1.jpg https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/52cd9799e4b00ae3ac706ed4/1480401116374-P0ZRHHQ6D94CDTJAIC08/Ani+Liu+Experimental+Art+and+Olfaction2.png - Project page: https://ani-liu.com/botanyofmemory #### I'm Humanity — Etsuko Yakushimaru (2016) - Type: Artwork · Organisms: Bacteria & microbes, DNA & molecules - Idea: A living organism can be a recording medium that outlasts humanity. - What it is: A pop song whose chord progression was converted into DNA and inserted into the chromosome of the cyanobacterium Synechococcus, so the music replicates with the living microbe. - How it works: A cipher based on the codon table turned the chords into a 276-nucleotide sequence, which was synthesised and integrated into Synechococcus; the song was also released as music. - Video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=92Dcp9Fbdac - Images: https://ars.electronica.art/starts-prize/files/2017/05/imhumanity.jpg https://ars.electronica.art/starts-prize/files/2017/05/imhumanity1.jpg - Project page: https://ars.electronica.art/starts-prize/en/im-humanity/ #### MyoTomato — School of Visual Arts Biodesign Challenge team (2016) - Type: Research prototype · Organisms: Plants, DNA & molecules - Idea: A crop can be redesigned to carry the nutrition we now take from animals. - What it is: Students proposed tomatoes engineered to make myoglobin, the iron-rich protein that gives meat its colour and taste, and began inserting a beef-derived gene into tomato plants. - How it works: Agrobacterium-mediated transformation was used to insert a myoglobin DNA sequence into the tomato genome. - Video: https://vimeo.com/202106875 - Images: https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/552dc0ffe4b070a9e1a6a215/1464796965174-LJZZZ1B52VV3Y8WI1FCS/Myo-tomato005.jpg https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/552dc0ffe4b070a9e1a6a215/1464796881490-9U97HW1P4TMPG6ZKIB85/Myo-tomato003.jpg - Project page: https://www.biodesignchallenge.org/sva2016 #### Soy Leghemoglobin (Impossible Burger heme) — Impossible Foods (2016) - Type: Product & platform · Organisms: DNA & molecules, Bacteria & microbes - Idea: Identify the single molecule that reads as meat, then ferment it. - What it is: A plant protein normally found in soy root nodules is produced in engineered yeast and added to a plant burger to give it the smell, colour change and taste of cooking meat. - How it works: The soy leghemoglobin gene is expressed in Pichia pastoris yeast and the purified heme protein is blended into a plant-protein patty, where it drives Maillard reactions during frying. - Video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n6U4H8WC9jg - Project page: https://impossiblefoods.com/heme #### Tame is to Tame — Pei-Ying Lin (2016) - Type: Speculative design · Organisms: Bacteria & microbes, Human body - Idea: Replace the war metaphor for microbes with domestication. - What it is: A conceptual 'dance' between humans and viruses: a virus-taming programme based on virology research that treats viruses as partners to domesticate rather than enemies to kill. BAD Award 2016 winner, with the Viroscience lab at Erasmus MC. - How it works: Speculative programme and objects built on virology findings about virus–host co-evolution, with Miranda de Graaf. - Images: https://peiyinglin.net/images/tameistotame/000.jpg https://peiyinglin.net/images/tameistotame/001.jpg - Project page: https://peiyinglin.net/page?p=tameistotame #### The Condition — Laura Beloff (2016) - Type: Artwork · Organisms: Plants - Idea: Treat a mass-cloned Christmas tree as a postnatural organism of the future forest. - What it is: Cloned Nordmann fir Christmas trees rotate continuously in a machine that simulates microgravity, testing whether a tree bred and cloned for the market could survive changed conditions. - How it works: Genetically identical saplings from somatic embryogenesis at the University of Copenhagen are mounted on rotating clinostat-like rigs with lighting. - Images: https://hybridmatters-production.s3.eu-central-1.amazonaws.com/photo/image/5715d7b53ee3ee65f3000000/standard__DSC3034.jpg https://hybridmatters-production.s3.eu-central-1.amazonaws.com/photo/image/5715d7b53ee3ee65f3000001/standard__DSC3041.jpg - Project page: https://exhibitions.hybridmatters.net/works/the-condition #### Vespers — Neri Oxman, Mediated Matter Group (MIT Media Lab) (2016) - Type: Artwork · Organisms: Bacteria & microbes - Idea: A printed object can serve as a spatial template that tells living cells where to express colour. - What it is: Three series of 3D-printed death masks move from ancient to future: in the third series, engineered microbes inside the masks produce pigments in designed patterns. - How it works: Voxel-based multi-material printing created chemical gradients that induced engineered E. coli to express pigments locally. - Paper: https://doi.org/10.1002/adfm.201907401 (Advanced Functional Materials 2020) - Video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9g0w6rpjvvE - Images: https://dam-prod.media.mit.edu/thumb/2016/12/13/33_Mask_5_close_notext.jpg.1400x1400.jpg https://cdn.prod.website-files.com/690e0b6e2e2a0cbc45ab116e/69738dd099ab05e2609cd8d4_imgi_2_67d4aa0ca8744e9431c38d4e_vespersiii-hlm-blue-pigment-bacteria.jpg - Project page: https://www.oxman.com/projects/vespers-iii #### (Im)possible Baby — Ai Hasegawa (2015) - Type: Speculative design · Organisms: Human body, DNA & molecules - Idea: Make the speculative child concrete enough that the family, and the law, have to respond. - What it is: Using the genome data of a real same-sex couple, the project simulates the children they could have and presents them as a family photo album and a television documentary. - How it works: Consumer genotyping data from both partners is combined to predict plausible offspring traits, which are used to generate portraits and staged family scenes, aired on NHK in Japan. - Video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Bz933usY7E8 - Project page: https://www.japansociety.org/ #### Engineer-it Kit and Amino Labs Minilab — Amino Labs (2015) - Type: Product & platform · Organisms: Bacteria & microbes - Idea: Design the whole beginner experience, and genetic engineering becomes teachable in a classroom. - What it is: A set of desktop appliances and cartridge-style kits guide a beginner through transforming bacteria to produce a coloured pigment over four days. - How it works: The DNA Playground incubator-cooler, sterile pre-poured plates and freeze-dried reagents remove wet-lab set-up; students transform E. coli with pigment plasmids and read results by colour. - Video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZADzCQValI0 - Images: https://amino.bio/cdn/shop/files/allkits_18ab326a-fe5a-4f52-99bf-57f2437646d8_1024x1024.png?v=1614278632 - Project page: https://amino.bio/ #### An Ecosystem of Excess — Pinar Yoldas (2014) - Type: Speculative design · Organisms: Animals, Ecosystems - Idea: Imagine what evolution does with our pollution. - What it is: A speculative set of new organisms imagined to evolve in the plastic-filled Pacific garbage patch, with organs that sense, digest or display plastic. - How it works: Sculpted specimens and illustrations of speculative organisms, grounded in research on plastic-degrading microbes. - Images: https://payload.cargocollective.com/1/0/10589/10336044/prt_450x301_1443471010_2x.jpg - Project page: https://www.pinaryoldas.info/Ecosystem-of-Excess-2014 #### Animal-Free Whey Protein — Perfect Day (2014) - Type: Product & platform · Organisms: DNA & molecules, Bacteria & microbes - Idea: Keep the molecule, drop the animal: the product tastes the same because the protein is the same. - What it is: Whey protein identical to cow's milk protein is produced by engineered fungi in fermentation tanks, and sold inside ice cream, milk and protein powders. - How it works: The bovine beta-lactoglobulin gene is expressed in Trichoderma fungi fed sugar; the secreted protein is purified and used as a drop-in dairy ingredient. - Video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wjAv24vhKmM - Project page: https://perfectday.com/ #### Designing Synthetic Biology — Christina Agapakis (2014) - Type: Paper · Organisms: Bacteria & microbes - Idea: The metaphors a field designs with decide the organisms it produces. - What it is: An essay arguing that synthetic biology's engineering metaphors — parts, circuits, chassis — are design choices, and that collaboration with designers changes what gets built. - How it works: A critical review from inside the field, comparing engineering-driven abstraction with design and craft practices, drawing on the author's residencies with artists and designers. - Paper: https://doi.org/10.1021/sb4001068 (ACS Synthetic Biology) - Project page: https://doi.org/10.1021/sb4001068 #### Synthetic Aesthetics: Investigating Synthetic Biology's Designs on Nature — Alexandra Daisy Ginsberg (2014) - Type: Book & essay · Organisms: Bacteria & microbes - Idea: Put scientists and designers together early, and let each question the other's idea of design. - What it is: A book (MIT Press) from a programme that paired synthetic biologists with artists and designers, with essays on how synthetic biology designs living things. - How it works: Edited volume by Ginsberg, Jane Calvert, Pablo Schyfter, Alistair Elfick and Drew Endy, documenting paired residencies and critical essays. - Images: https://www.daisyginsberg.com/img/work/syn_aesthetics_cover.jpg https://www.daisyginsberg.com/img/work/synthetic_aesthetics_2.jpg - Project page: https://www.daisyginsberg.com/work/synthetic-aesthetics #### The Economics of Evolution: The Perfect Pigeon — Studio PSK (2014) - Type: Speculative design · Organisms: Animals - Idea: Markets are now an evolutionary force. - What it is: A near-future scenario in which pigeons are bred as tamper-proof biological couriers for biotech companies, showing how economic pressure could replace natural selection. BAD Award 2014 winner, with the University of Groningen. - How it works: Props, images and narrative built with evolutionary ecologist Jan Komdeur on selective breeding and pigeon genetics. - Images: https://www.badaward.nl/imager/assets/site/482/STUDIOPSK1_a5a12f426a1ab11909951db4fe37df8f.jpg https://www.badaward.nl/imager/assets/site/372/15897462326_37b42203c9_o_a5a12f426a1ab11909951db4fe37df8f.jpg - Project page: https://www.badaward.nl/artists-scientists/studio-psk #### The In Vitro Meat Cookbook — Next Nature Network (2014) - Type: Book & essay · Organisms: Cells & tissue, Animals - Idea: Recipes make an abstract technology concrete enough to argue about. - What it is: A speculative cookbook in which lab-grown meat is the recurring ingredient, with essays by scientists, chefs and philosophers, used to open public debate on cultured meat. - How it works: Design fiction: imagined dishes (meat ice cream, knitted meat) are illustrated and paired with scientific commentary. - Images: https://www.dutchdesignawards.nl/wp-content/uploads/2014/07/the-in-vitro-meat-cookbook_0-1500x882.jpg https://www.dutchdesignawards.nl/wp-content/uploads/2014/07/the-in-vitro-meat-cookbook_1-1500x882.jpg - Project page: https://www.dutchdesignawards.nl/en/gallery/the-in-vitro-meat-cookbook/ #### The Smell of Us — iGEM Paris Bettencourt (2014) - Type: Research prototype · Organisms: Bacteria & microbes, Human body - Idea: Body odour is designed by the skin microbiome, so design the microbiome. - What it is: A probiotic alternative to antibacterial deodorants, with a BioBrick smell library for mixing 'genetic perfumes' and a CRISPR method to isolate naturally odourless skin bacteria. - How it works: Scent-pathway parts and CRISPR-based selection were built for skin commensals. - Images: https://static.igem.org/mediawiki/2014/b/b1/Smelltheroses.png - Project page: https://2014.igem.org/Team:Paris_Bettencourt #### Wanderers: An Astrobiological Exploration — Neri Oxman, Mediated Matter Group (MIT Media Lab), OXMAN (2014) - Type: Speculative design · Organisms: Bacteria & microbes - Idea: A garment can be a portable ecosystem that keeps its wearer alive. - What it is: Four 3D-printed wearables designed for other planets; Mushtari has 58 m of internal channels meant to host microbes that turn sunlight into food and useful compounds for the wearer. - How it works: Generative growth algorithms produced the forms; multi-material printing made fluid channels designed for co-cultures of photosynthetic cyanobacteria and E. coli. - Paper: https://doi.org/10.1089/3dp.2016.0027 (3D Printing and Additive Manufacturing 2016) - Video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6zMlowpj3Ko - Images: https://dam-prod.media.mit.edu/thumb/2017/10/13/wanderers01.jpg.1400x1400.jpg https://dam-prod.media.mit.edu/thumb/files/Display/mushtari.png.1400x1400.png - Project page: https://www.media.mit.edu/projects/wanderers/overview/ #### Designing for the Sixth Extinction — Alexandra Daisy Ginsberg (2013) - Type: Speculative design · Organisms: Ecosystems, Bacteria & microbes - Idea: Before engineering a fix for biodiversity loss, ask what kind of nature it would produce. - What it is: Imagines synthetic organisms released into the wild to stand in for the ecological work of lost species, and asks whether nature designed by industry could still be called nature. - How it works: Speculative field-guide specimens and renderings of engineered organisms, each with a function such as bioremediation or seed dispersal. - Images: https://www.daisyginsberg.com/img/work/extinction-gallery-16.jpg https://www.daisyginsberg.com/img/work/extinction-gallery-1.jpg - Project page: https://www.daisyginsberg.com/work/designing-for-the-sixth-extinction #### Glowing Plant — Glowing Plant (Taxa Biotechnologies) (2013) - Type: Product & platform · Organisms: Plants - Idea: Synthetic biology sold directly to consumers, before anyone had made it work. - What it is: A Kickstarter campaign promised backers seeds of a glowing Arabidopsis engineered with firefly and bacterial luciferase genes; it raised over $480,000 and never shipped a plant that visibly glowed. - How it works: Luciferase gene constructs were designed in Genome Compiler and transformed into Arabidopsis thaliana; light output stayed far below what the renderings promised, and the company later pivoted to a scented moss. - Video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_CQZVWwiPbE - Project page: https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/antonyevans/glowing-plants-natural-lighting-with-no-electricit #### I Wanna Deliver a Dolphin… — Ai Hasegawa (2013) - Type: Speculative design · Organisms: Animals, Human body - Idea: Speculative reproduction scenarios can reveal how we value other species. - What it is: A woman gestates and gives birth to an endangered Maui's dolphin, which could then be raised or eaten, as a response to overpopulation and the wish to have a child. - How it works: A proposed synthetic placenta would let a human womb support a dolphin fetus; presented as film and objects. - Images: https://www.kontejner.org/images/modules/tn_large_landscape_1609597134-_dsf1790.jpg - Project page: https://www.dezeen.com/2013/11/18/i-wanna-deliver-a-dolphin-synthetic-biology-concept-humans-giving-birth-to-food-by-ai-hasegawa/ #### Nano Supermarket — Next Nature Network (2013) - Type: Speculative design · Organisms: DNA & molecules, Animals - Idea: Put future products on a shelf so people can decide before they arrive. - What it is: A travelling supermarket stocked with speculative products based on emerging nano- and biotechnologies, where visitors vote on which futures they want. - How it works: Designers contribute product prototypes and packaging; a mobile shop and voting system gather public responses. - Images: https://www.dutchdesignawards.nl/wp-content/uploads/2014/08/nano-supermarket_0-1500x882.jpg https://www.dutchdesignawards.nl/wp-content/uploads/2014/08/nano-supermarket_4-1500x882.jpg - Project page: https://www.dutchdesignawards.nl/en/gallery/nano-supermarket/ #### Seasons of the Void — Alexandra Daisy Ginsberg, Sascha Pohflepp (2013) - Type: Speculative design · Organisms: Bacteria & microbes - Idea: If astronauts need GM food, it must also satisfy desire, not just engineering specs. - What it is: Designed fruits for a crewed voyage to Mars, grown by redesigned microorganisms that feed on electricity from sunlight, presented as a catalogue of specimens and journeys. - How it works: Speculative objects and images based on electrosynthesis research, in which microbes fix carbon using electrical current instead of photosynthesis; commissioned by the EDF Foundation. - Images: http://thisisalive.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/04/Seasons-of-the-Void-catalog-Fruit-760x541.png http://thisisalive.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/04/Seasons-of-the-Void-catalog-Journey-760x411.png - Project page: http://thisisalive.com/seasons-of-the-void/ #### The New Weathermen — David Benqué (2013) - Type: Speculative design · Organisms: Bacteria & microbes, Plants - Idea: Synthetic biology tools can serve ideology, including activist ideology. - What it is: Test rigs and small experiments attributed to a fictional eco-activist group that uses synthetic biology to force radical environmental change, blurring activism and crime. - How it works: Design fiction built from DIY-biology equipment and props that hint at larger plans, drawing on biopunk, open-science and Anonymous-style networks. - Video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GXjq_1Jd8a0 - Images: https://davidbenque.com/projects/the-new-weathermen/cover.jpg - Project page: https://davidbenque.com/projects/the-new-weathermen/ #### Zero Park — Sascha Pohflepp (2013) - Type: Speculative design · Organisms: Ecosystems, Plants - Idea: The same landscape can be conservation and industrial infrastructure at once. - What it is: A narrated diaphanorama of a restored wilderness in northern California that, as the narrator talks, turns out to be an engineered ecosystem designed to produce rocket fuel for a private spaceflight. - How it works: A 19th-century diaphanorama device combines a translucent landscape image with changing light and a voice-over whose speaker could be naturalist, synthetic biologist or tech CEO. - Video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2zgs-5TL3mc - Project page: https://dublin.sciencegallery.com/growyourown/zeropark #### BioDesign: Nature + Science + Creativity — William Myers (2012) - Type: Book & essay · Organisms: Ecosystems - Idea: Biodesign means using living processes in the work itself, not only imitating nature's forms. - What it is: A book (MoMA / Thames & Hudson) surveying over 70 projects that integrate living organisms into architecture, design and art; it helped name and define the field of biodesign. - How it works: A curated survey with case studies and interviews, updated in a 2018 edition. - Images: https://static.wixstatic.com/media/ed6edc_1b2898bda8bc44dfb8403afdae21109c%7Emv2.jpg/v1/fit/w_2500,h_1330,al_c/ed6edc_1b2898bda8bc44dfb8403afdae21109c%7Emv2.jpg - Project page: https://www.biology-design.com/ #### Plastic Republic — iGEM Team UCL London (2012) - Type: Speculative design · Organisms: Bacteria & microbes, Ecosystems - Idea: A cleanup idea can also be a satire of land and ownership. - What it is: A proposal to engineer marine bacteria with stronger adhesion so their biofilms gather ocean microplastics into 'plastic islands', with a design fiction selling them as new land. - How it works: Roseobacter and E. coli adhesion genes were proposed to aggregate particles into biofilm rafts. - Images: https://static.igem.org/mediawiki/2012/c/c5/Ucl2012-landforsalebanner.jpg - Project page: https://2012.igem.org/Team:UCL_London #### Post Natural History — Vincent Fournier (2012) - Type: Artwork · Organisms: Animals - Idea: Present engineered species in the neutral language of a natural history museum to make them feel real. - What it is: A photographic archive of imagined 'neo-beings': animals redesigned by synthetic biology and tissue engineering to cope with climate change, each shown with a short scientific label, including a semi-robotic jellyfish drone that waters drought-stricken land. - How it works: Staged photographs and 3D-printed specimens combine real animals with digitally added traits; labels are written with advice from scientists. - Video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XomQ2nkQ20Q - Images: http://thisisalive.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/03/post-natural-history-1.jpg http://thisisalive.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/04/RoboticJellyfish-760x547.jpg - Project page: http://thisisalive.com/post-natural-history/ #### The Rise and Fall of Rayfish Footwear — Next Nature Network (2012) - Type: Speculative design · Organisms: Animals, DNA & molecules - Idea: A convincing fiction can reveal how readily people accept engineered animals as products. - What it is: A fake company that claimed to grow personalised sneakers from genetically engineered stingrays whose skin patterns customers could design online; the hoax and its staged collapse became a documentary. - How it works: Website, ads and videos for a fictional 'bio-customisation' service, run as a campaign with Ton Meijdam and Floris Kaayk and later revealed as design fiction. - Video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gVk_Vw1C7cs - Project page: https://www.biology-design.com/biodesign-rotterdam #### All That I Am — Koby Barhard (2011) - Type: Speculative design · Organisms: Animals, DNA & molecules - Idea: Three online services are enough to turn a celebrity's hair into made-to-order animals. - What it is: Hair said to be Elvis Presley's, bought on eBay, is sequenced and used to order transgenic 'Elvis mouse models', which are shown in cages staging episodes of his life, such as a distorting mirror for fame. - How it works: Chains commercial DNA sequencing, trait analysis and transgenic mouse-model services; the cages are designed environments that mirror nurture alongside nature. - Video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uSw60KwHWxo - Project page: https://dublin.sciencegallery.com/growyourown/alliam #### AuxIn — iGEM Team Imperial College London (2011) - Type: Research prototype · Organisms: Bacteria & microbes, Plants - Idea: Design a microbe as a gardener for eroding soil. - What it is: Engineered E. coli that swim toward plant roots, secrete the hormone auxin to boost root growth against soil erosion, and carry a containment module. - How it works: Three modules: Phyto-Route (chemotaxis to roots), Auxin Xpress (auxin synthesis) and Gene Guard (containment). - Video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=klKg9Q1OS2g - Images: https://static.igem.org/mediawiki/2011/a/a7/New_storyboard_v2-08.png - Project page: https://2011.igem.org/Team:Imperial_College_London #### Banana Bacteria — C-Lab (Laura Cinti & Howard Boland) (2011) - Type: Artwork · Organisms: Bacteria & microbes - Idea: Changing how a microbe smells changes how we feel about it. - What it is: An olfactory installation of flasks of E. coli engineered to lose their usual foul smell and produce the scent of banana oil instead. - How it works: Uses the MIT iGEM 2006 BioBrick (BBa_J45250) in an odourless knockout strain; adding isoamyl alcohol lets the bacteria convert it to isoamyl acetate, the banana-scented ester. - Images: https://firebasestorage.googleapis.com/v0/b/c-lab-fe10d.appspot.com/o/userdata%2Fprojects%2Fbananabacteria00.jpg?alt=media&token=cf5d32d3-04d9-4a62-aa2b-886e3ebef0e4 - Project page: http://c-lab.co.uk/projects/banana_bacteria #### Glowing Sushi Cooking Show — Center for Genomic Gastronomy (Zack Denfeld & Cathrine Kramer) (2011) - Type: Artwork · Organisms: Animals - Idea: Serve the genetically modified organism that is already legal and watch the argument change. - What it is: A cooking show in which fluorescent GM aquarium fish are prepared as sushi, using a pet-shop transgenic animal to make debates about GM food edible. - How it works: GloFish bought as pets are filleted and served under UV light in a performed cooking show, with the legal and regulatory status of each organism discussed as part of the recipe. - Video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dxJWngFe00E - Project page: https://genomicgastronomy.com/ #### Packaging That Creates Its Contents — IDEO (2011) - Type: Speculative design · Organisms: Bacteria & microbes - Idea: Packaging could be the product: the container grows the drink and then disappears. - What it is: A concept for a probiotic drink whose cup is formed by light-responsive bacteria; the dormant cup comes alive when filled with water, produces the drink and later composts. - How it works: Imagines engineered bacteria that aggregate into a solid cup under a specific light wavelength (likely building on light-control work in Wendell Lim's UCSF lab), then metabolise when rehydrated. - Images: http://thisisalive.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/04/10_Packaging_Creates_Contents_1-760x506.jpg http://thisisalive.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/04/11_Packaging_Creates_Contents_2.jpg - Project page: http://thisisalive.com/packaging-that-creates-its-contents/ #### E.glowli — iGEM Team Cambridge (2010) - Type: Research prototype · Organisms: Bacteria & microbes, DNA & molecules - Idea: Engineered microbes can be a designed light source. - What it is: A set of BioBricks enabling bioluminescence in E. coli in many colours, for biosensor reporters and as light sources, shown in a bacterial 'bubble lamp' and photos lit only by bacteria. - How it works: Luciferase genes from fireflies and bacteria were standardised and tuned for different colours. - Images: https://static.igem.org/mediawiki/2010/7/70/Front.jpg - Project page: https://2010.igem.org/Team:Cambridge #### Half Life Lamp — Joris Laarman (2010) - Type: Research prototype · Organisms: Cells & tissue, DNA & molecules - Idea: A product could be alive, need care and eventually die, instead of using electricity. - What it is: A lamp whose light source is a culture of genetically modified cells that glow when fed their substrate, made with the University of Twente. - How it works: A Chinese hamster ovary (CHO) cell line carrying the firefly luciferase gene emits light when the substrate luciferin is added. - Video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=edC9s3Hx9wU - Images: https://www.jorislaarman.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/11/half-life-web-5.jpg - Project page: https://www.jorislaarman.com/work/half-life/ #### Pigeon d'Or — Revital Cohen & Tuur Van Balen (2010) - Type: Speculative design · Organisms: Bacteria & microbes, Animals - Idea: Use an urban animal as a platform for synthetic biology to question who designs the city's metabolism. - What it is: Tuur Van Balen designed bacteria that, fed to city pigeons, would turn their droppings into soap, plus a windowsill pigeon house for the process. - How it works: With biochemist James Chappell, bacteria were engineered to produce lipase and lower pH in the pigeon gut; a domestic 'pigeon-house' interface was prototyped. - Video: https://vimeo.com/17574292 - Images: https://www.cohenvanbalen.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/09/100403_tuur_5D_0082.jpg - Project page: https://www.cohenvanbalen.com/work/pigeon-dor #### Plant Fiction — Troika (2010) - Type: Speculative design · Organisms: Plants - Idea: Imagined plant species expose how utilitarian our view of nature is. - What it is: Five fictional plant species placed in a near-future London, each designed to fix a human-made problem, such as Agave Autovora, a plant that digests itself into biofuel. - How it works: Speculative specimens and narratives: plants that turn into biofuel, secrete security pigments, sense airborne viruses or recover gold from electronic waste. - Images: http://thisisalive.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/03/IM_TROIKA_PLANT_FICTION_Selfeaterjpg-760x796.jpg - Project page: http://thisisalive.com/plant-fiction-weeping-thief/ #### iGarden — iGEM Team Harvard (2010) - Type: Research prototype · Organisms: Plants, DNA & molecules - Idea: Imagine synthetic biology as home gardening. - What it is: A BioBrick toolkit for engineering garden plants via Agrobacterium, with a 'genetic fence' against gene spread and parts for new flavours, allergen knockdown and petal colour. - How it works: Plant expression parts were built for Arabidopsis and strawberry with containment logic. - Images: https://static.igem.org/mediawiki/2010/2/2d/Harvard2010igardenbanner.png - Project page: https://2010.igem.org/Team:Harvard #### Common Flowers / Flower Commons — BCL (Georg Tremmel & Shiho Fukuhara) (2009) - Type: Artwork · Organisms: Plants - Idea: If a company patents a living thing, cloning it in a kitchen is a political act. - What it is: BCL bought Suntory's genetically modified blue carnation, cloned it from cut flowers with a kitchen tissue-culture protocol, and released the plants and the method as a commons. - How it works: Cut Moondust carnations are surface-sterilised and propagated in vitro on home-made media; the resulting plants are distributed with the protocol so others can reproduce the GM organism. - Video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VhzRSjDUciE - Project page: https://bcl.io/ #### Designs for an Overpopulated Planet: Foragers — Dunne & Raby (Anthony Dunne & Fiona Raby) (2009) - Type: Speculative design · Organisms: Human body, Bacteria & microbes - Idea: Take matters into your own gut: DIY biology as survival equipment. - What it is: Prototypes of digestive devices for people who, facing food scarcity, use synthetic biology and animal digestion to extract nutrition from roadside plants. - How it works: Each foraging device combines mechanical processing with cultures and enzymes borrowed from ruminants and microbes, presented as worn prototypes with a field film. - Video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gjEaIiCzMnQ - Project page: https://dunneandraby.co.uk/ #### E. chromi — Alexandra Daisy Ginsberg (2009) - Type: Speculative design · Organisms: Bacteria & microbes - Idea: Designers can work inside a synthetic biology project and show its possible futures before the technology is finished. - What it is: With James King and the Cambridge iGEM 2009 team, Ginsberg helped engineer E. coli that produce visible colours, then designed scenarios for coloured bacteria, such as a yoghurt whose bacteria colour faeces to signal disease. - How it works: Standard BioBrick genetic parts were combined so E. coli express pigments of different colours in response to chemical signals. - Video: https://vimeo.com/19759432 - Images: https://www.daisyginsberg.com/img/work/echromi-gallery-1.jpg https://www.daisyginsberg.com/img/work/echromi-gallery-3.jpg - Project page: https://www.daisyginsberg.com/work/echromi-living-colour-from-bacteria #### Genspace Community Biology Lab — Genspace (2009) - Type: Product & platform · Organisms: Bacteria & microbes - Idea: A membership lab is the infrastructure that lets non-scientists design with life. - What it is: The first community biolab open to the public: a BSL-1 space in Brooklyn where artists, designers, students and amateurs run biotechnology projects with shared equipment and supervision. - How it works: Genspace runs a certified biosafety level 1 lab with classes, residencies and open nights, so projects that need sterile technique and equipment do not need a university affiliation. - Images: https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/588b7cc315d5dbdea1425e5e/45081f2d-2c8a-497a-9842-25822a1536be/Website+Banner+.png - Project page: https://www.genspace.org/about #### Growth Assembly — Alexandra Daisy Ginsberg, Sascha Pohflepp (2009) - Type: Speculative design · Organisms: Plants - Idea: If plants can grow our products, the factory becomes a field and the supply chain becomes seasonal. - What it is: A set of botanical-style illustrations shows a future in which product parts, such as a herbicide sprayer, are grown by engineered plants and assembled by hand. - How it works: Speculative design using scientific illustration to depict plants engineered to grow product components. - Video: https://vimeo.com/7009032 - Images: https://www.daisyginsberg.com/img/work/growth-gallery-8.jpg https://www.daisyginsberg.com/img/work/growth-gallery-2.jpg - Project page: https://www.daisyginsberg.com/work/growth-assembly #### The Synthetic Kingdom — Alexandra Daisy Ginsberg (2009) - Type: Speculative design · Organisms: Bacteria & microbes, Human body - Idea: Imagine the side effects of a technology, not only its intended uses. - What it is: Proposes a new branch on the tree of life for engineered organisms and imagines their unintended side effects on bodies and landscapes. - How it works: Speculative objects and a taxonomic diagram present consequences of synthetic organisms escaping into the world. - Video: https://vimeo.com/5271766 - Images: https://www.daisyginsberg.com/img/work/synking-gallery-1.jpg https://www.daisyginsberg.com/img/work/synking-gallery-2.jpg - Project page: https://www.daisyginsberg.com/work/synthetic-kingdom #### Life Support — Revital Cohen & Tuur Van Balen (2008) - Type: Speculative design · Organisms: Animals - Idea: Asking animals to replace medical machines shows how we already use them as devices. - What it is: Revital Cohen proposed that retired working animals, such as racing greyhounds and farm sheep, could become companions that also act as a patient's breathing aid or dialysis machine. - How it works: Speculative design with photographs and prototypes: a greyhound whose breathing would drive a patient's ventilator and a sheep proposed as an external dialysis companion; the medical mechanisms are hypothetical. - Images: https://www.cohenvanbalen.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/09/ventilation-dog.jpg - Project page: https://www.cohenvanbalen.com/work/life-support #### Nanotopia, from the Future Farm project — Michael Burton (2006) - Type: Speculative design · Organisms: Human body, Cells & tissue - Idea: When bodies can grow products, bodies become a new kind of farmland, with all its inequalities. - What it is: A speculative scenario in which nanotechnology that controls cell growth widens the gap between rich and poor: the rich grow cosmetic features such as long eyelashes, while the poor turn their bodies into farms for pharmaceutical products. - How it works: Photographs and prosthetics made with human hair depict bodies used to cultivate stem cells from fat tissue and other clinical products. - Images: https://www.moma.org/interactives/exhibitions/2008/elasticmind/assets/images/Nanotopia/Nanotopia.jpg - Project page: https://www.moma.org/interactives/exhibitions/2008/elasticmind/ #### Biopresence — BCL (Georg Tremmel & Shiho Fukuhara), Joe Davis (2005) - Type: Artwork · Organisms: Plants, DNA & molecules - Idea: A grave that grows, with the person's code written into non-coding DNA. - What it is: A service proposing living memorials: a person's DNA is encoded into the genome of a tree using Joe Davis's transcription method, making the tree a carrier of memory without changing how it grows. - How it works: Human DNA sequence is translated by Davis's DNA Manifold algorithm into a sequence inserted into the tree genome at sites chosen to leave phenotype unchanged; the project was framed as a commercial service. - Video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hjrY36VD82I - Project page: https://bcl.io/ #### MyBio — Elio Caccavale (2005) - Type: Speculative design · Organisms: Animals, DNA & molecules - Idea: Familiar toy forms can make engineered animals discussable at home. - What it is: A set of soft toys of genetically modified and cloned animals, such as a glowing GFP bunny, a spider goat that makes silk protein in its milk and a bioreactor cow, meant to help children discuss biotechnology. - How it works: Nylon and polyester plush figures based on real transgenic and xenotransplantation research animals, each with a story of its genetic modification. - Images: https://www.moma.org/interactives/exhibitions/2008/elasticmind/assets/images/MyBioBunny/mybioglowingrabbit.jpg https://www.moma.org/interactives/exhibitions/2008/elasticmind/assets/images/MyBioSpiderGoat/mybiospidergoat.jpg https://www.moma.org/interactives/exhibitions/2008/elasticmind/assets/images/MyBioreactorCow/mybiobioreactor.jpg - Project page: https://www.moma.org/interactives/exhibitions/2008/elasticmind/ #### GloFish — Yorktown Technologies (GloFish) (2003) - Type: Product & platform · Organisms: Animals - Idea: A research organism became an ornament, and regulation had to catch up with the aquarium trade. - What it is: Fluorescent transgenic zebrafish, first engineered in Singapore as water pollution sensors, were licensed and sold in US pet shops as the first genetically modified pet. - How it works: Zebrafish carry fluorescent protein genes from jellyfish and coral under constitutive promoters, so the colour is inherited; the line was commercialised without FDA objection in 2003. - Video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Kn-eQFbrXiI - Project page: https://www.glofish.com/ #### The Cactus Project — C-Lab (Laura Cinti & Howard Boland) (2001) - Type: Artwork · Organisms: Plants, DNA & molecules - Idea: Transgenic art can make the paradoxes of genetic engineering visible and uncomfortable. - What it is: A living artwork in which a human keratin gene was introduced into cacti, with the aim of making the plants grow hair-like structures in place of spines. - How it works: A disarmed Agrobacterium tumefaciens strain (LBA4404) carried the keratin construct into cactus tissue; transformed shoots were regenerated on hormone media and confirmed by PCR and Southern blot. - Images: http://thisisalive.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/03/CactusProject42_42-760x895.jpg - Project page: http://thisisalive.com/the-cactus-project/ ### Bio Art Art that uses living tissue, cells, bacteria or genes as its medium. #### Salivations — Orkan Telhan (2025) - Type: Artwork · Organisms: Bacteria & microbes, Animals - Idea: Shared saliva as evidence of shared life: a microbiome as a record of migration. - What it is: Chewing gum chewed by four displaced dogs is cast into architectural forms and paired with DNA sequencing of the microbes that the dogs and their humans share. - How it works: Gum chewed by the dogs is collected, sterilised and formed into structures with the architecture collective elii; DNA from the samples is sequenced to identify shared oral microbiota. - Images: https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5258ba2be4b0804fa254bd19/1754594952210-4HY9KGSS6DBR5WNOPU9A/salivations03.png - Project page: https://www.orkantelhan.com/salivations #### Untitled (The Days Are Long But The Years Are Short) — Ani Liu (2025) - Type: Artwork · Organisms: Human body - Idea: A body cast in its own milk slowly burns away, like the time of early parenthood. - What it is: Two candles made of beeswax and breast milk, cast directly from the artist's breasts while she was lactating, kept burning so they change continuously. - How it works: Beeswax mixed with breast milk is cast from body moulds and fitted with cotton wicks. - Images: https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/52cd9799e4b00ae3ac706ed4/e97877ad-30e8-4bf6-888a-9a0692aa5b50/IMG_8755.JPG https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/52cd9799e4b00ae3ac706ed4/52b01761-74fe-411d-9806-9fb4f09678ad/Ani+Liu+breasts+on+wall.JPG https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/52cd9799e4b00ae3ac706ed4/04fbca2a-a123-4f34-857c-c0b7bc26b5e6/Ani+Liu+Breast+2.JPG - Project page: https://ani-liu.com/breasts-in-flux #### 'イ'(1926) by BioLuminescent Bacteria — Takumi Saeki (2024) - Type: Artwork · Organisms: Bacteria & microbes - Idea: An image with a lifespan: media history re-rendered in a living display. - What it is: The katakana 'イ', the first image Kenjiro Takayanagi showed on a CRT television in 1926, silkscreen-printed onto agar with bioluminescent bacteria as ink; it glows, then fades and vanishes as the bacteria grow and die. - How it works: Digital silkscreen printing deposits luminous bacteria on agar media; the image is photographed over 12 to 48 hours as it develops. - Paper: https://doi.org/10.1145/3623509.3635320 (TEI 2024) - Project page: https://doi.org/10.1145/3623509.3635320 #### Gift — Jiabao Li (2024) - Type: Artwork · Organisms: Cells & tissue, Human body - Idea: Return to a mother, cell by cell, the heart she once grew in her womb. - What it is: The artist grew heart cells from stem cells in her menstrual blood and bioprinted a heart structure for them — a gift to her mother, who had developed heart disease. - How it works: Menstrual-derived stem cells are differentiated into cardiomyocytes and seeded into a 3D bioprinted heart scaffold. - Images: https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/58688c8a6a496327e937e35b/67349179-d419-4b3d-b8f0-6ff307904448/Jiabao+Li+Duende+146.jpg https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/58688c8a6a496327e937e35b/f1794ba2-562b-4aff-bdc9-6fce1bdc6b5f/Jiabao+Li+Duende+147.jpg https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/58688c8a6a496327e937e35b/26f2a861-79de-4294-924e-6fd059675e2e/%E7%A4%BC%E7%89%A9.jpg - Project page: https://www.jiabaoli.org/gift #### Mold Printer — Valentin Postl (2024) - Type: Research prototype · Organisms: Fungi - Idea: Machine precision draws the plan; fungal growth finishes the picture. - What it is: A modified 3D printer that deposits invisible mould spores onto growth medium, so computer drawings slowly reveal themselves as coloured fungal growth over days. - How it works: A modified 3D printer deposits spores of two non-toxic mould species on agar along a computer drawing; growth, colour and species interaction shape the final image. - Paper: https://doi.org/10.1145/3623509.3633396 (TEI 2024) - Images: https://biodigitalviz.github.io/images/mold_printer.png - Project page: https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3623509.3633396 #### Sentient Clit: The Pussification of BioTech — Jiabao Li (2024) - Type: Artwork · Organisms: Cells & tissue, Neurons & organoids - Idea: If bioprinted organs can respond neurally, who can consent for them? - What it is: With WhiteFeather Hunter, the artist bioprinted clitoris forms seeded with cells derived from menstrual fluid, and discussed them through video performance and online platforms such as OnlyFans. - How it works: Stem cells from menstrual fluid are 3D bioprinted into clitoris shapes in support gel; some are seeded with cardiomyocytes. - Paper: https://doi.org/10.1145/3686169.3686201 (Halfway to the Future 2024) - Video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DkvH62jYCjM - Images: https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/58688c8a6a496327e937e35b/714f6ccf-9ea2-4a1b-b5fd-38214abb33dd/Clitoris+bio+print+1-2.jpg https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/58688c8a6a496327e937e35b/25df8a3d-0242-4211-93e4-15bb0835bff8/Jiabao+Li+Sentient+Clit+2.jpg https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/58688c8a6a496327e937e35b/1698638118344-WF5FC29CY43FLONUQRGO/neuron+2.jpg - Project page: https://www.jiabaoli.org/sentient-clit #### Beauty — Johnny DiBlasi, Carlos Castellanos (2023) - Type: Artwork · Organisms: Bacteria & microbes - Idea: What happens to beauty when a machine learns to groom living growth? - What it is: A machine-microbial artwork in which a reinforcement-learning agent alters cultures of pattern-forming bacteria to make them more 'beautiful'. - How it works: A deep reinforcement-learning agent observes Paenibacillus and Bacillus colonies by camera and acts on them (likely by dispensing nutrients), rewarded by an aesthetic score. - Paper: https://doi.org/10.1145/3597626 (Proceedings of the ACM on Computer Graphics and Interactive Techniques 2023) - Video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=F-XhDxIQP-M - Images: https://biodigitalviz.github.io/images/beauty.jpg - Project page: https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3597626 #### Ocular Germination — Ana María Gómez López (2023) - Type: Artwork · Organisms: Plants, Human body - Idea: The human body can be a habitat for plant life. - What it is: The artist germinates Begonia seeds with her own basal tears, turning her body into an ecosystem that merges human and botanical realms. - How it works: Tears are collected and used as the germination medium for seeds in the studio. - Images: https://falling-walls.com/sites/default/files/styles/slider/public/medien/4/bilder/fw23_art_and_science_1final1aopthalmologicalbasaltear-ana-maria-gomez-lopez.jpg?h=a05dec19&itok=QT0LDu2o - Project page: https://falling-walls.com/challenging-human-nature-divide-ana-m-gomez-lopezs-inventive-self-experimentation #### Atlas of Queer Anatomy (Filthy Anatomy) — Kuang-Yi Ku (2022) - Type: Speculative design · Organisms: Bacteria & microbes, Human body - Idea: Anatomy can include the microbes that blur where one body ends. - What it is: Speculative anatomies of the LGBTQ+ body that visualise microbes migrating between people through contact, drawing body borders as shared zones rather than clean lines. BAD Award 2022 winner, with Henry de Vries (Amsterdam UMC). - How it works: Microbial cultures and dermatology research are combined with speculative anatomical illustration and objects. - Video: https://vimeo.com/781878851 - Images: https://www.badaward.nl/imager/assets/site/5161/Filthy-Anatomy_1_220811_114119_a5a12f426a1ab11909951db4fe37df8f.jpg https://www.badaward.nl/imager/assets/site/5162/Filthy-Anatomy_3_a5a12f426a1ab11909951db4fe37df8f.jpg - Project page: https://www.badaward.nl/artists-scientists/kuang-yi-ku-with-henry-de-vries #### Bio-Electrólisis — Gilberto Esparza (2022) - Type: Artwork · Organisms: Bacteria & microbes, Ecosystems - Idea: Let the river's own microbes etch the story of its pollution. - What it is: A series of prints etched onto copper plates by electrolysis powered by bacteria from the polluted Atoyac River, telling the river's history; the bioreactor etches plates live in the gallery. - How it works: A microbial-fuel-cell bioreactor with native Geobacter-rich bacteria is wired to copper and iron plates; the current erodes the copper, which is then printed on a press. - Images: http://gilbertoesparza.net/wp-content/uploads/2023/01/IMG_8819-1024x768.jpg - Project page: https://gilbertoesparza.net/portfolio/bio-electrolisis/ #### Menstrual Garden — Jiabao Li (2022) - Type: Artwork · Organisms: DNA & molecules, Human body - Idea: An understudied body fluid becomes a garden of proteins. - What it is: A multisensory installation with the smells of fresh and stagnant menstrual blood and 3D-printed sculptures of proteins found only in menstrual fluid, from a long-term mass-spectrometry study of the artist's own blood. - How it works: Menstrual effluent was analysed by mass spectrometry to build a stable menstrual proteome; top proteins were 3D printed from their structures. - Images: https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/58688c8a6a496327e937e35b/1669072958670-Y5OZPGTKSBGKPQFVU1L0/Jiabao+Li+menstrual+garden+4-3.jpg https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/58688c8a6a496327e937e35b/1669072954462-P6HVTCDOE9M9M4TRT58F/Jiabao+Li+menstrual+garden+2-2.jpg https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/58688c8a6a496327e937e35b/1669072957252-938SXWXN6UXALLH2BZ3K/Jiabao+Li+menstrual+garden+3.jpg - Project page: https://www.jiabaoli.org/menstrual-garden #### Untitled (Feeding Through Space and Time) — Ani Liu (2022) - Type: Artwork · Organisms: Human body - Idea: Show the monthly volume of a body's care work as a physical mass. - What it is: An installation that circulates about 5.85 gallons of milk, the volume of breast milk the artist produced each month, as a meditation on the invisible labor of reproduction and pumping at work. - How it works: Tubing, pumps and valves circulate synthetic milk in the rhythm of a breast pump, whose sound came to trigger the artist's letdown reflex. - Video: https://vimeo.com/721278759 - Images: https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/52cd9799e4b00ae3ac706ed4/df1a4341-31c3-41cd-a365-2fa81fa765bc/Untitled+Pumping+detail+Image+Credit+Ani+Liu.jpg https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/52cd9799e4b00ae3ac706ed4/40f74ccf-38e0-426a-92aa-234fea173d83/Installationview_Labouring+Bodies_Museum+Tinguely+2026_Pati+Grabowicz-128.jpg https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/52cd9799e4b00ae3ac706ed4/5100a0be-9602-4627-8e27-3c8a5b67f362/Installationview_Labouring+Bodies_Museum+Tinguely+2026_Pati+Grabowicz-122.jpg - Project page: https://ani-liu.com/feeding-through-space-time #### Untitled (Labor of Love) — Ani Liu (2022) - Type: Artwork · Organisms: Human body - Idea: Care logged in its own materials becomes a visible calendar of labor. - What it is: A data portrait of the first 30 days after giving birth: a grid of glass vials, each marking 30 minutes, filled with breast milk, formula or diaper fragments for every feed and diaper change. - How it works: Hand-logged feeding and diaper data are mapped onto a 24-hour by 30-day grid of vials in acrylic. - Images: https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/52cd9799e4b00ae3ac706ed4/1801bfd5-c031-4dd3-968e-050acd3b6292/Untitled+Labor+of+Love+Image+Credit+Ani+Liu.jpg https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/52cd9799e4b00ae3ac706ed4/617ebb04-0cc6-4da5-b338-dee19e52a8b3/IMG_2954.JPG https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/52cd9799e4b00ae3ac706ed4/114aefdc-6b33-4ac6-af27-c069d6ec7c49/IMG_9333.jpg - Project page: https://ani-liu.com/untitled-labor-of-love #### Untitled (Milk Fat Globules) — Ani Liu (2022) - Type: Artwork · Organisms: Cells & tissue, Human body - Idea: Under the microscope, breast milk is both information exchange and intimate labor. - What it is: A scalloped-edge portrait of the artist's breast milk that layers microscope images of milk fat globules with camera imagery. - How it works: Microscopic images of milk are layered with photographs and printed in a shape that echoes nursing pads and anatomical drawings. - Images: https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/52cd9799e4b00ae3ac706ed4/a46ffee5-2c1c-4fe5-ab33-c31dc3cb6c5f/BLF-2022-0606-Cuchifritos-AniLiu-0130.jpg https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/52cd9799e4b00ae3ac706ed4/59dda90c-938a-4b3d-bc48-4ea5dcdc4d07/BLF-2022-0606-Cuchifritos-AniLiu-0124.jpg - Project page: https://ani-liu.com/milk-fat-globules #### Untitled (pumping) — Ani Liu (2022) - Type: Artwork · Organisms: Human body - Idea: The breast pump both frees and binds the postpartum body; make its rhythm visible. - What it is: A kinetic sculpture that circulates one week's worth of breast milk (synthetic) through a coil of tubing, driven at the rhythm of the artist's own breast pump. Part of the solo show Ecologies of Care. - How it works: Food-grade tubing, a liquid pump, an air pump and a solenoid valve are timed by a microcontroller to the pump rhythm. - Video: https://vimeo.com/721287551 - Images: https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/52cd9799e4b00ae3ac706ed4/c1d67815-cc53-4cd4-b4d1-be60401c6439/03++Ani+Liu+Untitled+pumping.jpg - Project page: https://ani-liu.com/untitled-pumping #### Fermenting Futures — Anna Dumitriu (2021) - Type: Artwork · Organisms: Fungi, DNA & molecules - Idea: The organism that gave us bread and beer may also help with climate change. - What it is: A body of artworks with Alex May about yeast, made during a residency at the Institute of Microbiology and Microbial Biotechnology, BOKU Vienna, exploring how engineered yeast might help with environmental problems. - How it works: The artists worked alongside BOKU's yeast researchers, likely including Pichia pastoris strains engineered to fix CO2, and combined cultures, textiles and sculpture into installation works. - Paper: https://doi.org/10.1162/leon_a_02279 (Leonardo 2022) - Video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QooCEfG-EH4 - Images: https://annadumitriu.co.uk/wp-content/uploads/2021/08/IMG_5479-1.jpeg - Project page: https://annadumitriu.co.uk/portfolio/fermenting-futures/ #### Microbiospheric Engineering — Kevin Blackistone (2021) - Type: Artwork · Organisms: Bacteria & microbes - Idea: A petri dish shaped like a planet makes population growth and resource depletion visible in days. - What it is: A clear sphere coated with sculpted agar on which human-seeded bacteria spread alongside wild microbes, while an automated microscope surveys the growth like a satellite over a planet; shown in the SIGGRAPH Asia 2021 Art Gallery. - How it works: Bacterial colonies are seeded onto an agar landscape on a transparent sphere; a robotic microscope images them daily and presents the images as satellite-style maps. - Paper: https://doi.org/10.1145/3476123.3487875 (SIGGRAPH Asia 2021 Art Gallery) - Images: https://history.siggraph.org/wp-content/uploads/2025/10/2021-SA-Art-Gallery-Blackistone_Microbiospheric-Engineering-1.jpg https://history.siggraph.org/wp-content/uploads/2025/10/2021-SA-Art-Gallery-Blackistone_Microbiospheric-Engineering-2.jpg - Project page: https://history.siggraph.org/artwork/kevin-blackistone-amir-bastan-microbiospheric-engineering/ #### mEat me — Theresa Schubert (2020) - Type: Artwork · Organisms: Cells & tissue, Human body - Idea: If humans treat animals as material, the logic should apply to humans too. - What it is: An artistic research project and performance in which the artist proposes her own body as material and food, growing tissue from her cells and serving it in a staged tasting. - How it works: Cells taken from the artist's body were cultured in the lab into a small 'meat' sample presented in a performance at Kapelica Gallery. - Images: https://ars.electronica.art/starts-prize/files/2021/06/Theresa-Schubert-mEat-me-performance-06.02.2020.-Photo-Tina-Lagler-Kapelica-Gallery-Archive-1024x512.jpg - Project page: https://ars.electronica.art/starts-prize/en/meat-me/ #### Bacteria Lamp — Jan Klingler (2019) - Type: Product & platform · Organisms: Bacteria & microbes - Idea: A person's microbial trace can become a keepsake. - What it is: A blown-glass lamp holding agar on which bacteria sampled from meaningful people and places are grown for 24–48 hours, then sealed in stasis and backlit. - How it works: Swabbed microbes grow on nutrient agar inside the glass; growth is stopped and the vessel sealed, lit by an LED in the stopper. - Images: https://designmuseum.org/image/c5cb9388-e5ce-4094-96a6-46c28a29a277?width=1600 https://static1.squarespace.com/static/5af188458ab722cefd414847/t/5ca32166f9619a0cc6a8e019/1554194815879/DSC02023.jpg - Project page: https://janklingler.com/ #### BioArtBot — Tim Dobbs (2019) - Type: Research prototype · Organisms: Bacteria & microbes - Idea: Put a lab robot on the internet so anyone can paint with living ink. - What it is: An open-source platform where anyone online designs pixel art that a liquid-handling robot prints onto agar with coloured E. coli, which then grows into the picture. - How it works: A web app converts designs into a procedure for an Opentrons robot that inoculates plates with five E. coli strains, each making a different coloured protein. - Video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SMBGHynhiAQ - Images: https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5f201c898b5f5516ea2b6ec0/1602061428993-TPM4UFM5MYOU6HQIIUHP/1.+bunny%2C+by+BT.jpg https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5f201c898b5f5516ea2b6ec0/1602061761960-T4QAAMWHN16LNSY3T11N/1.+bunny%2C+by+BT.jpg?format=1000w - Project page: https://biosummit.live/2020/bio-creation-station/darktemplate-3el6p #### In Posse — Charlotte Jarvis (2019) - Type: Artwork · Organisms: Cells & tissue, Human body - Idea: Unmake one of biology's assumed asymmetries and see what social forms follow. - What it is: With stem cell scientist Susana Chuva de Sousa Lopes, Jarvis works towards making sperm from a female body, alongside a 'female' semen made from the bodily fluids of many contributors. - How it works: Induced pluripotent stem cells from the artist are differentiated towards germ cells in the Leiden lab, while a plasma-like 'semen' is composed from donated fluids and used in performances. - Video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o0bcNLzp_y8 - Project page: https://sheffdocfest.com/films/in-posse/ #### Labor — Paul Vanouse (2019) - Type: Artwork · Organisms: Bacteria & microbes, Human body - Idea: The smell of human work is made by microbes. - What it is: An installation in which bioreactors grow the skin bacteria that produce human sweat odour, recreating the smell of bodies under strenuous labour without any humans present. - How it works: Bacteria isolated from human skin are cultured in glass bioreactors on a sweat-like medium so that their metabolism releases the scent of exertion. - Video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PaRdHTqZyqA - Images: https://www.paulvanouse.com/labor-install-BN-1.jpg https://www.paulvanouse.com/labor-install-tj-2.jpg - Project page: https://artifact-archive.org/whole-archive #### Mothering Bacteria — Prophecy Sun (2019) - Type: Artwork · Organisms: Bacteria & microbes, Human body - Idea: The body as an interface that hosts and 'mothers' other life. - What it is: An installation that links a female body to bacteria grown from it: projected time-lapse images and sound follow the microbes' growth while visitors watch. - How it works: Bacteria sampled from the artist's body are cultured and filmed; the growth is rendered as video and sound in a performative exhibition shown at Creativity & Cognition 2019. - Paper: https://doi.org/10.1145/3325480.3329173 (C&C 2019) - Images: https://freight.cargo.site/w/1030/i/0628c89dccbcfd87fce26815139587bdd0ca155613e2ac0280f92bda9d46448f/mothering-bacteria-1.jpg - Project page: https://artifact-archive.org/whole-archive #### Ouroboros Steak — Andrew Pelling, Orkan Telhan (2019) - Type: Speculative design · Organisms: Cells & tissue, Fungi, Human body - Idea: Growing meat from yourself exposes the hidden inputs of cultured meat. - What it is: A DIY kit for growing miniature 'steaks' from one's own cells on mushroom-based scaffolds with expired blood serum, critiquing the sustainability claims of the lab-grown meat industry. - How it works: Human cells are seeded on fungal mycelium scaffolds and fed with expired human blood serum (instead of fetal bovine serum). - Images: https://designmuseum.org/image/9c493538-a9c6-4a78-886d-e0e718da70da?width=1600 https://designmuseum.org/image/55c60d98-14cc-472e-a3e7-af47ebe94700?width=1600 - Project page: https://designmuseum.org/exhibitions/beazley-designs-of-the-year/product/ouroboros-steak #### Semi-Human Vase — Hongjie Yang (2019) - Type: Artwork · Organisms: Cells & tissue, Human body - Idea: An everyday object made partly of human tissue blurs the line between body and product. - What it is: A 3D-printed vase-shaped scaffold cultured with patches of human cells, stained blue, made with tissue engineers at TU Eindhoven and shown at the Centre Pompidou. - How it works: Human cells are seeded onto a 3D-printed mould in the lab of Patricia Dankers with Dan Jing Wu, grown in culture and then stained to make them visible. - Video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YHtBWkvpzws - Project page: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YHtBWkvpzws #### Spoiled Spores — Avril Corroon (2019) - Type: Artwork · Organisms: Fungi, Bacteria & microbes - Idea: Mould from a tenant's wall becomes an artisanal luxury — and a poisonous gift for the landlord. - What it is: An installation of up to 25 cheeses made with toxic black mould scraped over a year from damp rental homes in Dublin and London, responding to the housing crisis. - How it works: Mould samples collected with tenants were cultured and used as ripening cultures in cheese-making. - Images: https://ars.electronica.art/starts-prize/files/2020/06/SPOILED_SPORES_2000x1000-1024x512.jpg - Project page: https://ars.electronica.art/starts-prize/en/spoiled-spores/ #### The Other Townsend — Marley E. Townsend (2019) - Type: Artwork · Organisms: Human body, DNA & molecules - Idea: Collecting biological and personal data by hand exposes what corporations do silently. - What it is: A literal and data portrait of a 'theoretical sibling', built by hand-tracking a family's moods, sleep, texting, genetics and browsing history for seven days. - How it works: The artist combined family genetic information with manually logged behavioural data into drawings and a chatbot persona. - Images: https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/552dc0ffe4b070a9e1a6a215/1561581725231-74KVXP751STI5NMIB8C7/Other_Townsend_policesketch.png https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/552dc0ffe4b070a9e1a6a215/1563218848839-AATWJFE2SRFCY8SQU1X6/Other_Townsend_habitat.jpg - Project page: https://theothertownsend.com/ #### A Search for Ghosts in the Meat Machine (No Regrets for What You Haven't Been) — Ani Liu (2018) - Type: Artwork · Organisms: Human body, Cells & tissue - Idea: Split a body into all the ways science measures it and ask where the person went. - What it is: Nine sculptures, each the artist's height and holding her body's volume of liquid, that describe a person through anatomy, genetics, biochemistry, behaviour and algorithms. Made for the 2018 BAD Award with radiologists at Amsterdam UMC. - How it works: Medical scans of the artist (likely MRI, with Amsterdam UMC radiology) were turned into 3D prints and paired with vials, antennas and fluids in steel-and-glass vitrines. - Video: https://vimeo.com/305178743 - Images: https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/52cd9799e4b00ae3ac706ed4/1544245727691-QE3IR7RZ38EAVTHN7OXG/IMG_2816.JPG https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/52cd9799e4b00ae3ac706ed4/1606859073999-2NH7A06PZQD48DCPEMXG/far6nkr54s7rcvtbkocsb70lq2ss.jpeg https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/52cd9799e4b00ae3ac706ed4/1544246021666-LOP4M25PNVBBTRBLH5DQ/IMG_3029.JPG - Project page: https://ani-liu.com/the-ghosts-you-havent-been #### Anti-Marta — Marta de Menezes (2018) - Type: Artwork · Organisms: Cells & tissue, Human body, DNA & molecules - Idea: An immune rejection can also be a lasting form of recognition between two people. - What it is: Artist Marta de Menezes and her partner, immunologist Luís Graça, exchanged small skin grafts so that each body made antibodies against the other; the work shows these antibodies as a record of mutual recognition. - How it works: Reciprocal skin grafts between the couple triggered antibody production, which was isolated and displayed with video. - Images: https://artlaboratory-berlin.org/wp-content/uploads/2021/11/ANTI-MARTA__20211029-_62B1711-s20.jpg - Project page: https://artlaboratory-berlin.org/exhibitions/paired-immunity/ #### Vapour Meat — Oron Catts, The Tissue Culture & Art Project (2018) - Type: Speculative design · Organisms: Cells & tissue - Idea: Push a food technology to its absurd end to show how far it moves us from the animal. - What it is: A helmet that emits a vapour of lab-grown rat muscle cells, essential oils and water, mixing molecular gastronomy, lab-grown meat and e-cigarettes. - How it works: Cultured rat muscle cells were suspended with oils and water and vaporised in a wearable device, with Devon Ward. - Images: https://tcaproject.net/wp-content/uploads/2018/12/Devon-Ward-Oron-Catts-Vapour-Meat-Science-Gallery-Dublin-1200x800-01.jpg - Project page: https://tcaproject.net/portfolio/vapour-meat/ #### Blood Related — Basse Stittgen (2017) - Type: Artwork · Organisms: Animals - Idea: Give a hidden waste stream a form, and the ethics of meat become something you can hold. - What it is: Objects made entirely from discarded cow blood from slaughterhouses, including a record that plays the animal's heartbeat and polished tiles that act as mirrors; first shown at the Design Academy Eindhoven Graduation Show during Dutch Design Week 2017. - How it works: Blood is dried and the protein is heat-pressed in moulds, where it binds without additives into a hard, dark, polishable material. - Video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qCYBHBqLEVM - Images: https://freight.cargo.site/w/1200/i/0be2011e5e264283e0511bea3e417968d58141da25369d4b1abed3b99e8af354/BloodRelatedMU.jpg https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/3f80f56e7c6192721acd186eb133ad69e35df1b908060bbc0cb71a6fdf5a3b92/BloodRelatedVase.jpg - Project page: https://www.bassestittgen.com/Blood-Related #### Borderless Bacteria / Colonialist Cash — Ken Rinaldo (2017) - Type: Artwork · Organisms: Bacteria & microbes, Fungi - Idea: Money is also a microbial medium that ignores borders. - What it is: Banknotes from many countries are laid on nutrient agar in large Petri dishes; over weeks the microbes they carry grow over the portraits and symbols of national currency. - How it works: Used banknotes are cultured on enriched agar and the growing bacterial and fungal colonies are viewed with light boxes and a digital microscope. - Images: https://artlaboratory-berlin.org/wp-content/uploads/2021/03/SL_03-scaled.jpg https://artlaboratory-berlin.org/wp-content/uploads/2021/03/SL-IMG_20200124_182446.jpg - Project page: https://artlaboratory-berlin.org/exhibitions/borderless-bacteria-colonialist-cash/ #### Glowing Nature — Studio Roosegaarde (2017) - Type: Artwork · Organisms: Algae, Human body - Idea: Imagine lighting that lives and answers your touch. - What it is: A darkened space whose floor is covered with living bioluminescent algae that flash blue light wherever visitors step or press. - How it works: Dinoflagellate algae that emit light under mechanical stress are kept in transparent containers on the floor; shown at Museum De Lakenhal, Leiden, and elsewhere. - Paper: https://doi.org/10.1145/3284389.3284495 (MAB 2018) - Video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kZsNPzdNv8U - Images: https://cdn.prod.website-files.com/6683beecb76948bee8843558/66cd6ff64ca6e352a6547779_GLOWING%20NATURE%20ROOSEGAARDE%2001_new.webp https://cdn.prod.website-files.com/6683beecb76948bee8843558/66cd6ff568b0455145891497_GLOWING%20NATURE%20ROOSEGAARDE%2005_new.webp - Project page: https://artifact-archive.org/whole-archive #### K-9_topology: ARTE_mis — Maja Smrekar (2017) - Type: Artwork · Organisms: Cells & tissue, Animals, Human body - Idea: Co-evolution with a companion species can be made literal at the level of the cell. - What it is: The artist's own egg cell was emptied of its nucleus and fused with a body cell from her dog Ada, creating a hybrid cell that cannot develop further, preserved in liquid nitrogen. - How it works: Somatic cell fusion with an enucleated human oocyte, done in a biotechnology lab; the fused cell was cryopreserved. - Images: https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5c326f997c9327edb6347bf8/1575144123627-D23FKWEOWCQDMTPEUYSY/Maja_Smrekar_ARTE_mis_Photo_Maja_Smrekar.jpg - Project page: https://www.majasmrekar.org/k-9-topology-artemis #### Make Do and Mend — Anna Dumitriu (2017) - Type: Artwork · Organisms: Bacteria & microbes, DNA & molecules - Idea: Mending clothes and editing genes are both repair; the craft metaphor makes gene editing discussable. - What it is: A 1940s British utility dress is patched with fabric impregnated with E. coli from which an antibiotic-resistance gene was removed by CRISPR editing. - How it works: CRISPR-Cas9 was used in a lab to knock out a resistance gene in E. coli, which was then killed and applied to textile patches. - Video: https://vimeo.com/214423418 - Images: https://i0.wp.com/annadumitriu.co.uk/wp-content/uploads/2020/02/FEAT_Anna-Dumitriu_Make-Do-and-Mend_Detail2.jpg?resize=768%2C1024&ssl=1 - Project page: https://annadumitriu.co.uk/portfolio/make-do-and-mend/ #### Meta_bolus — Saša Spačal (2017) - Type: Artwork · Organisms: Bacteria & microbes, Human body, DNA & molecules - Idea: Metabolism is an exchange of doses between species; ask whether we can smell antibiotic resistance. - What it is: A lab installation built around the soil bacterium Streptomyces rimosus, which produces both antibiotics and geosmin, the smell of rain on soil; extracted antibiotics are returned to the earth while visitors breathe in the scent. - How it works: Streptomyces rimosus cultures are processed in lab glassware into two metabolites, antibiotics and geosmin, forming two linked loops. - Video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RtxmJPxQegw - Project page: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RtxmJPxQegw #### Probably Chelsea — Heather Dewey-Hagborg (2017) - Type: Artwork · Organisms: DNA & molecules, Human body - Idea: One genome, thirty faces: DNA phenotyping is interpretation, not identification. - What it is: Thirty different 3D-printed portrait masks, all generated from Chelsea Manning's DNA, hang together to show how many faces one genome can be read as. - How it works: Genotype data from a cheek swab and hair sent by Manning is run through the artist's phenotyping algorithms with different parameters, and each resulting face is 3D printed in translucent plastic. - Images: https://deweyhagborg.com/media/pages/projects/probably-chelsea/9769243e4c-1643025328/heatherdeweyhagborgchelseamanning_pap5596.jpg - Project page: https://deweyhagborg.com/projects/probably-chelsea #### Strange Encounters: Metaphysics, Algae and Carcinoma — Špela Petrič (2017) - Type: Artwork · Organisms: Algae, Cells & tissue - Idea: Stage an encounter between plant and human cells to make biopower visible. - What it is: A lab performance in which the artist brings together the single-celled alga Chlorella and human bladder carcinoma cells and documents their negotiation; in at least one case the cancer cells appeared to ingest the algae. - How it works: Co-culture of Chlorella and a human carcinoma cell line under microscope, performed and narrated by the artist. - Video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vxpwYC6yTS8 - Images: https://artlaboratory-berlin.org/wp-content/uploads/2021/05/Add__SL_170119-_110_top_slider_K.jpg https://artlaboratory-berlin.org/wp-content/uploads/2021/05/SL_DSC_0054.jpg - Project page: https://artlaboratory-berlin.org/exhibitions/strange-encounters-with-vegetal-others/ #### BioMess — Oron Catts, Ionat Zurr (2016) - Type: Artwork · Organisms: Cells & tissue, Animals - Idea: Life is messier than engineering allows; the most designed life form may be the most dependent one. - What it is: Two displays in luxury vitrines: natural history specimens of odd, context-dependent adaptations, and a semi-living hybridoma cell line kept alive in the gallery, questioning the fetish for engineered life. - How it works: Museum specimens are paired with hybridoma cells, a fusion of cancer and immune cells, maintained in a custom bioreactor display case. - Video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FQ3VgB_eaC0 - Project page: https://collection.cooperhewitt.org/exhibitions/2318794480/ #### Confronting Vegetal Otherness: Phytoteratology — Špela Petrič (2016) - Type: Artwork · Organisms: Plants, Human body - Idea: Hormones cross kingdoms; a plant can be partly 'fathered' by a human. - What it is: Plant embryos were grown in vitro with human hormones from the artist's own body, producing small 'plant-human monsters' displayed as an ectogenetic nursery. - How it works: Plant tissue culture: embryos were cultured on media supplemented with steroid hormones extracted from the artist's urine. - Images: https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5aeca48a506fbe863b23a8b6/1534189733741-1EUWR4JLBX43M635NE6J/MG_6180.jpg - Project page: https://www.spelapetric.org/phytoteratology #### Et In Arcadia Ego — Charlotte Jarvis (2016) - Type: Artwork · Organisms: Cells & tissue, Human body - Idea: Use tissue engineering to make mortality, not only enhancement, tangible. - What it is: The artist grew colon tumour tissue from her own cells and shows it live in the gallery, confronting cancer as a material rather than a metaphor. - How it works: Tumour tissue was grown in the lab from the artist's own intestinal cells with scientific collaborators; the exact protocol is not published. - Video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kzoqrzUeYBs - Project page: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kzoqrzUeYBs #### Haem — Cecilia Jonsson (2016) - Type: Artwork · Organisms: Human body, Cells & tissue - Idea: A discarded organ can yield the material for a navigation tool. - What it is: A compass needle made from iron extracted from human placentas, shown in a placenta-inspired labyrinth as a metaphor for how maternal resources guide a life. BAD Award 2016 winner, with the Netherlands Cancer Institute. - How it works: Iron from the haemoglobin in donated placentas is extracted and smelted, combining medicine and metallurgy. - Images: https://static.wixstatic.com/media/203bbb_012089f7702f40d9ae4122dc542699c1~mv2.jpg https://static.wixstatic.com/media/203bbb_82282135be2f4718aa03086cc22e080a~mv2.jpg - Project page: https://www.ceciliajonsson.com/4-haem #### Heirloom — Gina Czarnecki (2016) - Type: Artwork · Organisms: Cells & tissue, Human body - Idea: A family portrait made of the sitter, which has to be fed to stay a likeness. - What it is: Living portraits of the artist's two daughters, grown from their own skin cells onto glass casts of their faces, made with cell biologist John Hunt. - How it works: Skin cells taken from the daughters are cultured onto glass face casts in a bioreactor over months; the growing cell sheet gradually takes on the features of the cast. - Video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Uk70Yd02Dg4 - Project page: https://ginaczarnecki.com/ #### Holding Back Is Another Kind of Need (Smelfies) — Ani Liu (2016) - Type: Artwork · Organisms: Human body, DNA & molecules - Idea: Lab chemistry can be used to keep a person's smell, not only their image. - What it is: A series of perfumes that bottle the body scent of three people who matter to the artist, distilled in the lab with a chemist; she also calls them 'smelfies'. - How it works: Scent compounds are collected from a person and distilled into ethanol, informed by research linking olfactory stimuli to behaviour. - Video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_pQ1BCdSTTI - Images: https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/52cd9799e4b00ae3ac706ed4/1536399924955-Q9FYDCJZL93AHYYLCIJA/bottles+in+a+row+copy.JPG https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/52cd9799e4b00ae3ac706ed4/1536400102286-JIDKV1X9DF7JK17VA8FD/taking+a+smell.JPG https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/52cd9799e4b00ae3ac706ed4/1478025317708-ZPAP9TGKY5NGQZGBTLW6/IMG_4955.jpg - Project page: https://ani-liu.com/holding-back-is-another-kind-of-need #### Microbial We: Bacterial Self Portraits — Ani Liu (2016) - Type: Artwork · Organisms: Bacteria & microbes, Human body - Idea: A portrait of 'me' can be drawn by the microbes that live on me. - What it is: Self-portraits made from bacteria cultured from different parts of the artist's body, grown in Petri dishes through cut vinyl masks. - How it works: Skin swabs are plated on LB agar in 4-inch Petri dishes, with vinyl stencils shaping where colonies grow. - Images: https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/52cd9799e4b00ae3ac706ed4/1478023420325-R8SL80ZKE3C32W127YTC/IMG_4495.jpg https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/52cd9799e4b00ae3ac706ed4/1478023429052-RQD8XVEWRY89NAVTGRUN/Screen+Shot+2016-11-01+at+12.33.20+PM.png - Project page: https://ani-liu.com/microbial-we #### Pure Human — Tina Gorjanc (2016) - Type: Speculative design · Organisms: Cells & tissue, DNA & molecules, Human body - Idea: Genetic material can be patented and commercialised before the law protects the person it came from. - What it is: A speculative project proposing leather grown from Alexander McQueen's DNA, extracted from hair in his 1992 graduate collection, shown through tattooed and freckled pigskin prototypes; exhibited in the Biofabricate 2016 Design Lab. - How it works: Gorjanc filed a patent application for the process and used cured, tattooed pigskin to stand in for lab-grown human skin; likely no human tissue was cultured. - Video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BNzUNNGVSUg - Project page: https://www.tinagorjanc.com #### Regenerative Reliquary — Amy Karle (2016) - Type: Artwork · Organisms: Cells & tissue, Human body - Idea: A scaffold can be a sculpture that finishes itself as cells grow into it. - What it is: A bioprinted scaffold in the shape of a human hand skeleton, held in a bioreactor so that human stem cells can grow over it and turn into bone. - How it works: A trabecular hand scaffold printed in PEGDA hydrogel was seeded with human mesenchymal stem cells to differentiate into bone. - Video: https://vimeo.com/245243383 - Images: https://www.amykarle.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/12/Amy-Karle-REGENERATIVE-RELIQUARY-3D-printed-trabecular-scaffold-in-pegda-hydrogel-for-stem-cell-culture-in-bioreactor.jpg - Project page: https://www.amykarle.com/project/regenerative-reliquary/ #### Stir Fly: Nutrient Bug 1.0 — Oron Catts, Ionat Zurr, The Tissue Culture & Art Project (2016) - Type: Speculative design · Organisms: Cells & tissue, Insects - Idea: A domestic appliance can expose the hidden dependencies of 'clean' food technology. - What it is: A prototype kitchen bioreactor for growing insect meat from fly cells at home, which also makes visible that the nutrient bag still contains animal serum. - How it works: Insect cells, which grow at room temperature, were cultured in a sterile vessel fed from a nutrient bag, with Robert Foster. - Images: https://tcaproject.net/wp-content/uploads/2018/12/TCA-Project-Stir-Fly-The-Nutrient-Bug-1.0-by-Oron-Catts-Ionat-Zurr-4.jpg - Project page: https://tcaproject.net/portfolio/stir-fly-nutrient-bug-1-0/ #### Yeastograms — Johanna Rotko (2016) - Type: Artwork · Organisms: Fungi, Human body - Idea: Let microbial growth take over a human image. - What it is: Portraits of human faces printed into living yeast cultures; as the yeast and other microbes keep growing, the face slowly dissolves until it is barely recognisable. - How it works: UV light exposes raster photographs onto yeast grown on a nutrient medium; unexposed cells grow into the image, which then keeps changing. - Video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HI1UUhRvs7s - Images: http://www.hiivagrammi.fi/portfolio2019/wp-content/uploads/2019/09/about-nelio-1500x1200.jpg - Project page: https://artifact-archive.org/whole-archive #### Confronting Vegetal Otherness: Skotopoiesis — Špela Petrič (2015) - Type: Artwork · Organisms: Plants, Human body - Idea: Meet a plant on its own time scale: slow down until you can exchange something with it. - What it is: For 20 hours the artist stood facing a field of germinating cress lit by a projector; her shadow made the cress grow pale and elongated, leaving a lasting imprint of her body. - How it works: Shading caused etiolation in the cress (growth in darkness), while the artist's body lost water and shrank slightly. - Images: https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5aeca48a506fbe863b23a8b6/1525552300442-FEP7QGQK17Y9ULKP8HCH/scotopoiesis_press_04.jpg - Project page: https://www.spelapetric.org/scotopoiesis #### GFP Screen — Interspecifics (2015) - Type: Artwork · Organisms: Bacteria & microbes - Idea: Living fluorescence can carry text, one bit per culture. - What it is: A 16-bit binary screen of GFP-expressing E. coli lit by black-light lamps, spelling out in ASCII a random poem 'written' from a bacterial point of view. - How it works: Lamps near the GFP excitation band switch individual bacterial cells on and off under software control, two characters every two milliseconds. - Images: https://farm2.staticflickr.com/1545/24486216019_abc97d5daf_k_d.jpg https://farm2.staticflickr.com/1492/24760358331_b204617c4e_k_d.jpg - Project page: https://interspecifics.cc/work/gfp-screen-2015/ #### Kisses from the Future (Microbial Self Portraits) — Ani Liu (2015) - Type: Artwork · Organisms: Bacteria & microbes, Human body - Idea: The self is co-made by the microbes we exchange with the people we touch. - What it is: A series of Petri-dish portraits of microorganisms cultured from kisses, presenting identity as a multispecies constellation shaped by touch. - How it works: Microorganisms sampled from a kiss are cultured on agar in 4-inch dishes and shown as portraits. - Images: https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/52cd9799e4b00ae3ac706ed4/f8b83e11-4e77-4c98-bb15-50b0494dcac0/IMG_6847+2.JPG https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/52cd9799e4b00ae3ac706ed4/4575d900-863d-41d6-b834-6dbe28934dd0/IMG_6892.JPG https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/52cd9799e4b00ae3ac706ed4/e9db4ee0-7365-4f35-887e-769256539f6b/IMG_6894.JPG - Project page: https://ani-liu.com/kisses-from-the-future #### Open Source Estrogen — Mary Maggic (2015) - Type: Artwork · Organisms: Human body, DNA & molecules - Idea: Hormones are an environmental and political material, so the protocol is the artwork. - What it is: A set of DIY protocols, workshops and videos for detecting and extracting estrogen from bodies and water using kitchen equipment, distributed as open documentation. - How it works: Low-cost extraction from urine and water samples, yeast estrogen biosensors and instructional formats including a soap-opera style video make hormone work reproducible outside clinics. - Video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9JLaPYmmeaU - Project page: https://maggic.ooo/Open-Source-Estrogen #### Silk Poems — Jen Bervin (2015) - Type: Artwork · Organisms: Insects, DNA & molecules - Idea: Silk is biocompatible, so a poem on silk could be read inside a body. - What it is: A poem about silk, written in a six-character chain like the protein's structure, nanoimprinted on a transparent silk-film biosensor designed to be implanted in the body. - How it works: Developed with silk materials scientists (Fiorenzo Omenetto's Silk Lab at Tufts): regenerated Bombyx mori silk fibroin is cast into film and the text is imprinted at nanoscale. - Video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LavMzNPgC0k - Project page: https://www.biology-design.com/risd #### The Art of Deception — Isaac Monté (2015) - Type: Artwork · Organisms: Animals, Cells & tissue - Idea: Biotech can make organs not only functional but beautiful — and that is a kind of deception. - What it is: Discarded pig hearts are decellularised into translucent scaffolds, cast and dyed as elegant 'vessels for new life' that could be repopulated with cells. BAD Award 2015 winner, with Toby Kiers at VU Amsterdam. - How it works: Detergent decellularisation removes cells from pig hearts, leaving the extracellular matrix, which is dried, cast and coloured. - Images: https://www.badaward.nl/imager/assets/site/460/ARTOFDECEPTION1_a5a12f426a1ab11909951db4fe37df8f.jpg https://www.badaward.nl/imager/assets/site/461/ARTOFDECEPTION2_a5a12f426a1ab11909951db4fe37df8f.jpg - Project page: https://www.badaward.nl/artists-scientists/isaac-mont%C3%A9-and-toby-kiers #### 1000 Handshakes — François-Joseph Lapointe (2014) - Type: Artwork · Organisms: Bacteria & microbes, Human body - Idea: A handshake is a microbial exchange; a self-portrait can be a changing microbiome. - What it is: A performance in which the artist shakes more than a thousand hands while his palm is swabbed every 50 handshakes; sequencing shows how his hand microbiome changes, and the results become network portraits. - How it works: Palm swabs were analysed by next-generation sequencing and the bacterial communities visualised with bioinformatic network software. - Video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=a07QOTzpZxQ - Images: https://artlaboratory-berlin.org/wp-content/uploads/2021/04/SL_DSC_0412.jpg https://artlaboratory-berlin.org/wp-content/uploads/2021/05/SL_20160419_Art_Lab_0068.jpg - Project page: https://artlaboratory-berlin.org/exhibitions/nonhuman-subjectivities-microbiome/ #### Invisible — Heather Dewey-Hagborg (2014) - Type: Artwork · Organisms: DNA & molecules, Human body - Idea: If DNA is surveillance data, then counter-forensics can be a consumer product. - What it is: Two sprays sold as a kit: one deletes most of the DNA a person leaves behind, the other replaces it with a confusing mixture of other people's DNA. - How it works: Erase uses a bleach-based cleanser that degrades DNA on surfaces; Replace applies a mix of DNA from many sources so any recovered sample yields an unusable profile. - Images: https://deweyhagborg.com/media/pages/projects/invisible/45706f416f-1643025441/be_invisible_stop.jpg - Project page: https://deweyhagborg.com/projects/invisible #### Ivorish — Nina van den Broek (2014) - Type: Research prototype · Organisms: Human body - Idea: If ivory is precious, why not use our own? - What it is: An ivory substitute made at Waag's Open Wetlab by pulverising human milk teeth and mixing the powder with a binder, questioning the ethics of animal ivory. - How it works: Teeth are ground to dentine powder, bound and polished into small objects. - Images: https://new-material-award.nl/wp-content/uploads/2021/11/Ivorish-1024x678.jpg - Project page: https://new-material-award.nl/en/ivorish/ #### Sterile — Revital Cohen & Tuur Van Balen (2014) - Type: Artwork · Organisms: Animals - Idea: Making an animal that cannot reproduce exposes how design turns living beings into products. - What it is: An edition of 45 albino goldfish engineered to hatch without reproductive organs, conceived by the artists not as animals but as objects that cannot take part in the biological cycle. - How it works: Produced over a long collaboration in Professor Etsuro Yamaha's fish-biology lab in Hokkaido, likely by embryo manipulation that blocks germ-cell development. - Video: https://vimeo.com/200047560 - Images: https://www.cohenvanbalen.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/01/IMG_6457-website.jpg - Project page: https://www.cohenvanbalen.com/work/sterile #### Sugababe — Diemut Strebe (2014) - Type: Artwork · Organisms: Cells & tissue, Human body - Idea: Genetic relatedness used as a material for art history, with a live tissue as the artefact. - What it is: A living replica of Van Gogh's severed ear, grown from cartilage cells engineered with DNA from a Van Gogh descendant and kept alive in a nutrient case visitors can speak into. - How it works: Cartilage cells from a great-great-grandson of Van Gogh's brother are engineered and grown on a printed ear-shaped scaffold in a bioreactor; a microphone and processor relay visitors' voices as nerve-like signals. - Video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tdZYPLYEkVc - Project page: https://diemutstrebe.com/ #### The Romantic Disease: An Artistic Investigation of Tuberculosis — Anna Dumitriu (2014) - Type: Artwork · Organisms: Bacteria & microbes - Idea: Craft objects can hold the history and the biology of a disease at the same time. - What it is: Textiles, lace and objects about the history of tuberculosis, dyed with materials from historical remedies; some pieces contain sterilised TB bacteria. - How it works: Worked with microbiologists on whole-genome sequencing of TB; bacteria were grown, sterilised and embedded in textiles alongside natural dyes. - Images: https://i0.wp.com/annadumitriu.co.uk/wp-content/uploads/2020/01/00100lPORTRAIT_00100_BURST20190603101317260_COVER.jpeg?resize=1024%2C768&ssl=1 - Project page: https://annadumitriu.co.uk/portfolio/the-romantic-disease/ #### Cellular Propeller — C-Lab (Laura Cinti & Howard Boland) (2013) - Type: Artwork · Organisms: Cells & tissue - Idea: Cells can be put to work as tiny motors, which raises the question of whose cells and for what. - What it is: An ongoing bio-art project that tries to make living cells turn a tiny synthetic propeller, first with contracting heart-muscle cells and later with the artist's own sperm racing around a spinning disc; the sperm proposal was debated before an ethics panel at Waag's Trust Me, I'm an Artist in 2016. - How it works: Living motile or contractile cells are placed on a synthetic moulded disc so their movement spins it, developed during a lab residency at the German Cancer Research Center (DKFZ) in Heidelberg. - Video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=49rzRKYMKyo - Project page: https://waag.org/en/article/propelled-sperm/ #### Selfmade — Christina Agapakis, Sissel Tolaas (2013) - Type: Artwork · Organisms: Bacteria & microbes, Human body - Idea: Our body microbes and food microbes are relatives; showing that can reduce fear of bacteria. - What it is: Cheeses made with bacteria swabbed from people's hands, feet, noses and armpits, including from Olafur Eliasson and Michael Pollan, shown with the smells of their donors. - How it works: Skin swabs were inoculated into pasteurised milk and incubated at 37 °C; curds were strained and pressed into fresh cheese. - Video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1Ej4BP64BsU - Images: https://freight.cargo.site/w/1200/i/0fc1e65d151b6460db94908392cd3eca4a26dd45a35f4ca05d650779e358ab65/cheese.png - Project page: https://agapakis.com/selfmade #### The Mechanism of Life – After Stéphane Leduc — Oron Catts, Ionat Zurr (2013) - Type: Artwork · Organisms: DNA & molecules - Idea: Today's protocell hype repeats century-old claims that life is only chemistry. - What it is: Tissue Culture & Art Project restage Stéphane Leduc's 1911 osmotic-growth experiments with a machine that prints protocell-like forms, which grow and then dissolve back into the liquid. - How it works: Uses one of Leduc's simplest diffusion and osmosis protocols, in which metal-salt crystals dropped into a solution such as sodium silicate form semi-permeable membranes that grow into cell- and plant-like shapes; made with Corrie van Sice. - Video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=G3DRmqlphGQ - Project page: https://dublin.sciencegallery.com/growyourown/mechanismlife%E2%80%94afterst%C3%A9phaneleduc #### Transfigurations — Agi Haines (2013) - Type: Speculative design · Organisms: Human body - Idea: If the body is designable, the first client is a parent making decisions for someone else. - What it is: Silicone infant models show surgical modifications a parent might choose — a heat-dissipating skull, a caffeine-absorbing patch, a facial change for social advantage. - How it works: Hyper-real silicone babies are sculpted with plausible post-operative results, presented as if from a medical catalogue to test where a viewer's objection begins. - Images: https://static.wixstatic.com/media/82b477_8c7c0a19de57410483df6a884d1b2256~mv2_d_5616_3744_s_4_2.jpg/v1/fill/w_2500,h_1666,al_c/82b477_8c7c0a19de57410483df6a884d1b2256~mv2_d_5616_3744_s_4_2.jpg - Project page: https://www.agihaines.com/transfigurations #### When I Feel Like Nature May Give Up — Christian Kerrigan (2013) - Type: Artwork · Organisms: DNA & molecules - Idea: Lifelike chemistry can become a drawing agent with its own will. - What it is: A drawing and film made by dropping protocell-laden ink droplets onto a canvas among sand, stones and burnt wood; the droplets move towards a food source for two to three minutes and leave coloured trails. - How it works: Protocells are chemical droplets (not alive) whose programmed chemistry lets them move and respond to each other; the artist places each colour and films the resulting traces. - Images: http://thisisalive.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/04/ChristianKerrigan04-760x570.jpg - Project page: http://thisisalive.com/when-i-feel-like-nature-may-give-up/ #### Crude Matter — Oron Catts, Ionat Zurr, The Tissue Culture & Art Project (2012) - Type: Artwork · Organisms: Cells & tissue - Idea: The material a cell sits on can shape what it becomes; substrate is a design decision. - What it is: Loosely based on the Golem story, cells are grown on different synthetic substrates that push stem cells to become blood, bone or fat. - How it works: Stem cells were cultured on a range of polymer substrates that steer differentiation. - Images: https://tcaproject.net/wp-content/uploads/2018/12/TCA-Project-Crude-Matter-Oron-Catts-Ionat-Zurr-03.jpg - Project page: https://tcaproject.net/portfolio/crude-matter/ #### Ergo Sum — Charlotte Jarvis (2012) - Type: Artwork · Organisms: Cells & tissue, Human body - Idea: A person can now exist as living parts outside their body. - What it is: The artist donated blood, skin and urine to a Leiden stem-cell lab, where they were turned into stem cells and grown into her own heart cells, brain cells and blood vessels: a cellular double that never lived inside her. BAD Award 2012 winner. - How it works: Induced pluripotent stem cells (iPSCs) derived from the artist's samples were differentiated into cardiac, neural and vascular cells with Prof. Christine Mummery's lab. - Images: https://www.badaward.nl/imager/assets/site/547/ERGO-SUM-1_a5a12f426a1ab11909951db4fe37df8f.jpg https://www.badaward.nl/imager/assets/site/548/ERGO-SUM-2_a5a12f426a1ab11909951db4fe37df8f.jpg - Project page: https://www.badaward.nl/artists-scientists/charlotte-jarvis #### Kapitän Biopunk: Fermentation Madness — Julian Abraham 'Togar' (2012) - Type: Artwork · Organisms: Fungi, Bacteria & microbes - Idea: Open the lab: fermentation knowledge can be a public-health tool. - What it is: A series of workshops and an acoustic, performative installation that teaches people to ferment safe, affordable alcohol with DIY and open-source tools, made in response to deaths from toxic bootleg liquor in Indonesia; shown in the SIGGRAPH 2012 Art Gallery. - How it works: Participants ferment sugars with yeast in home-built vessels, and the fermentation set-up is played as an acoustic installation, likely by amplifying and processing its bubbling; the workshops share recipes and safety checks. - Video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=C0m6RDDYiR0 - Images: https://history.siggraph.org/wp-content/uploads/2017/10/2012_Abraham_KapitanBiopunk.jpg - Project page: https://history.siggraph.org/artwork/julian-abraham-kapitan-biopunk-fermentation-madness/ #### Microbial Me — Mellissa Monsoon (2012) - Type: Artwork · Organisms: Bacteria & microbes, Human body - Idea: A self-portrait drawn by the microbes that live on you. - What it is: A cast of the artist's face made in agar and seeded with bacteria from her skin; the colonies grow, mix with microbes from the air and die, turning the portrait into a living ecosystem. - How it works: Skin swabs are cultured on an agar face cast; first made in 2012 at the University of Westminster and later commissioned by the Eden Project. - Images: https://static.wixstatic.com/media/efecb5_752c2fdbf427484ca3126278481b8180%7Emv2_d_5184_3456_s_4_2.jpg/v1/fit/w_2500,h_1330,al_c/efecb5_752c2fdbf427484ca3126278481b8180%7Emv2_d_5184_3456_s_4_2.jpg - Project page: https://artifact-archive.org/whole-archive #### Stranger Visions — Heather Dewey-Hagborg (2012) - Type: Artwork · Organisms: DNA & molecules, Human body - Idea: The traces we leave everywhere can be read by anyone with a lab; genetic privacy is a design issue. - What it is: Hair, cigarette butts and chewing gum collected in New York streets were analysed for DNA and turned into 3D-printed portrait masks of the strangers who left them. - How it works: DIY-lab DNA extraction and SNP analysis for traits such as ancestry and eye colour fed a face-modelling program; results were 3D-printed. - Video: https://vimeo.com/257272785 - Images: https://deweyhagborg.com/media/pages/projects/stranger-visions/d8bb0edf45-1643025614/wall_of_faces.jpg https://deweyhagborg.com/media/pages/projects/stranger-visions/ac735c5217-1643025534/petri-web.jpg - Project page: https://deweyhagborg.com/projects/stranger-visions #### 2.6g 329m/s (Bulletproof Skin) — Jalila Essaïdi (2011) - Type: Artwork · Organisms: Cells & tissue, Human body - Idea: Test a science-fiction idea in the lab to open debate on safety and enhancement. - What it is: Woven spider silk was embedded in lab-grown human skin and shot at with .22 bullets: the skin stopped a slower bullet but not one at full speed. - How it works: Transgenic spider silk from Utah State University was woven and layered between bioengineered skin cells at Leiden University Medical Center. - Images: https://arte-util.org/cms/wp-content/uploads/2013/12/280-Bullet-Proof-01-707x1060.jpg https://clotmag.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/05/The-bulletproof-skin-samples-right-before-they-were-shot-with-.22-LR-calibre-bullets-in-the-background.jpg - Project page: https://jalilaessaidi.com/2-6g-329ms/ #### Bacterial Radio — Joe Davis (2011) - Type: Artwork · Organisms: Bacteria & microbes - Idea: Grow the electronics: bacteria as a fabrication step for a radio. - What it is: Engineered bacteria deposit semiconducting minerals on glass, producing the crystal-radio components of a working receiver grown rather than manufactured. - How it works: E. coli carrying genes for metal-binding proteins precipitate germanium and other semiconducting compounds in patterns on substrates, which are wired into a crystal radio circuit. - Video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=W0pyeRCCJ44 - Project page: https://ars.electronica.art/ #### Blighted by Kenning — Charlotte Jarvis (2011) - Type: Artwork · Organisms: DNA & molecules, Bacteria & microbes, Plants - Idea: A text hidden in DNA turns a piece of fruit into a forbidden, readable message. - What it is: The Universal Declaration of Human Rights was encoded into bacterial DNA, which was then used to 'contaminate' apples grown in The Hague; the fruit was sent to genomics labs worldwide, whose scientists were asked to decode the message and eat the apple. - How it works: Each letter is written as one DNA codon, using the amino-acid single-letter code with a few reassigned codons for spaces and letters without amino acids; the DNA is extracted from bacteria and applied to the apples. - Video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UBVejRz4PW0 - Project page: https://dublin.sciencegallery.com/growyourown/blightedkenning #### Cryobook Archives — Tagny Duff (2011) - Type: Artwork · Organisms: Cells & tissue, DNA & molecules - Idea: Treat skin as a page and a virus as the ink. - What it is: Small handmade books whose pages are human and pig skin tissue marked by a lentivirus, stored and shown in a portable freezer that works as a miniature library. - How it works: Explant tissue and HaCaT skin cells were transfected with a lentiviral vector, stained immunohistochemically and bound using traditional bookbinding. - Video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Bdnb4U7eP_k - Project page: https://static.weboffice.uwa.edu.au/archive/www.symbiotica.uwa.edu.au/1352166.html #### May the Horse Live in Me — Art Orienté Objet (2011) - Type: Artwork · Organisms: Human body, Animals, Cells & tissue - Idea: Make kinship with another species a physiological event inside one's own body. - What it is: After months of preparation, Marion Laval-Jeantet is injected with horse blood plasma and then walks with the horse on stilt-hooves in a one-hour performance at Kapelica Gallery, Ljubljana. - How it works: The artist was gradually immunised with different horse immunoglobulins so that a final injection of horse plasma would be tolerated, while an ethologist prepared her and the horse to be together for the performance. - Images: https://archive.aec.at/asset/730673/preview/ https://archive.aec.at/asset/730631/preview/ - Project page: https://archive.aec.at/prix/169875/ #### Stress-o-stat — C-Lab (Laura Cinti & Howard Boland) (2011) - Type: Artwork · Organisms: Bacteria & microbes - Idea: Make an invisible cellular state readable as light, and let the machine that feeds the cells look alive. - What it is: A life-size chemostat installation in which engineered E. coli fluoresce when stressed, so bacterial stress becomes a flickering light. - How it works: An oxidative-stress promoter drives fluorescent protein expression; a chemostat of pumps and vessels keeps the culture alive while light and filters reveal the glow. - Video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fEAfDs_8hD0 - Images: https://firebasestorage.googleapis.com/v0/b/c-lab-fe10d.appspot.com/o/userdata%2Fprojects%2Fstressostat%2FstressOstat_01.jpg?alt=media&token=e7e082f9-fb2f-43d6-8299-477c1ca466c3 https://biodigitalviz.github.io/images/stress-o-stat.jpg - Project page: https://www.c-lab.co.uk/projects/stress_o_stat #### Biogenic Timestamp — Hideo Iwasaki, Oron Catts (2010) - Type: Artwork · Organisms: Bacteria & microbes - Idea: Let microbes write geological time onto our electronic waste. - What it is: Cyanobacteria grow over discarded PC motherboards, absorbing and rearranging dissolved metals and minerals and slowly building sediment over the electronics. - How it works: Oscillatoria, Nostoc, Pseudanabaena and Synechococcus elongatus PCC 7942 (one strain engineered to raise alkaline phosphatase and promote lithification) are cultured with motherboards and minerals in culture media. - Images: https://cdn.myportfolio.com/b55c7e54-61bd-45c3-a02a-c28798af8ee3/18eb95bc-f6eb-460b-badd-2c1dbc0fedb9_car_1x1.jpg?h=6435d1017f6d54c4fb2478da8fc85871 https://cdn.myportfolio.com/b55c7e54-61bd-45c3-a02a-c28798af8ee3/005add81-1184-433e-8c37-01967f0bdb12_rw_1920.JPG?h=8fd4f4ec4f00a0ab9760c4ce632e678f - Project page: https://hideo-iwasaki.com/biognic-timestamp-with-oron-catts-2010 #### E. coli pen — iGEM Team KIT-Kyoto (2010) - Type: Research prototype · Organisms: Bacteria & microbes - Idea: Draw with living colour. - What it is: A pen that uses no ink but a medium of genetically modified E. coli expressing more than four colours at various intensities from a single culture, presented as a tool for art. - How it works: Coloured protein genes under tunable promoters let one strain produce several hues. - Images: https://static.igem.org/mediawiki/2010/1/13/Science-and-art.png - Project page: https://2010.igem.org/Team:KIT-Kyoto/Home #### (In)visible Membrane — Sonja Bäumel (2009) - Type: Artwork · Organisms: Bacteria & microbes, Human body - Idea: The body does not end at the skin; clothing could be designed with our microbes. - What it is: Crocheted garments, a film and bacterial cultures make visible the layer of skin bacteria that surrounds every person as a second skin. - How it works: Skin bacteria were likely transferred onto agar and cultured to reveal their pattern; the artist learned microbiology during an internship at Wageningen University. - Images: https://sonjabaeumel.at/files/pro/00032/4crochetedmembranephotobyMaurizioMontalt_mm.jpg - Project page: http://www.sonjabaeumel.at/info/13-archive/8-invisible-membrane #### Natural History of the Enigma (Edunia) — Eduardo Kac (2009) - Type: Artwork · Organisms: Plants, DNA & molecules - Idea: Make kinship between species literal by putting your own gene into a flower. - What it is: Edunia is a petunia that expresses the artist's own DNA only in the red veins of its petals, a 'plantimal' mixing human and plant. - How it works: A gene fragment isolated from Kac's blood (an immune-system protein) was engineered to be expressed only in the flower's red veins. - Images: https://www.ekac.org/kac.nat.hist.enigma.01.jpg - Project page: https://www.ekac.org/nat.hist.enig.html #### Symbiose — Jelte van Abbema (2009) - Type: Artwork · Organisms: Bacteria & microbes - Idea: Graphic design can be a living surface that keeps changing after printing. - What it is: An advertising column with a controlled climate in which bacteria grow over printed posters, transforming the prints and spreading beyond the paper's edges. - How it works: Posters printed with nutrient-bearing inks are inoculated and kept warm and humid inside the column. - Images: https://www.dutchdesignawards.nl/wp-content/uploads/2014/09/jelte-van-abbema_0-1500x882.jpg https://www.dutchdesignawards.nl/wp-content/uploads/2014/09/jelte-van-abbema_1-1100x647.jpg - Project page: https://www.dutchdesignawards.nl/en/gallery/jelte-van-abbema/ #### Living Viral Tattoos — Tagny Duff (2008) - Type: Artwork · Organisms: Cells & tissue, DNA & molecules - Idea: A virus can draw on skin, and the drawing only becomes visible through lab staining. - What it is: Sculptural prototypes of blue-brown 'bruises' made on pigskin and donated human skin with a non-pathogenic lentivirus, preserved in jars and shown in a glass case. - How it works: Skin samples were kept alive in tissue culture, infected with a replication-deficient lentiviral vector, and stained with immunohistochemistry so infected areas appear as coloured marks. - Paper: https://doi.org/10.1162/leon_a_00123 (Leonardo 2011) - Images: https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/682e21ea2de63b385eab8dfa/93fad5d5-c27d-4795-b356-c29a7ed971cd/Duff_ViralTattoos.jpg https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/682e21ea2de63b385eab8dfa/789d76d7-012e-4cdd-b042-cdc132040d63/Duff_LivingViralTattoos_Sculptures_PlugInGallery1_2014.jpg - Project page: https://www.tagnyduff.com/work/brine-czg86 #### The Crucible — Allison Kudla (2008) - Type: Artwork · Organisms: Bacteria & microbes - Idea: Software that grows: the machine reads living data that its own light keeps rewriting. - What it is: A mechatronic installation that scans Petri dishes printed with cyanobacteria in the pattern of computer punch cards, then changes each dish's light according to what it reads. - How it works: A camera on a mechanical arm reads the colonies; brighter light speeds cyanobacterial growth, so the 'punch card' darkens and the reading changes over time. - Images: http://allisonx.com/wp-content/uploads/2008/12/algae-punch-card-petri-1024x768.jpg http://allisonx.com/wp-content/uploads/2008/12/3154897266_b6120856ec_o-1024x768.jpg https://biodigitalviz.github.io/images/crucible.jpg - Project page: http://allisonx.com/project/the-crucible/ #### Harlequin Coat — ORLAN (2007) - Type: Artwork · Organisms: Cells & tissue, Human body - Idea: Stitch identity together from other people's living cells. - What it is: A prototype coat made of living skin cells of different origins, colours and ages, cultured in diamond-shaped Petri dishes, as a figure of cultural and biological crossbreeding. - How it works: Skin cells from the artist and from donors of different backgrounds were grown in vitro at SymbioticA and arranged in a harlequin pattern. - Video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rXogCaax954 - Project page: https://static.weboffice.uwa.edu.au/archive/www.symbiotica.uwa.edu.au/1351984.html #### Latent Figure Protocol — Paul Vanouse (2007) - Type: Artwork · Organisms: DNA & molecules - Idea: A 'DNA fingerprint' is an image produced by choices in the lab, not a neutral reading. - What it is: In a live performance, DNA samples are run through gel electrophoresis so the DNA bands form recognisable images, such as a copyright symbol. - How it works: Restriction enzymes cut DNA into fragments of chosen lengths; loaded into many gel wells, the bands build a pixel image. - Video: https://vimeo.com/337656704 - Images: https://www.paulvanouse.com/DSC_154-small.jpg - Project page: https://www.paulvanouse.com/lfp.html #### NoArk — Oron Catts, Ionat Zurr, The Tissue Culture & Art Project (2007) - Type: Artwork · Organisms: Cells & tissue, Animals - Idea: Biotechnology produces life that breaks our categories; a new kind of collection is needed to display it. - What it is: An experimental vessel keeps alive a single mass of cells and tissues that came from many different organisms, a 'surrogate body' for life forms that no taxonomy fits. - How it works: Cell lines from tissue banks and labs were co-cultured in one custom bioreactor, with Marcus Canning. - Images: https://tcaproject.net/wp-content/uploads/2018/12/TCA-Project-NoArk-Oron-Catts-and-Ionat-Zurr-04.jpg - Project page: https://tcaproject.net/portfolio/noark/ #### The Martian Rose — C-Lab (Laura Cinti & Howard Boland) (2007) - Type: Artwork · Organisms: Plants - Idea: The symbol of romantic love becomes a test subject for life beyond Earth. - What it is: A rose placed in a planetary simulation chamber at the Mars Simulation Laboratory, Aarhus University, and exposed to Martian temperature, pressure and atmosphere for six hours. - How it works: The artists worked with planetary scientists to run a standard Mars-simulation exposure on a cut rose and documented its changes. - Paper: https://doi.org/10.1162/leon.2009.42.2.178 (Leonardo 2009) - Video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JXucfw6c1kE - Project page: https://www.c-lab.co.uk/projects/the_martian_rose #### Biojewellery — Tobie Kerridge (2006) - Type: Research prototype · Organisms: Cells & tissue, Human body - Idea: Tissue engineering can serve intimate, symbolic objects, not only medicine. - What it is: Couples donated bone cells that were grown in a lab on a ceramic scaffold and then made into wedding rings, so each partner wears a ring grown from the other's bone tissue. - How it works: Bone cells from wisdom-tooth extractions were cultured on a bioactive hydroxyapatite and tricalcium phosphate scaffold at King's College London, then finished with silver by jewellers. - Video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mVrgztn6sfU - Images: https://www.moma.org/interactives/exhibitions/2008/elasticmind/assets/images/Biojewellery/biojewellery1.jpg - Project page: https://www.moma.org/interactives/exhibitions/2008/elasticmind/ #### Dressing the Meat of Tomorrow — James King (2006) - Type: Speculative design · Organisms: Cells & tissue, Animals - Idea: Cultured meat needs a designed form that reminds eaters where it came from. - What it is: A proposal for how lab-grown meat could be shaped: a mobile MRI unit scans the most beautiful farm animals, and their organ cross-sections become moulds for in-vitro meat, shown as sculpted models. - How it works: Speculative models in plastisol based on MRI slices of animal organs, responding to the Tissue Culture & Art Project's 'disembodied cuisine'. - Video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xmqHnBp8odg - Images: https://www.moma.org/interactives/exhibitions/2008/elasticmind/assets/images/DressingtheMeatofTomorrow/JamesKingDressingtheMeatofTomorrow.jpg - Project page: https://www.moma.org/interactives/exhibitions/2008/elasticmind/ #### Specimen of Secrecy about Marvelous Discoveries — Eduardo Kac (2006) - Type: Artwork · Organisms: Bacteria & microbes, Ecosystems - Idea: A painting can be a self-sustaining ecosystem that the artist only orchestrates. - What it is: A series of 'biotopes': framed living works of earth, water and thousands of microorganisms whose colours change over the exhibition as the microbes metabolise. - How it works: Kac arranged microbial communities and nutrients in sealed frames so their metabolism produces evolving colour fields. - Images: https://www.ekac.org/specimen_doohickey.jpg - Project page: https://www.ekac.org/specimen.html #### The Race, from the Future Farm project — Michael Burton (2006) - Type: Speculative design · Organisms: Bacteria & microbes, Insects, Human body - Idea: Instead of more hygiene, design could help us live closer to microbes and animals again. - What it is: Objects for a post-antibiotic future that help people re-expose themselves to microbes: re-engineered rugged fingernails where bacteria can grow and hair cages for keeping maggots, crickets and mantises close to the body. - How it works: Speculative prototypes in resin, silicone, wood, wire, hair and a taxidermy mantis, based on the hygiene hypothesis and antibiotic resistance. - Images: https://www.moma.org/interactives/exhibitions/2008/elasticmind/assets/images/TheRace/fingernails400.jpg - Project page: https://www.moma.org/interactives/exhibitions/2008/elasticmind/ #### Normal Flora (Bed Flora, Plate Flora, Table Flora) — Anna Dumitriu (2005) - Type: Artwork · Organisms: Bacteria & microbes - Idea: Every surface at home is a landscape of microbes we never see. - What it is: Prints and objects showing the harmless bacteria that live on everyday things in the artist's home, such as her bed, plates and table, grown and photographed from swabs; the prints were shown in the SIGGRAPH 2005 Art Gallery. - How it works: Swabs from household objects are cultured on agar with microbiologists, then photographed through microscopy and printed; later works embed cultures in textiles and crochet. - Video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VKFYnLfuivU - Images: https://history.siggraph.org/wp-content/uploads/2017/10/2005_Dumitriu_BedFlora.jpg https://history.siggraph.org/wp-content/uploads/2017/10/2005_Dumitriu_TableFlora.jpg - Project page: https://history.siggraph.org/artwork/anna-dumitriu-bed-flora/ #### Victimless Leather — Oron Catts, Ionat Zurr, The Tissue Culture & Art Project (2004) - Type: Artwork · Organisms: Cells & tissue - Idea: A 'victimless' material still involves life, death and care; the gallery has to decide when to kill it. - What it is: A miniature stitchless jacket grown from living cells in a glass bioreactor; at MoMA's Design and the Elastic Mind (2008) it grew so fast that the curator had to switch it off. - How it works: Mouse and human cell lines were grown over a jacket-shaped biodegradable polymer in a perfusion bioreactor. - Images: https://tcaproject.net/wp-content/uploads/2018/12/TCA-Project-Victimless-Leather-Oron-Catts-and-Ionat-Zurr.jpg - Project page: https://tcaproject.net/portfolio/victimless-leather/ #### Disembodied Cuisine — Oron Catts, Ionat Zurr, The Tissue Culture & Art Project, SymbioticA (2003) - Type: Artwork · Organisms: Cells & tissue, Animals - Idea: Lab-grown meat is not 'victimless'; showing the donor animal next to the steak makes that visible. - What it is: Frog muscle was grown into a small 'steak' in the gallery while the living frogs it came from lived beside it; at the end the tissue was cooked and eaten at a dinner in Nantes. - How it works: Frog skeletal muscle cells were grown over biopolymer scaffolds in a bioreactor; the medium included animal-derived serum. - Paper: https://doi.org/10.1080/13534645.2013.752062 (Parallax 2013) - Images: https://tcaproject.net/wp-content/uploads/2003/12/TCA-Disembodied-Cuisine-Oron-Catts-and-Ionat-Zurr-0.jpg - Project page: https://tcaproject.net/portfolio/disembodied-cuisine/ #### Extra Ear ¼ Scale — Oron Catts, Ionat Zurr, The Tissue Culture & Art Project (2003) - Type: Artwork · Organisms: Cells & tissue, Human body - Idea: Grow a body part outside the body to ask who owns it and what it is for. - What it is: With performance artist Stelarc, a quarter-scale replica of Stelarc's ear was grown from living cells, a step towards the ear he later had implanted on his arm. - How it works: Human cells were seeded on an ear-shaped biodegradable scaffold and grown in a bioreactor. - Images: https://tcaproject.net/wp-content/uploads/2018/12/TCA-Project-Extra-Ear-Oron-Catts-and-Ionat-Zurr-and-Stelarc-01.jpg - Project page: https://tcaproject.net/portfolio/extra-ear/ #### Relative Velocity Inscription Device — Paul Vanouse (2002) - Type: Artwork · Organisms: DNA & molecules, Human body - Idea: Turn the apparatus of genetic comparison into a visible contest, and its politics show. - What it is: A live gel electrophoresis race between DNA samples from four members of the artist's mixed-race family, running for the length of the exhibition. - How it works: A custom horizontal electrophoresis system separates family members' DNA over weeks; the migrating bands are lit and monitored, with skin-colour genetics as the stated premise. - Images: https://www.paulvanouse.com/RVID-wide1.jpg - Project page: https://www.paulvanouse.com/rvid.html #### Malamp — Brandon Ballengée (2001) - Type: Artwork · Organisms: Animals, Ecosystems - Idea: Scientific specimens can become portraits that make ecological harm personal. - What it is: Large prints of deformed frogs collected in the field, chemically cleared and stained so their bones glow red and cartilage blue, serve as memorials to amphibian decline. - How it works: Field surveys of malformed amphibians; specimens were cleared with enzymes and stained with alizarin red and alcian blue, then scanned. - Images: https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/69bc4da3042b683983220a8c/81a66649-8091-4547-8f65-f8bc1af405b1/brandon_ballengee_dfb42_electra_ozomene.jpg - Project page: https://www.brandonballengee.com/malamp/ #### Pig Wings — Oron Catts, Ionat Zurr, The Tissue Culture & Art Project (2001) - Type: Artwork · Organisms: Cells & tissue, Animals - Idea: Tissue engineering can make metaphors literal, and in doing so expose the desires behind biotech. - What it is: Three sets of small wings — in the shapes of bat, bird and pterosaur wings — were grown from pig bone-marrow stem cells, answering the saying 'when pigs fly'. - How it works: Pig mesenchymal stem cells were differentiated into bone tissue over wing-shaped biodegradable scaffolds. - Images: https://tcaproject.net/wp-content/uploads/2018/12/TCA-Pigs-Wings-Oron-Catts-and-Ionat-Zurr-01.jpg - Project page: https://tcaproject.net/portfolio/pigs-wings/ #### The Eighth Day — Eduardo Kac (2001) - Type: Artwork · Organisms: Animals, Plants, Bacteria & microbes - Idea: Assemble transgenic life into one artificial ecology and watch it become a shared condition. - What it is: A clear dome holds a small ecology of transgenic organisms that all glow green — plants, amoebae, fish and mice — together with a biobot moved by amoeba activity. - How it works: GFP-expressing organisms are kept in a four-foot acrylic dome with life-support; a biobot with an amoeba colony as its brain moves according to their collective activity, streamed online. - Images: http://www.ekac.org/8thday-general-nopublic.jpg - Project page: http://www.ekac.org/8thday.html #### GFP Bunny (Alba) — Eduardo Kac (2000) - Type: Artwork · Organisms: Animals, DNA & molecules - Idea: A transgenic animal as art is as much about responsibility and care as about the organism. - What it is: Alba, an albino rabbit carrying a green fluorescent protein gene, was presented as an artwork including the public debate and the family life around her. - How it works: Alba was produced at the French agricultural research institute INRA with an enhanced GFP gene that makes her glow green under blue light. - Paper: https://doi.org/10.1162/002409403321554125 (Leonardo 2003) - Images: https://www.ekac.org/albagreen-cutout.png - Project page: https://www.ekac.org/gfpbunny.html #### Nature? — Marta de Menezes (2000) - Type: Artwork · Organisms: Insects - Idea: You can design a living form through its development without touching its genes. - What it is: Live butterflies were given wing patterns never seen in nature, such as asymmetric eyespots, by intervening in the development of the pupae; the designs live and die with the butterflies. - How it works: Microsurgery and cauterisation on developing wing tissue of Bicyclus anynana altered eyespot formation; the change is not inherited. - Images: https://martademenezes.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/07/01-Nature__Cover-1000x1000.jpg - Project page: https://martademenezes.com/portfolio/nature/ #### Semi-Living Worry Dolls — Oron Catts, Ionat Zurr, The Tissue Culture & Art Project, SymbioticA (2000) - Type: Artwork · Organisms: Cells & tissue - Idea: A 'semi-living' object is neither alive nor dead, and needs our care to exist. - What it is: Seven tiny doll figures, modelled on Guatemalan worry dolls, were grown from living cells on degradable polymer inside a bioreactor; visitors were invited to whisper their worries to them. - How it works: Cells were seeded onto hand-shaped scaffolds of biodegradable polymer and surgical sutures and kept in a sterile bioreactor at body temperature. - Paper: https://doi.org/10.1162/002409402760181123 (Leonardo 2002) - Images: https://tcaproject.net/wp-content/uploads/2018/12/TCA-Semi-Living-Worry-Dolls-Oron-Catts-and-Ionat-Zurr-09.jpg - Project page: https://tcaproject.net/portfolio/worry-dolls/ #### Genesis — Eduardo Kac (1999) - Type: Artwork · Organisms: DNA & molecules, Bacteria & microbes - Idea: DNA is also a writing system; letting the public mutate it asks who has dominion over life. - What it is: A sentence from the Book of Genesis was translated into Morse code and then into a synthetic gene placed in bacteria; online visitors switched on UV light to mutate the bacteria and so rewrite the text. - How it works: Text → Morse → base pairs; the synthetic gene was cloned into E. coli under a microscope connected to the internet with remotely controlled UV. - Paper: https://doi.org/10.2307/j.ctv36xw15f.7 (Art, Technology, Consciousness (Intellect) 2000) - Images: https://www.ekac.org/genesis.kac.1.jpg - Project page: https://www.ekac.org/geninfo.html #### Microvenus — Joe Davis (1986) - Type: Artwork · Organisms: DNA & molecules, Bacteria & microbes - Idea: Living cells can carry an image as a message, like a plaque sent to space. - What it is: An ancient Germanic rune for life and the female earth was encoded as a short synthetic DNA sequence and inserted into E. coli, often cited as the first artwork made with molecular biology. - How it works: The icon was converted to binary and then to a 28-base-pair DNA sequence, synthesised with geneticist Dana Boyd and cloned into E. coli. - Paper: https://doi.org/10.1080/00043249.1996.10791743 (Art Journal 1996) - Project page: https://doi.org/10.1080/00043249.1996.10791743 ## Human × Biocomputing Interfaces and computers that include living organisms: plants as sensors, fungi and slime moulds that compute, microbes in wearables, biohybrid robots. ### Living Interfaces Devices and displays with living organisms inside, and how people care for them. #### Cry for AI: A Moss-Controlled AI Wearable for Resource-Aware Interaction — Saetbyeol LeeYouk (2026) - Type: Research prototype · Organisms: Plants, Human body - Idea: Tie AI use to the health of a living thing to make its resource costs felt. - What it is: A wearable in which living moss controls access to an AI assistant: when the moss dries out, AI answers are limited or refused until a tear-activated sensor rehydrates it. - How it works: Moss viability sensing gates voice-controlled AI modes with preset resource budgets. - Paper: https://doi.org/10.1145/3772363.3799109 (CHI 2026) - Video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3QSlfBesMqI - Project page: https://doi.org/10.1145/3772363.3799109 #### Entangled Life and Code: A Computational Design Taxonomy for Synergistic Bio-Digital Systems — Zoë Breed, Elvin Karana, Alessandro Bozzon, Katherine W. Song (2026) - Type: Paper · Organisms: Bacteria & microbes, Algae, Fungi - Idea: Ask which computing role the organism plays: most systems use microbes only as transducers or batteries, leaving memory, evaluation and adaptation open. - What it is: A taxonomy that describes bio-digital systems by eight computational layers (input, transduction, evaluation, routing, memory, adaptation, output, power), applied to 70 microorganism-based systems from HCI, design, engineering and bio-art, with an open visualisation platform. - How it works: Two coders from biodesign and computer science coded each system's organism, trigger, output, scale, timing and the computational roles of organism and electronics, then explored gaps in a React/D3 Sankey visualisation. - Paper: https://arxiv.org/abs/2601.15804 (CHI 2026) - Images: https://arxiv.org/html/2601.15804v1/figures/header_final_cropped.jpg https://arxiv.org/html/2601.15804v1/figures/new_bio_digital_systems_thumbnails_copy.jpg https://arxiv.org/html/2601.15804v1/figures/viz_home.png - Project page: https://biodigitalviz.github.io/ #### Spectrospira: A Case of Designing and Displaying a Cyanobacteria Photobioreactor — Fiona Bell (2026) - Type: Artwork · Organisms: Bacteria & microbes - Idea: A data sculpture can also be a home for living microbes that must be cared for on site. - What it is: A sculptural data physicalization of environmental sound data that is also a working photobioreactor keeping cyanobacteria alive, shown for four months in an art museum. Made with artist Andrea Polli. - How it works: 3D-printed forms from sound data around a hand-blown glass vessel, with pumps and lights to culture cyanobacteria (likely Spirulina). - Paper: https://doi.org/10.1145/3800645.3812785 (DIS 2026) #### The MECC — Emily Salvi (2026) - Type: Research prototype · Organisms: Bacteria & microbes - Idea: A building skin can host microbes that clean the air. - What it is: A modular façade panel for landfills and gasworks that houses living methanotrophic microbes in a carrageenan hydrogel to oxidise methane, with sensors monitoring the community. - How it works: Methanotrophs in hydrogel cells are exposed to air flows; panel bodies are printed from wood-fibre PLA. - Images: https://content.gp-award.com/assets/media/award26/new-0-up-the-mecc_blogLarge.jpg https://content.gp-award.com/assets/media/award26/new-1-up-the-mecc_blogLarge.jpg - Project page: https://www.gp-award.com/en/projects/the-mecc #### Algae-Symbiont — Ye Wen (2025) - Type: Research prototype · Organisms: Algae - Idea: Furniture can be a place where people live with algae. - What it is: Living microalgae cultures built into an air-purifying table and wall module; an Arduino-controlled pump circulates room air through the algae, which absorb CO2 and release oxygen. - How it works: Tubes of microalgae are lit and aerated by a microcontroller-driven pump. - Images: https://content.gp-award.com/assets/media/award25/0-algae-symbiont_blogLarge.jpg - Project page: https://www.gp-award.com/en/projects/algae-symbiont #### Growth — Cody Lukas (2025) - Type: Artwork · Organisms: Cells & tissue, Human body - Idea: Listen to tissue growth itself, making the line between creation and uncontrolled growth audible. - What it is: An immersive sound installation built from hydrophone recordings of living ovarian cancer organoids, whose metabolic frequencies are slowed and amplified around a suspended sculpture. - How it works: Ultrasensitive hydrophones recorded organoids from the OvaCure Collection biobank; frequencies were isolated, time-stretched and amplified, then played with light in the space. - Video: https://www.codylukas.com/Growth-Cody-Lukas.mp4 - Project page: https://www.codylukas.com/portfolio/ #### Mold Sounds — Alexandra Teixeira Riggs (2025) - Type: Research prototype · Organisms: Fungi - Idea: Let growth you usually clean away become a voice in the piece. - What it is: A sound artefact in which moulds grow over conductive components and so change the sounds it produces, reframing 'toxic' mould as a polyphonic multispecies collaborator. - How it works: Moulds colonise conductive materials in an enclosed environment; their growth alters electrical paths that modulate a sound circuit. - Paper: https://doi.org/10.1145/3689050.3704417 (TEI 2025) - Images: https://biodigitalviz.github.io/images/mould.jpg - Project page: https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3689050.3704417 #### MuSE (Multispecies Sensory Engagement): Enhancing Emotional Bonds with Microorganisms — Logan Shockey, Elena Sabinson (2025) - Type: Research prototype · Organisms: Bacteria & microbes - Idea: Sensory contact can turn disgust toward microbes into care. - What it is: MuSE is a soft silicone bioreactor that houses a kombucha SCOBY and translates the culture's health into light, movement and touch, inviting people to care for microbes they might find off-putting. - How it works: Research through design with an autoethnographic study, drawing on exposure therapy and embodied cognition. - Paper: https://doi.org/10.21606/iasdr.2025.812 (IASDR 2025) - Project page: https://doi.org/10.21606/iasdr.2025.812 #### SquidKid — Northeastern University Biodesign Challenge team (2025) - Type: Product & platform · Organisms: Bacteria & microbes - Idea: Caring for glowing microbes can teach children respect for invisible life. - What it is: An educational toy with a safe bioreactor of bioluminescent Aliivibrio fischeri bacteria that children feed and watch glow, learning to value microbial life. - How it works: The bacteria glow through quorum-sensing-controlled luciferase when their population is dense and well fed. - Video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0VgPBadKbfo - Images: https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/552dc0ffe4b070a9e1a6a215/1751487060117-CGVZHZZA87E15ZBXJAQL/SquidKid_Poster1_1080x1080.jpg - Project page: https://www.biodesignchallenge.org/northeastern-university-2025 #### The Singing Textiles: Weaving Life — Paola Torres Núñez del Prado (2025) - Type: Artwork · Organisms: Fungi, Algae - Idea: A textile can be an interface where growth and sensing cannot be separated. - What it is: Woven textiles with living lichens that respond to humidity, touch and atmospheric change and express those responses as sound, presented as a garden of care and interspecies symbiosis. - How it works: Electronic sensing threads measure the lichens' responses and drive a sound system; weaving draws on Andean knotting and computation. - Video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3IqJ0lpUh3M - Images: https://ars.electronica.art/starts-prize/files/2026/06/the-singing-textiles_barumkunsthall__0_photo_by_tor_s__ulstein-1024x576.jpg - Project page: https://www.singingtextiles.com #### Algae Alight: Exploring the Potential of Bioluminescence through Bio-kinetic Pixels — Zoë Breed, Bahareh Barati (2024) - Type: Paper · Organisms: Algae - Idea: A pixel can be a living organism that glows when touched. - What it is: A living light display whose pixels are vessels of bioluminescent algae; vibration modules shake each pixel so the algae flash in controlled patterns. - How it works: Adjustable-weight vibration modules stimulate dinoflagellates' mechanically triggered bioluminescence, with organism-centric algorithms that rest pixels to avoid exhausting them. - Paper: https://doi.org/10.1145/3643834.3660728 (DIS 2024) - Video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u_ZRy6KOdmQ - Images: https://biodigitalviz.github.io/images/algae_alight.png - Project page: https://doi.org/10.1145/3643834.3660728 #### Bio-Digital Calendar: Attuning to Nonhuman Temporalities for Multispecies Understanding — Fiona Bell, Mirela Alistar (2024) - Type: Paper · Organisms: Bacteria & microbes, Fungi - Idea: A calendar can count time in another organism's growth instead of in human days. - What it is: A calendar built around a jar of kombucha SCOBY that tracks its growth with sensors and turns it into sound, so that daily looking and listening tunes its keepers to the organism's slowness. - How it works: Non-invasive sensors around the SCOBY vessel log growth and health; data are sonified and displayed as a daily calendar. - Paper: https://doi.org/10.1145/3623509.3633386 (TEI 2024) - Video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dxP_CiyKbVI - Project page: https://www.colorado.edu/atlas/microbial-interfaces #### Living with Cyanobacteria: Exploring Materiality in Caring for Microbes in Everyday Life — Jiwei Zhou, Elvin Karana (2024) - Type: Paper · Organisms: Bacteria & microbes - Idea: A living object's material qualities shape how people learn to care for it. - What it is: Eight participants lived for two weeks with a pliable, colour-changing cyanobacterial artefact that purifies air, placing and caring for it around their homes. - How it works: Cyanobacteria embedded in an adhesive, suspendable biocomposite whose colour reflects vitality; diary photos and interviews analysed. - Paper: https://doi.org/10.1145/3613904.3642039 (CHI 2024) - Video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9BqEG7GXjFQ #### Algal Relay Computer (ARC) — Yuta Ikeya, Bahareh Barati (2023) - Type: Research prototype · Organisms: Algae - Idea: Let a computer run at the pace of algae to make nonhuman time felt. - What it is: A 'slow' computer whose relays are switched by the growth of algae, so a calculation takes days instead of nanoseconds. - How it works: Spirulina cultures grow under light; sensing of their growth (likely optical) switches relays that carry the calculation forward. - Paper: https://doi.org/10.1145/3544549.3585874 (CHI 2023 Extended Abstracts) - Video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FKSwIlIvUAk - Images: https://biodigitalviz.github.io/images/algae_relay.jpg - Project page: https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3544549.3585874 #### Biohybrid Devices — Madalina Nicolae (2023) - Type: Paper · Organisms: Bacteria & microbes, Fungi - Idea: Grow the housing of a device around its electronics instead of moulding plastic. - What it is: Interactive devices, such as a game controller, whose bodies are grown from a living SCOBY biofilm that encloses the electronic components as it forms; published at UIST 2023 and exhibited at Dutch Design Week 2024. - How it works: Circuits and sensors are placed on a scaffold in a kombucha culture; the bacteria and yeast grow a cellulose biofilm over them, which is then dried into a flexible, functional casing. - Paper: https://doi.org/10.1145/3586183.3606774 (UIST 2023) - Video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=w5ecPikgSTo - Images: https://ddw.ams3.cdn.digitaloceanspaces.com/thumbs/gamepad-light_1722536799_1200x630.jpg - Project page: https://site.ddw.nl/en/programme/11985/biohybrid-device-grown-technology #### Felt Experiences with Kombucha Scoby: Exploring First-person Perspectives with Living Matter — Netta Ofer, Mirela Alistar (2023) - Type: Paper · Organisms: Bacteria & microbes, Fungi - Idea: Designing with a living material starts with noticing how it feels to live alongside it. - What it is: An autoethnography of growing and crafting with kombucha SCOBY—hearing it ferment, touching it at harvest, watching layers slowly form—leading to 'sensory engagement probes' that share these experiences. - How it works: Material samples fabricated from SCOBY biofilm, reflective writing and designed sensory probes (sound, touch, time-lapse). - Paper: https://doi.org/10.1145/3544548.3581276 (CHI 2023) - Video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tAAHQFDw1Gc #### FloraWear — Hye Yeon Nam (2023) - Type: Research prototype · Organisms: Plants, Human body - Idea: Wearing a growing plant makes the wearer part of its ecosystem. - What it is: DIY wearable planters (bracelets, necklaces and rings) in which seeds germinate and grow on the body; twenty people wore them for weeks. - How it works: 3D-printed flexible holders with growing substrate host sprouts; the pictorial documents material tests, design iterations and wearers' experiences. - Paper: https://doi.org/10.1145/3569009.3572801 (TEI 2023) - Images: https://figures.semanticscholar.org/54f125b7db030e39acb47e955b7234c294f587c0/500px/1-Figure1-1.png https://figures.semanticscholar.org/54f125b7db030e39acb47e955b7234c294f587c0/500px/2-Figure2-1.png - Project page: https://doi.org/10.1145/3569009.3572801 #### Kombucha electronics: electronic circuits on kombucha mats — Andrew Adamatzky (2023) - Type: Paper · Organisms: Bacteria & microbes, Fungi - Idea: Grow your circuit board from tea, sugar and microbes. - What it is: Circuits were printed and mounted on dried and living kombucha mats, the cellulose films grown by bacteria and yeast; LEDs and simple circuits kept working even after the mats were folded or crumpled. - How it works: Conductive polymer tracks were printed and components attached to bacterial cellulose mats from a SCOBY culture, then tested under bending and tearing. - Paper: https://doi.org/10.1038/s41598-023-36244-8 (Scientific Reports) - Images: https://media.springernature.com/full/springer-static/image/art%3A10.1038%2Fs41598-023-36244-8/MediaObjects/41598_2023_36244_Fig1_HTML.jpg - Project page: https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-023-36244-8 #### Korallysis — Gilberto Esparza (2023) - Type: Artwork · Organisms: Animals, Ecosystems - Idea: A machine and a coral colony can live in mutual benefit. - What it is: A hybrid organism of ceramic segments and coral colonies on the seabed that harvests energy from currents and waves to drive electrolysis, which accretes minerals and speeds coral growth. - How it works: Kinetic generators power mineral accretion (calcium carbonate) on the ceramic structure, which also shelters juvenile fish. - Video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ppD3TJ4X8K4 - Images: https://ars.electronica.art/starts-prize/files/2024/06/korallysis_3_2-c-gilberto-esparza-1024x576.jpg - Project page: https://korallysis.org #### SCOBY Breastplate: Slowly Growing a Microbial Interface — Fiona Bell, Mirela Alistar (2023) - Type: Artwork · Organisms: Bacteria & microbes, Fungi, Human body - Idea: Prototype at the pace of the organism, not at the pace of fail-fast. - What it is: An interactive breastplate grown from kombucha SCOBY over 13 weeks, with embedded sensors and LEDs that respond differently to being hugged, tapped or brushed. - How it works: SCOBY biofilm tuned for strength, colour and conductivity through DIY-bio, digital fabrication and craft, then embedded with touch sensors and LEDs. - Paper: https://doi.org/10.1145/3569009.3572805 (TEI 2023 Arts Track) - Images: https://www.colorado.edu/atlas/sites/default/files/styles/wide_image_style/public/2025-06/microbialInterfacesBanner.png?h=2aa4d2e4&itok=hWcw52SV - Project page: https://www.colorado.edu/atlas/microbial-interfaces #### Acute multidrug delivery via a wearable bioreactor facilitates long-term limb regeneration in adult Xenopus laevis (BioDome) — Michael Levin (2022) - Type: Paper · Organisms: Animals, Cells & tissue - Idea: A short, well-timed nudge from a wearable device can start a body's own long-term growth program. - What it is: Adult frogs, which normally cannot regrow limbs, wore a silicone 'BioDome' with a five-drug cocktail over a fresh amputation for just 24 hours, and over the next 18 months regrew a largely functional leg. - How it works: A wearable silk-hydrogel bioreactor delivers growth and anti-inflammatory compounds to the wound for 24 hours; regeneration is tracked by imaging, micro-CT and sensory tests. - Paper: https://doi.org/10.1126/sciadv.abj2164 (Science Advances) - Video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KQPP7AOr47g - Images: https://cdn.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/blobs/c9be/8791464/db53aba00e45/sciadv.abj2164-f1.jpg - Project page: https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC8791464/ #### Cryptographic Beings — Michael Sedbon (2022) - Type: Artwork · Organisms: Algae - Idea: Living behaviour reduced to two states can hold digital data. - What it is: A data-storage machine that uses marimo algae balls as bits: lit balls float (1) and dark ones sink (0), so an array can store a five-letter word. - How it works: Aegagropila linnaei photosynthesise under controlled light, trapping gas bubbles that make them float; darkness lets them sink; tubes are addressed as bytes. - Video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BPFqU_wRMXM - Images: https://freight.cargo.site/w/1200/i/13aa55cb03d22d09726d26f969946bbc5e5bf60349ec69204148670ccf1cb518/RK_00215.png https://freight.cargo.site/w/1750/i/110ee6337084ec3ec011aef5a996afc6d13cef872d6efb81d065be9030377669/RK_00209.jpg - Project page: https://michaelsedbon.com/Cryptographic-Beings #### Integrating Living Organisms in Devices to Implement Care-based Interactions — Jasmine Lu, Pedro Lopes (2022) - Type: Paper · Organisms: Slime mould, Human body - Idea: Make a device feature depend on keeping an organism alive, so care becomes part of the interaction. - What it is: A smartwatch whose heart-rate sensor is wired through a living slime mould: if the wearer feeds and waters it, the mould stays conductive and the sensor works; if neglected, it dries out and the feature switches off until care resumes. Participants wore it for 9–14 days. - How it works: Physarum polycephalum grows along a channel between two electrodes and acts as a 'living wire' that closes the circuit to the heart-rate sensor only when hydrated and fed with oats. - Paper: https://doi.org/10.1145/3526113.3545629 (UIST 2022) - Video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Bex91KV56PQ - Images: https://lab.plopes.org/project-thumbnails/UIST22-IntegratingPhysarum.png - Project page: https://lab.plopes.org/ - Code: https://github.com/humancomputerintegration/integrating-living-organisms #### MycelioTronics: Fungal mycelium skin for sustainable electronics — Martin Kaltenbrunner (2022) - Type: Paper · Organisms: Fungi - Idea: Replace plastic circuit boards with a skin grown by a fungus. - What it is: The thin skin that Ganoderma lucidum grows on wood is peeled off and used as a flexible, heat-resistant substrate for circuit boards, batteries and sensors that decompose in soil. - How it works: Mycelium skins are harvested from beech-wood cultures, dried and laminated, then metallised with laser-patterned copper and gold tracks. - Paper: https://doi.org/10.1126/sciadv.add7118 (Science Advances) - Video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jz7ftR8ln0I - Images: https://www.jku.at/fileadmin/_processed_/7/f/csm_myceliotronics_edabc67f66.jpg https://cdn.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/blobs/8059/9651864/c189498a5480/sciadv.add7118-f1.jpg - Project page: https://www.jku.at/en/institute-of-experimental-physics/soft-matter-physics/news-highlights/detail/news/publication-myceliotronics-fungal-mycelium-skin-for-sustainable-electronics/ #### Sprayful Interaction — Gabrielle Hong (2022) - Type: Research prototype · Organisms: Plants - Idea: A living display can use almost no electricity: water is the pixel driver. - What it is: A slow, low-resolution display made of living moss panels: spraying water makes dry, curled moss open up and turn green, so people 'draw' by watering. - How it works: Moss boards pinned to a wall in a design school respond to a spray gun; ten participants took part in think-aloud sessions, observation and interviews. - Paper: https://doi.org/10.1145/3572921.3576207 (OzCHI 2022) - Images: https://figures.semanticscholar.org/d2f55629205ac87cfe462c6fb4c6b085af5d38db/500px/3-Figure2-1.png https://figures.semanticscholar.org/d2f55629205ac87cfe462c6fb4c6b085af5d38db/500px/5-Figure3-1.png - Project page: https://doi.org/10.1145/3572921.3576207 #### The Crossing — Kuai Shen (2022) - Type: Artwork · Organisms: Insects - Idea: Use an animal's movement through a sensor field as a live variable in a composition. - What it is: Army ants crossing laser beams in the Amazon rainforest generate data that shapes the sound of three steel sculptures, alongside a night projection of the crossing. - How it works: Low-power lasers and photocells in the Sarayaku forest registered ants interrupting the beams; the data changed pitch and envelope in Sonic Pi on Raspberry Pis driving transducers under corten steel discs. - Video: https://vimeo.com/801272088 - Images: https://kuaishen.tv/images/crossing/1.jpg https://kuaishen.tv/images/crossing/gal_8.jpg - Project page: https://kuaishen.tv/thecrossing.html #### Time of the Flies — Ursula Damm (2022) - Type: Artwork · Organisms: Insects - Idea: Living with an organism's rhythms changes your own; share that with the audience. - What it is: A development of Drosophila Karaoke Bar in which live fruit-fly cultures are observed on video screens that show their group behaviour and spacing, reflecting on distance and proximity during the pandemic. - How it works: Fruit-fly cultures kept in the artist's home and exhibition lab are filmed and tracked, and an interface visualises their collective movement and sounds; first shown in SWARM at Science Gallery Melbourne. - Video: https://vimeo.com/695691167 - Images: https://ursuladamm.de/api/media/file/Laboransicht-2-scaled.jpg https://ursuladamm.de/api/media/file/Interface_screen-scaled.jpg - Project page: https://ursuladamm.de/en/artworks/time-of-the-flies #### (de)Compositions — Kasia Molga (2021) - Type: Artwork · Organisms: Animals, Ecosystems - Idea: Pair living biosensors with digital sensors so data never loses its source. - What it is: A soil monolith in which earthworms mix fertile and depleted soil over weeks, while sensors turn their activity and the changing moisture into a slowly shifting spatial sound piece. - How it works: Moisture sensors and piezo sensors track soil conditions and worm activity in a layered container, driving at least four speakers and proximity-triggered lights; with GROW Observatory, commissioned by STARTS. - Video: https://vimeo.com/336319358 - Images: https://www.studiomolga.com/DECOMP/decomp_01.png https://www.studiomolga.com/DECOMP/decomp_02.png - Project page: https://www.studiomolga.com/art_DECOMP.html #### Designing Direct Interactions with Bioluminescent Algae — Netta Ofer, Fiona Bell, Mirela Alistar (2021) - Type: Paper · Organisms: Algae - Idea: Design the organism's environment first, then the interaction. - What it is: Dinoflagellates glow blue when moved; the team designs vessels that keep them healthy and three games—checkers, a ball game and hopscotch—where players' touches and steps make the algae light up. - How it works: Mechanical stimulation of dinoflagellate cultures in sealed, organism-centred containers triggers bioluminescence; a four-part framework (form, reception, feedback, control) guides design. - Paper: https://doi.org/10.1145/3461778.3462090 (DIS 2021) - Video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LLGP6N0eDic - Images: https://www.colorado.edu/atlas/sites/default/files/styles/wide_image_style/public/block/bioluminescent_algea_2.png?h=7e15e65c&itok=apcnQsmw - Project page: https://www.colorado.edu/atlas/designing-bioluminescence #### Living Light Interfaces: An Exploration of Bioluminescence Aesthetics — Elvin Karana (2021) - Type: Paper · Organisms: Algae - Idea: Before designing with living light, learn its aesthetics: how it flashes, fades and spreads. - What it is: A study of how bioluminescent microalgae flash when shaken, rotated or vibrated, documenting the intensity, texture and spatial spread of their light as material for future 'living light' interfaces. First author Bahareh Barati. - How it works: A DIY shaking device applies orbital, pulsing and vibrating stimuli to dinoflagellate cultures while cameras record flash characteristics. - Paper: https://doi.org/10.1145/3461778.3462038 (DIS 2021) - Video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XUX-4XPI1is #### MossWater — Ying Zhou (2021) - Type: Research prototype · Organisms: Plants, Human body - Idea: Caring for moss becomes a metaphor for caring for one's own health. - What it is: A living moss display on the desk that is watered each time an office worker drinks, so the moss's condition shows how well the person is hydrating. - How it works: A cup sensor detects drinking and triggers a pump and fan module that water and ventilate the moss; a user study examined usability and empathy. - Paper: https://doi.org/10.1145/3411763.3451648 (CHI 2021 EA) - Video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VNmdOLdt6ac - Images: https://figures.semanticscholar.org/39be850142e4cf5b51de5d705ea6ce01adf520c0/500px/2-Figure1-1.png https://figures.semanticscholar.org/39be850142e4cf5b51de5d705ea6ce01adf520c0/500px/4-Figure4-1.png - Project page: https://doi.org/10.1145/3411763.3451648 #### Nukabot: Design of Care for Human-Microbe Relationships — Dominique Chen (2021) - Type: Paper · Organisms: Bacteria & microbes, Human body - Idea: Voice a microbial community's needs so caring for it becomes a conversation. - What it is: A traditional wooden nukadoko pickling bucket fitted with sensors and a voice so the lactic-acid bacteria can 'tell' people when they need stirring; six people lived with it for ten days. - How it works: Sensors in the rice-bran bed (likely gas and temperature) estimate fermentation state; a speech interface answers questions and prompts care. - Paper: https://doi.org/10.1145/3411763.3451605 (CHI 2021 Extended Abstracts) - Video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Un597Bil9Iw - Images: https://biodigitalviz.github.io/images/nukabot.png - Project page: https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3411763.3451605 #### Living Media Interfaces: A Multi-perspective Analysis of Biological Materials for Interaction — Timothy Merritt, Foad Hamidi, Mirela Alistar (2020) - Type: Paper · Organisms: Bacteria & microbes, Plants, Fungi - Idea: A living interface engages people because it is alive, and that brings duties as well as possibilities. - What it is: Defines 'living media interfaces'—user interfaces that contain actual living organisms—and analyses them from biological, ethical, artistic and HCI perspectives, with Marta de Menezes. - How it works: Conceptual analysis grounded in exemplar artworks and prototypes. - Paper: https://doi.org/10.1080/14626268.2019.1707231 (Digital Creativity 2020) #### Supraorganism — Justine Emard (2020) - Type: Artwork · Organisms: Insects - Idea: Let a machine inherit a colony's collective rhythm, so an installation behaves like a swarm. - What it is: About twenty robotic blown-glass sculptures light up, move and sound according to predictions from a neural network trained on data recorded in a bee colony, and react to visitors' presence. - How it works: Sensor data from a honeybee hive trains a custom machine-learning model whose live predictions drive lights and motors in the glass modules; ambient sensors add visitor response. - Video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=syA6uD0qkHY - Images: https://justineemard.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/01/Jutsine-Emard@KIKK22_photographe_quentin_chevrier-11-e1674466988849.jpg - Project page: https://justineemard.com/supraorganism/ #### CMD: Experiments in Bio-Algorithmic-Politics — Michael Sedbon (2019) - Type: Artwork · Organisms: Bacteria & microbes - Idea: Let algorithms govern living cells and watch which politics lets them thrive. - What it is: An artificial ecosystem of photosynthetic bacterial cultures that share scarce light, governed by self-learning algorithms that test market strategies of competition and collaboration. BAD Award 2019 winner, with Raoul Frese (VU Amsterdam). - How it works: Photosynthetic bacteria (likely cyanobacteria) in bioreactors receive light allocated by a learning algorithm that reads their growth. - Images: https://www.badaward.nl/imager/assets/site/8187/2019.11.29-BoudewijnBollmann_Polarities_opening-LORES-032_a5a12f426a1ab11909951db4fe37df8f.jpg https://www.badaward.nl/imager/assets/site/8188/2019.11.29-BoudewijnBollmann_Polarities_opening-LORES-035_a5a12f426a1ab11909951db4fe37df8f.jpg - Project page: https://www.badaward.nl/artists-scientists/michael-sedbon-raoul-frese #### Biological HCI: Towards Integrative Interfaces Between People, Computer, and Biological Materials — Pat Pataranutaporn (2018) - Type: Paper · Organisms: Bacteria & microbes, Cells & tissue - Idea: Design interfaces in three layers: the living material, the platform that hosts it, and the person. - What it is: An early Bio-HCI framework with Todd Ingalls and Ed Finn (Arizona State University) that treats biological materials as interface elements, organised into biological material, intermediate platform and user interaction, with four experiments. - How it works: Framework built with biotechnologists and speculative designers, tested through prototypes combining microbes and digital sensing. - Paper: https://doi.org/10.1145/3170427.3188662 (CHI 2018 Extended Abstracts) - Video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=L1x_uDRuRfQ #### Drosophila Karaoke Bar — Ursula Damm (2018) - Type: Artwork · Organisms: Insects, Human body - Idea: Invite people into a lab model organism's own culture: its songs. - What it is: Visitors sing or play into a karaoke booth with fruit flies in a sound-isolated box; the flies' courtship songs and the humans' tones are picked up and shown together so people can try to sing with the flies. - How it works: Drosophila wing vibrations are captured with sensitive microphones; Max/MSP identifies pitch of fly and human sounds and visualises natural harmonics in real time (Fly Songs module programmed by Johann Nigel). - Video: https://vimeo.com/386157744 - Images: https://ursuladamm.de/api/media/file/KB_full-scaled.jpg https://ursuladamm.de/api/media/file/02-damm-sprache_der_fliegen-scaled.jpg - Project page: https://ursuladamm.de/en/artworks/drosophila-karaoke-bar-2018 #### Insect Songs — Ursula Damm (2018) - Type: Artwork · Organisms: Insects, Human body - Idea: Technology should only adjust our senses so two species can respond to each other in real time. - What it is: Musicians improvise with swarming chironomid midges: the midges' wingbeat tones are amplified, and cello playing visibly stirs lazy midges into intense swarming. - How it works: Midges in a sound-isolated box are recorded with sensitive microphones and their pitch analysed in real time, while players with cello and electronics respond; with Christina Meissner and Teresa Carrasco. - Video: https://vimeo.com/382565915 - Images: https://ursuladamm.de/api/media/file/Box_3.jpg https://ursuladamm.de/api/media/file/Box_innen_500-360.jpg - Project page: https://ursuladamm.de/en/artworks/insect-songs #### Long-term, stochastic editing of regenerative anatomy via targeting endogenous bioelectric gradients (two-headed planaria) — Michael Levin (2017) - Type: Paper · Organisms: Animals, Cells & tissue - Idea: Body shape is stored partly in a bioelectric pattern that can be rewritten, like memory. - What it is: Flatworms cut while their cell-to-cell electrical connections were briefly blocked regrew with a head at both ends; in many others the change stayed hidden and appeared only when they were cut again, with no change to their genome. - How it works: Planarian fragments regenerated in 8-OH-octanol, a gap-junction blocker; their bioelectric state was imaged with voltage-sensitive dyes and the worms were re-cut in plain water. - Paper: https://doi.org/10.1016/j.bpj.2017.04.011 (Biophysical Journal) - Video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XheAMrS8Q1c - Images: https://cdn.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/blobs/fa1d/5443973/952dc79ee79a/gr1.jpg https://cdn.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/blobs/fa1d/5443973/bfc91713360f/gr2.jpg - Project page: https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC5443973/ #### Thermotaxis — Kuai Shen (2017) - Type: Artwork · Organisms: Insects, Bacteria & microbes - Idea: Listen to a colony's metabolism: heat as a musical signal. - What it is: A redwood ant nest rests in a cooled 'hibernation vessel'; a thermal camera reads the heat produced by the ants and their microbes and turns it into a live composition. - How it works: A self-regulating cooling system and thermal-camera computer vision map temperature patterns of the Formica rufa nest to acoustic patterns; made with Technarium and Vilnius University. - Video: https://vimeo.com/209588545 - Images: https://kuaishen.tv/images/thermotaxis/5.jpg https://kuaishen.tv/images/thermotaxis/7.jpg - Project page: https://kuaishen.tv/thermotaxis.html #### Fly Printer – Extended — Laura Beloff (2016) - Type: Artwork · Organisms: Insects - Idea: Chain an insect, a machine and a person into one image-making system. - What it is: Fruit flies feeding on coloured food leave dots of excrement that form images; a camera and a convolutional neural network then look at the patterns and interpret them for a human audience. - How it works: Drosophila live in a chamber with pigmented food over paper; a camera with a CNN classifies the resulting marks in real time. - Images: https://hybridmatters-production.s3.eu-central-1.amazonaws.com/photo/image/582971c13ee3ee126545f835/standard_FlyPrinter_Nikolaj.jpg - Project page: https://exhibitions.hybridmatters.net/works/fly-printer-extended #### Mutua — Southern California Institute of Architecture (SCI-Arc) Biodesign Challenge team (2016) - Type: Speculative design · Organisms: Slime mould, Fungi - Idea: Let organisms that react to their surroundings become the home's sensor display. - What it is: A wall panel for the home on which lichen or slime mould grows, acting both as a living artwork and as a biosensor that shows changes in the indoor environment. - How it works: Lichen and slime mould respond visibly to humidity, light and pollution, so their growth patterns on the panel read out indoor conditions (visualised speculatively). - Video: https://vimeo.com/173535470 - Project page: https://www.biodesignchallenge.org/sci-arc #### The Foragers — Heather Barnett (2016) - Type: Artwork · Organisms: Insects - Idea: Use a colony's chemical communication as an image-making system. - What it is: An experimental film made with about a thousand pavement ants, whose foraging trails across a new territory are tracked and turned into images. - How it works: Time-lapse photography and image processing trace the pheromone trails of Tetramorium tsushimae ants as they search for food; made during a residency with The Swarm Lab. - Video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=alwQoavH61Q - Project page: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=alwQoavH61Q #### The Intelligent Guerilla Beehive — Anne Marie Maes (2016) - Type: Artwork · Organisms: Insects, Bacteria & microbes - Idea: Design a shelter for another species that also turns it into a living monitoring technology. - What it is: A beehive for urban swarms that doubles as a biosensor: bees and bacteria report on the pollution of the foraging fields around it. - How it works: A hive structure (likely 3D-printed and partly biomaterial) hosts a honeybee colony, with sensors and bacterial cultures on the shell indicating air quality; developed with scientists at JRC Ispra and UPF Barcelona. - Images: https://annemariemaes.net/wp-content/uploads/2017/04/Intelligent-Guerilla-Beehive_web-624x624.jpg https://annemariemaes.net/wp-content/uploads/2018/06/1.IB_.jpeg - Project page: https://annemariemaes.net/projects/the-intelligent-guerilla-beehive/ #### flyAI — David Bowen (2016) - Type: Artwork · Organisms: Insects - Idea: Make the survival of living beings depend on how well an AI recognises them. - What it is: A colony of houseflies is photographed as they land in front of a camera; if image-recognition software ranks 'fly' first, a pump feeds the colony, otherwise it gets nothing. - How it works: TensorFlow image classification scores each frame and the confidence for 'fly' sets how much water and nutrient the pump delivers. - Video: https://vimeo.com/195333146 - Images: https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5509f2e8e4b042d7b1ec6ab5/1481569482088-JAE5RF2SJPVTMH6NF0VB/flyAI%28banner%29.jpg - Project page: https://www.dwbowen.com/flyai #### Aurelia 1+Hz / Proto Viva Sonification — Robertina Šebjanič (2015) - Type: Artwork · Organisms: Animals - Idea: Perform with a jellyfish as a co-player, to rehearse cohabitation between species. - What it is: A 20-minute audiovisual performance with live moon jellyfish, whose movements in an aquarium are tracked and sonified on stage. - How it works: Video tracking of Aurelia aurita drives sound synthesis and projection in real time; technical support by Slavko Glamočanin; honorary mention at Prix Ars Electronica 2016 (Interactive Art+). - Video: https://vimeo.com/126787314 - Images: https://i0.wp.com/robertina.net/wp-content/uploads/2025/09/79f37-aurelia-1-hz_proto_viva_sonification-by-robertina-sebjanic-and-slavko-glamocanin-photo-le-cube-01.jpg - Project page: https://robertina.net/aurelia-1hz-proto-viva-sonification/ #### Miserable Machines — Špela Petrič (2015) - Type: Artwork · Organisms: Animals - Idea: Show the ethical cost of plugging living bodies into production machines. - What it is: Mussels are strapped into an electro-stimulation apparatus that makes them contract every twenty minutes, scratching a design into a slowly rising vase until they die. - How it works: Electrical stimulation triggers muscle contractions of mussels whose shells scratch a rotating cylinder that moves about 20 cm in six hours; designed with Miha Turšič, produced by MU Eindhoven. - Images: https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5aeca48a506fbe863b23a8b6/1534194306437-QYYPT4HXJLBO20QT2W2A/DSC_1419.jpg https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5aeca48a506fbe863b23a8b6/1534194440978-SBJGUEM5AV0F476U555C/MU-Body-of-Matter-Hanneke-Wetzer-01.jpg - Project page: https://www.spelapetric.org/miserable-machines/ #### Hydra Reminiscence — Robertina Šebjanič (2014) - Type: Artwork · Organisms: Animals - Idea: Listen to a biologically 'immortal' animal to question the human wish to prolong life. - What it is: A sound performance in which live signals generated with a Hydra, the freshwater polyp known for regeneration, are mixed with recordings made while its body regrew and with the sound of the Danube. - How it works: A DIY biology setup in the Hackteria tradition with a Theremidi Orchestra 'Micronoise' device turns the polyp's activity under a microscope into sound (likely via electrodes or optical sensing); made at Stadtwerkstatt during Ars Electronica 2014. - Video: https://vimeo.com/111332588 - Images: https://robertina.net/wp-content/uploads/2025/09/1dd92-hydra-reminiscence2.jpg https://i0.wp.com/robertina.net/wp-content/uploads/2025/09/b0c92-hydra-reminiscence4.jpg - Project page: https://robertina.net/hydra-reminiscence/ #### Plectrum — Kuai Shen (2014) - Type: Artwork · Organisms: Insects, Human body - Idea: Make an ant colony a band member by amplifying the vibrations it already uses to talk. - What it is: An audiovisual performance in which the amplified stridulation signals of leaf-cutter ants play alongside human musicians on guitars and electronics. - How it works: Piezo pickups capture substrate-borne vibrations from the stridulatory organ of Atta cephalotes, which are amplified and processed live with visuals; with Markus Muschenich, João Martins and later Auriel. - Images: https://kuaishen.tv/images/plectrum/Plectrum6_cynetart2015_by_David-Pinzer.jpg https://kuaishen.tv/images/plectrum/plectrum_postkarte-2.jpg - Project page: https://kuaishen.tv/plectrum.html #### Rafigh: A Living Media Interface for Speech Intervention — Foad Hamidi (2014) - Type: Paper · Organisms: Fungi - Idea: Use the growth of a living thing you care for as motivation and feedback. - What it is: A speech-therapy game for children in which the more they speak during exercises, the more water a living mushroom colony receives; the mushrooms' growth shows their progress. - How it works: Speech activity measured in a tablet game controls an automated irrigation system for a mushroom colony (likely an oyster-mushroom kit). - Paper: https://doi.org/10.1145/2556288.2557402 (CHI 2014) - Video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=01a_J6VB3SM - Images: https://www.foadhamidi.info/uploads/5/9/6/3/59639565/1441316583.png - Project page: https://www.foadhamidi.info/rafigh.html #### The Outline of Paradise (installation) — Ursula Damm (2014) - Type: Artwork · Organisms: Insects - Idea: Treat a swarm as a living display that might be trained, and test it in public. - What it is: Non-biting midges are bred in an aquarium in the gallery; their swarms are exposed to sound and video to find out whether swarm flight can be influenced and the behaviour passed to later generations. - How it works: Chironomus riparius larvae are reared in sand and water under artificial daylight; swarm tracks were observed under live cello improvisation and projected airshow loops, with scientific advice from ecotoxicologists. - Video: https://vimeo.com/180605402 - Images: https://ursuladamm.de/api/media/file/Paradise%40ClausBach.jpg https://ursuladamm.de/api/media/file/Paradise2%40ClausBach.jpg - Project page: https://ursuladamm.de/en/artworks/outline-paradise-installation-2014 #### The Transparent Beehive — Anne Marie Maes (2013) - Type: Artwork · Organisms: Insects - Idea: Make the hive readable: sound and data let people follow a colony's health day by day. - What it is: An observation hive built like a book, with a living colony inside, fitted with microphones, cameras and climate sensors whose data are sonified and visualised to show the colony's state. - How it works: Plexiglass, wood and aluminium frames after François Huber's 1788 leaf hive carry contact microphones and webcams; audio and sensor data go through pattern recognition and AI; first installed on a Brussels rooftop. - Video: https://vimeo.com/158627265 - Images: https://annemariemaes.net/wp-content/uploads/2013/10/TranspBeehive01.jpg https://annemariemaes.net/wp-content/uploads/2013/10/TranspBeehive04.jpg - Project page: https://annemariemaes.net/projects/the-transparent-beehive/ #### Coin-Operated Wetland — Tega Brain (2012) - Type: Artwork · Organisms: Plants, Ecosystems, Bacteria & microbes - Idea: Connect an everyday action directly to an ecosystem so that care becomes part of use. - What it is: A working laundromat whose washing machines run on water cleaned by a constructed wetland, so each wash depends on the health of the plants. - How it works: Greywater from commercial washers is pumped through gravel beds planted with wetland species, where plants and root-zone microbes treat it for reuse. - Video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lnk_fx9E2Mg - Images: https://freight.cargo.site/w/1200/i/859d2e2359adfdc425b36dbfe44aca00e11b6aa26910fc5d3433072f47110e67/wetland.jpeg https://freight.cargo.site/w/1200/i/2009a1d61f6cefbb2ee26b74dfa558f393ce08ea55b25c0794cf67497fab9a31/smithsonian.jpeg - Project page: https://tegabrain.com/Coin-Operated-Wetland-2012 #### Living Mirror — C-Lab (Laura Cinti & Howard Boland) (2012) - Type: Artwork · Organisms: Bacteria & microbes - Idea: Living bacteria can be the pixels of a mirror. - What it is: An interactive bio-installation in which a visitor's face is captured and redrawn as a liquid, three-dimensional image made of magnetic bacteria. BAD Award 2012 winner, with FOM-Institute AMOLF. - How it works: Magnetic (magnetotactic) bacteria in liquid are likely steered by electromagnets driven from processed camera images of the viewer. - Images: https://www.badaward.nl/imager/assets/site/573/LIVING-MIRROR-1_a5a12f426a1ab11909951db4fe37df8f.jpg https://www.badaward.nl/imager/assets/site/574/LIVING-MIRROR-2_a5a12f426a1ab11909951db4fe37df8f.jpg - Project page: https://www.badaward.nl/artists-scientists/laura-cinti-howard-boland #### The Outline of Paradise (Sustainable Luminosity) — Ursula Damm (2012) - Type: Speculative design · Organisms: Insects - Idea: Replace screens with trained, glowing living swarms and ask what that would mean. - What it is: A speculative product and video proposing that city advertising could be written by swarms of genetically modified midges that glow like fireflies and fly in trained formations. - How it works: Developed as a product for the super-cell synthetic-biology supermarket with the iGEM 2010 Weimar-Heidelberg arts team; glowing Chironomus midges were proposed and training setups tested, while the luminous swarm itself is simulated in video. - Video: https://vimeo.com/37476923 - Images: https://ursuladamm.de/api/media/file/16_ACCHybris_067-scaled.jpg https://ursuladamm.de/api/media/file/Trainingsstation_small-b-scaled.jpg - Project page: https://ursuladamm.de/en/artworks/sustainable-luminosity #### fly tweet — David Bowen (2012) - Type: Artwork · Organisms: Insects - Idea: Plug a swarm into social media and let it post. - What it is: Houseflies live in an acrylic sphere with a keyboard; when they fly over keys, the characters are typed into Twitter and sent as a tweet at 140 characters or when a fly hits Enter. - How it works: A camera tracks the flies over the keyboard and custom software maps positions to key presses and the Twitter API. - Video: https://vimeo.com/36877335 - Images: https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5509f2e8e4b042d7b1ec6ab5/1427108839560-3YQT279XJV60HGTFGNUV/banner_sized_fly_tweet%28screen2%29.jpg - Project page: https://www.dwbowen.com/flytweet #### Moon Goose Analogue: Lunar Migration Bird Facility — Agnes Meyer-Brandis (2011) - Type: Artwork · Organisms: Animals - Idea: Use imprinting as an interface: the artist becomes part of the animals' world to rehearse a fiction. - What it is: The artist raised eleven geese imprinted on her as their mother, named them after astronauts, trained them to fly and housed them in a moon-analogue habitat operated from a control room in the gallery. - How it works: Geese were imprinted from hatching and trained on expeditions; live cameras and controls connect the remote habitat to a gallery control room; commissioned by FACT Liverpool and Arts Catalyst. - Video: https://vimeo.com/38986659 - Images: http://www.blubblubb.net/mga/pics/mga-pics_neu/765/MoonGooseAnalogue-videostil.jpg http://www.blubblubb.net/mga/pics/pics/237pix/totale-seite_1085-schmal.jpg - Project page: http://www.blubblubb.net/mga/ #### The Body is a Big Place — Helen Pynor (2011) - Type: Artwork · Organisms: Animals, Cells & tissue, Human body - Idea: Stage an organ as a performer to show that death is a stretch of time, not a single moment. - What it is: An immersive installation around a working heart-perfusion system; in live performances a pair of fresh pig hearts is reanimated to beat again, re-enacting steps of human heart transplantation. - How it works: A Langendorff-style perfusion rig pumps oxygenated solution through the coronary vessels of pig hearts to restart beating, shown with five-channel video of transplant recipients and donors' families and a sound work by Gail Priest; with Peta Clancy. - Video: https://vimeo.com/368439138 - Images: http://www.helenpynor.com/works/the_body_is_a_big_place/06_The%20Body%20is%20a%20Big%20Place_Performance_2.jpg http://www.helenpynor.com/works/the_body_is_a_big_place/01_The%20Body%20is%20a%20Big%20Place_Installation_1.jpg - Project page: http://www.helenpynor.com/works/the_body_is_a_big_place/ #### Tardigotchi — SWAMP (2010) - Type: Artwork · Organisms: Animals - Idea: Pair a real micro-animal with its virtual twin so digital care has living consequences. - What it is: A brass sphere that houses a living tardigrade under a microscope lens next to its digital-pet avatar; caring for the avatar also feeds and warms the real animal. - How it works: Interactions with the on-screen pet trigger a feeding mechanism and a heat lamp for the tardigrade, which is visible through a magnifying lens. - Paper: https://doi.org/10.1145/1935701.1935795 (TEI 2011) - Video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jqILkd54ENY - Images: https://biodigitalviz.github.io/images/Tardigotchi.jpg - Project page: https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/1935701.1935795 #### RADIO VAN GOGH / (H)EAR — Thomas Feuerstein (2009) - Type: Artwork · Organisms: Cells & tissue, Human body - Idea: Use a consumer playback device as a sensor, so living tissue becomes the record that plays itself. - What it is: Cartilage cells taken from the artist's ear grow on the surface of CDs; a modified CD player reads the growing cells and software turns the data into sound, streamed live online for up to three weeks. - How it works: Human ear chondrocytes are cultured between two CDs in medium inside a 37 °C player; a CD-based cell-counting read-out is converted to audio in real time; made with Thomas Seppi, Medical University of Innsbruck. - Images: https://thomasfeuerstein.net/50_WORKS/75_LABORATORY/77_HEAR.jpg - Project page: https://thomasfeuerstein.net/50_WORKS/75_LABORATORY/77_HEAR #### fly lights — David Bowen (2009) - Type: Artwork · Organisms: Insects - Idea: Amplify a swarm's invisible micro-movements into architecture-scale light. - What it is: Six spherical chambers of houseflies are ringed by spotlights; whenever a fly moves near a sensor, the light pointing in that direction switches on, throwing chaotic beams around the room. - How it works: Directional sensors inside each chamber are mapped one-to-one to spotlights by a microcontroller. - Video: https://vimeo.com/21018735 - Images: https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5509f2e8e4b042d7b1ec6ab5/1427115381204-IL75ESUUD5P57UWBVHOD/sized_fly_lights.jpg - Project page: https://www.dwbowen.com/fly-lights #### Empathetic living media — Adrian David Cheok (2008) - Type: Paper · Organisms: Bacteria & microbes - Idea: Couple personal data to a living organism so people care about the data as they care about a living thing. - What it is: An ambient display in which genetically modified E. coli glow brighter or dimmer to show social or ecological data, such as time spent with family. - How it works: A closed-loop controller doses inducer fluids into E. coli cultures carrying a fluorescence gene, setting their glow in near real time. - Paper: https://doi.org/10.1145/1394445.1394495 (DIS 2008) - Images: https://biodigitalviz.github.io/images/emph_liv_media.png - Project page: https://doi.org/10.1145/1394445.1394495 #### fly drawing device — David Bowen (2008) - Type: Artwork · Organisms: Insects - Idea: Let an insect's small movements become the hand of a drawing machine. - What it is: When a housefly enters a small chamber, sensors track its movements and a drawing arm traces them on paper; when the fly leaves, the paper scrolls and the device waits for the next fly. - How it works: Light sensors in the chamber detect the fly and a microcontroller moves a pen arm in real time. - Video: https://vimeo.com/20968497 - Images: https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5509f2e8e4b042d7b1ec6ab5/1427123103340-95A7NW8RKFBI2RTOHI07/sized_fly_drawing_2.jpg - Project page: https://www.dwbowen.com/fly-drawing-device #### Bee's — Susana Soares (2007) - Type: Speculative design · Organisms: Insects, Human body - Idea: Borrow another species' senses as a medical interface. - What it is: A set of blown-glass diagnostic objects in which a person exhales into a chamber and trained bees fly toward the breath if they smell a disease marker. - How it works: Based on research showing bees can be conditioned (Pavlovian training) to respond to specific odours; the glass objects have an inner chamber for the bees and an outer one for the breath. - Video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NcWyf20aMv0 - Images: http://www.susanasoares.com/uploads/pics/02-b-diagnostic-tool-2-_02.jpg http://www.susanasoares.com/uploads/pics/01-b-face-object-b-copy_04.jpg - Project page: http://www.susanasoares.com/index.php?id=52 #### Bel-Air — Mathieu Lehanneur (2007) - Type: Research prototype · Organisms: Plants - Idea: An appliance can be a life-support system for a plant that in return cleans the air. - What it is: A domestic air filter in which a fan pulls room air through a glass chamber holding a living plant, so that the leaves and roots absorb toxic compounds released by paints, glues and plastics. - How it works: Builds on NASA research on plants absorbing volatile organic compounds; air is forced past leaves, soil and roots inside a Pyrex and aluminium enclosure, developed with Harvard scientist David Edwards at Le Laboratoire. - Video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l_QRBlxyFIY - Images: https://www.moma.org/interactives/exhibitions/2008/elasticmind/assets/images/BelAir/PAV18.jpg - Project page: https://www.moma.org/interactives/exhibitions/2008/elasticmind/ #### The Living Screen — Guy Ben-Ary (2006) - Type: Artwork · Organisms: Cells & tissue - Idea: Use living tissue as the display surface, so the medium itself ages and alters the message. - What it is: A 'Bio-Kino' in which micron-scale films are projected onto screens grown from living tissue; as the cells change and eventually die, they distort the images viewers watch through a coffin-like projector. - How it works: Tissue cultures are prepared as screens under a microscope-based 'Bio-Projector' modelled on the Kinetoscope, which projects 25-50 µm 'Nano-Movies' onto them; with Tanya Visosevic and Bruce Murphy. - Images: https://www.guybenary.com/images/living-screen.jpg https://www.guybenary.com/images/ls-bio-kino15-copy.jpg - Project page: https://www.guybenary.com/projects/living-screen.html #### Fish, Plant, Rack — Andy Gracie (2004) - Type: Artwork · Organisms: Animals, Plants - Idea: Build a three-way loop of fish, robot and plants and ask whether the fish notices its effect. - What it is: A rail-mounted robot tends hydroponic plants while learning how to behave from the electric pulses of an elephantnose fish, and shows the fish video of the plants from its own point of view. - How it works: Electrodes in the aquarium pick up the electrolocation pulses of Gnathonemus petersii, which the AI system Dharmai (by Brian Lee Yung Rowe) interprets as parameters for the robot's actions and emotive signals. - Images: https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5c51d5fa9772aea91d1c75bf/1584448613870-5JD4KM5J8DW2YL0DT321/IMG_4153.jpg https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5c51d5fa9772aea91d1c75bf/1584448591457-A1BSIX9VOXWAWCQJV6BS/IMG_0970.jpg - Project page: https://www.hostprods.net/fish-plant-rack-copy-2/ #### Small Work for Robot and Insects — Andy Gracie (2003) - Type: Artwork · Organisms: Insects - Idea: Let the insects decide: the machine must earn their participation. - What it is: A hexapod robot tries to establish a dialogue with a colony of live crickets, composing 'sentences' of movements, lights and sounds and learning which ones the crickets answer. - How it works: A neural network called Dharmai analyses cricket song, picks responses from 18 motions, 7 light sequences and 32 sounds, and refines its vocabulary from the crickets' reactions. - Images: https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5c51d5fa9772aea91d1c75bf/1584449425491-Q8XSV6Z3502BQWR2886W/swfri_hi_1.jpg https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5c51d5fa9772aea91d1c75bf/1584449458483-2RZVP2RO2IB2ZYBMS2JP/artbots_above.JPG - Project page: https://www.hostprods.net/small-work-for-robot-and-insects-copy-2/ #### from here to ear — Céleste Boursier-Mougenot (1999) - Type: Artwork · Organisms: Animals - Idea: Set up instruments as habitat and let animal behaviour be the composer. - What it is: A flock of zebra finches lives in a room with electric guitars and amplifiers; when the birds land on the strings or peck them, they produce an ever-changing composition. - How it works: Amplified electric guitars and cymbals are laid out as perches and nesting sites; the only 'interface' is the birds' everyday behaviour (many versions, including Barbican 2010 and HangarBicocca). - Video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CXHYZ6khx-A - Images: https://web-assets-hangarbicocca.pirelli.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/02/MOUGENOT09.jpg https://web-assets-hangarbicocca.pirelli.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/02/MOUGENOT01.jpg - Project page: https://pirellihangarbicocca.org/en/exhibition/celeste-boursier-mougenot/ #### Ritual for Giant Hissing Madagascar Cockroaches — Miya Masaoka (1995) - Type: Artwork · Organisms: Insects, Human body - Idea: Hand part of a score to animals by letting their movements trigger their own voices. - What it is: Giant hissing cockroaches crawl over the performer's body; each time they cross laser beams, samples of their own hissing are triggered, so the insects shape the piece. - How it works: Laser beams and light sensors detect the cockroaches' movement and interactive software plays back pre-recorded hissing sounds (performed 1995–98). - Video: https://vimeo.com/95526461 - Images: https://miyamasaoka.com/wp-content/uploads/1995/05/Ritual1-1.jpg - Project page: https://miyamasaoka.com/work/1995/ritual-for-giant-hissing-madagascar-cockroaches/ ### Plant Interfaces & Cyborg Botany Plants as touch sensors, displays, antennas and robots. #### When Plants Play: Rethinking Plant Materiality in Digital Games — Yoonji Lee (2026) - Type: Paper · Organisms: Plants - Idea: Put a plant in control and humans learn to read slow, unpredictable play. - What it is: Plant.play() is a pet-simulation game whose only player is a living plant: its bioelectrical signals, environment and daily rhythm drive the caregiving actions while humans watch. - How it works: Plant bioelectrical signals, environmental sensors and circadian rhythms feed a game; deployed in a four-day exhibition with interviews. - Paper: https://doi.org/10.1145/3772318.3791373 (CHI 2026) - Images: https://figures.semanticscholar.org/c2571b3b672a4eedb0e264a4e7fb7569f65417d3/7-Figure4-1.png https://figures.semanticscholar.org/c2571b3b672a4eedb0e264a4e7fb7569f65417d3/4-Figure2-1.png #### Origin — Thijs Biersteker (2025) - Type: Artwork · Organisms: Plants - Idea: Connect a consumer to the living plant behind a food product, across the supply chain, in real time. - What it is: A cacao tree in Indonesia fitted with sensors streams how it drinks, grows and breathes to its digital-twin sculpture in China, where the data become movement, rhythm and light. - How it works: Environmental and plant sensors on a cacao tree send live data over the network to a kinetic light sculpture; made with the Indonesian Coffee and Cocoa Research Institute (ICCRI). - Video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=So_Ad7JrBWY - Images: https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5d80d9eeb97e2f5b4a6ceb62/3ddbef30-ed71-44f8-8954-93b1d5377176/W__04022.jpg https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5d80d9eeb97e2f5b4a6ceb62/da19df78-e344-4aae-ad3f-a0ef85179531/keyvisual.jpg - Project page: https://thijsbiersteker.com/origin #### PlantMate: A Bidirectional Touch-Based System for Enhancing Human-Plant Empathy and Pro-Environmental Behavior — Hong Luo (2025) - Type: Paper · Organisms: Plants, Human body - Idea: Let people feel a plant's response in their own muscles. - What it is: PlantMate turns a person's touch into bioelectrical stimulation for a plant, and turns the plant's electrical signals under changing temperature and humidity into electrical muscle stimulation felt by the person. - How it works: Plant bioelectrical sensing coupled with electrical muscle stimulation (EMS); pilot study with 12 participants. - Paper: https://doi.org/10.1145/3706599.3720288 (CHI EA 2025) - Video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Aa_BlTsGhkM #### Sonifying Aquatic Plant Photosynthesis: A Music Generation System for Everyday Engagement and Care — Harpreet Sareen, Yasuaki Kakehi (2025) - Type: Paper · Organisms: Plants - Idea: Make a plant's photosynthesis audible so caring for it becomes a daily listening habit. - What it is: A home music system that listens to the tiny oxygen bubbles released by coontail, an aquatic plant, and turns them into ambient music that follows the day cycle and the plant's health. - How it works: A hydrophone captures bubble sounds from Ceratophyllum demersum; features of the raw audio drive a generative ambient music engine. First author Yating Dai. - Paper: https://doi.org/10.1145/3715668.3736347 (DIS 2025 Companion) - Images: https://harpreetsareen.com/wp-content/uploads/2025/08/sonifying.jpg #### Designing Plant-Driven Actuators for Robots to Grow, Age, and Decay — Jasmine Lu, Pedro Lopes (2024) - Type: Paper · Organisms: Plants - Idea: Let plants be the motors, and design robots that are slow, grow old and fall apart. - What it is: Yuhan Hu, Jasmine Lu, Pedro Lopes, Guy Hoffman and colleagues replace motors with plants: growing roots, swelling seeds and drying stems push, lift and bend robot parts over days, and decay becomes part of the robot's life. - How it works: Growth, turgor and drying forces of seeds, sprouts and stems are measured and used as actuation primitives inside 3D-printed robot structures. - Paper: https://doi.org/10.1145/3643834.3661519 (DIS 2024) - Video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jcS5ZctTZ7o - Images: https://lab.plopes.org/project-thumbnails/DIS24-PlantBasedActuator.jpg - Project page: https://lab.plopes.org/ #### Guttation Sensor — Qiuyu Lu, Lining Yao (2024) - Type: Research prototype · Organisms: Plants - Idea: Read a plant's chemistry on the spot, without a lab. - What it is: A paper-based microfluidic chip worn on a leaf that collects guttation droplets and changes colour to show six chemicals linked to the plant's condition. - How it works: Wearable paper microfluidics with colorimetric reagents collect droplets from leaf margins; tested on tomato plants. - Paper: https://doi.org/10.1145/3613905.3651087 (CHI 2024 EA) - Video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6hi09Wjc1j4 - Project page: https://doi.org/10.1145/3613905.3651087 #### HoneyPot — Ebba Ahlqvist (2024) - Type: Research prototype · Organisms: Plants, Human body - Idea: A houseplant can be a slow, calm channel for social connection. - What it is: Two networked plant pots that glow with warm ambient light; touching one lights up its remote twin, so two people living apart can feel each other's presence through their plants. - How it works: Sensor-equipped pots with LEDs are linked over the internet; the design was iterated through prototypes and tested with adolescents facing isolation. - Paper: https://doi.org/10.1145/3656650.3656735 (AVI 2024) - Project page: https://doi.org/10.1145/3656650.3656735 #### Immersive Flora — Youyang Hu, Yasuaki Kakehi (2024) - Type: Research prototype · Organisms: Plants, Ecosystems - Idea: Let people feel the forest's weather through what the plants perceive. - What it is: A VR forest built from 3D scans in which particle effects move with what real forest plants are sensing: their biosignals are classified as responses to wind, rain and sunlight. - How it works: Biosensors on plants in a forest observation station feed machine-learning classifiers; results drive a real-time point-cloud particle system of the reconstructed forest. - Paper: https://doi.org/10.1145/3613905.3648675 (CHI 2024 EA) - Video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ig7lsqdQ_Jk - Images: https://xlab.iii.u-tokyo.ac.jp/wp-content/uploads/ImmersiveFloraTeaser.png - Project page: https://doi.org/10.1145/3613905.3648675 #### Phytopoiesis — Scenocosme (2024) - Type: Artwork · Organisms: Plants, Human body - Idea: Let a plant author the prompts of a generative AI. - What it is: A living plant that reacts to touch with sound and sends prompts to a local image generator, producing ever-changing hybrids of plant and human bodies on a facing screen. - How it works: Electrostatic touch sensing through the plant triggers sound and prompt generation for Stable Diffusion running offline on a local computer. - Video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=E2i_oqGb_ww - Images: http://www.scenocosme.com/phytopoiesis/pano.jpg http://www.scenocosme.com/phytopoiesis/phytopoiesis_FR-1.jpg - Project page: http://www.scenocosme.com/phytopoiesis.htm #### Xylemia — Thijs Biersteker (2024) - Type: Artwork · Organisms: Plants - Idea: Visualise a tree's internal flow as a pulse, so empathy starts from a shared physiology. - What it is: A sculpture wrapped around a living tree shows the sap flowing through its xylem in real time, so visitors can compare the tree's circulation with their own. - How it works: Sap-flow sensors on the trunk (likely heat-pulse probes) stream data to light elements in a vine-like sculpture; commissioned by Ruinart. - Video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ucInTo2U5r4 - Images: http://static1.squarespace.com/static/5d80d9eeb97e2f5b4a6ceb62/t/66621b8fa1c4d36bb0e5728b/1717705625657/xylemia-forest-01.jpg?format=1500w https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5d80d9eeb97e2f5b4a6ceb62/1717705849059-TG35N6YSMVTVXYQ4Z9MY/thijsbiersteker-xylemia-ruinarst.jpg - Project page: https://thijsbiersteker.com/xylemia #### Heliobots: Stem-Based Robots on Helianthus annuus for Directed Morphological Growth — Harpreet Sareen (2023) - Type: Research prototype · Organisms: Plants - Idea: Shape living plants with light instead of cutting or tying them. - What it is: Small robots that live on the stems of sunflowers and use onboard directional lights to steer how the plants grow; each week they climb to a new position and bend the stem toward a planned shape. - How it works: Stem-mounted robots exploit phototropism with programmed LED illumination, repositioning themselves along the stem as the plant grows. - Video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eK9rcXLm6bU - Images: https://harpreetsareen.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/08/robotic-arbortecture.jpg - Project page: https://harpreetsareen.com/research #### Neither Here Nor There: Botanical (mis)Communication — Harpreet Sareen, Yasuaki Kakehi (2023) - Type: Artwork · Organisms: Plants - Idea: Put humans in the position of not understanding, and let plants be the ones in conversation. - What it is: Four large potted plants hold a meeting around a table, discussing what it means to be human in sounds generated from GPT-3 text; visitors can only follow through a decoding app on their phones. - How it works: Prompts on humanity and planetary politics are fed to GPT-3; outputs are encoded as plant sounds and decoded through a mobile app. Made with Lauria Clarke. - Paper: https://doi.org/10.1145/3591196.3596828 (Creativity & Cognition 2023) - Images: https://harpreetsareen.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/08/download-3.jpeg #### Phytosphere — Hang Su (2023) - Type: Speculative design · Organisms: Plants - Idea: Give plants agency over where they go. - What it is: Six plant–machine hybrids in which plants' own bioelectric signals control robotic bodies, letting them move and adjust their environment within a plant community. - How it works: Electrodes read plant bioelectric potentials and map them to motors that move pots toward light or water. - Images: https://content.gp-award.com/assets/media/award23/1-phytosphere_blogLarge.jpg https://content.gp-award.com/assets/media/award23/10-phytosphere_blogLarge.jpg - Project page: https://www.gp-award.com/en/projects/phytosphere #### Plant Playmate — Bingjie Gao (2023) - Type: Research prototype · Organisms: Plants, Human body - Idea: An interactive plant can make micro-breaks more pleasant than an ordinary plant. - What it is: A smart office plant with interactive lights, anthropomorphic facial expressions and virtual credits, tested as a way to take short stress-relief breaks at work. - How it works: A within-subject study with 18 office workers compared it with an ordinary plant using electrodermal data, SAM and UEQ questionnaires and interviews. - Paper: https://doi.org/10.21606/iasdr.2023.416 (IASDR 2023) - Project page: https://dl.designresearchsociety.org/iasdr/iasdr2023/fullpapers/139 #### Plantae Agrestis: Distributed, Self-Organizing Cybernetic Plants in a Botanical Conservatory — Harpreet Sareen, Yasuaki Kakehi (2023) - Type: Artwork · Organisms: Plants - Idea: Let many plants, each with its own robot body, arrange themselves as a collective. - What it is: A group of plant-robot hybrids in a botanical conservatory that each follow their plant's signals and together organise themselves in space. - How it works: Mobile robot bases likely read plant electrophysiology and light conditions, with simple local rules producing distributed movement across the conservatory. - Paper: https://doi.org/10.1162/leon_a_02315 (Leonardo 2023) - Images: https://harpreetsareen.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/08/plantae-agrestis.png - Project page: https://harpreetsareen.com/research #### Synplant — Youyang Hu, Yasuaki Kakehi (2023) - Type: Artwork · Organisms: Plants - Idea: Experience the weather from a plant's point of view. - What it is: An installation of plant sensing units that reads plants' biosignals as wind and rain hit them and turns these responses into cymatics patterns of light and sound. - How it works: Supervised learning (SVM/SVR) classifies changes in plant biopotential under environmental stimuli and drives acoustic-lighting devices that vibrate water into cymatics patterns. - Paper: https://doi.org/10.1145/3597622 (PACMCGIT 2023 (SIGGRAPH Art Papers)) - Images: https://figures.semanticscholar.org/8031fa5616c048f33f95aebea2eabfd734a3e4a4/500px/2-Figure1-1.png https://figures.semanticscholar.org/8031fa5616c048f33f95aebea2eabfd734a3e4a4/500px/5-Figure4-1.png - Project page: https://doi.org/10.1145/3597622 #### Minty Zoo — Fei (Dillon) Shieh (2022) - Type: Research prototype · Organisms: Plants - Idea: Let plants 'communicate' their needs to each other through a technical system. - What it is: A cabinet of five 'hub' mint plants given uneven water and light; 15 sensors track their collective behaviour and the data decides how resources are redistributed among them. - How it works: Soil moisture, temperature, humidity, CO2 and ammonia sensors plus time-lapse imaging feed rules that re-route water and light across the plants. - Paper: https://doi.org/10.1145/3546155.3547295 (NordiCHI 2022) - Images: https://figures.semanticscholar.org/20d175ba44269323d29d2dea687ac38c9754ccaa/500px/2-Figure1-1.png - Project page: https://doi.org/10.1145/3546155.3547295 #### Patterns and Opportunities for the Design of Human-Plant Interaction — Michelle Chang, Lining Yao (2022) - Type: Paper · Organisms: Plants - Idea: Plants can be sensors, displays and collaborators; map the field before designing. - What it is: A systematic survey of human-plant interaction projects across HCI, art and design that sorts them by the roles plants play and points out open opportunities for future work. - How it works: Systematic review and coding of existing human-plant interaction projects. - Paper: https://doi.org/10.1145/3532106.3533555 (DIS 2022) - Video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Szm8WD-pjoQ - Project page: https://doi.org/10.1145/3532106.3533555 #### Plant Ragas — Tarun Nayar (2022) - Type: Artwork · Organisms: Plants - Idea: Constrain plant biodata with a musical tradition so it becomes playable music. - What it is: Live pieces in which the bio-electrical signals of trees and plants, such as a bigleaf maple, play notes within an Indian classical raga chosen for the time of day. - How it works: Electrodes on leaves feed a biodata-to-MIDI device that drives synthesizers quantised to a raga; recorded outdoors in the Gulf Islands of British Columbia in 2021. - Video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dBXMahpNzAU - Images: https://i.ytimg.com/vi/dBXMahpNzAU/maxresdefault.jpg - Project page: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dBXMahpNzAU #### Prototype for a New BioMachine — Ivan Henriques (2022) - Type: Artwork · Organisms: Plants - Idea: Move toward self-sustaining machines where plant signals and electronics form one body. - What it is: A follow-up to Jurema Action Plant in which a robotic structure moves when visitors touch the leaves of the plant it carries. - How it works: Bioelectric data from the plant are processed by electronic circuits that drive the robot's motors; exhibited at the Verbeke Foundation. - Video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Fhk4knuHOmM - Project page: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Fhk4knuHOmM #### Pudica — Olivia Seow (2022) - Type: Research prototype · Organisms: Plants - Idea: Plant interfaces fit emotionally strong uses best, and they need a plan for maintenance and reproducibility. - What it is: A design framework and prototype that close the leaves of a Mimosa pudica with electrical stimulation, so each leaf can display data such as air quality or a message from a loved one. - How it works: Electrodes trigger the thigmonastic leaf-closing response of Mimosa pudica; a user study measured affinity for plants and for the interface. - Paper: https://doi.org/10.1145/3519391.3519394 (AHs 2022) - Images: https://dam-prod.media.mit.edu/thumb/2022/03/12/out.gif.1400x1400.gif https://dam-prod.media.mit.edu/thumb/2022/03/12/ahs2022-3-fig1.jpg.1400x1400.jpg - Project page: https://www.media.mit.edu/projects/pudica/overview/ #### Towards the Plant-Based Sensor — Tyler Luong (2022) - Type: Research prototype · Organisms: Plants, Bacteria & microbes - Idea: A plant-and-microbe system could power the sensor that watches it. - What it is: Long-running experiments with mud and plant microbial fuel cells to power low-power circuits that sense a plant's movement responses. - How it works: MudWatt kits and a plant-based MFC (asparagus fern) were logged for weeks; plant sensing relies on thigmonastic responses and biopotential. - Paper: https://doi.org/10.1145/3560905.3568418 (SenSys 2022) - Project page: https://doi.org/10.1145/3560905.3568418 #### Algaphon — Harpreet Sareen, Yasuaki Kakehi (2021) - Type: Artwork · Organisms: Algae - Idea: Translate human speech into light, and hear the algae answer in bubbles at their own pace. - What it is: An online hybrid installation for 'talking' with algae: a visitor's voice message is stretched in time and turned into light over a remote aquarium; a hydrophone records the oxygen bubbles the algae release in response and plays them back. - How it works: Voice input modulates photosynthetically active radiation (PAR) over the tank; hydrophone recordings of photosynthetic bubbling are returned as the reply. Made with Franziska Mack. - Video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7dYqzQ4rBV0 - Images: https://harpreetsareen.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/08/algphon-cit.jpg - Project page: https://harpreetsareen.com/research #### An On-demand Plant-based Actuator Created Using Conformable Electrodes — Xiaodong Chen (2021) - Type: Paper · Organisms: Plants - Idea: Plants can be both sensors and actuators in a robot, controlled through their own electrical language. - What it is: A Venus flytrap wired with soft electrodes closes when triggered from a smartphone, and serves as a robotic gripper that can pick up small objects. - How it works: Soft conformable electrodes (likely hydrogel-based) record and deliver electrical signals to the flytrap lobes, triggering action potentials and closure. - Paper: https://doi.org/10.1038/s41928-020-00530-4 (Nature Electronics 2021) - Video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JysNL6NYGqg #### pheB — Elena Sabinson (2021) - Type: Research prototype · Organisms: Plants, Human body - Idea: Feel a plant's state through a moving surface to regulate your own emotions. - What it is: A soft robotic wall surface that inflates and deflates with a plant's internal signals and guides people in confined spaces through breathing exercises. - How it works: Plant biosignals drive pneumatic soft actuators; an early user study tested guided breathing and design preferences. - Paper: https://doi.org/10.1145/3430524.3446065 (TEI 2021) - Video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=58Cpgsja0iM - Project page: https://doi.org/10.1145/3430524.3446065 #### AmbiPlant: Ambient Feedback for Digital Media through Actuated Plants — Donald Degraen (2020) - Type: Paper · Organisms: Plants - Idea: A plant moving beside the screen can extend a film into the room. - What it is: Living plants next to a TV are moved by actuated support structures in sync with the film, as an alternative to ambient lighting; viewers found it more exciting and novel. - How it works: Servo-driven supports under plant stems move according to media content; compared in a user study with ambient light and no effects. - Paper: https://doi.org/10.1145/3334480.3382860 (CHI 2020 Extended Abstracts) - Video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7T9ZChhi0JU #### PL'AI — Špela Petrič (2020) - Type: Artwork · Organisms: Plants - Idea: Imagine play, not work, as the basis of a relationship between plants and machines. - What it is: Over several months an AI robot with 36 wires plays with cucumber plants at their own pace, moving coloured balls toward them while the tendrils grab and reshape the wires into a trellis. - How it works: A laser scanner images the cucumbers, a neural network decides how to move 36 individually controlled strings at about 1 cm per hour, and tendril growth feeds back into the model. - Video: https://vimeo.com/561021288 - Images: http://static1.squarespace.com/static/5aeca48a506fbe863b23a8b6/t/60a267a80d9395780c7d70ac/1637486481660/KERSNIKOVA_Spela_Petric_PLAY_20201206_HanaJosic-65.jpg?format=1500w https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5aeca48a506fbe863b23a8b6/1621255859914-VEJU1B7LODW2FEE7YDOR/KERSNIKOVA_Spela_Petric_PLAY_20201206_HanaJosic-48.jpg - Project page: https://www.spelapetric.org/plai/ #### The Hearing Test — Laura Beloff (2020) - Type: Artwork · Organisms: Plants - Idea: Use the limits of our listening equipment to question which species' signals we take seriously. - What it is: An artistic experiment that tries to detect the high-frequency clicks reported to come from growing plant root tips, and asks what counts as evidence of a plant 'voice'. - How it works: Ultrasonic recording of plant roots in the 20–300 kHz range, where clicks are thought to come from bursting air bubbles; documented in Leonardo Music Journal. - Paper: https://doi.org/10.1162/lmj_a_01097 (Leonardo Music Journal 30 (2020)) - Project page: https://doi.org/10.1162/lmj_a_01097 #### Alt-C — Michael Sedbon (2019) - Type: Artwork · Organisms: Plants, Bacteria & microbes - Idea: Make money literally grow on plants, to question what happens when ecosystems become financial infrastructure. - What it is: Electricity from plant microbial fuel cells powers a single-board computer that mines cryptocurrency, while a neural network predicts mining yield from the weather and plans to buy land to plant more. - How it works: Root exudates from photosynthesising plants feed soil bacteria that release electrons between electrodes; the current runs a mining rig, and a neural network trained on UK weather forecasts steers reinvestment. - Images: https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/85c99f47f3c541409fb45c831bac0202cf23ef6dbd39edb5c9d3e7e82388c977/IMG_1071_3_o.jpg https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/ac28ad1964931a2e48ef2e49a0cc2c7639e20d20470487dee991082f061f7ecc/IMG_1087_o.jpg - Project page: https://michaelsedbon.com/Alt-C #### Argus: Water Monitoring through Nanosensors inside Living Plants — Harpreet Sareen (2019) - Type: Research prototype · Organisms: Plants - Idea: Use a plant's own water uptake as a continuous, self-powered water test. - What it is: A bionic plant that checks water quality: nanosensors in its leaves glow, and the glow fades when the water it drinks contains heavy metals such as lead. - How it works: Fluorescent nanosensors are infused into leaves; their near-infrared signal is quenched by heavy-metal ions carried up from the roots. - Video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mkfdhwnJr_U - Images: https://dam-prod.media.mit.edu/thumb/2019/06/18/Cover.jpg.1400x1400.jpg - Project page: https://www.media.mit.edu/projects/argus-sensors-inside-plants/overview/ #### Cyborg Botany: Exploring In-Planta Cybernetic Systems for Interaction — Harpreet Sareen (2019) - Type: Paper · Organisms: Plants - Idea: Instead of building sensors, grow them into plants that already sense and move. - What it is: Plants as sensors, displays and actuators: in Planta Digitalis a conductive wire is grown inside a plant's xylem so the plant becomes a touch and motion sensor or antenna; in Phytoactuators, tapping an app makes a Venus flytrap snap shut. - How it works: A conductive polymer (PEDOT) self-assembles in the plant's vascular tissue; electrical stimulation through electrodes triggers the flytrap's action potentials. - Paper: https://doi.org/10.1145/3290607.3313091 (CHI 2019 Extended Abstracts) - Video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6gVrt37s9oY - Images: https://dam-prod.media.mit.edu/thumb/2019/05/08/titlegid-nosub.gif.1400x1400.gif - Project page: https://www.media.mit.edu/projects/cyborg-botany/overview/ #### One Tree ID – How to Become a Tree for Another Tree — Agnes Meyer-Brandis (2019) - Type: Artwork · Organisms: Plants, Human body - Idea: Enter a plant's communication channel by wearing its chemical identity. - What it is: The volatile organic compounds of one Himalayan cedar are measured and turned into a perfume, so a person wearing it may take part in the chemical conversation between trees. - How it works: Chamber measurements of roots, stem and needles identified over 100 VOCs, which were recomposed by a perfumer; made with Birgit Piechulla and Uta Effmert (University of Rostock). - Video: https://vimeo.com/328989340 - Images: http://www.blubblubb.net/OneTreeID/pics_doku/770/OneTreeID-totale06b.jpg http://www.blubblubb.net/OneTreeID/pics_doku/770/OneTreeID-3Flakons02.jpg - Project page: http://www.blubblubb.net/OneTreeID/ #### Overgrown: Supporting Plant Growth with an Endoskeleton for Ambient Notifications — Donald Degraen (2019) - Type: Paper · Organisms: Plants - Idea: Hide the robot inside a plant so notifications feel alive. - What it is: A robotic 'endoskeleton' over which a living plant grows; the structure moves to give ambient notifications, relying on people's empathy for the plant. - How it works: Actuated robotic frame designed for climbing plants to grow over; evaluated in a focus group. - Paper: https://doi.org/10.1145/3290607.3312833 (CHI 2019 Extended Abstracts) - Images: https://figures.semanticscholar.org/95c54b6cd4336a6907474812776f28e92d0d2614/5-Figure6-1.png https://figures.semanticscholar.org/95c54b6cd4336a6907474812776f28e92d0d2614/4-Figure4-1.png #### Plant shadow morphing display — Ashley Colley (2019) - Type: Research prototype · Organisms: Plants - Idea: A plant's natural shadow can carry information without adding another screen. - What it is: An ambient display that changes the shadow cast by a real houseplant to carry low-priority notifications. - How it works: A projector adds or removes shadow shapes around the shadow of a real plant lit by a desk lamp; a focus group (n = 6) discussed the concept. - Paper: https://doi.org/10.1145/3365610.3368410 (MUM 2019) - Images: https://figures.semanticscholar.org/c7bdc7c5d76e823db02b6f795c2882ff914fee17/500px/2-Figure2-1.png https://figures.semanticscholar.org/c7bdc7c5d76e823db02b6f795c2882ff914fee17/500px/2-Figure3-1.png - Project page: https://doi.org/10.1145/3365610.3368410 #### Vegetariat: Work Zero — Špela Petrič (2019) - Type: Artwork · Organisms: Plants - Idea: Let plants perform as data workers to confuse and critique surveillance capitalism. - What it is: Popular potted office plants are wired to smart watches that report their activity to fitness apps, feeding plant data into the prediction algorithms of platform companies. - How it works: An electro-mechanical interface likely translates plant movement or bioelectric changes into motion that smart watches register as activity; interface by Gregor Krpič, realised by Scenart. - Images: https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5aeca48a506fbe863b23a8b6/1600011006003-DE1GEPNVONE6LAXDT717/IMG-3822aAdjust.jpg https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5aeca48a506fbe863b23a8b6/1600010366568-0NP2K4Y9SDX48XM36QZ6/2020_01_14+-+SpelaPetric-109.jpg - Project page: https://www.spelapetric.org/vegetariat-work-zero/ #### Deep Swamp — Tega Brain (2018) - Type: Artwork · Organisms: Plants, Ecosystems - Idea: Ask what happens when software with narrow goals manages living ecosystems. - What it is: Three wetland tanks are each tended by an AI agent that adjusts light, water flow, fog and nutrients to reach its goal: a natural wetland, a work of art, or attention. - How it works: Each agent photographs its tank, compares images against goals learned by deep learning from tagged online image collections, and tries new combinations of misters, pumps and lights. - Images: https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/e1786b6df7a8b2e2134cde8ab4672b08fcfd265876d167b9c09cfd34d189cf87/first.jpg https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/38807456402ca9213d790228119c00a899f9b39aec3410f814d25e65e6c982d4/DSC_8690.jpg - Project page: https://tegabrain.com/Deep-Swamp #### Elowan: A Plant-Robot Hybrid — Harpreet Sareen (2018) - Type: Research prototype · Organisms: Plants - Idea: Give a plant a body so its own signals decide where it goes. - What it is: A potted plant on a wheeled robot base that moves itself toward light: electrodes on its leaves and stem read its own bioelectrical responses and the robot follows them. - How it works: Silver electrodes pick up light-triggered action and variation potentials from the plant; amplified signals drive the robot's motors. - Video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rptKlKZc7cs - Images: https://dam-prod.media.mit.edu/thumb/2018/11/01/BannerImage_v01.jpg.1400x1400.jpg - Project page: https://www.media.mit.edu/projects/elowan-a-plant-robot-hybrid/overview/ #### Institute for Inconspicuous Languages: Reading Lips — Špela Petrič (2018) - Type: Artwork · Organisms: Plants - Idea: Look for a shared code with a plant through the body part it already uses to regulate itself. - What it is: An attempt to build a sign language with a ficus tree by reading the opening and closing of its leaf stomata and answering with codes of light. - How it works: Microscope cameras and computer vision track stomata on Ficus benjamina leaves, and light signals are given as Pavlovian conditioning cues; built with Bart Peeters, Klara Nosan and Tim Oblak. - Video: https://vimeo.com/457493103 - Images: https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5aeca48a506fbe863b23a8b6/1600016130132-1NOFOTHIQXG2OIOKVMUM/190418+E%CC%82pela+Petriu%CC%88+-+Nociceptor_branje+ustnic_foto.miha.fras_030.JPG https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5aeca48a506fbe863b23a8b6/1600017122954-D2JL8SG1Z115XYZ24BHU/2014_0102_172917_002.jpg - Project page: https://www.spelapetric.org/institute-for-inconspicuous-languages/ #### Plantxel: Towards a Plant-based Controllable Display — Vito Gentile (2018) - Type: Paper · Organisms: Plants - Idea: Build a screen out of plants that move when touched. - What it is: A display whose pixels are living Mimosa plants: puffs of air make the leaves fold, switching each 'plantxel' between open and closed for public visualisations. - How it works: Thigmonastic Mimosa spegazzinii stimulated by an air-jet system; contrast depends on leaf density. - Paper: https://doi.org/10.1145/3205873.3205888 (PerDis 2018) - Images: https://figures.semanticscholar.org/fd30fb11e697de6fc936eb14532ef915830322d3/4-Figure2-1.png https://figures.semanticscholar.org/fd30fb11e697de6fc936eb14532ef915830322d3/6-Figure4-1.png #### Voice of Nature — Thijs Biersteker (2018) - Type: Artwork · Organisms: Plants - Idea: Speed up a tree's own record-keeping, the growth ring, so people can read it on their timescale. - What it is: Sensors on the roots, leaves and branches of a living tree in Chengdu feed a display that grows a new tree ring every second, showing how the tree responds to pollution in real time. - How it works: Twelve sensors measure CO2, temperature, moisture, photosynthesis and growth, and an algorithm renders the data as rings on a screen behind the tree; developed with TU Delft scientists. - Video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DnSy1SCg55Q - Images: https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5d80d9eeb97e2f5b4a6ceb62/1569167416126-GKH9EF217MX3ZCJ3S7SV/2.+Voice+Of+Nature+By+Thijs+Biersteker+-+small.jpg https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5d80d9eeb97e2f5b4a6ceb62/1569167426763-17ODE75S8HEK70E5O4EH/3.+Voice+Of+Nature+By+Thijs+Biersteker+-+small.jpg - Project page: https://thijsbiersteker.com/voice-of-nature #### A Nanobionic Light-Emitting Plant — Michael Strano (2017) - Type: Paper · Organisms: Plants - Idea: Grow lamps instead of wiring them. - What it is: Watercress and other plants infused with firefly enzymes glow dimly for hours, a first step toward plants that light rooms and streets. - How it works: Nanoparticles carrying luciferase, luciferin and coenzyme A are infused into leaves under pressure and release the reactants slowly. - Paper: https://doi.org/10.1021/acs.nanolett.7b04369 (Nano Letters 2017) - Video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hp-vqd8zJM4 - Images: https://news.mit.edu/sites/default/files/images/201712/MIT-Glowing-Plants.jpg - Project page: https://news.mit.edu/2017/engineers-create-nanobionic-plants-that-glow-1213 #### Living Light — Nova Innova (2017) - Type: Product & platform · Organisms: Plants, Bacteria & microbes - Idea: Everyday electricity could come from the microbes around a plant's roots. - What it is: A lamp powered by the living plant and soil bacteria inside it; the light turns on when you touch the plant. - How it works: A plant microbial fuel cell: bacteria in the soil break down organic compounds released by roots and release electrons that are harvested by electrodes. - Images: https://ars.electronica.art/starts-prize/files/2021/06/LivingLight-3-Nova-Innova-1024x512.jpg https://ars.electronica.art/starts-prize/files/2021/06/LivingLight-2-Nova-Innova-1024x512.jpg - Project page: https://ars.electronica.art/starts-prize/en/the-living-light/ #### EmotiPlant: Human-Plant Interaction for Older Adults — Leonardo Angelini (2016) - Type: Paper · Organisms: Plants - Idea: A plant that 'says' how it feels makes caring easier and more social. - What it is: An augmented houseplant that expresses emotions about its light, water and temperature and responds to touch, helping older adults care for indoor plants and keeping them company. - How it works: Environmental sensors in the pot and (likely capacitive) touch sensing on the plant drive expressive lights and sounds. - Paper: https://doi.org/10.1145/2839462.2856548 (TEI 2016) - Images: https://figures.semanticscholar.org/789bdc3f9373fefe32b90246dab6647b6df10742/2-Figure1-1.png https://figures.semanticscholar.org/789bdc3f9373fefe32b90246dab6647b6df10742/4-Figure4-1.png #### Go & Grow — Fadi Botros (2016) - Type: Research prototype · Organisms: Plants, Human body - Idea: A living visualisation makes data personal: people feel pride, guilt and responsibility toward the plant. - What it is: A living plant that receives water in proportion to how active its owner is: the fitter the owner, the healthier the plant. Ten people lived with one for six weeks. - How it works: A fitness tracker's step data drives a pump that waters the plant; a six-week qualitative study led to a Goal Motivation Model. - Paper: https://doi.org/10.1145/2909132.2909267 (AVI 2016) - Images: https://figures.semanticscholar.org/bd419b94ce4f7855e40ed770a5a515fd7f1fb952/500px/4-Figure3-1.png https://figures.semanticscholar.org/bd419b94ce4f7855e40ed770a5a515fd7f1fb952/500px/1-Figure1-1.png - Project page: https://doi.org/10.1145/2909132.2909267 #### Nitroaromatic Detection and Infrared Communication from Wild-type Plants Using Plant Nanobionics — Michael Strano (2016) - Type: Paper · Organisms: Plants - Idea: A living plant can be an environmental sensor that sends its own signal. - What it is: Spinach leaves embedded with carbon nanotubes detect explosives in groundwater drawn up by the roots and report them as an infrared signal read by a smartphone-class camera. - How it works: Near-infrared fluorescent single-walled carbon nanotubes in the leaf mesophyll change emission when nitroaromatics arrive via transpiration. - Paper: https://doi.org/10.1038/nmat4771 (Nature Materials) - Images: https://news.mit.edu/sites/default/files/images/201610/MIT-Plant-Communication.jpg - Project page: https://news.mit.edu/2016/nanobionic-spinach-plants-detect-explosives-1031 #### Project Florence: A Plant to Human Experience — Helene Steiner (2016) - Type: Speculative design · Organisms: Plants - Idea: Use language as the bridge for a plant–human interface. - What it is: A conversation with a plant at Microsoft Research: typed messages are analysed for sentiment and turned into light on the plant, and the plant's electrical and chemical responses are combined into a reply in words. - How it works: Azure natural-language processing modulates a light source on the plant; sensors read plant electrophysiology and environment to generate a response. - Video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WmNX9c9CUJs - Images: https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/research/wp-content/uploads/2015/11/florence2-1024x683.jpg - Project page: https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/research/project/project-florence/ #### Sonnengarten — Till Fastnacht (2016) - Type: Artwork · Organisms: Plants, Human body - Idea: Make plants in a city square noticeable by letting them answer touch. - What it is: An urban light installation in Weimar: plants set in a tilted glowing planter respond to passers-by's touch with light. - How it works: Capacitive sensing through the plants detects touch and triggers LED light patterns in the planter. - Paper: https://doi.org/10.1145/2968219.2971423 (UbiComp 2016 Adjunct) - Video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rcR-6nRcGvc - Images: https://figures.semanticscholar.org/aea854f717ba85c2e5ff85926abf4d38df889caf/500px/2-Figure3-1.png https://figures.semanticscholar.org/aea854f717ba85c2e5ff85926abf4d38df889caf/500px/2-Figure1-1.png - Project page: https://doi.org/10.1145/2968219.2971423 #### Symbiome – Economy of Symbiosis — Saša Spačal (2016) - Type: Artwork · Organisms: Plants, Bacteria & microbes - Idea: Make a symbiotic negotiation audible, and let visitors' breath enter it. - What it is: A hydroponic chamber of red clover and nitrogen-fixing bacteria whose nutrient exchange sets the rhythm of water drops; the ripples are turned into real-time sound. - How it works: Indirect measurements of the Trifolium pratense–Rhizobium exchange, likely pH of the hydroponic solution, control a dripper; ripples are captured and phase-modulated into sound, and visitors' exhaled CO2 affects the plant. - Video: https://vimeo.com/243696887 - Images: https://www.agapea.si/wp-content/uploads/2017/01/Najavna-fotka_I_HD.jpg https://www.agapea.si/wp-content/uploads/2017/01/Sasa_Spacal__0_obrezana_pobarvana.jpg - Project page: https://www.agapea.si/en/projects/symbiome-the-economy-of-symbiosis #### Biogotchi! — Jacqueline T. Chien (2015) - Type: Research prototype · Organisms: Plants - Idea: Plants can be slow, affective displays for personal information. - What it is: Four experiments that manipulate how plants grow, bend and colour to display personal data, such as a person's behaviour, as ambiguous, living feedback. - How it works: A plant-manipulation system controls light, water and other conditions so that growth changes encode data; four experiments test the design space. - Paper: https://doi.org/10.1145/2702613.2732770 (CHI 2015 EA) - Project page: https://doi.org/10.1145/2702613.2732770 #### Cactunes — Pierre Charreau, Martin Hertig & Pauline Lemberger (2015) - Type: Research prototype · Organisms: Plants - Idea: A plant you avoid touching can become an instrument you play. - What it is: Household cacti fitted with touch sensors and audio devices become musical instruments, challenging the reflex not to touch them. - How it works: Capacitive sensing through the cactus spines triggers sounds from a speaker base. - Video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uzowZxKJ80k - Project page: https://web.archive.org/web/20210515055322/https://www.globalgradshow.com/project/cactunes/ #### Electronic Plants — Eleni Stavrinidou (2015) - Type: Paper · Organisms: Plants - Idea: The plant's own plumbing can host electronic circuits. - What it is: Roses whose vascular tissue carries conductive polymer wires grown inside them, forming working transistors and digital logic, later extended to storing energy in the plant. - How it works: Cut rose stems take up PEDOT-S solution, which self-assembles into conducting wires in the xylem; electrodes form organic electrochemical transistors. - Paper: https://doi.org/10.1126/sciadv.1501136 (Science Advances 2015) - Video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SNm6mJxNe7g #### Hortum machina, B — Interactive Architecture Lab (2015) - Type: Research prototype · Organisms: Plants - Idea: Give a garden a body and let the plants decide where it goes. - What it is: A three-metre geodesic sphere holding twelve garden modules rolls through the city, steered by the electrical responses of the plants on board, which 'vote' to move toward sun or shade. - How it works: Electrodes read plant electrophysiology; a robotic core shifts the sphere's centre of gravity according to the plants' collective responses. - Paper: https://doi.org/10.1145/3469410.3469419 (MAB 2020) - Video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8Qk3BeolyiA - Images: https://ars.electronica.art/starts-prize/files/2016/06/hortummachina.jpg - Project page: https://artifact-archive.org/whole-archive #### Oscillatorium – Living Systems Oscillation — Robertina Šebjanič, Monika Pocrnjić (2015) - Type: Artwork · Organisms: Plants, Human body - Idea: Treat living plants as analog oscillators, like components in a synthesizer. - What it is: An installation of objects with living plants that act as natural oscillators; when visitors engage with them, embedded sound systems mix natural and synthetic sounds. - How it works: Bioelectric oscillations of plants are picked up and fed into analog circuits (likely electrode-based biosonification) that respond to visitors' touch and proximity; shown at KIBLIX and MFRU 2015. - Images: https://robertina.net/wp-content/uploads/2025/09/d1752-oscillatorium-by-robertina-sejanic-adn-monika-pocrnjic-photo-by-aisen-caro-chacin-01676767-1.jpg https://i0.wp.com/robertina.net/wp-content/uploads/2025/09/552e6-oscillatorium-by-robertina-sejanic-adn-monika-pocrnjic-photo-by-aisen-caro-chacin-011.jpg - Project page: https://robertina.net/oscillatorium-living-systems-oscillation/ #### Plandscapes — Kasia Molga (2015) - Type: Artwork · Organisms: Plants - Idea: Treat a plant as the artist with its own style. - What it is: A chosen plant streams its internal biosignals into algorithms that draw generative images, and also decides which drawings are printed and shown. - How it works: The PlanEt device designed by World Wilder Lab acquires biodata from inside the plant (first a Fatsia japonica) and feeds custom drawing algorithms and a printer. - Video: https://vimeo.com/653877448 - Images: https://www.studiomolga.com/PLANDSCAPES/PL_01.png https://www.studiomolga.com/PLANDSCAPES/PL_02.png - Project page: https://www.studiomolga.com/art_PLANDSCAPES.html #### PlantWave (MIDI Sprout) — Data Garden (2015) - Type: Product & platform · Organisms: Plants - Idea: Give everyone a way to 'listen' to a plant's biosignals. - What it is: A small device clipped to a plant's leaves that turns fluctuations in its electrical conductance into MIDI and music in an app; first launched as MIDI Sprout. - How it works: Two electrode pads measure galvanic changes across a leaf; firmware maps variations to MIDI notes and synthesised sound. - Video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ycRKI1AABKE - Images: https://plantwave.com/cdn/shop/files/plantwave.png?v=1678040631 - Project page: https://plantwave.com/ #### Sonic Garden — Mileece (2015) - Type: Artwork · Organisms: Plants, Human body - Idea: Turn living plants into a public instrument through aesthetic sonification. - What it is: An interactive garden at Sonos Studio in Los Angeles where visitors touch plants and hear generative music made from the plants' bioelectric signals. - How it works: Electrodes on leaves pick up bioelectric emissions, which generative software, likely written in SuperCollider, turns into sound played through a Sonos system. - Video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wYU18eiiFt4 - Project page: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mileece #### Organic Cinema — Kasia Molga (2014) - Type: Artwork · Organisms: Plants - Idea: Make plants the actors and editors of a film. - What it is: A live cinema in which the electrical responses of common plants decide the order and variation of projected images and sound. - How it works: Sensors read action and variation potentials from plants in real time, and an algorithm maps them to sequences of pre-made imagery and sound; by World Wilder Lab. - Video: https://vimeo.com/102268314 - Images: https://www.studiomolga.com/ORGCINEMA/OC_01.jpg https://www.studiomolga.com/ORGCINEMA/OC_02.jpg - Project page: https://www.studiomolga.com/art_ORGANICCINEMA_01.html #### Bio-Box — Interspecifics (2013) - Type: Artwork · Organisms: Plants, Algae - Idea: Let small plants play in a band: their gestures of micro-voltage become knobs on a synthesizer. - What it is: A live-performance interface that uses the electrical responses of mosses and algae to light, vibration and touch as analog control data for audio generators. - How it works: Electrodes read micro-voltage from moss and algae cultures, amplified and mapped to control voltages of analog sound generators. - Images: https://farm3.staticflickr.com/2840/10285871193_f568029acc_k_d.jpg https://farm8.staticflickr.com/7451/10285764085_143ee3271a_k_d.jpg - Project page: https://interspecifics.cc/work/bio-box-2013/ #### Botanicus Interacticus: Interactive Plants Technology — Ivan Poupyrev (2012) - Type: Research prototype · Organisms: Plants - Idea: Any plant can be an expressive, touch-sensitive interface with a single wire in its soil. - What it is: Ordinary living plants become multi-touch and gesture controllers: touching, sliding along or approaching a leaf or stem is recognised and triggers sound and visuals. Shown at SIGGRAPH 2012 by Disney Research. - How it works: Swept Frequency Capacitive Sensing (from Touché) with one electrode in the soil measures the plant's impedance profile, and machine learning classifies touch and proximity. - Paper: https://doi.org/10.1145/2343456.2343460 (SIGGRAPH 2012 Emerging Technologies) - Video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mhasvJW9Nyc - Images: http://www.ivanpoupyrev.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/11/Botanicus-Interacticus-06-1200x720.png - Project page: http://www.ivanpoupyrev.com/project/botanicus-interacticus #### Domestic Plant — Scenocosme (2012) - Type: Artwork · Organisms: Plants, Human body - Idea: Give a plant animal-like mobility and ask what domestication means for it. - What it is: A potted plant on a small robot that moves and makes sounds when people touch it, behaving like a wild animal kept on a leash. - How it works: Capacitive sensing through the plant detects touch and triggers sound and the movement of a Magabot mobile robot base. - Video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OkWZ-YV3dOs - Images: http://www.scenocosme.com/domestic_plant/isea_albuquerque_scenocosme_domestic_plant-2.jpg http://www.scenocosme.com/domestic_plant/pano.jpg - Project page: http://www.scenocosme.com/domestic_plant.htm #### Pulsu(m) Plantae — Interspecifics (2012) - Type: Artwork · Organisms: Plants - Idea: Give plants an audible voice with a biofeedback prosthesis, and compare the patterns across species. - What it is: A sound prosthesis reads the bioelectric activity of living plants and turns it into synthesised sound, so visitors can hear specimens respond over time. - How it works: Electrodes on leaves and stems pick up micro-voltage changes that drive a sound synthesis process; developed with UNAM botanist Juan Carlos González. - Video: https://vimeo.com/62232734 - Images: https://farm9.staticflickr.com/8402/8673828683_2535184eed_k_d.jpg https://farm9.staticflickr.com/8121/8673900797_c0bf6d8954_k_d.jpg - Project page: https://interspecifics.cc/work/pulsum-plantae-2012/ #### Ecotelemedia (plant–GSR hybrid interface) — Guto Nóbrega (2011) - Type: Artwork · Organisms: Plants, Human body - Idea: Put plants into a networked performance as equal data sources next to human performers. - What it is: In a telematic performance linking Rio de Janeiro, Copenhagen and Beijing, groups of living plants acted as organic sensors whose signals were sonified together with dancers' gestures. - How it works: Two plant-GSR systems, each monitoring three plants, streamed conductivity data over OSC into Pure Data sound engines alongside iPad accelerometers; by the NANO lab (UFRJ) with IT University of Copenhagen. - Paper: https://doi.org/10.5216/vis.v9i2.19847 (Visualidades 9(2), 2011) - Project page: https://doi.org/10.5216/vis.v9i2.19847 #### Nanomagnetic Plants — C-Lab (Laura Cinti & Howard Boland) (2011) - Type: Artwork · Organisms: Plants - Idea: Nanoparticles give plants an 'invisible interface' for motion on human timescales. - What it is: Plants whose roots have absorbed magnetic nanoparticles move visibly when an external magnet is brought near, making plant behaviour immediate and interactive. - How it works: Borrowed from stem-cell targeting research at UCL's Centre for Advanced Biomedical Imaging: engineered magnetic nanoparticles bypass root uptake selection and accumulate in the plant, which then responds to a magnet. - Images: http://thisisalive.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/04/NanomagneticPlants03-760x535.jpg http://thisisalive.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/04/NanomagneticPlants05.jpg - Project page: http://thisisalive.com/nanomagnetic-plants/ #### Phonofolium — Scenocosme (2011) - Type: Artwork · Organisms: Plants, Human body - Idea: Turn a plant into a sensor of human touch and give it a voice. - What it is: A living shrub that sings when visitors stroke or approach it, each touch producing a different sound character. - How it works: The plant and the visitor's body form a capacitive circuit that detects electrostatic changes from touch and proximity, mapped to generative sound. - Video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vE5-Eml2YeE - Images: http://www.scenocosme.com/phonofolium/phonofolium.jpg http://www.scenocosme.com/phonofolium/phonofolium_scenocosme_1.jpg - Project page: http://www.scenocosme.com/phonofolium.htm #### Jurema Action Plant — Ivan Henriques (2010) - Type: Artwork · Organisms: Plants - Idea: Give a plant the ability to flee by wiring its own signals to wheels. - What it is: A robotic structure carrying a sensitive plant (Mimosa pudica) that reads the plant's electrical response to touch and moves it away from the person touching it. - How it works: Electrodes on the branches pick up action potentials, which an amplifier turns into triggers for the robot's motors; developed at V2_ Lab with Fytagoras and Leiden University biologists. - Video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZdrDNA0-nz0 - Images: https://ivanhenriques.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/09/dsc2412.jpg https://ivanhenriques.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/09/as_henriques_i_03.jpg - Project page: https://ivanhenriques.com/works/jurema-action-plant/ #### My Green Pet — Sungjae Hwang (2010) - Type: Research prototype · Organisms: Plants, Human body - Idea: Personifying a plant helps children understand that plants are alive. - What it is: An interactive plant for children that recognises stroking, tickling and holding through tiny currents and answers with laughter, cries and lights, as if it had feelings. - How it works: A current-based sensing framework on an Arduino classifies touch gestures on a regular potted plant and plays voice files and LED feedback; a user test with children followed. - Paper: https://doi.org/10.1145/1810543.1810573 (IDC 2010) - Video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9HTxxT4ds64 - Images: https://figures.semanticscholar.org/1c7991f8a75771efccfa22ffc47123c78c2fa0b2/500px/3-Figure4-1.png - Project page: https://doi.org/10.1145/1810543.1810573 #### Please touch the plant on your way up the stairs — Susan Loh (2010) - Type: Research prototype · Organisms: Plants, Human body - Idea: A living plant as the button makes a small green action feel tangible. - What it is: A pilot at a university building that used live green plants as the interface for an energy-saving action: touching a plant on the way up the stairs gave students immediate feedback for choosing the stairs. - How it works: Tangible plant/digital interface on a stairway, likely using touch sensing on the plants, evaluated as a pilot study with students. - Paper: https://doi.org/10.1145/1952222.1952321 (OzCHI 2010) - Images: https://figures.semanticscholar.org/ac1fefb2c93bec118edb33bc006643683bd8630a/2-Figure1-1.png - Project page: https://doi.org/10.1145/1952222.1952321 #### Plant Feeling Light — Satoshi Kuribayashi (2009) - Type: Research prototype · Organisms: Plants - Idea: Let a plant's own rhythm set the light in a room. - What it is: A lighting system whose colour and brightness follow the biorhythm of a living plant, read from its bioelectric signals. - How it works: Plant biopotential is measured and mapped by a control algorithm onto the amplitude and colour of LED panels. - Paper: https://doi.org/10.1145/1690388.1690504 (ACE 2009) - Images: https://figures.semanticscholar.org/1a04ae7915fd05bcc31bb952a5c190b88cf169c2/500px/1-Figure2-1.png - Project page: https://doi.org/10.1145/1690388.1690504 #### Plants Derail Model Train — Miya Masaoka (2009) - Type: Artwork · Organisms: Plants - Idea: Replay a Cold War plant-sensing experiment as theatre to question what plants 'know'. - What it is: Houseplants wired to electrodes trip a switch on a model railway and derail the train, while spy-camera footage from the train is projected and musicians perform. - How it works: Recreating an experiment by Pierre Sauvin, electrodes read the plants' electrical activity through a computer that actuates a track switch; performed with Damon Holzborn. - Images: https://miyamasaoka.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/06/Plant-blows-up-train.jpeg - Project page: https://miyamasaoka.com/work/2009/plants-derail-model-train-2/ #### Breathing — Guto Nóbrega (2008) - Type: Artwork · Organisms: Plants, Human body - Idea: Design interaction at the tempo of a plant: breathing, not clicking. - What it is: A hybrid creature made of a living plant and a robotic body reacts when a visitor breathes close to the plant, turning a very quiet exchange into movement and light. - How it works: A galvanic-response circuit reads changes in the electrical conductivity of the leaves, which drive the robotic structure; developed during the artist's PhD at the University of Plymouth. - Video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4XROsZaW0Cc - Images: https://i.ytimg.com/vi/4XROsZaW0Cc/hqdefault.jpg - Project page: https://doi.org/10.5216/vis.v9i2.19847 #### Akousmaflore — Scenocosme (2007) - Type: Artwork · Organisms: Plants, Human body - Idea: Invisible bioelectric contact between people and plants can be made audible. - What it is: A garden of hanging living plants that 'sing' when touched or approached: each plant reacts to the electrical charge of visitors' bodies with its own sounds. - How it works: Capacitive sensing of the body's electrostatic field through each plant triggers sound samples. - Video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1hae2Fwrqn8 - Images: https://www.scenocosme.com/image/panoramique_akousmaflore_2.jpg - Project page: https://www.scenocosme.com/akousmaflore_en.htm #### I/O Plant — Satoshi Kuribayashi (2007) - Type: Research prototype · Organisms: Plants - Idea: Treat a plant as a module you can plug into interaction design. - What it is: A toolkit that lets designers attach sensors and actuators to living plants and wire them as input/output modules in hybrid plant-electronic circuits. - How it works: Sensor and actuator modules read plant biopotential and touch and drive outputs such as light and motion; the paper reports usage patterns and examples. - Paper: https://doi.org/10.1145/1240866.1241037 (CHI 2007 EA) - Video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f5Gk0hRFzUY - Project page: https://doi.org/10.1145/1240866.1241037 #### PlantDisplay: Turning Houseplants into Ambient Display — Akira Wakita (2006) - Type: Paper · Organisms: Plants - Idea: A plant's slow organic change can be a calm, emotional display. - What it is: Houseplants show information through how they grow: the amount of communication between people is translated into watering and light, so the plants' condition reflects it. - How it works: Data mapped to automated light and water supply for potted plants (likely daily communication logs as input). First author Satoshi Kuribayashi. - Paper: https://doi.org/10.1145/1178823.1178871 (ACE 2006) #### growth rendering device — David Bowen (2006) - Type: Artwork · Organisms: Plants - Idea: Let a plant and a machine co-author a drawing whose outcome depends on growth. - What it is: A machine feeds a plant with light and hydroponic solution and, every 24 hours, prints a rasterised inkjet drawing of it on a scrolling roll of paper. - How it works: A scanner or camera (likely) captures the plant daily and an inkjet head renders it, then the paper advances about four inches for the next cycle; the system runs indefinitely. - Video: https://vimeo.com/20967793 - Images: https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5509f2e8e4b042d7b1ec6ab5/1426961120054-AQOE22AJFU93DLLMQ4PT/sized_growthfull2.jpg - Project page: https://www.dwbowen.com/growth-rendering-device #### Infotropism: Living and Robotic Plants as Interactive Displays — Jodi Forlizzi (2004) - Type: Paper · Organisms: Plants - Idea: Let a plant's phototropism slowly display collective behaviour. - What it is: Living plants placed between trash and recycling bins in a cafeteria received bursts of light whenever someone recycled, so over two weeks they leaned toward the more-used bin; people talked about caring for them. - How it works: Sensors on bins trigger directional lights; living plants bend over days by phototropism, compared with a robotic plant analogue. First author David Holstius. - Paper: https://doi.org/10.1145/1013115.1013145 (DIS 2004) - Images: https://figures.semanticscholar.org/9063f812ff5cce96a14ebf63ac80b06b92dc7d62/1-Figure1-1.png https://figures.semanticscholar.org/9063f812ff5cce96a14ebf63ac80b06b92dc7d62/4-Figure8-1.png #### Spore 1.1 — SWAMP (2004) - Type: Artwork · Organisms: Plants - Idea: Tie a living organism's welfare directly to an abstract economic signal to make the link felt. - What it is: A rubber tree bought at The Home Depot lives in a self-contained ecosystem that waters it only when the company's stock price rises; if it dies, it is returned under the store's one-year guarantee. - How it works: An on-board computer with Wi-Fi checks the weekly stock price and controls a watering pump accordingly; won first prize at VIDA 7.0. - Video: https://vimeo.com/10856823 - Images: https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5faac0bf539a36489f436207/1605051510985-9P18MQQUXNMIL7QRVGT1/1406_Spore-1.jpg - Project page: https://www.swamp.nu/projects/spore #### The Telegarden — Ken Goldberg (1995) - Type: Artwork · Organisms: Plants, Human body - Idea: A living garden can hold together a remote community that must cooperate to keep it alive. - What it is: Anyone on the web could plant, water and watch seedlings in a real garden through an industrial robot arm; over 9,000 members tended it in the first year, and it ran at the Ars Electronica Center until 2004. - How it works: An Adept-1 robot arm with a camera over a circular planter was controlled through a web interface; co-directed with Joseph Santarromana at the University of Southern California. - Video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vQE-qJ_aYPw - Images: https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/3/31/Telegarden.jpg/960px-Telegarden.jpg https://goldberg.berkeley.edu/garden/telegarden-8x6-72dpi.jpg - Project page: https://goldberg.berkeley.edu/garden/Ars/ #### Essay Concerning Human Understanding — Eduardo Kac (1994) - Type: Artwork · Organisms: Plants, Animals - Idea: Connect two species that never meet through a telematic loop and let them take turns. - What it is: A canary in Lexington, Kentucky, and a philodendron in New York held a live sonic dialogue over a phone line: the bird's song reached the plant, and the plant's electrical response triggered sounds sent back to the bird. - How it works: An electrode on the leaf fed microvoltage changes into brain-wave analysis software (IBVA) and a MAX patch that controlled a MIDI sequencer; made with Ikuo Nakamura. - Images: https://www.ekac.org/essay4_final.jpg https://www.ekac.org/essay_diagram.jpg - Project page: https://www.ekac.org/essay-info.html #### Teleporting an Unknown State — Eduardo Kac (1994) - Type: Artwork · Organisms: Plants, Human body - Idea: Make the network a life-support system, so a plant grows only if strangers keep sending light. - What it is: A single seed in a dark room grows only on the light that remote internet users send through live video feeds, projected onto the soil. - How it works: Participants pointed cameras at the sky and streamed the images over the internet (CU-SeeMe videoconferencing); a projector above the pedestal turned the incoming video into light for photosynthesis. - Images: https://www.ekac.org/handsky.gif https://www.ekac.org/fullygrown.gif - Project page: https://www.ekac.org/teleporting.html #### Interactive Plant Growing — Christa Sommerer & Laurent Mignonneau (1992) - Type: Artwork · Organisms: Plants - Idea: Real plants can be the controllers of a digital world. - What it is: Visitors touch or approach five real plants, and each gesture makes virtual plants grow on a large projection; the living plants act as the interface to an artificial garden. - How it works: The electrical potential difference between plant and visitor's body is measured and mapped to the growth of 3D computer-generated plants. - Video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JXX7JNFD2X8 ### Fungal & Slime-mould Computing Mycelium and slime moulds that sense, signal and solve problems. #### Ecoshroom — Ivan Henriques (2025) - Type: Artwork · Organisms: Fungi, Plants, Human body - Idea: Let plants and fungi steer the climate of a building through their own signals. - What it is: A glass pavilion of plants colonised by mycorrhizal fungi, where a machine learning system reads their bioelectric signals and adjusts light, humidity and air to keep them well, and sonifies their state. - How it works: Electrodes record signals from plants and arbuscular mycorrhizal fungi alongside light, temperature, humidity, CO2 and soil moisture; a custom model learns to control the environment; with Toby Kiers's lab and others. - Video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pZTQja6s9xM - Images: https://ivanhenriques.com/wp-content/uploads/George-Knegtel_Ecoshroom_Z2S_24.jpg https://ivanhenriques.com/wp-content/uploads/George-Knegtel_Ecoshroom_Z2S_05.jpg - Project page: https://ivanhenriques.com/works/ecoshroom/ #### SLIMO CITY — Mengyao Guo (2025) - Type: Research prototype · Organisms: Slime mould - Idea: Translate microscopic growth into an urban metaphor people already understand. - What it is: A game that turns a living slime mould's growth into a developing city visualisation, mapping its behaviour to city scale, colour palette and building height. - How it works: Sensors monitor Physarum polycephalum growth and environmental responses; software maps these readings to three urban parameters in real time. - Paper: https://doi.org/10.1145/3708557.3716346 (IUI 2025 Companion) - Images: https://biodigitalviz.github.io/images/slimo_city.png - Project page: https://doi.org/10.1145/3708557.3716346 #### Sustainable memristors from shiitake mycelium for high-frequency bioelectronics — John LaRocco (2025) - Type: Paper · Organisms: Fungi - Idea: Grow computer memory from edible mushrooms instead of mining rare materials. - What it is: Dehydrated shiitake mycelium was wired into circuits and worked as a memristor, switching at up to about 5,850 times per second with around 90% accuracy. - How it works: Shiitake mycelium cultured on growth medium was dried, rehydrated and connected with electrodes, then characterised with voltage sweeps at different frequencies. - Paper: https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0328965 (PLOS One) - Images: https://content.presspage.com/uploads/2170/3dd114e8-4e60-4ca6-9e58-663439f2ddfe/1920_journal.pone.0328965.g004.png https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article/figure/image?size=large&id=10.1371/journal.pone.0328965.g001 - Project page: https://news.osu.edu/powered-by-mushrooms-living-computers-are-on-the-rise/ #### Interwoven — Jonne Verheij & Lidewei Reitsma (2024) - Type: Artwork · Organisms: Fungi - Idea: Make a fungus's electrical life perceptible to people. - What it is: An installation that measures the electrical impulses fungi use to signal in their mycelial networks and translates them into projection and sound; touching the fungus changes the signal. - How it works: Electrodes in the substrate record spiking potentials, which drive generative visuals and audio. - Images: https://content.gp-award.com/assets/media/award24/0-interwoven_blogLarge.jpg https://content.gp-award.com/assets/media/award24/2-interwoven_blogLarge.jpg - Project page: https://www.gp-award.com/en/projects/interwoven #### Tracing slime mold — Netta Ofer, Mirela Alistar (2024) - Type: Paper · Organisms: Slime mould - Idea: Tracing is a material practice that shows both the organism's ways and the designer's own habits of control. - What it is: A first-person design study that traces slime mould growth by drawing its paths, placing oats on a stage dish, predicting routes and sonifying its electrical resistance. - How it works: Reflective writing accompanies visual, embodied and sonified tracings of Physarum polycephalum grown in petri dishes and a fabricated stage dish. - Paper: https://doi.org/10.1145/3643834.3661621 (DIS 2024) - Images: https://figures.semanticscholar.org/7771463357d50963c3f222def9f37ea4369dea45/500px/6-Figure2-1.png - Project page: https://doi.org/10.1145/3643834.3661621 #### Field Notes — Tarun Nayar (2023) - Type: Artwork · Organisms: Fungi, Plants - Idea: Treat field recording as live collaboration with fungi rather than capture. - What it is: An album composed over two years in the field with mushrooms and plants wired to synthesizers, their electrical fluctuations playing the melodies. - How it works: Biodata sonification devices clipped to mushroom caps and leaves convert conductance changes into MIDI notes played through modular and software synths. - Video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hASCAGgZNZ0 - Images: https://i.ytimg.com/vi/hASCAGgZNZ0/maxresdefault.jpg - Project page: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hASCAGgZNZ0 #### Symbiont::MyceliOhms — Tosca Terán (2023) - Type: Artwork · Organisms: Fungi, Human body - Idea: Route a human touch through a fungus before it becomes sound, making a duet of two bodies. - What it is: A seven-month mixed-reality installation where living fungi control point-cloud visuals of an old-growth forest; visitors touch gold sensors on a branch so their bio-electrical signals pass through the fungi into synthesizers. - How it works: Living fungi are wired into a nodal network that drives projected Lidar and photogrammetry scans; touch sensors send visitors' signals through the branch and mycelium to synthesizers; at the Art Gallery of Greater Victoria. - Images: https://static.wixstatic.com/media/c666a3_c1315fff9c424831ae3fd25bd7a8b928~mv2.jpeg https://static.wixstatic.com/media/c666a3_815c7d839ee8492088ea69ffb82d0104~mv2.jpeg - Project page: https://www.toscateran.com/myceliohms #### Synthium — Aidan Mark Puse (2023) - Type: Research prototype · Organisms: Fungi - Idea: Playful sound can introduce fungi as fellow stakeholders in the city. - What it is: A tangible installation for urban green spaces that turns electrical signals from living mushrooms into sound people can play with. - How it works: Electrodes read bioelectric signals from mushrooms and drive a synthesiser; the concept moved from cardboard prototypes to a mid-fidelity proof of concept through a Double Diamond process. - Paper: https://doi.org/10.1145/3544549.3583842 (CHI 2023 EA) - Video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=K3gPgBTqGYs - Images: https://figures.semanticscholar.org/887787d72be6ec4e61ed9c9872022bd9d00a1033/500px/4-Figure6-1.png https://figures.semanticscholar.org/887787d72be6ec4e61ed9c9872022bd9d00a1033/500px/4-Figure4-1.png - Project page: https://doi.org/10.1145/3544549.3583842 #### Ctrl — Michael Sedbon (2022) - Type: Artwork · Organisms: Slime mould - Idea: Put a living organism inside a game of control and watch who controls whom. - What it is: An installation in which ten slime moulds compete in Conway's Game of Life: their electrical potentials set the game's moves, and an AI uses light flashes to 'optimise' their behaviour. - How it works: Electrodes at both ends of a protoplasmic tube between two food sources measure potential differences used as coordinates; an algorithm triggers light stimuli. - Video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=z3f2JyQ8pu0 - Images: https://freight.cargo.site/w/1200/i/c7355d1a6c8c98402ec9b9b58ac773e267fffad1bc97046d3df6cd94bdf346fa/IMG_0120.jpg - Project page: https://michaelsedbon.com/C-t-r-l #### Language of fungi derived from their electrical spiking activity — Andrew Adamatzky (2022) - Type: Paper · Organisms: Fungi - Idea: Treat fungal electrical activity as a signal to decode, maybe even a language, not as noise. - What it is: Electrodes pushed into mycelium-colonised substrates of four fungal species recorded trains of electrical spikes; grouping the spikes into 'words' gave vocabularies of up to about 50 words per species. - How it works: Sub-dermal needle electrodes and a data logger recorded voltage spikes from enoki, split gill, ghost and caterpillar fungi over days, then spike trains were clustered and analysed with linguistic complexity measures. - Paper: https://doi.org/10.1098/rsos.211926 (Royal Society Open Science) - Video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CT_zB9XJ7kI - Images: https://blogs.uwe.ac.uk/research-external-engagement/wp-content/uploads/sites/3/2022/04/mushrrooms.jpg https://cdn.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/blobs/49d0/8984380/3cd48c7b91b5/rsos211926f01.jpg - Project page: https://blogs.uwe.ac.uk/research-business-innovation/uwe-bristol-academic-researches-the-language-of-fungi-derived-from-their-electrical-spiking-activity/ #### Mining logical circuits in fungi — Andrew Adamatzky (2022) - Type: Paper · Organisms: Fungi - Idea: Grown fungal materials could compute, not just insulate or package. - What it is: Many-input Boolean functions found in mycelium-bound composites of oyster fungus: electrical pulses in, spiking responses out, decoded as logic. - How it works: Pleurotus ostreatus composites receive input bits as electrical stimuli of set amplitude or frequency; their nonlinear electrical responses are mapped to logical outputs. - Paper: https://doi.org/10.1038/s41598-022-20080-3 (Scientific Reports 2022) - Images: https://biodigitalviz.github.io/images/mining.png - Project page: https://doi.org/10.1038/s41598-022-20080-3 #### Encoding memory in tube diameter hierarchy of living flow network — Karen Alim (2021) - Type: Paper · Organisms: Slime mould - Idea: Memory can be stored in the shape of a body. - What it is: When a slime mould finds food, the tubes near it thicken and others shrink; the pattern of tube widths persists and stores where food was found, working as a memory written into the body. - How it works: Microscopy of Physarum networks after local food stimuli, combined with a flow model where a softening agent is carried by cytoplasmic flow. - Paper: https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.2007815118 (PNAS) - Images: https://mediasvc.eurekalert.org/Api/v1/Multimedia/22575943-afdb-431d-8165-5265f158dee5/Rendition/low-res/Content/Public https://mediasvc.eurekalert.org/Api/v1/Multimedia/5c929f33-15de-44df-a0df-92f842bc5852/Rendition/low-res/Content/Public - Project page: https://www.eurekalert.org/news-releases/671382 #### Forest UnderSound — Tosca Terán (2021) - Type: Artwork · Organisms: Fungi, Plants - Idea: A slow-growing fungal culture can run a months-long generative composition. - What it is: Reishi and oyster mycelium and mycorrhizal plant roots grow in a gallery for seven months, their electrical activity generating a live soundscape that changes with the seasons and with visitors nearby. - How it works: Electrodes on mycelium and roots feed purpose-built circuits that detect micro-fluctuations and translate them into control data for analog and digital synthesizers; first shown at SONICA21, The Museum, Kitchener. - Images: https://static.wixstatic.com/media/c666a3_8cfac27bf6d44f51b0399788628c4368~mv2.png https://static.wixstatic.com/media/c666a3_1e731d3e801c40b5a5f1bbc8be65a036~mv2.png - Project page: https://www.toscateran.com/forest-undersound #### Mycelia — Tosca Terán (2021) - Type: Artwork · Organisms: Fungi, Human body - Idea: Let a fungus perform inside a virtual world through its biodata. - What it is: A live performance in VRChat where living mycelium's bio-electrical signals drive the music and a dancer in full-body tracking interprets it inside a crystalline cave world. - How it works: Bio-sonification hardware on mycelium produces MIDI and control voltage for synthesizers, streamed into a VRChat world built with Sara Lisa Vogl and Meta Crew South Africa; shown at A MAZE. Berlin and Venice VR Expanded 2021. - Video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FpKTw7dGUUI - Images: https://static.wixstatic.com/media/c666a3_5de5caab935f44f0aec524ee504ffd22~mv2.jpg - Project page: https://www.toscateran.com/mycelia #### Reactive fungal wearable — Andrew Adamatzky (2021) - Type: Paper · Organisms: Fungi, Human body - Idea: Clothing that feels, because a fungus is woven into it. - What it is: Patches of living oyster mushroom mycelium worn on the body spike electrically when pressed or stretched, turning the fungus into a wearable sensor. - How it works: Mycelium-colonised hemp patches with needle electrodes were stimulated mechanically and their spiking responses recorded. - Paper: https://doi.org/10.1016/j.biosystems.2020.104304 (BioSystems) - Images: https://ars.els-cdn.com/content/image/1-s2.0-S0303264720301805-gr1.jpg - Project page: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0303264720301805 #### Towards fungal sensing skin — Andrew Adamatzky (2021) - Type: Paper · Organisms: Fungi - Idea: A skin that grows, heals and senses because it is alive. - What it is: A thin sheet of living Ganoderma mycelium responds to touch and light with changes in its electrical potential, working as a soft sensing skin that could cover robots or buildings. - How it works: Electrodes on a mycelium-bound hemp sheet record spikes and potential shifts when weights press on it or it is illuminated. - Paper: https://doi.org/10.1186/s40694-021-00113-8 (Fungal Biology and Biotechnology) - Images: https://media.springernature.com/lw685/springer-static/image/art%3A10.1186%2Fs40694-021-00113-8/MediaObjects/40694_2021_113_Fig1_HTML.jpg - Project page: https://fungalbiolbiotech.biomedcentral.com/articles/10.1186/s40694-021-00113-8 #### inside an inside forest — Theresa Schubert (2021) - Type: Artwork · Organisms: Fungi, Plants - Idea: Let sound be both the artwork and the life support of the organism inside it. - What it is: A room lined with tree bark and a hunting seat, where speaker cones double as bioreactors: sine waves keep liquid Reishi cultures moving while forming cymatic patterns. - How it works: Ganoderma (Reishi) mycelium grows in submerged culture inside speaker chassis, stirred and oxygenated by a 4-channel sine-wave composition. - Video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jp-Jqod-Zpw - Images: https://www.theresaschubert.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/02/3_inside-an-inside-forest_speaker_SCHUBERT-Theresa.jpg https://www.theresaschubert.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/08/inside-forest_02_TheresaSchubert_web.jpg - Project page: https://www.theresaschubert.com/works/inside-an-inside-forest/ #### Élève ton blob (Raise your blob) — Audrey Dussutour (2021) - Type: Research prototype · Organisms: Slime mould - Idea: A brainless organism can become a shared experiment between astronauts and schoolchildren. - What it is: A citizen-science experiment by CNES and CNRS: slime moulds flew to the International Space Station with astronaut Thomas Pesquet while thousands of French classrooms ran the same feeding experiments on Earth. - How it works: Dormant, dried Physarum samples were revived in microgravity and in schools; students photographed growth under different food conditions and compared it with the ISS results. - Video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zqR0jWoYbfw - Images: https://lejournal.cnrs.fr/sites/default/files/styles/visuel_principal/public/assets/images/le_blob_myxomycete_h8082_ter.jpg https://i.ytimg.com/vi/zqR0jWoYbfw/maxresdefault.jpg - Project page: https://lejournal.cnrs.fr/articles/le-blob-a-la-conquete-de-lespace #### Ecological memory and relocation decisions in fungal mycelial networks — Yu Fukasawa (2020) - Type: Paper · Organisms: Fungi - Idea: A mycelial network carries a memory of where it has been going. - What it is: A wood-decay fungus that grew from one wood block to a new one 'remembered' the direction it had come from: when moved to fresh soil, it regrew mainly from the side facing its former target. - How it works: Phanerochaete velutina was grown between wood blocks on soil; after transferring the original block, the direction and extent of new growth were measured. - Paper: https://doi.org/10.1038/s41396-019-0536-3 (The ISME Journal) - Images: https://media.springernature.com/full/springer-static/image/art%3A10.1038%2Fs41396-019-0536-3/MediaObjects/41396_2019_536_Fig1_HTML.png - Project page: https://www.nature.com/articles/s41396-019-0536-3 #### Sound for Fungi. Homage to Indeterminacy — Theresa Schubert (2020) - Type: Artwork · Organisms: Fungi - Idea: Ask how fungi perceive sound, then let people play that role. - What it is: An interactive video where a visitor's hand acts as a sound frequency that changes simulated hyphae growth in real time, based on an experiment in which the artist played tones to forest fungi. - How it works: Mycelia collected near Berlin grew in sound-insulated boxes under sine tones and mostly grew faster and denser; the installation simulates this in openFrameworks with Leap Motion hand tracking. - Video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zzrYc4v5bjE - Images: https://www.theresaschubert.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/06/ExperimentaLifeForms_TheresaSchubert_Remi_Sound-for-fungi-1.jpg https://www.theresaschubert.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/05/theresa_schubert_sound_of_fungi_csm_mycelium5470.jpg - Project page: https://www.theresaschubert.com/works/sound-for-fungi/ #### FUNGAR — Fungal Architectures — Andrew Adamatzky (2019) - Type: Speculative design · Organisms: Fungi - Idea: A building whose walls are a living, thinking fungal network. - What it is: An EU research project (2019–2023) that aimed to grow a building from living mycelium composites that would sense light, touch and pollutants and process that information, a 'fungal architecture' that computes. - How it works: Mycelium-bound building blocks with embedded electrodes were tested as sensors and computing elements, alongside functionalisation with nanoparticles. - Video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=awY2WjxjAek - Images: https://usercontent.one/wp/www.fungar.eu/wp-content/uploads/2019/12/cropped-FUNGAR_Prototype_001_03_LargeRotated.jpg https://cordis.europa.eu/docs/article/images/2023-10/446827.jpg - Project page: https://www.fungar.eu/ #### Biocomputer Rhythms — Eduardo Reck Miranda (2018) - Type: Artwork · Organisms: Slime mould - Idea: Grow the electronic components of a music machine instead of manufacturing them. - What it is: A piece for piano with electromagnets and percussion, composed and performed with PhyBox, a stand-alone biocomputer built from slime mould memristors. - How it works: Physarum polycephalum grown in 3D-printed barrels with electrodes acts as biomemristors in PhyBox, which generates rhythmic responses that drive electromagnets vibrating piano strings and percussion. - Images: https://archive.aec.at/asset/2688572/preview/ https://archive.aec.at/asset/2688614/preview/ - Project page: https://archive.aec.at/prix/244863/ #### Composing with Biomemristors: Is Biocomputing the New Technology of Computer Music? — Eduardo Reck Miranda (2018) - Type: Paper · Organisms: Slime mould - Idea: A living memory component can shape how a music system answers a performer. - What it is: PhyBox, a biocomputer of four slime-mould memristors that generates music interactively; the article walks through a composition made with it. - How it works: Music input is encoded as voltage transitions through Physarum biomemristors, and the currents they yield are decoded as musical output. - Paper: https://doi.org/10.1162/comj_a_00469 (Computer Music Journal 2018) - Images: https://biodigitalviz.github.io/images/Biocomputer_Rhythms.png - Project page: https://direct.mit.edu/comj/article/42/3/28/94775/Composing-with-Biomemristors-Is-Biocomputing-the #### Towards fungal computer — Andrew Adamatzky (2018) - Type: Paper · Organisms: Fungi - Idea: A mushroom colony is a wet, self-growing circuit board. - What it is: A proposal for a computer made of a living mycelium network, in which electrical spikes travelling through hyphae are the signals and the network geometry is the circuit. - How it works: Based on recorded action-potential-like spikes in oyster mushroom mycelium, the paper outlines how stimuli at some points could be read as spike patterns at others to implement logic. - Paper: https://doi.org/10.1098/rsfs.2018.0029 (Interface Focus) - Video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d8Jwn9VuD0s - Images: https://cdn.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/blobs/49a6/6227805/0820f15791d1/rsfs20180029-g1.jpg - Project page: https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC6227805/ #### Minakata Mandala — Jenna Sutela (2017) - Type: Artwork · Organisms: Slime mould - Idea: Hand a diagram of the world to a decentralised organism and watch it reorganise it. - What it is: Slime mould grows through a labyrinth shaped after the mandala drawn by the naturalist Kumagusu Minakata, finding its own route between oat flakes. - How it works: Physarum polycephalum on agar navigates a mandala-shaped maze baited with oat flakes; part of a series of organisational labyrinths. - Images: https://jennasutela.com/wp-content/uploads/Jenna-Sutela_Minakata-Mandala-2017_photo-Dario-Lasagni.jpg - Project page: https://jennasutela.com/minakata-mandala/ #### Resilient Topographies #1: the peninsula of Paljassaare — Heather Barnett (2017) - Type: Artwork · Organisms: Slime mould, Ecosystems - Idea: Let a living organism read a city site and propose its own network. - What it is: A film in which slime mould grows across a model of the Paljassaare peninsula in Tallinn, mapping routes and resources on a contested post-industrial landscape. - How it works: Physarum polycephalum was grown on an agar map of the peninsula with food sources at chosen locations and filmed in time-lapse, for the Tallinn Architecture Biennale 2017. - Video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qRzRXUTkgP0 - Images: https://heatherbarnett.co.uk/wp-content/uploads/2015/07/Resilient-Topographies-Paljassaare-%C2%A9-Heather-Barnett-2-1030x579.jpg https://heatherbarnett.co.uk/wp-content/uploads/2015/07/Resilient_Topographies_CityMapping%C2%A9-Heather-Barnett01-1030x586.jpg - Project page: https://heatherbarnett.co.uk/work/the-physarum-experiments/ #### Swarm | Cell | City — Heather Barnett (2017) - Type: Artwork · Organisms: Slime mould, Human body - Idea: Compare how people and a slime mould explore the same city, and let each trace inform the other. - What it is: A two-day workshop in Berlin where participants walked the city with GPS trackers following slime mould rules, while real slime mould grew on maps of the same area. - How it works: Physarum polycephalum cultures on city maps were compared with participants' GPS walking traces; made with the artist duo plan b (Sophia New and Daniel Belasco Rogers) at Art Laboratory Berlin. - Video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BZTpxQmRsCI - Project page: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BZTpxQmRsCI #### [Slime Mould] Living Screens — IAAC (2017) - Type: Research prototype · Organisms: Slime mould - Idea: A facade could display information by growing it. - What it is: A student architecture project that grows slime mould inside panels and steers its growth with food, salt and light so that its yellow network forms a changing screen. - How it works: Physarum polycephalum is cultured under controlled moisture and light; oat food sources attract it and salt or light repel it to draw patterns. - Images: https://www.iaacblog.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/06/final-presentation_0646.jpg https://www.iaacblog.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/04/hud_circles_page_01.jpg - Project page: https://www.iaacblog.com/projects/slime-mould-living-screens-2/ #### Habituation in non-neural organisms: evidence from slime moulds — Audrey Dussutour (2016) - Type: Paper · Organisms: Slime mould - Idea: Learning does not need a nervous system. - What it is: Slime moulds that had to cross a bridge coated with bitter but harmless quinine or caffeine to reach food hesitated less each day, and recovered their aversion after a pause: a simple form of learning without neurons. - How it works: Physarum polycephalum was trained over six days on agar bridges containing repellents; crossing time was compared with naive controls. - Paper: https://doi.org/10.1098/rspb.2016.0446 (Proceedings of the Royal Society B) - Video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dYQG6ac38UA - Images: https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/6/6a/Habituation_P._polycephalum.png https://cdn.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/blobs/bccc/4855389/d7b108bb6413/rspb20160446-g1.jpg - Project page: https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC4855389/ #### Physarum-Based Memristors for Computer Music — Eduardo Reck Miranda (2016) - Type: Paper · Organisms: Slime mould - Idea: A living component whose resistance remembers can be a musical partner. - What it is: Grown slime-mould memristors used to answer musical material: the organism's changing resistance turns seed melodies into responses played in a composition for live performance. - How it works: Physarum polycephalum grown between electrodes behaves as a memristor; note sequences encoded as voltages pass through it and the measured currents are decoded back into notes. - Paper: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-26662-6_34 (Advances in Unconventional Computing (Springer) 2016) - Video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5y36KcWmBtw - Images: https://media.springernature.com/lw685/springer-static/image/chp%3A10.1007%2F978-3-319-26662-6_34/MediaObjects/385644_1_En_34_Fig2_HTML.gif - Project page: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-26662-6_34 #### Biocomputer Music — Eduardo Reck Miranda (2015) - Type: Artwork · Organisms: Slime mould - Idea: Improvise with a living organism as a musical partner. - What it is: A piano duet between composer Eduardo Miranda and a biocomputer: notes he plays are sent through slime-mould memristors, and the altered currents come back as the biocomputer's reply played on the same piano. - How it works: Physarum polycephalum grown between electrodes acts as a memristor; MIDI notes are converted to voltages, and the resulting current is mapped back to notes played by electromagnets on the piano. - Paper: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-46282-0_26 (Music, Mind, and Embodiment (CMMR 2015), LNCS) - Video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yoCwysg_YpI - Images: https://i.ytimg.com/vi/yoCwysg_YpI/hqdefault.jpg - Project page: https://link.springer.com/chapter/10.1007/978-3-319-46282-0_26 #### Growing Geometries – tattooing mushrooms — Theresa Schubert (2015) - Type: Artwork · Organisms: Fungi - Idea: Use a growing organism as a slow image processor that rewrites a human drawing. - What it is: The artist tattoos circles, squares and triangles into living mushrooms and records over a growth cycle how the fungus deforms the lines into new shapes. - How it works: Geometric lines are tattooed into fungal fruiting bodies; a Raspberry Pi camera shoots time-lapse images that become an animation of the changing tattoos. - Images: https://www.theresaschubert.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/07/2019-GRowingGEometries_SCHUBERT-author-Rytis-Seskaitis_MO-1.jpg https://www.theresaschubert.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/05/theresa_schubert_growing_geometries_a68a568939.jpg - Project page: https://www.theresaschubert.com/works/growing-geometries-tattooing-mushrooms/ #### Slime Mould Memristors — Ella Gale, Andrew Adamatzky (2015) - Type: Paper · Organisms: Slime mould - Idea: A living cell can be a circuit element with memory. - What it is: Measurements show that living Physarum polycephalum has a pinched current–voltage loop, the signature of a memristor, so its resistance depends on the current that has passed through it. - How it works: Current–voltage sweeps were applied across slime-mould tubes between electrodes and the hysteresis loops analysed. - Paper: https://doi.org/10.1007/s12668-014-0156-3 (BioNanoScience) - Images: https://media.springernature.com/full/springer-static/image/art%3A10.1007%2Fs12668-014-0156-3/MediaObjects/12668_2014_156_Fig1_HTML.gif - Project page: https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s12668-014-0156-3 #### Slime mould logic gates based on frequency changes of electrical potential oscillation — Andrew Adamatzky (2014) - Type: Paper · Organisms: Slime mould - Idea: A single cell's rhythm can encode Boolean values. - What it is: Logic gates built from protoplasmic tubes of the slime mould Physarum polycephalum, where inputs are light or food and outputs are shifts in the tube's electrical oscillation frequency. - How it works: Electrodes record the tubes' electrical potential oscillation; stimuli change its frequency, and thresholds on that change are read as logical 0/1, cascaded with software. - Paper: https://doi.org/10.1016/j.biosystems.2014.08.001 (BioSystems 2014) - Images: https://biodigitalviz.github.io/images/logic-gate.jpg - Project page: https://doi.org/10.1016/j.biosystems.2014.08.001 #### Being Slime Mould — Heather Barnett (2013) - Type: Artwork · Organisms: Slime mould, Human body - Idea: Borrow the rules of a single-celled organism to let people feel how collective decisions emerge. - What it is: A participatory game in which groups of people follow a few rules taken from slime mould behaviour and try to find food and move as one body without a leader. - How it works: Participants enact Physarum behaviours such as oscillation, pulsing contact and retreat from repellents, informed by the artist's lab work with the organism; devised with Daniel Grushkin. - Images: https://heatherbarnett.co.uk/wp-content/uploads/2015/07/Being-Slime-Mould-Enactment-2013-%C2%A9-film-still-by-Tim-Grabham-2-1030x579.jpg - Project page: https://heatherbarnett.co.uk/work/being-slime-mould/ #### Mycophone_unison — Saša Spačal (2013) - Type: Artwork · Organisms: Fungi, Bacteria & microbes, Human body - Idea: Hear a human body as many organisms acting together for a moment. - What it is: A sound map in which a visitor presses a fingerprint to send a signal through cultures of the three authors' microbiomes, which modulate it into a single sound of unison. - How it works: Signals are routed through living cultures of fungi and microbes taken from the authors' bodies, whose electrical properties likely alter the sound; made with Mirjan Švagelj and Anil Podgornik, produced by KIBLA. - Video: https://vimeo.com/205934235 - Images: https://www.agapea.si/wp-content/uploads/2015/05/mycophone_unison_1_0.jpg https://www.agapea.si/wp-content/uploads/2015/05/Mycophone_unison_hires_3.jpg - Project page: https://www.agapea.si/en/projects/mycophone_unison #### bodymetries — Theresa Schubert (2013) - Type: Artwork · Organisms: Slime mould, Human body - Idea: Map the human body with the spatial logic of a slime mould. - What it is: An interactive table where visitors lay their arms down, a camera scans the skin, and a slime mould simulation grows networks between their moles and marks. - How it works: Lab experiments with living Physarum polycephalum informed a multi-user Processing simulation of its network growth, projected onto visitors' arms via camera tracking and OSC. - Images: https://www.theresaschubert.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/07/bodymetries_installation-view_2014_KW-Berlin.jpg https://www.theresaschubert.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/07/bodymetries-installation_sliimemould-scaled.jpg - Project page: https://www.theresaschubert.com/works/bodymetries/ #### Mycophone_emergence — Saša Spačal (2012) - Type: Artwork · Organisms: Fungi, Human body - Idea: Make a living network part of a sound instrument that needs care to keep playing. - What it is: A biohacked music box: winding it sends a signal through a mycelium culture that changes the sound, and petting the hairy mycelium makes its voice change as if it purrs. - How it works: A signal from the wound music box passes through a growing mycelium whose conductivity, touch and proximity modulate the sound; made with Mirjan Švagelj and Anil Podgornik. - Images: https://www.agapea.si/wp-content/uploads/2015/05/20120915_interactivospresentationofprototypes_007_0.jpg https://www.agapea.si/wp-content/uploads/2015/05/20120915_interactivospresentationofprototypes_009_0.jpg - Project page: https://www.agapea.si/en/projects/mycophone_emergence #### Characteristics of pattern formation and evolution in approximations of Physarum transport networks — Jeff Jones (2010) - Type: Paper · Organisms: Slime mould - Idea: A few local rules for sensing and moving are enough to grow organic networks. - What it is: A simulation in which thousands of simple agents deposit and follow a chemical trail reproduces the network patterns of slime mould; the model later spread widely as a generative-art technique. - How it works: Particles with forward-facing sensors turn toward higher trail concentration and deposit trail as they move; the trail map diffuses and decays each step. - Paper: https://doi.org/10.1162/artl.2010.16.2.16202 (Artificial Life) - Images: https://media.springernature.com/full/springer-static/cover-hires/book/978-3-319-16823-4 - Project page: https://direct.mit.edu/artl/article/16/2/127/2650 #### Physarum Machines: Computers from Slime Mould — Andrew Adamatzky (2010) - Type: Book & essay · Organisms: Slime mould - Idea: A single cell spreading over oat flakes can be read as a general-purpose, if slow, computer. - What it is: A book that collects experiments in which the slime mould Physarum polycephalum computes: it builds spanning trees and Voronoi diagrams, routes around obstacles, and acts as logic gates and robot controllers. - How it works: Data are encoded as positions of nutrients and repellents; the plasmodium's growing and retracting protoplasmic tubes form the output pattern. - Paper: https://doi.org/10.1142/7968 (World Scientific Series on Nonlinear Science) - Video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=75k8sqh5tfQ - Images: https://i.ytimg.com/vi/75k8sqh5tfQ/hqdefault.jpg https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/5/58/Blob_%28Physarum_polycephalum%29.jpg - Project page: https://doi.org/10.1142/7968 #### Road planning with slime mould: if Physarum built motorways — Andrew Adamatzky, Jeff Jones (2010) - Type: Paper · Organisms: Slime mould - Idea: Let an organism draft infrastructure, then compare its plan with ours. - What it is: Oat flakes placed on a map of the UK at the positions of major cities were connected by the slime mould, whose tube network was compared with the real motorway system; later studies repeated this for many countries. - How it works: Physarum plasmodium is inoculated at London on an agar map with oat flakes at urban areas; the resulting protoplasmic network is compared with motorway graphs. - Paper: https://doi.org/10.1142/S0218127410027568 (International Journal of Bifurcation and Chaos) - Video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_DB-RAgAlVI - Images: https://i.guim.co.uk/img/static/sys-images/Guardian/Pix/pictures/2014/2/17/1392652837727/A-map-of-the-M6-motorway--011.jpg?width=445&dpr=1&s=none&crop=none https://i.ytimg.com/vi/_DB-RAgAlVI/hqdefault.jpg - Project page: https://www.theguardian.com/cities/2014/feb/18/slime-mould-rail-road-transport-routes #### Rules for biologically inspired adaptive network design (slime mould Tokyo rail) — Toshiyuki Nakagaki, Atsushi Tero (2010) - Type: Paper · Organisms: Slime mould - Idea: Evolution has already solved network design problems that engineers still work on. - What it is: Oat flakes placed like the cities around Tokyo were linked by the slime mould into a network with efficiency, cost and fault tolerance similar to the real rail system; the authors derived a mathematical model from it. - How it works: Physarum was grown on a template of the Kanto region with light used to mimic mountains and sea; tube thickening by flow was captured in a simple adaptive-network model. - Paper: https://doi.org/10.1126/science.1177894 (Science) - Video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GwKuFREOgmo - Images: https://media.wired.com/photos/59346eb5d80dd005b42b4404/191:100/w_1280,c_limit/slime_mold_21.jpg - Project page: https://www.wired.com/2010/01/slime-mold-grows-network-just-like-tokyo-rail-system/ #### The Physarum Experiments — Heather Barnett (2009) - Type: Artwork · Organisms: Slime mould - Idea: Set up simple spatial problems and let a brainless organism draw its own solution over time. - What it is: An ongoing series of numbered time-lapse studies in which slime mould solves mazes, fuses with other colonies, starves and forages on designed food landscapes. - How it works: Physarum polycephalum is cultured on agar with oat flakes as attractants and light or salt as repellents, and filmed with time-lapse photography and microscopy. - Video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b--9igdjVj0 - Images: https://heatherbarnett.co.uk/wp-content/uploads/2015/07/The-PhysarumExperimentsStudy019TheMaze_film-still_%C2%A9HeatherBarnett_1-1030x579.jpg https://heatherbarnett.co.uk/wp-content/uploads/2015/07/fireworks-2-1030x687.jpg - Project page: https://heatherbarnett.co.uk/work/the-physarum-experiments/ #### Amoebae anticipate periodic events — Toshiyuki Nakagaki (2008) - Type: Paper · Organisms: Slime mould - Idea: Even a single cell can keep time and expect the future. - What it is: After being exposed to cold, dry pulses at regular intervals, a slime mould slowed down at the time the next pulse would have come, even when it did not come. - How it works: Migrating Physarum was subjected to periodic drops in temperature and humidity; its locomotion speed was tracked and modelled with coupled oscillators. - Paper: https://doi.org/10.1103/PhysRevLett.100.018101 (Physical Review Letters) - Images: https://journals.aps.org/prl/article/10.1103/PhysRevLett.100.018101/figures/1/medium https://journals.aps.org/prl/article/10.1103/PhysRevLett.100.018101/figures/2/medium - Project page: https://journals.aps.org/prl/abstract/10.1103/PhysRevLett.100.018101 #### Robot control with biological cells — Soichiro Tsuda (2007) - Type: Paper · Organisms: Slime mould - Idea: Use the rhythm of a living cell as a robot's nervous system. - What it is: A six-legged robot was controlled by a living slime mould grown on a star-shaped circuit; light shone on the cell by the robot's sensors changed its oscillations, which drove the legs. In 2010 Tsuda also drove a wheeled robot the same way. - How it works: Physarum on a patterned electrode reacts to light stimuli; its local thickness oscillations are measured and mapped to motor commands for a hexapod robot. - Paper: https://doi.org/10.1016/j.biosystems.2006.09.016 (BioSystems) - Video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EbHDSabIN-w - Images: https://ars.els-cdn.com/content/image/1-s2.0-S0303264706001687-gr3.jpg https://ars.els-cdn.com/content/image/1-s2.0-S0303264706001687-gr4.jpg - Project page: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0303264706001687 #### Maze-solving by an amoeboid organism — Toshiyuki Nakagaki (2000) - Type: Paper · Organisms: Slime mould - Idea: Intelligence can be a property of growth and shrinkage, not of a brain. - What it is: A slime mould filling a maze, given food at the entrance and exit, withdrew from dead ends and kept a single tube along the shortest route. - How it works: Pieces of Physarum polycephalum plasmodium were placed in an agar maze; oat flakes at two exits caused tubes on longer paths to disappear. - Paper: https://doi.org/10.1038/35035159 (Nature) - Video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p4C-7ina7-o - Images: https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/d/d1/Slime_mold_solves_maze.png https://media.springernature.com/full/springer-static/image/art%3A10.1038%2F35035159/MediaObjects/41586_2000_Article_BF35035159_Fig1_HTML.jpg - Project page: https://www.nature.com/articles/35035159 ### Microbial Sensors & Wearables Engineered or natural microbes as sensors, displays and on-body companions. #### Micro Orchestrism: Musical co-creation of human and sake yeast to interrogate creative hierarchy — Harpreet Sareen (2026) - Type: Artwork · Organisms: Fungi - Idea: Treat microbes as creative collaborators rather than compliant materials. - What it is: An audiovisual installation in which fermenting sake yeast act as co-composers, grounded in interviews with four Japanese sake brewers who describe microbes as active contributors to taste. - How it works: Fermentation activity of sake yeast is likely sensed and mapped to sound and image, set against brewers' accounts of microbial agency. First author Kaori Ogawa. - Paper: https://doi.org/10.1145/3731459.3779137 (TEI 2026) - Images: https://figures.semanticscholar.org/e52f1c0b2013baa30cc2a2e9ca0b6bc4e22e297f/2-Figure2-1.png https://figures.semanticscholar.org/e52f1c0b2013baa30cc2a2e9ca0b6bc4e22e297f/3-Figure3-1.png #### SoilSense: Appropriating Soil-based Microbial Fuel Cells to Create Tangible Interfaces — Tian Min (2025) - Type: Research prototype · Organisms: Bacteria & microbes, Ecosystems - Idea: Living soil can be an interface, not only a power source. - What it is: SoilSense uses soil microbial fuel cells as touch interfaces: pressing on the cathode changes the voltage produced by soil microbes, so a patch of soil can act as a button or controller. - How it works: Characterises voltage changes under pressure across electrode layouts and moisture levels, then builds modular prototypes. - Paper: https://doi.org/10.1145/3746059.3747675 (UIST 2025) - Video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4PeMhZEtf3Y - Project page: https://doi.org/10.1145/3746059.3747675 #### Yenikapı (Night Sways, but Underground Listens) — Orkan Telhan (2025) - Type: Artwork · Organisms: Bacteria & microbes, Ecosystems - Idea: Read the city's ground as a living archive by listening to its microbes' electricity. - What it is: A sculpture filled with Istanbul soil logs the electrical activity of its bacteria for two weeks and turns it into a procedural animation of subterranean microbial rhythms. - How it works: Soil bacteria in the sculpture generate small currents (a soil microbial fuel cell, likely), read by custom electronics that drive screen-printed electroluminescent panels and the animation; shown in REBUILD at Contemporary Istanbul. - Images: https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5258ba2be4b0804fa254bd19/1766505080579-9WBVJ1W7Z5PTQ4JDYJQU/yenikapi2.jpg - Project page: https://www.orkantelhan.com/art #### Microbial Prophetesses — Carla Alcalà Badias (2024) - Type: Artwork · Organisms: Bacteria & microbes, Ecosystems - Idea: Bacteria that feed on pollutants can be heard as environmental oracles. - What it is: Electroactive bacteria from marine sediments are staged as modern Sibyls whose electrical signals 'sing' warnings about pollution. BAD Award 2024 winner, with Laura Villanueva (NIOZ). - How it works: Likely sediment microbial fuel cells that harvest electrons from electroactive bacteria, with the current translated into sound. - Video: https://vimeo.com/1039596411 - Images: https://www.badaward.nl/imager/assets/site/8190/Microbial-Prophetesses-Still-Video-Wouter-3_a5a12f426a1ab11909951db4fe37df8f.jpg https://www.badaward.nl/imager/assets/site/8191/Microbial-Prophetesses-Still-Video-Wouter-1_a5a12f426a1ab11909951db4fe37df8f.jpg - Project page: https://www.badaward.nl/artists-scientists/carla-alcal%C3%A0-badias-laura-villanueva #### Aquacycl BioElectrochemical Treatment — Aquacycl (2023) - Type: Product & platform · Organisms: Bacteria & microbes - Idea: Treatment plants could be power sources run by microbes. - What it is: Wastewater treatment that uses naturally occurring bacteria in microbial fuel cells to break down organic pollutants while generating a little electricity. - How it works: Electroactive bacteria oxidise organics at anodes, transferring electrons through an external circuit. - Video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZekQeI-AJQs - Images: https://earthshotprize.org/wp-content/uploads/2023/09/JN0044-Sized-Assets-AQUACYCLPAGE-Carousel-01-16_9.jpg - Project page: https://www.aquacycl.com/ #### Cyano-chromic Interface: Aligning Human-Microbe Temporalities Towards Noticing and Attending to Living Artefacts — Jiwei Zhou, Elvin Karana, Raphael Kim (2023) - Type: Paper · Organisms: Bacteria & microbes - Idea: Close the time gap between microbes and people with a display that speaks at human speed. - What it is: Cyanobacteria are coupled to an electrochromic display so that their photosynthetic activity shows up as a colour change people can notice quickly, instead of the days it takes to see microbes change. - How it works: The photosynthetic activity of Synechocystis sp. PCC6803 is coupled to an electrochromic material (likely through the small current it generates), forming a monochrome living display. - Paper: https://doi.org/10.1145/3563657.3596132 (DIS 2023) - Video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DF7c-9PynpQ #### FlavoMetrics: Towards a Digital Tool to Understand and Tune Living Aesthetics of Flavobacteria — Elvin Karana (2023) - Type: Paper · Organisms: Bacteria & microbes - Idea: Prototype with microbes in software first, to match their slow time with design time. - What it is: An open-source simulation tool in which designers 'inoculate' virtual Flavobacteria and tune stimuli to preview how their living colour will develop, before growing them in a lab. First author Clarice Risseeuw. - How it works: Computer-graphics rendering of iridescent colonies driven by a model of growth under different stimuli; evaluated with six biodesigners. - Paper: https://doi.org/10.1145/3563657.3596085 (DIS 2023) - Video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oMSLKfJZpuI #### Soil-Powered Computing: The Engineer's Guide to Practical Soil Microbial Fuel Cell Design — Josiah Hester (2023) - Type: Paper · Organisms: Bacteria & microbes, Ecosystems - Idea: Soil microbes can replace batteries for long-lived environmental sensors. - What it is: A soil microbial fuel cell redesigned for real use powers underground sensors and backscatter wireless communication from electricity made by bacteria in dirt, in wet and dry soil. - How it works: Vertical cell geometry keeps the anode in moist soil and the cathode in air; microbes oxidise organic matter and the energy is harvested for low-power electronics. First author Bill Yen, with Nivedita Arora. - Paper: https://doi.org/10.1145/3631410 (IMWUT 2023) - Video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DSuPx2K-9Ic - Images: https://news.northwestern.edu/assets/Stories/2024/01/dirt1940__FocusFillMaxWyIwLjAwIiwiMC4wMCIsMTIwMCw2MzBd.jpg - Project page: https://news.northwestern.edu/stories/2024/01/dirt-powered-fuel-cell-runs-forever/ #### Surfacing Livingness in Microbial Displays: A Design Taxonomy for HCI — Raphael Kim, Elvin Karana (2023) - Type: Paper · Organisms: Bacteria & microbes - Idea: A microbial display must first make its livingness visible; here are six ways to do it. - What it is: A taxonomy, built from a review of microbial artefacts and a Flavobacteria case study, of six ways to make microbes' 'livingness' noticeable: canvassing, marking, magnifying, translating, nudging and molecular programming. - How it works: Systematic review of HCI and art artefacts with microorganisms, plus hands-on studies with iridescent Flavobacteria. - Paper: https://doi.org/10.1145/3544548.3581417 (CHI 2023) - Video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=x_ZvWRkyFuE #### The Soothing Cup — Lucrezia Alessandroni (2023) - Type: Research prototype · Organisms: Bacteria & microbes, Human body, Algae - Idea: Intimate products can be designed as relationships with microbes. - What it is: A menstrual cup coated with a seaweed-based hydrogel plus an incubator in which users grow anti-inflammatory bacteria on their own cup, making a care ritual with microbes. - How it works: Probiotic bacteria are cultured on an alginate-type hydrogel layer before use. - Images: https://content.gp-award.com/assets/media/award23/1-the-soothing-cup_blogLarge.jpg - Project page: https://www.gp-award.com/en/projects/the-soothing-cup #### Utter — Paul Vanouse (2023) - Type: Artwork · Organisms: Bacteria & microbes - Idea: Separate breath from the body to show that every utterance is also a microbial exchange. - What it is: A glass apparatus incubates bacteria from the human mouth and releases moist, scented 'breath' through vents, simulating human exhalation without humans. - How it works: Oral bacterial species are cultured in custom scientific glassware; air passes through liquid valve traps and 0.1-micron filters so odours escape but microbes do not; in progress since the COVID pandemic, glassware with Tracy Drier. - Images: https://www.paulvanouse.com/Utter-RDD-med.jpg https://www.paulvanouse.com/utter-manifold-med.jpg - Project page: https://www.paulvanouse.com/utter-new.html #### Vermi-Cell — Jenna Sutela (2023) - Type: Artwork · Organisms: Animals, Bacteria & microbes - Idea: Let a compost ecosystem be the battery and the voice of an artwork. - What it is: A living sculpture of soil, metals, worms and food waste whose electricity powers a saxophone voice and pulsing lights. - How it works: Metal electrodes in active vermicompost form an earth battery, likely a soil microbial fuel cell, whose output drives sound and LEDs. - Images: https://jennasutela.com/wp-content/uploads/Jenna-Sutela_Vermi-Cell-2023_photo-Jonas-Wendelin-Fragile_2_web.jpg https://jennasutela.com/wp-content/uploads/Jenna-Sutela_Vermi-Cell_Jonas-Wendelin.jpg - Project page: https://jennasutela.com/vermi-cell-2/ #### Vermi-Sibyl — Jenna Sutela (2023) - Type: Artwork · Organisms: Animals, Bacteria & microbes - Idea: Treat a compost heap as a speaking, energy-giving oracle. - What it is: A compost oracle on the roof of the Swiss Institute in New York, powered by an earth battery and summoned in a live performance with a saxophonist and voice actors. - How it works: Worms and soil microbes in a compost bin generate current through an earth battery, likely a soil microbial fuel cell, that powers the oracle's voice; performed as Midden (LIVE) for Performa Biennial. - Images: https://jennasutela.com/wp-content/uploads/Vermi-Sibyl-on-the-roof-of-SI_Alison-Coplan_web.jpg https://jennasutela.com/wp-content/uploads/Midden-LIVE-2023_photo-Walter-Wlodarczyk.jpg - Project page: https://jennasutela.com/vermi-sibyl/ #### Archaean Memory Farm — Where Dogs Run (2022) - Type: Artwork · Organisms: Bacteria & microbes - Idea: Treat ancient bacteria as a slow, geological storage medium. - What it is: A robotic farm that cultivates magnetotactic bacteria and uses magnetic fields to write data into them, aiming at 'geological clots of information' made by humans and bacteria together. - How it works: A roboticised setup keeps magnetotactic bacteria alive and applies patterned magnetic fields so that their magnetite accumulates as a physical record. - Paper: https://doi.org/10.1162/leon_a_02278 (Leonardo 2022) - Video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=R0xcev8793U - Images: https://starts.eu/wp-content/uploads/Where-Dogs-Run_Archean-Memory-Farm_cover_Credit-WDR.jpg - Project page: https://doi.org/10.1162/leon_a_02278 #### Bacterial Networked Electronic Interface — iGEM Paris Bettencourt (2022) - Type: Research prototype · Organisms: Bacteria & microbes, DNA & molecules - Idea: Toward an 'Internet of Living Things' with bacteria as networked processors. - What it is: A two-way electrical interface between engineered bacteria and computers: information from the internet is sent as an electrical signal into a bacterial population, processed by genetic circuits and read back electronically. - How it works: An electro-genetic toolkit of 19 electro-responsive promoters, a processor plasmid and an output plasmid, plus hardware to stimulate and monitor gene expression. - Images: https://biodigitalviz.github.io/images/bacteria_interface.png https://static.igem.wiki/teams/4216/wiki/wiki/general-scheme.png - Project page: https://2022.igem.wiki/paris-bettencourt/ #### EuglPollock: Rethinking Interspecies Collaboration through Art Making — Kyungwon Lee, Seung Ah Lee (2022) - Type: Paper · Organisms: Cells & tissue - Idea: Co-author a painting with a microorganism. - What it is: A platform for making artworks with Euglena: users guide the cells with light under a microscope, and the cells' swimming traces become unique, non-repeatable paintings. - How it works: Light-projection microscopy steers phototactic Euglena gracilis; their tracked trajectories are rendered as brush strokes in the manner of action painting. - Paper: https://doi.org/10.1145/3503161.3548151 (ACM Multimedia 2022) - Images: https://figures.semanticscholar.org/cc8eef4cb3cbb96ae10ef153ff429bc30ba5a929/2-Figure2-1.png - Project page: https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3503161.3548151 #### Flavorium: An Exploration of Flavobacteria's Living Aesthetics for Living Color Interfaces — Elvin Karana, Raphael Kim (2022) - Type: Paper · Organisms: Bacteria & microbes - Idea: Bacteria can be a colour display whose colours are alive and change over weeks. - What it is: A bio-digital habitat that keeps iridescent Flavobacteria alive for a month while a capture tool records how their colour, form and texture change, giving a design space for living colour interfaces. - How it works: Structural-colour Flavobacteria colonies grown on agar under controlled conditions; imaging quantifies iridescence over time. First author Eduard Georges Groutars. - Paper: https://doi.org/10.1145/3491102.3517713 (CHI 2022) - Video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Bgheg_J5qws #### Hylē — Theresa Schubert (2022) - Type: Artwork · Organisms: Algae, Human body - Idea: Close a loop of breathing between a human, algae and a machine. - What it is: A bio-cybernetic installation in which visitors' breath feeds CO2 to an algae sculpture, whose sensor signals alter projected point clouds, while the projection light in turn feeds the algae. - How it works: Custom bioreactors with CO2 and TDS sensors read by Raspberry Pis stream algae data to two 4K point-cloud projections and sound; made with Ivan Taranin. - Video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=m716fyZAGdc - Images: https://www.theresaschubert.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/07/Hyle-Dokumentation-04_web.jpg https://www.theresaschubert.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/07/Hyle-Dokumentation-10_web.jpg - Project page: https://www.theresaschubert.com/works/hyle/ #### Microbial biofilms for electricity generation from water evaporation and power to wearables — Jun Yao (2022) - Type: Paper · Organisms: Bacteria & microbes, Human body - Idea: Microbial material can harvest energy from evaporation without being fed. - What it is: A thin sheet of bacterial biofilm that continuously generates electricity as water evaporates from it, worn as a skin patch that powers wearables from sweat and moisture. - How it works: A ~40 µm engineered biofilm (likely Geobacter sulfurreducens) sits between mesh electrodes; water evaporation through it drives an ionic current. - Paper: https://doi.org/10.1038/s41467-022-32105-6 (Nature Communications 2022) - Images: https://media.springernature.com/full/springer-static/image/art%3A10.1038%2Fs41467-022-32105-6/MediaObjects/41467_2022_32105_Fig1_HTML.png - Project page: https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-022-32105-6 #### Mud Collecting Journey — Daniëlle Ooms, Bahareh Barati, Teresa van Dongen (2022) - Type: Research prototype · Organisms: Bacteria & microbes, Ecosystems - Idea: Slow, unpredictable microbes challenge the designer's sense of control and invite care. - What it is: A toolkit for collecting mud from the wild to set up Electric Life, Teresa van Dongen's bacteria-powered light installation at the Centre Pompidou, and a reflection on how the process shifted the designers from concern to care. - How it works: Mud from natural sites is packed into microbial fuel cells whose electroactive bacteria light LEDs; the toolkit asks the user to touch and observe the mud. - Paper: https://doi.org/10.1145/3546155.3547285 (NordiCHI 2022) - Images: https://static.wixstatic.com/media/f6397f_dda67aa2802e414299641a89c94c17e3~mv2.jpeg https://static.wixstatic.com/media/f6397f_16b7924c9b184dd296e86f610efa831e~mv2.jpeg https://payload.cargocollective.com/1/16/540742/13689755/Electric-Life-2.0.01_1250.jpg - Project page: https://doi.org/10.1145/3546155.3547285 #### Power Mutualism — Keer Hu, Tongji University College of Design and Innovation Biodesign Challenge team (2022) - Type: Research prototype · Organisms: Algae, Bacteria & microbes, Human body - Idea: Wearables can run on a mutualistic exchange with living microbes. - What it is: A wearable that houses cyanobacteria: the body supplies moisture from sweat and breath, and the microbes' photosynthesis generates a small electrical current in return. - How it works: A biophotovoltaic cell with cyanobacteria collects moisture from the wearer and converts light into electricity. - Images: https://www.jamesdysonaward.org/Document/77da4a75-83d5-4b34-a4d1-5dee635791a7/dyson%e5%9b%be%e7%89%87001.jpeg https://www.jamesdysonaward.org/Document/b5f50ab8-66f6-411d-a2a5-32b32df2489f/dyson%e5%9b%be%e7%89%87002.jpeg - Project page: https://www.jamesdysonaward.org/en-GB/2021/project/power-mutualism/ #### Microbe-HCI: Introduction and Directions for Growth — Raphael Kim, Pat Pataranutaporn, Ingmar Riedel-Kruse, Mirela Alistar (2021) - Type: Paper · Organisms: Bacteria & microbes - Idea: Microbe-HCI is a community: bring biologists, artists and interaction designers into one room. - What it is: The CHI special interest group that first gathered researchers who put microorganisms into HCI, mapping people, themes and future directions of the field. - How it works: Structured SIG discussion at CHI 2021 organised by Kim, Pataranutaporn, Forman, Lee, Riedel-Kruse, Alistar, Lazaro Vasquez and Vega. - Paper: https://doi.org/10.1145/3411763.3450408 (CHI 2021 Extended Abstracts) #### ooze — Theresa Schubert (2021) - Type: Artwork · Organisms: Algae, Human body - Idea: Use a living culture as an analogue random generator that brings real unpredictability into a digital work. - What it is: A double 4K projection of laser-scanned forests and server farms whose motion and sound are driven by sensor data from living microalgae bioreactors that visitors can light with their phones. - How it works: Sensors monitor growth and metabolism of microalgae in custom bioreactors and stream parameters to point-cloud visuals and sound; made with Ivan Taranin and TU Berlin Bioprocess Engineering. - Video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=i5gGQq_xb8M - Images: https://www.theresaschubert.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/11/ooze_algae_still-web.jpg https://www.theresaschubert.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/01/2021_NewTretyakovGallery_Schubert_IMG7118_v2_WEB2.jpg - Project page: https://www.theresaschubert.com/works/ooze/ #### ALICE — Rachel Armstrong, Julie Freeman, Ioannis Ieropoulos (2020) - Type: Artwork · Organisms: Bacteria & microbes - Idea: Microbes can be both the power source and the storyteller of an interface. - What it is: An interactive artwork powered by a bank of microbial fuel cells that also displays their data as animated creatures ('mobes') and sound, treating microbial electrons as data. - How it works: Fifteen MFCs power a small computer, sensors and lights; sensor data feed an artificial-life algorithm based on bacterial foraging that animates the mobes. - Video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ye3N_X4dOKA - Images: https://alice-interface.eu/assets/img/alice_479A9372crop.jpg https://alice-interface.eu/assets/img/white_mfc_detail-crop.png - Project page: https://alice-interface.eu/ #### Living Bits: Opportunities and Challenges for Integrating Living Microorganisms in Human-Computer Interaction — Pat Pataranutaporn (2020) - Type: Paper · Organisms: Bacteria & microbes, Human body - Idea: Treat the trillions of microbes around us as living 'bits' for interaction design. - What it is: A framework paper, modelled on Tangible Bits, that maps how microbes on, in and around the body could become parts of wearables, games, instruments and robots, and gives principles for brainstorming microbial interfaces. Best Paper at Augmented Humans 2020. - How it works: Literature and project survey characterizing human–microbe interactions by context and scale, plus design cards for workshops. - Paper: https://doi.org/10.1145/3384657.3384783 (Augmented Humans 2020) - Video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lIp1kZ_JiBM - Images: https://dam-prod.media.mit.edu/thumb/2020/03/18/overview.png.1400x1400.png - Project page: https://www.media.mit.edu/projects/living-bits/overview/ #### Living Water – POND — Nova Innova (2020) - Type: Artwork · Organisms: Bacteria & microbes, Ecosystems - Idea: Give water a voice powered by the life in it. - What it is: A floating network of lights in city water powered by the water's own microbes; the lights' colours show water quality measured by sensors running on that microbial power. - How it works: Microbial fuel cells capture electrons released as bacteria break down organic matter; the power runs water-quality sensors and a light 'language' after dark. - Video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sWj5ujsJmNI - Images: https://www.novainnova.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/10/POND-tech-V4-1876x2048.png https://www.novainnova.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/09/POND_29-1-26_BrianLubking_DEF-91-crop-800x800.jpg - Project page: https://www.novainnova.com/pond/ #### MicroAquarium: An Immersive and Interactive Installation with Living Microorganisms — Kyungwon Lee, Seung Ah Lee (2020) - Type: Paper · Organisms: Cells & tissue - Idea: Scale the viewer down to the cells' world, and let hands speak in light. - What it is: An immersive installation where visitors' hand motions become light patterns projected onto living phototactic microorganisms, whose magnified response fills a large screen like an aquarium. - How it works: A custom light-projection microscope with a hand-tracking input device projects patterns onto Euglena and shows the live view on an immersive display. - Paper: https://doi.org/10.1145/3334480.3383164 (CHI 2020 Extended Abstracts) - Images: https://figures.semanticscholar.org/8f745c8c5db30f909633d7f4421c49e94f828224/1-Figure1-1.png - Project page: https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3334480.3383164 #### Pac-Euglena: A Living Cellular Pac-Man Meets Virtual Ghosts — Ingmar Riedel-Kruse, Seung Ah Lee (2020) - Type: Paper · Organisms: Cells & tissue - Idea: Mix living cells, virtual game objects and human players in one mixed reality. - What it is: A biotic Pac-Man in which players steer a living Euglena cell with light through a real microfluidic maze while virtual ghosts and collectibles are overlaid on the microscope view. - How it works: A microscope with directional LED stimuli guides phototactic Euglena gracilis; computer vision tracks the cell and merges it with game logic. - Paper: https://doi.org/10.1145/3313831.3376378 (CHI 2020) - Video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sy5Mistz150 - Images: https://biodigitalviz.github.io/images/pac_eugelena.png - Project page: https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3313831.3376378 #### Semina Aeternitatis: Using Bacteria for Tangible Interaction with Data — Mirela Alistar (2020) - Type: Artwork · Organisms: Bacteria & microbes, DNA & molecules - Idea: Store a person's stories inside living bacteria and let people touch memory. - What it is: The memories of an elderly woman were encoded in DNA and inserted into cellulose-producing bacteria, which grew into a sculpture holding billions of copies of her stories that visitors could see, touch, smell and taste. Made with artist Margherita Pevere. - How it works: Stories were encoded as nucleotides, assembled into a plasmid and transformed into Komagataeibacter rhaeticus, which grows a bacterial cellulose sheet. - Paper: https://doi.org/10.1145/3334480.3381817 (CHI 2020 Extended Abstracts) - Images: https://margheritapevere.com/app/uploads/2024/02/Pevere_Semina-Aeternitatis_11.jpg - Project page: https://margheritapevere.com/seminaaeternitatis/ #### Working with Nature's Lag: Initial Design Lessons for Slow Biotic Games — Raphael Kim (2020) - Type: Paper · Organisms: Fungi, Bacteria & microbes - Idea: Design for the organism's clock, not the player's impatience. - What it is: Design lessons for games whose core mechanic is slow microbial growth, with practical recommendations for building play around an organism's response time. - How it works: Reflection on the development and play of Mould Rush and related biotic game prototypes. - Paper: https://doi.org/10.1145/3402942.3409790 (FDG 2020) #### Growable, Invisible, Connected Toys: Twitching Towards Ubiquitous Bacterial Computing — Raphael Kim (2019) - Type: Paper · Organisms: Bacteria & microbes, Fungi - Idea: Treat bacteria as the next connected toy, and teach microbiology through play. - What it is: Introduces MouldCraft, a smartphone-controlled console for playing with living microorganisms, framing bacteria as growable, invisible, connected 'toys' that can sense, act and communicate. - How it works: Modular, interchangeable console with incubation, lighting and camera modules controlled over a smartphone app. - Paper: https://doi.org/10.1145/3363384.3363387 (Halfway to the Future 2019) #### Moldy Ghosts and Yeasty Invasions: Glitches in Hybrid Bio-Digital Games — Raphael Kim (2019) - Type: Paper · Organisms: Fungi, Bacteria & microbes - Idea: When living parts misbehave, the glitch itself can become the design. - What it is: Reports two 'glitches' in the biotic game Mould Rush—an extra character created by stray mould and a game freeze caused by invading yeast—and proposes using such glitches for learning, gameplay and ethical debate. - How it works: Observation of unexpected microbial contamination in the camera-tracked game and its effect on the digital game logic. - Paper: https://doi.org/10.1145/3290607.3312895 (CHI 2019 Extended Abstracts) - Video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=z7gvj6DucF4 #### Sensorial Skin: L'Origine du Monde — Anne Marie Maes (2019) - Type: Artwork · Organisms: Bacteria & microbes, Insects - Idea: Grow a living skin that shows the state of the air by changing colour. - What it is: A cyanobacterial biofilm grown as the outer skin of a beehive changes colour when fine-dust pollution passes a threshold, turning the hive's shell into a pollution display. - How it works: Photosynthetic cyanobacteria in a biofilm respond to stress from atmospheric particles with visible changes in pigment and texture; a STARTS residency project. - Video: https://vimeo.com/393465407 - Images: https://annemariemaes.net/wp-content/uploads/2020/02/STARTS.004.jpg https://annemariemaes.net/wp-content/uploads/2020/02/STARTS.010.jpg - Project page: https://annemariemaes.net/projects/sensorial-skin/ #### Shadows from the Walls of Death — Adam W. Brown (2019) - Type: Artwork · Organisms: Bacteria & microbes - Idea: Let a microbe remediate, and redraw, a poison that art once spread through homes. - What it is: A performance series that re-synthesises Paris Green, a toxic arsenic pigment, paints wallpaper with it, and inoculates the paint with arsenic-oxidising bacteria that turn it from green to black. - How it works: Herminiimonas arsenicoxydans oxidises As(III) to As(V) in the Paris Green paint, shifting its colour; synthesis checked by XRD and SEM; with Rebekah Blesing and Robert Root-Bernstein. - Video: https://vimeo.com/809544365 - Images: https://adamwbrown.net/wp-content/uploads/2020/06/SWoD-960x641.jpg https://adamwbrown.net/wp-content/uploads/2021/03/Transpalette-Octobre-2019-dish.jpg - Project page: https://adamwbrown.net/projects-2_previous/shadows-from-the-walls-of-death/ #### [ir]reverent: Miracles on Demand — Adam W. Brown (2019) - Type: Artwork · Organisms: Bacteria & microbes - Idea: Show that a microbe could have written chapters of religious history, and put it on demand. - What it is: A bio-incubator shaped like a Catholic monstrance grows Serratia marcescens on a Eucharist host, making the bread 'bleed' in two days, as historical blood miracles did. - How it works: Micro-droplets of S. marcescens culture are dispensed onto a host inside a temperature-controlled incubator where the red pigment prodigiosin develops. - Video: https://vimeo.com/324961619 - Images: https://adamwbrown.net/wp-content/uploads/2019/03/irrerverent_full.jpg https://adamwbrown.net/wp-content/uploads/2019/03/case-verticle.jpg - Project page: https://adamwbrown.net/projects-2_previous/irreverent/ #### A New Mould Rush — Raphael Kim (2018) - Type: Paper · Organisms: Fungi, Bacteria & microbes - Idea: Slowness of living growth can make a game better, not worse. - What it is: An online multiplayer strategy game driven by real mould growing in Petri dishes: players place moves remotely and the colonies' growth over days decides the outcome. - How it works: Living mould colonies grow on agar in a physical game board; their growth is likely captured by camera and turned into game state in an online interface. - Paper: https://doi.org/10.1145/3235765.3235798 (FDG 2018) - Images: https://figures.semanticscholar.org/d55e1b434a1d0b9047cd87ea186e2f1a689a53af/6-Figure8-1.png https://figures.semanticscholar.org/d55e1b434a1d0b9047cd87ea186e2f1a689a53af/3-Figure2-1.png #### Algae Powered Thermometer — Fabienne Felder (2018) - Type: Artwork · Organisms: Algae, Bacteria & microbes - Idea: A 'biological solar panel' can run a small everyday instrument. - What it is: An installation in which containers of three algae species act as photo-microbial fuel cells that together power an electric thermometer. - How it works: Photosynthesis and bacterial digestion in each container release electrons and protons that electrodes collect; the cells are wired together to reach the needed voltage. - Video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=POl5Y-xN_X4 - Project page: https://www.biology-design.com/risd #### Prototyping biotic games with JavaScript — Peter Washington, Ingmar Riedel-Kruse (2018) - Type: Product & platform · Organisms: Bacteria & microbes - Idea: Make living cells programmable over the web like any other interactive medium. - What it is: An online IDE and JavaScript API for writing games and interactive experiments that control swarms of live Euglena in remote microscopes in real time. - How it works: Cloud-connected microscopes image microfluidic chips of Euglena gracilis; the API exposes cell tracking and LED light stimuli to user code. - Paper: https://doi.org/10.1145/3170427.3186510 (CHI 2018 EA) - Video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6iGI8DAr8PM - Images: https://figures.semanticscholar.org/b62d2e08a0664bce0349528876313eaa95da7383/500px/3-Figure2-1.png - Project page: https://doi.org/10.1145/3170427.3186510 #### BioSoNot 1.2 — Gilberto Esparza (2017) - Type: Artwork · Organisms: Bacteria & microbes, Ecosystems - Idea: A polluted river can be an instrument, and playing it can help clean it. - What it is: A musical synthesizer that plays the biological activity of microorganisms in contaminated water samples while those microbes clean the water. - How it works: Water from polluted sites fills microbial fuel cells; the fluctuating electrical output from bacterial metabolism is translated into sound. - Paper: https://doi.org/10.1145/3072940.3080500 (ACM SIGGRAPH 2017 Art Gallery) - Video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pDvqnnBTjD0 - Images: https://samim.io/static/upload/0biosonot-12.jpg - Project page: https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3072940.3080500 #### Electricity generation from digitally printed cyanobacteria — Marin Sawa, Paolo Bombelli (2017) - Type: Paper · Organisms: Bacteria & microbes - Idea: Print living power sources like you print a page. - What it is: A paper-based bio-solar cell made with a standard inkjet printer: living cyanobacteria printed onto carbon-nanotube ink generate current in light and, as a 'bio-battery', in the dark. - How it works: Synechocystis cells are inkjet-printed over a printed carbon-nanotube conductive layer; photosynthetic electron export produces current (biophotovoltaics). - Paper: https://doi.org/10.1038/s41467-017-01084-4 (Nature Communications 2017) - Video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1KU7jE4_DnI - Images: https://media.springernature.com/full/springer-static/image/art%3A10.1038%2Fs41467-017-01084-4/MediaObjects/41467_2017_1084_Fig1_HTML.jpg https://www.designboom.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/11/wallpaper-bio-solar-panel-designboom01-1.jpg - Project page: https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-017-01084-4 #### Gut-Machine Poetry — Jenna Sutela (2017) - Type: Artwork · Organisms: Bacteria & microbes, Fungi - Idea: Let a gut-like microbial culture write, so language comes from digestion rather than a mind. - What it is: A homebrew computer fuelled by a kombucha ferment, whose bacterial and yeast activity acts as a random number generator for producing a new kind of language. - How it works: Fluctuations in a SCOBY kombucha culture, likely read by sensors, seed a text-generating program; commissioned by Kiasma, with Vincent de Belleval and Johanna Lundberg. - Images: https://jennasutela.com/wp-content/uploads/Jenna-Sutela_Gut-Machine-Poetry-2017_backend.jpg https://jennasutela.com/wp-content/uploads/Jenna-Sutela_Nam-Gut-the-microbial-breakdown-of-language-2017_photo-Adrianna-Glaviano.jpg - Project page: https://jennasutela.com/gut-machine-poetry/ #### Interactive Biology Cloud Lab — Ingmar Riedel-Kruse (2017) - Type: Research prototype · Organisms: Cells & tissue - Idea: Put living cells in the cloud so anyone can experiment with them. - What it is: Remote microscopes let online students run real light experiments on living Euglena over the internet; in an edX course, more than 300 learners ran over 2,300 experiments. - How it works: Networked microscopes with LED stimulation and cell tracking, controlled through web interfaces and a JavaScript API. - Paper: https://doi.org/10.1145/3051457.3053994 (Learning @ Scale 2017) - Video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PuHRoSVmE_w #### Let the microbes power your sensing display — Maurizio Rossi (2017) - Type: Paper · Organisms: Bacteria & microbes, Plants - Idea: A potted plant can be the battery of an Internet-of-Things device. - What it is: A self-powered sensor node that drives an e-paper display using only electricity from electrogenic bacteria living with plant roots. - How it works: A plant-microbial fuel cell feeds a custom power-management circuit that stores energy and wakes the sensor and e-paper display. - Paper: https://doi.org/10.1109/ICSENS.2017.8234406 (IEEE SENSORS 2017) - Images: https://biodigitalviz.github.io/images/sensing_display.png - Project page: https://doi.org/10.1109/ICSENS.2017.8234406 #### Long range wireless sensing powered by plant-microbial fuel cell — Maurizio Rossi (2017) - Type: Paper · Organisms: Bacteria & microbes, Plants - Idea: Soil bacteria can power a wireless sensor if the electronics learn to sleep. - What it is: An ultra-low-power sensor that measures its surroundings and sends data over long-range radio, powered by a plant-microbial fuel cell that only needs watering. - How it works: FRAM keeps microcontroller state so the electronics can shut down fully between measurements while bacteria recharge the store. - Paper: https://doi.org/10.23919/DATE.2017.7927258 (DATE 2017) - Images: https://encrypted-tbn0.gstatic.com/images?q=tbn:ANd9GcRO0Wxvm4QU0B-fkBeOgnV5jbOSTQw95wE7vQ&s - Project page: https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/document/7927258 #### Microbial Sonorities — Carlos Castellanos (2017) - Type: Artwork · Organisms: Bacteria & microbes - Idea: Listen to microbial metabolism as rhythm and learn its patterns with machine learning. - What it is: A hybrid biological-electronic sound system in which voltage changes from an array of microbial fuel cells modulate modular synthesizers, with machine learning interpreting the bacterial patterns. - How it works: Amplified MFC signals become control voltages for a Eurorack synth and Max/MSP; classifiers trigger presets and regression predicts voltage changes. - Images: https://www.ccastellanos.com/wp-content/gallery/microbial-sonorities/d.jpg - Project page: https://www.ccastellanos.com/projects/microbial-sonorities/ #### Speculative Communications — Interspecifics (2017) - Type: Artwork · Organisms: Bacteria & microbes - Idea: Build a SETI-style listening post for non-human intelligence right under the microscope. - What it is: A machine watches a microorganism culture, learns to recognise repeated coordinated actions in it and turns them into an auto-generative audiovisual score streamed live. - How it works: A microscope camera and machine-learning system track behaviour patterns in a self-maintaining microbial culture (likely bacteria) and map them to musical and visual gestures; developed with support from FONCA, Laboratorio Arte Alameda, Medialab-Prado and DAAD. - Video: https://vimeo.com/320857134 - Images: https://live.staticflickr.com/65535/49813943778_95a0d6f39c_k_d.jpg https://interspecifics.cc/work/wp-content/uploads/2017/11/img_00000-1024x576.png - Project page: https://interspecifics.cc/work/speculative-communications-2017/ #### Stretchable Living Materials and Devices with Hydrogel–Elastomer Hybrids Hosting Programmed Cells — Xuanhe Zhao (2017) - Type: Paper · Organisms: Bacteria & microbes, Human body - Idea: Wearable living sensors need a soft, stretchable home that keeps cells alive and contained. - What it is: A stretchable glove and bandage with channels of living engineered bacteria that fluoresce when the wearer touches specific chemicals. - How it works: Programmed E. coli live in hydrogel chambers bonded to elastomer; chemicals diffuse in and trigger fluorescent reporters. With Timothy Lu. - Paper: https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.1618307114 (PNAS 2017) - Images: https://figures.semanticscholar.org/3c1b715a6843a25a660a3dde2935b975eed7777f/5-Figure4-1.png #### Towards a biohybrid sensing platform built on impedance-based bacterial flagellar motor tachometry — Michel Maharbiz (2017) - Type: Paper · Organisms: Bacteria & microbes - Idea: Borrow a bacterium's near-perfect chemical sense and read it electronically. - What it is: A biohybrid chemical sensor that reads how fast and in which direction a single E. coli flagellar motor spins, using that bacterium's own chemotaxis as the sensing front end. - How it works: Lithographic silica shaft encoders bind to flagellar motors; a four-point impedance array detects their rotation in a 4 x 4 micron region. - Paper: https://doi.org/10.1109/BIOCAS.2017.8325135 (IEEE BioCAS 2017) - Images: https://biodigitalviz.github.io/images/biohybrid_sensing.png - Project page: https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/document/8325135 #### BioGraphr: Science Games on a Biotic Computer — Ingmar Riedel-Kruse (2016) - Type: Paper · Organisms: Cells & tissue - Idea: At millimetre scale a population of microbes becomes a playable screen. - What it is: A tabletop gaming system that projects images into a mini-aquarium of millions of Euglena, which rearrange into visible bioconvection patterns within seconds for players to play with. - How it works: A projector shines light patterns onto phototactic Euglena gracilis; a camera tracks the resulting cell density patterns to drive games. - Paper: https://doi.org/10.26503/dl.v2016i1.753 (DiGRA/FDG 2016) - Images: https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Lukas-Gerber-3/publication/312491700/figure/fig1/AS:451685236645888@1484701560905/The-BioGraphr-uses-millions-of-living-organisms-Euglena-in-its-core-These-cells-form.png - Project page: https://doi.org/10.26503/dl.v2016i1.753 #### Biota Beats — Ani Liu (2016) - Type: Research prototype · Organisms: Bacteria & microbes - Idea: Your microbiome can be played like a record. - What it is: A microbial record player: a Petri dish plated with bacteria from the human body sits on a turntable, and the colonies are read and turned into music. Built with the EMW Street Bio iGEM team (bronze medal, 2016). - How it works: A camera images the colonies on the rotating dish and custom code maps their positions to sound; the goal was real-time tracking of growth. - Images: https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/52cd9799e4b00ae3ac706ed4/1481861564982-J2ABUJLNN3YFN6W9PR72/image-asset.jpeg https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/52cd9799e4b00ae3ac706ed4/1481861726132-U54OMZI3Y8AFZDHV6Q1P/image-asset.jpeg https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/52cd9799e4b00ae3ac706ed4/1481861508280-JVLI0OPYU2EEXM6LNPIN/image-asset.jpeg - Project page: https://ani-liu.com/biota-beats #### Geobacter Micropulse — Interspecifics (2016) - Type: Artwork · Organisms: Bacteria & microbes - Idea: Treat the flicker of bacterial electricity as the first letters of an interspecies alphabet. - What it is: Microbial fuel cells filled with New York seawater and sediment power light patterns whose fluctuations follow the bioelectric output of Geobacter communities, as a sketch of an encoded language. - How it works: Anaerobic Geobacter consortia in sediment fuel cells release electrons whose voltage fluctuations are amplified to drive LED patterns. - Video: https://vimeo.com/170066980 - Images: https://farm9.staticflickr.com/8543/29753694795_e98129f71e_k_d.jpg https://farm9.staticflickr.com/8028/29641866892_b183c0c7c3_k_d.jpg - Project page: https://interspecifics.cc/work/geobacter-micropulse-2016/ #### LudusScope: Accessible Interactive Smartphone Microscopy for Life-Science Education — Ingmar Riedel-Kruse (2016) - Type: Research prototype · Organisms: Cells & tissue - Idea: Turn the school microscope from something you look through into something you play with. - What it is: A 3D-printed DIY smartphone microscope with a joystick and LEDs that lets students play with and experiment on living Euglena, including game modes and Scratch programming. - How it works: Four joystick-controlled LEDs stimulate phototactic Euglena; the phone camera tracks cells in real time. - Paper: https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0162602 (PLOS ONE 2016) - Video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=C8uDOhuswgA #### Micro-Rhythms — Interspecifics (2016) - Type: Artwork · Organisms: Bacteria & microbes - Idea: Let microbes write a graphic score that a machine listens to. - What it is: An installation where tiny voltage variations from soil-bacteria fuel cells drive arrays of lights; a computer-vision algorithm finds matching light sequences and turns them into octophonic sound. - How it works: Microbial fuel cells filled with local soil power LEDs; three Raspberry Pi cameras with OpenCV track light patterns and SuperCollider plays them. - Video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=33gF1bvw2yQ - Images: https://farm6.staticflickr.com/5801/30454096641_4c9fa188d1_k_d.jpg https://farm6.staticflickr.com/5520/30541618515_d2b6f89fd2_k_d.jpg - Project page: https://interspecifics.cc/work/micro-ritmos-2016/ #### PhyChip / Phytracker — Interspecifics (2015) - Type: Artwork · Organisms: Slime mould - Idea: Read a slime mould's exploration as a score: its routing behaviour becomes the composition. - What it is: As artistic researchers in the EU PhyChip project on slime-mould computing, Interspecifics built Phytracker, a computer-vision tool that turns the growth and movement of Physarum into musical compositions. - How it works: A camera tracks Physarum polycephalum networks on agar and software maps their expansion to sound events; made at Bauhaus-Universität Weimar within the PhyChip consortium. - Video: https://vimeo.com/133038236 - Images: https://farm9.staticflickr.com/8871/16931660414_103c1f32f8_k_d.jpg https://farm8.staticflickr.com/7731/17700105163_72985e940b_k_d.jpg - Project page: https://interspecifics.cc/work/phychip-2015/ #### Tangible Interactive Microbiology for Informal Science Education — Seung Ah Lee, Ingmar Riedel-Kruse (2015) - Type: Paper · Organisms: Cells & tissue - Idea: Touch the screen, touch the microbe: drawing becomes a light stimulus for living cells. - What it is: A touch-screen microscope station where visitors draw on a live view of Euglena; the drawing is projected into the chamber as light and the cells swim in response. - How it works: A projector-equipped microscope images phototactic Euglena gracilis and projects users' touch drawings onto the microfluidic chamber. - Paper: https://doi.org/10.1145/2677199.2680561 (TEI 2015) - Images: https://figures.semanticscholar.org/0209bc61eb6ba83e58d4cd8e023d496210839d79/1-Figure1-1.png - Project page: https://doi.org/10.1145/2677199.2680561 #### The Living Language Project — Ori Elisar (2015) - Type: Artwork · Organisms: Bacteria & microbes - Idea: Let a living organism, not a type designer, write the missing evolution of an alphabet. - What it is: Paenibacillus vortex bacteria are grown in the shape of Paleo-Hebrew letters, and their spreading colonies slowly morph the ancient letters toward modern Hebrew forms in Petri dishes. - How it works: Pattern-forming Paenibacillus vortex was inoculated as letterforms on nutrient agar with controlled nutrients and conditions, and its growth was time-lapse filmed; developed with Eshel Ben-Jacob's lab at Tel Aviv University. - Video: https://vimeo.com/159103081 - Images: https://web.archive.org/web/20191114090514im_/https://orielisar.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/08/IMG_9224-copy1.jpg - Project page: https://web.archive.org/web/20191114090514/https://orielisar.com/ #### Trap it!: A Playful Human-Biology Interaction for a Museum Installation — Ingmar Riedel-Kruse (2015) - Type: Paper · Organisms: Cells & tissue - Idea: Draw with light, and living cells respond in real time. - What it is: A museum exhibit where visitors draw on a touchscreen showing live Euglena under a microscope; the drawings are projected as light onto the cells, which swim away from or toward them. - How it works: Phototactic Euglena gracilis in a microfluidic chamber; a projector through the microscope turns touch input into light patterns. Built with Paulo Blikstein's group at Stanford. - Paper: https://doi.org/10.1145/2702123.2702220 (CHI 2015) - Video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BcuBK7g6DQ0 #### Energy Bending Lab — Interspecifics (2014) - Type: Artwork · Organisms: Bacteria & microbes - Idea: Let bacterial voltage set the clock of the whole instrument, so the microbes pace the music. - What it is: A set of custom modular synthesizers amplifies the micro-voltage of electrogenic bacteria and sonifies it in real time, then turns the sound into visible patterns through cymatics. - How it works: Microbial fuel cells feed microvoltages into modular synthesizers that tune the system clock, and a cymatics plate converts the sound into patterns; built during ECAS residencies and at Bauhaus-Universität Weimar. - Video: https://vimeo.com/171048903 - Images: https://farm9.staticflickr.com/8767/18133468690_0110dda557_k_d.jpg https://farm2.staticflickr.com/1451/24623851831_c4b047636e_k_d.jpg - Project page: https://interspecifics.cc/work/energy-bending-lab-2014/ #### Culturing cut — Hideo Iwasaki (2013) - Type: Artwork · Organisms: Bacteria & microbes - Idea: Let the organism studied in a paper edit and overwrite that paper. - What it is: The artist cuts his own cyanobacteria research paper into paper-cut patterns, removing subjective sentences, then inoculates cyanobacteria where those sentences were; the bacteria glide over the cut-outs and draw new patterns. - How it works: Filamentous motile cyanobacteria from local ponds are cultured on paper cut-outs laid on solid media, where cut edges and conditions steer their collective gliding into species-specific patterns. - Video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FXv-tV8o4eU - Images: https://cdn.myportfolio.com/b55c7e54-61bd-45c3-a02a-c28798af8ee3/97002fdb-87bc-4c74-9d42-c38a58e38e6f_car_1x1.JPG?h=83677ffd9e84334be286509fa0e64008 https://cdn.myportfolio.com/b55c7e54-61bd-45c3-a02a-c28798af8ee3/036e3abf-b47e-4409-aba2-2ed413e4e285_rw_1920.JPG?h=fb2c1ce03a31350da7c0eb37fde4bf2d - Project page: https://hideo-iwasaki.com/culturing-papercut #### Living sensing systems (Winogradsky columns) — Stacey Kuznetsov (2013) - Type: Research prototype · Organisms: Bacteria & microbes, Ecosystems - Idea: Soil microbes can be slow, collective environmental sensors for a neighbourhood. - What it is: A bio-electronic device that visualises bacterial activity in Winogradsky columns filled with local soil, deployed for a month with two urban communities. - How it works: Electrodes measure electrical activity of microbial communities growing in soil columns; LED matrices show activity per layer and over time. - Paper: https://doi.org/10.1145/2466627.2466638 (C&C 2013) - Images: https://figures.semanticscholar.org/c2f8442319ac80dd71d060827331d3b6f373f9ab/500px/1-Figure1-1.png https://figures.semanticscholar.org/c2f8442319ac80dd71d060827331d3b6f373f9ab/500px/4-Figure3-1.png - Project page: https://doi.org/10.1145/2466627.2466638 #### Moss FM — Fabienne Felder, Paolo Bombelli (2013) - Type: Research prototype · Organisms: Plants, Bacteria & microbes - Idea: Living moss and microbes together can be a battery. - What it is: A radio powered by ten pots of moss: bacteria in the soil break down compounds released by the moss during photosynthesis, and the electrons are harvested to run a commercial FM radio. - How it works: Photo-microbial fuel cells with electrodes in moss pots harvest electrons from rhizosphere bacteria; later published as a bryophyte MFC study. - Paper: https://doi.org/10.1098/rsos.160249 (Royal Society Open Science 2016) - Video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PA2w9t2VNTw - Images: https://materiability.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/03/Moss-FM-2-copy.jpg - Project page: https://materiability.com/portfolio/moss-fm/ #### Plantas Autofotosintéticas (Autophotosynthetic Plants) — Gilberto Esparza (2013) - Type: Artwork · Organisms: Bacteria & microbes, Plants, Ecosystems - Idea: Close a loop in which sewage bacteria make the light that other organisms need to photosynthesise. - What it is: Modular microbial fuel cells fed with city sewage produce electricity that lights a central aquarium, where plants, algae, protozoa and crustaceans live in balance; their waste is pumped back to the cells to restart the cycle. - How it works: Electrogenic bacteria in modular fuel cells release power as light pulses for aquatic plants, and an electronic monitoring network pumps water between the modules and the core ecosystem. - Video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JOaeyf2qUKY - Images: https://gilbertoesparza.net/wp-content/uploads/2023/01/nucleo-PAF-1024x684.jpeg https://gilbertoesparza.net/wp-content/uploads/2023/01/TRANSPALETTE-1024x684.jpg - Project page: https://gilbertoesparza.net/portfolio/plantas-autofotosinteticasautophotosynthetic-plants/ #### Microbial Schöppingen — Mick Lorusso (2012) - Type: Artwork · Organisms: Bacteria & microbes - Idea: Show a microbial society as a town whose collective work keeps the lights on. - What it is: A Plexiglas model of the German village of Schöppingen in which bacterial communities live in the houses and together generate the electricity that lights the town hall, accompanied by live shadow-puppet shows. - How it works: Each house pair is a microbial fuel cell: an anaerobic anode house with bacteria feeding on food scraps connected through a proton-exchange membrane to an oxygenated cathode house, wired in series to a white LED; tuned with LabMET, Ghent University. - Images: https://micklorusso.net/wp-content/uploads/2015/09/mick_lorusso_mfc_schoppingen_1_1.jpg https://archive.aec.at/asset/1638449/preview/ - Project page: https://micklorusso.net/portfolio/microbial-schoppingen/ #### The Great Work of the Metal Lover — Adam W. Brown (2012) - Type: Artwork · Organisms: Bacteria & microbes - Idea: Re-enact alchemy with a microbe, so a metabolism performs the transmutation. - What it is: An alchemical bioreactor in which a metal-tolerant bacterium turns toxic gold chloride into 24-karat gold, shown live through a microscope and in gilded electron-microscope prints. - How it works: Cupriavidus metallidurans grows in a custom glass bioreactor with a CO2/H2 atmosphere and precipitates gold from AuCl3; SEM images guide gold-leaf application; made with microbiologist Kazem Kashefi. - Video: https://vimeo.com/46660836 - Images: https://adamwbrown.net/wp-content/uploads/2012/03/GWML.jpg https://adamwbrown.net/wp-content/uploads/2012/03/GWMLgold-sample.jpg - Project page: https://adamwbrown.net/projects-2_previous/the-great-work-of-the-metal-lover/ #### BBa_K221000: First Volume of Teenage Gene Poems — ArtScienceBangalore (2011) - Type: Artwork · Organisms: Bacteria & microbes - Idea: Encode the smell of the Indian monsoon as a genetic part, then ask what that promise means. - What it is: E. coli transformed with a BioBrick that makes geosmin produce the smell of wet earth after rain, grown in a collapsible DIY bio lab inside a geodesic dome. - How it works: The standard part BBa_K221000 (geosmin synthase) was transformed into E. coli and incubated in a custom incubator built from hacked consumer electronics; lab plans shared via hackteria.org. - Images: https://archive.aec.at/asset/731417/preview/ https://archive.aec.at/asset/1407070/preview/ - Project page: https://archive.aec.at/prix/169888/ #### Design, Engineering and Utility of Biotic Games — Ingmar Riedel-Kruse (2011) - Type: Paper · Organisms: Cells & tissue, Bacteria & microbes - Idea: Games can run on living biological processes, with real noise and real smells. - What it is: The paper that coined 'biotic games': eight games played with living microorganisms, such as PAC-mecium (steering paramecia with electric fields through a maze) and Biotic Pinball. - How it works: Microfluidic chambers, microscopes and cameras; players steer Paramecium and Euglena with electric fields, light or chemicals. - Paper: https://doi.org/10.1039/c0lc00399a (Lab on a Chip 2011) - Video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f2Ux4pQH7KY #### Imbued with Light — Mick Lorusso (2011) - Type: Artwork · Organisms: Bacteria & microbes - Idea: Let soil bacteria visibly power the artwork that describes them. - What it is: Glass cylinders of mud and compost act as microbial fuel cells whose bacteria break down organic waste and generate the current that lights an LED orb in the installation. - How it works: Sealed microbial fuel cells with graphite electrodes host anaerobic bacteria such as Geobacter that release electrons while digesting carbohydrates; MFA thesis at San Francisco Art Institute. - Images: https://micklorusso.net/wp-content/uploads/2015/09/1_m_lorusso_art-sci.jpg - Project page: https://micklorusso.net/portfolio/imbued-with-light/ #### Photoautotropica — Hideo Iwasaki (2011) - Type: Artwork · Organisms: Bacteria & microbes - Idea: Feed organisms on images of their own kind, closing a loop between life and its representation. - What it is: Cyanobacteria in culture vessels photosynthesise not with sunlight but with light from projected films of cyanobacterial colonies forming patterns under the microscope. - How it works: Geitlerinema, Nostoc and Leptolyngbya collected in Tokyo grow in liquid and gel media lit only by LED and video projection controlled by a PC. - Images: https://cdn.myportfolio.com/b55c7e54-61bd-45c3-a02a-c28798af8ee3/e9ef0f07-bd4c-4739-9c78-7eeb62ab939b_car_1x1.JPG?h=c0d0a60e762ce51ee2bb3a0dedfb6628 https://cdn.myportfolio.com/b55c7e54-61bd-45c3-a02a-c28798af8ee3/0b54f357-670c-492d-9505-a227940f0571_rw_1920.jpg?h=17bc297365864da5881e36a00546d596 - Project page: https://hideo-iwasaki.com/photoautotropica-2011-2012 #### The Communicating Bacteria Dress — Anna Dumitriu (2011) - Type: Artwork · Organisms: Bacteria & microbes - Idea: Make bacterial conversation visible as colour on a garment. - What it is: A whitework-embroidered dress stained with pigmented bacteria that change colour when they send and receive chemical signals, overlaid with 3D-mapped video projections. - How it works: Quorum-sensing pigmented bacteria (likely Chromobacterium violaceum, which makes violacein when signalling) were grown on the textile and then sterilised; video mapping made with Alex May. - Images: https://annadumitriu.co.uk/wp-content/uploads/2021/10/IMG_2149.jpg - Project page: https://annadumitriu.co.uk/portfolio/the-communicating-bacteria-dress/ #### Cybernetic Bacteria 2.0 — Anna Dumitriu (2010) - Type: Artwork · Organisms: Bacteria & microbes - Idea: Bacteria were networking long before we built the internet. - What it is: An art-science project comparing bacterial quorum sensing with data packets on the internet, combining live bacterial cultures, embroidery and an interactive artificial-life simulation. - How it works: Cultures of bacteria that signal by quorum sensing were grown and stitched into textiles, alongside software that models the signalling; built with a microbiologist, a philosopher and an artificial life programmer. - Paper: https://doi.org/10.1162/leon_a_00173 (Leonardo 2011) - Video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uc9GdS1WCfc - Project page: https://annadumitriu.co.uk #### Enteric Consciousness — Ken Rinaldo (2010) - Type: Artwork · Organisms: Bacteria & microbes, Human body - Idea: Make a machine's service depend on the health of a microbial community, like the gut deciding for the body. - What it is: A glass stomach full of living Lactobacillus acidophilus controls a giant robotic tongue chair, which gives visitors a 15-minute massage only while the bacterial culture is alive. - How it works: Bacterial cultures in a hand-blown glass stomach are kept cool by peristaltic pumps; the chair is likely enabled by a sensor reading of the culture's state, and two robotic tongues dip into chocolate and cheese. - Video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gNAk3_f1xbY - Images: https://www.kenrinaldo.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/05/5000290433_c659189cf5_o.jpg https://www.kenrinaldo.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/04/5000890388_801e16826e_o.jpg - Project page: https://www.kenrinaldo.com/portfolio/enteric-consciousness/ #### Plant-e: Electricity from Living Plants — Plant-e (2009) - Type: Product & platform · Organisms: Plants, Bacteria & microbes - Idea: Every planted surface could double as a small power plant. - What it is: Modules that generate electricity from living plants without harming them, used to power lights, sensors and Wi-Fi hotspots from green roofs, pots and wetlands. - How it works: Plant microbial fuel cells: roots release organic matter that soil bacteria oxidise, and electrodes collect the electrons. - Video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ku1-_MOzkTE - Project page: https://plant-e.com/ #### A Micro "Flea Circus": Self Assembly of Bacteria Through Spatio-Temporal Control of Aerotaxis — Michel Maharbiz (2006) - Type: Paper · Organisms: Bacteria & microbes - Idea: Electronics can choreograph living cells by shaping what they want, here oxygen. - What it is: A microfluidic chip whose tiny electrodes release doses of oxygen, so swimming Bacillus subtilis gather and self-assemble wherever the chip creates an oxygen hotspot. - How it works: Electrolysis at an array of microelectrodes patterns dissolved-oxygen gradients in space and time; aerotactic B. subtilis follow them. - Paper: https://doi.org/10.1109/MEMSYS.2006.1627861 (IEEE MEMS 2006) - Images: https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Mm-Maharbiz/publication/4240186/figure/fig3/AS:670022120775687@1536757130166/As-the-bacterial-cloud-collapsed-onto-the-pointsource-electrode-the-band-formed_Q320.jpg - Project page: https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/document/1627861 #### Engineering Escherichia coli to See Light — Christopher Voigt (2005) - Type: Paper · Organisms: Bacteria & microbes - Idea: Bacteria can be pixels that sense light and display an image. - What it is: A lawn of engineered E. coli works as photographic film: projected images are 'printed' in the bacteria as dark and light areas, including the famous 'Hello World' bacterial photograph. - How it works: A synthetic light-sensing receptor (cyanobacterial phytochrome fused to EnvZ) switches a pigment-producing gene off in light, so exposed cells stay pale. Led by Anselm Levskaya with the Voigt and Ellington labs. - Paper: https://doi.org/10.1038/nature04405 (Nature 2005) - Images: https://media.springernature.com/full/springer-static/image/art%3A10.1038%2Fnature04405/MediaObjects/41586_2005_BFnature04405_Fig1_HTML.jpg ### Biohybrid Robots Robots driven by muscle, cells, fungi or whole organisms. #### Anicca Antenna: Soil as Brain — Ken Rinaldo (2025) - Type: Artwork · Organisms: Insects, Bacteria & microbes, Ecosystems - Idea: Treat a whole soil ecosystem, not a single animal, as the controller of machines. - What it is: A terrarium of soil, plants, isopods, springtails and microbes acts as the 'brain' of a group of small antenna robots, which move, glow and play insect sounds in response to the living substrate. - How it works: Cameras and sensors track isopod movement and soil moisture and feed AI-driven robots that respond with motion, light and sound, and in a second version prompt watering of the terrarium. - Video: https://www.kenrinaldo.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/02/Anicca-Antenna-40-meg-v3.mp4 - Images: https://www.kenrinaldo.com/wp-content/uploads/2025/07/Anicca3KenRinaldo.jpg https://www.kenrinaldo.com/wp-content/uploads/2025/07/AniccaKenRinaldo.jpg - Project page: https://www.kenrinaldo.com/portfolio/anicca-soil-as-brain-2/ #### Biohybrid hand actuated by multiple human muscle tissues — Shoji Takeuchi (2025) - Type: Paper · Organisms: Cells & tissue, Human body - Idea: Bundle thin muscles like sushi rolls to reach the size of a human hand. - What it is: An 18-centimetre hand whose fingers bend and pinch, powered by bundles of rolled human muscle tissue, a jump in scale from earlier millimetre-sized biohybrids. - How it works: Thin sheets of cultured human muscle were rolled into 'MuMuTAs' (multiple muscle tissue actuators) and attached as tendons to a 3D-printed hand, then electrically stimulated. - Paper: https://doi.org/10.1126/scirobotics.adr5512 (Science Robotics) - Images: https://www.u-tokyo.ac.jp/content/400256657.png https://assets.newatlas.com/dims4/default/a710743/2147483647/strip/true/crop/1541x867+0+80/resize/1200x675!/quality/90/?url=https%3A%2F%2Fnewatlas-brightspot.s3.ap-southeast-2.amazonaws.com%2F5c%2F61%2Fcc6a072746f2850ddb3fb7743f85%2Fbiohybrid-hand.jpg - Project page: https://www.u-tokyo.ac.jp/focus/en/press/z0508_00386.html #### Cyborg insect factory: automatic assembly for insect-computer hybrid robots — Hirotaka Sato (2025) - Type: Paper · Organisms: Insects - Idea: Mass-producing cyborg animals changes the questions from 'can we' to 'should we, at scale'. - What it is: A robot arm guided by computer vision attaches electronic backpacks to cockroaches in about a minute each, turning cyborg-insect assembly into a production line. - How it works: A deep-learning vision system locates the insect's body segments and a robot arm mounts a backpack whose electrodes stimulate the pronotum for steering. - Paper: https://doi.org/10.1038/s41467-025-60779-1 (Nature Communications) - Video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AXA7plI6-6M - Images: https://www.ntu.edu.sg/media/images/default-source/hub-news/ai-powered-robot-assembles-search-and-rescue-cyborg-insects.jpg?sfvrsn=e402bfbb_1 https://mediasvc.eurekalert.org/Api/v1/Multimedia/5b6abd45-9ddb-43d8-8d02-480c0afa2be2/Rendition/low-res/Content/Public - Project page: https://www.ntu.edu.sg/news/detail/ai-powered-robot-assembles-search-and-rescue-cyborg-insects #### Navigating microalgal biohybrids through confinements with magnetic guidance — Metin Sitti (2025) - Type: Paper · Organisms: Algae - Idea: Combine an organism's propulsion with external magnetic steering to navigate confinement. - What it is: Magnetised green microalgae that swim on their own and are steered by magnetic fields through narrow, viscous spaces that mimic tissue and soil. - How it works: Chlamydomonas reinhardtii cells are coated with magnetic material in high yield; external fields guide them, producing backtracking and crossing behaviours in confined channels. - Paper: https://doi.org/10.1016/j.matt.2025.102052 (Matter 2025) - Video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=e0trR_1t5As - Images: https://www.cell.com/cms/10.1016/j.matt.2025.102052/asset/52030a26-3f3e-46a7-b557-7b8ef4ce3ff0/main.assets/fx1.jpg - Project page: https://doi.org/10.1016/j.matt.2025.102052 #### Swarm navigation of cyborg-insects in unknown obstructed soft terrain — Hirotaka Sato (2025) - Type: Paper · Organisms: Insects - Idea: Combine animal agility with swarm algorithms rather than controlling each insect tightly. - What it is: A group of cyborg cockroaches navigates as a swarm over rough terrain, with an algorithm that lets stuck insects be helped free by others. - How it works: Each cockroach carries a backpack with sensors and stimulators; a leader–follower algorithm uses the insects' natural behaviours and only nudges them occasionally. - Paper: https://doi.org/10.1038/s41467-024-55197-8 (Nature Communications) - Video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=th1bLBuLdc4 - Images: https://mediasvc.eurekalert.org/Api/v1/Multimedia/bed9d6e1-f699-4016-a69e-e15ab06c6789/Rendition/low-res/Content/Public https://mediasvc.eurekalert.org/Api/v1/Multimedia/6926c6e1-bf85-4799-abdb-1ad761d046aa/Rendition/low-res/Content/Public - Project page: https://www.eurekalert.org/news-releases/1069510 #### Biohybrid bipedal robot powered by skeletal muscle tissue — Shoji Takeuchi (2024) - Type: Paper · Organisms: Cells & tissue, Animals - Idea: Human-like walking with real muscle, not motors. - What it is: A small two-legged robot walks and turns underwater, each leg pulled by a strip of lab-grown muscle that contracts when stimulated. - How it works: Cultured skeletal muscle tissue attached to a flexible silicone body with a float; electrodes in the water trigger alternate leg contractions. - Paper: https://doi.org/10.1016/j.matt.2023.12.035 (Matter) - Video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IesRn6ca-ws - Images: https://www.u-tokyo.ac.jp/content/400231540.jpg https://www.u-tokyo.ac.jp/content/400231539.gif - Project page: https://www.u-tokyo.ac.jp/focus/en/press/z0508_00329.html #### Electromechanical enhancement of live jellyfish for ocean exploration — John Dabiri (2024) - Type: Paper · Organisms: Animals - Idea: Recruit animals as ocean sensors that power themselves. - What it is: Live jellyfish wear a 3D-printed streamlined 'hat' that can carry sensors, and a pacemaker makes them swim faster, as a step toward jellyfish that sample the deep ocean. - How it works: A 3D-printed forebody reduces drag and holds a payload; swimming was tested in a tall vertical tank with the electronic stimulator. - Paper: https://doi.org/10.1088/1748-3190/ad277f (Bioinspiration & Biomimetics) - Video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_ZfthP_7s5g - Images: https://caltech-prod.resources.caltech.edu/main/images/Dabiri-Jellyfish-Explorers-w.91523faf.fill-1600x810-c100.jpg - Project page: https://www.caltech.edu/about/news/building-bionic-jellyfish-for-ocean-exploration #### Light-deformable microrobots shape up for the biological obstacle course — Philip Wijesinghe (2024) - Type: Paper · Organisms: Algae, Cells & tissue - Idea: A microalga's own shape-changing can be the robot's actuator, steered by light. - What it is: A commentary on Euglena gracilis turned into soft bio-microrobots whose motion and body shape are controlled with light, for tasks such as drug delivery and removing diseased cells. - How it works: Light stimulates phototaxis and cell-body deformation of Euglena gracilis, so optical patterns steer and reshape the living microrobots. - Paper: https://doi.org/10.1038/s41377-024-01448-8 (Light: Science & Applications 2024) - Images: https://media.springernature.com/full/springer-static/image/art%3A10.1038%2Fs41377-024-01448-8/MediaObjects/41377_2024_1448_Fig1_HTML.png - Project page: https://www.nature.com/articles/s41377-024-01448-8 #### Perforation-type anchors inspired by skin ligament for robotic face covered with living skin — Shoji Takeuchi (2024) - Type: Paper · Organisms: Cells & tissue, Human body - Idea: Anchor living tissue the way ligaments do, so a machine can wear a face. - What it is: A small robotic face covered with lab-grown skin that is held on by anchors through tiny holes, so the skin moves with the face and forms a smile. - How it works: V-shaped perforations in the robot's surface fill with collagen gel and fibroblasts that anchor the dermis; the face is moved by actuators beneath. - Paper: https://doi.org/10.1016/j.xcrp.2024.102066 (Cell Reports Physical Science) - Video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p3DLgbOV9UM - Images: https://www.u-tokyo.ac.jp/content/400242951.png https://www.u-tokyo.ac.jp/content/400242950.png - Project page: https://www.u-tokyo.ac.jp/focus/en/press/z0508_00360.html #### Sensorimotor control of robots mediated by electrophysiological measurements of fungal mycelia — Anand Kumar Mishra, Rob Shepherd (2024) - Type: Paper · Organisms: Fungi - Idea: Put a fungus in the control loop so the robot senses the world through a living organism. - What it is: Two robots, a soft star-shaped walker and a wheeled rover, were driven by electrical spikes from living king oyster mycelium; shining UV light on the fungus changed its signals and so the robots' gait. - How it works: Mycelium grown into an electrode interface in a 3D-printed scaffold; its spikes are filtered and converted into actuator commands, with UV light as the stimulus. - Paper: https://doi.org/10.1126/scirobotics.adk8019 (Science Robotics) - Video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qREuXKvWMqA - Images: https://news.cornell.edu/sites/default/files/2024-08/figure-6a.jpg https://www.popsci.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/09/mushroom-robot.png - Project page: https://news.cornell.edu/stories/2024/08/biohybrid-robots-controlled-electrical-impulses-mushrooms #### bamboo bot — David Bowen (2024) - Type: Artwork · Organisms: Plants - Idea: Let a plant move its own body with a borrowed robotic limb. - What it is: A lucky bamboo plant sits on top of an industrial robot arm and positions the arm itself, while it keeps growing toward a light above. - How it works: Resistance signals measured through the stalk are mapped in real time to the joints of the robot carrying the plant. - Video: https://vimeo.com/1018793052 - Images: https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5509f2e8e4b042d7b1ec6ab5/1728677402499-7CZCITOJPVO0W47ADZ8D/bamboo_bot%28banner%29.jpg - Project page: https://www.dwbowen.com/bamboo-bot #### Anthrobots: Motile living biobots self-construct from adult human somatic progenitor seed cells — Gizem Gumuskaya, Michael Levin, Douglas Blackiston (2023) - Type: Paper · Organisms: Cells & tissue, Human body - Idea: Our own cells, freed from the body plan, can become new kinds of creatures. - What it is: Single adult human airway cells grown in a new environment built themselves into moving multicellular bots; placed on a scratched layer of human neurons, they helped the gap close. - How it works: Human tracheal epithelial cells were grown as organoids in Matrigel and then in low-viscosity medium, which turned their cilia outward so they could swim. - Paper: https://doi.org/10.1002/advs.202303575 (Advanced Science) - Video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4z-3DTlSnp0 - Images: https://now.tufts.edu/sites/default/files/uploaded-assets/images/2023-11/231130_anthrobots_lg.jpg https://wyss-prod.imgix.net/app/uploads/2023/11/29101538/Anthrobot-with-Cilia-02.jpg?auto=format%2Ccompress&crop=faces%2Centropy&fit=crop&q=50&w=800&s=db2cbe30b4a028e3f25f665e437c31f2 - Project page: https://now.tufts.edu/2023/11/30/scientists-build-tiny-biological-robots-human-cells #### Precisely Navigated Biobot Swarms of Bacteria Magnetospirillum magneticum for Water Decontamination — Martin Pumera (2023) - Type: Paper · Organisms: Bacteria & microbes - Idea: Living bacteria can be both the robot and the cleaning agent. - What it is: Swarms of magnetotactic bacteria steered by rotating magnetic fields to capture and remove the pesticide chlorpyrifos from water. - How it works: Magnetospirillum magneticum AMB-1 carry natural magnetite crystals; programmed clockwise fields make them swarm, and they bind organic pollutants. - Paper: https://doi.org/10.1021/acsami.2c16592 (ACS Applied Materials & Interfaces 2023) - Images: https://cdn.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/blobs/6768/10016748/e3ad2b337921/am2c16592_0006.jpg https://cdn.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/blobs/6768/10016748/e8c785413082/am2c16592_0003.jpg - Project page: https://pubs.acs.org/doi/10.1021/acsami.2c16592 #### Remote control of muscle-driven miniature robots with battery-free wireless optoelectronics — Rashid Bashir (2023) - Type: Paper · Organisms: Cells & tissue, Animals - Idea: Combine living muscle with battery-free electronics for untethered control. - What it is: Muscle-powered biobots carry a tiny wireless LED circuit on their backs; flashing the light contracts light-sensitive muscle, so each bot can be steered and turned remotely. - How it works: Optogenetic skeletal muscle is paired with a soft, wirelessly powered micro-LED module from John Rogers' group; radio frequency powers the lights. - Paper: https://doi.org/10.1126/scirobotics.add1053 (Science Robotics) - Video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MI__Nm6EzvA - Images: https://news.northwestern.edu/assets/Stories/2023/01/biobot1940__FocusFillMaxWyIwLjAwIiwiMC4wMCIsMTIwMCw2MzBd.jpg - Project page: https://news.northwestern.edu/stories/2023/01/muscle-powered-robots-have-freedom-of-movement/ #### An autonomously swimming biohybrid fish designed with human cardiac biophysics — Kit Parker (2022) - Type: Paper · Organisms: Cells & tissue, Human body - Idea: Build a heart's feedback loop into a body, and it keeps itself going. - What it is: A paper-and-gelatin fish powered by two layers of human stem-cell-derived heart muscle swims on its own for more than 100 days, with a built-in pacemaker node. - How it works: Human cardiomyocytes on each side of the tail stretch-activate each other in turn, while a separate node of cells sets the rhythm. - Paper: https://doi.org/10.1126/science.abh0474 (Science) - Video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PudGp0BeHTw - Images: https://seas.harvard.edu/sites/default/files/styles/opengraph/public/2022-02/hFish_02.jpg?h=406f0743&itok=nfC2Gm-2 https://www.seas.harvard.edu/sites/default/files/styles/embedded_image_large/public/2022-02/hFish_09.jpg?itok=xPJWhb42 - Project page: https://www.seas.harvard.edu/news/2022/02/biohybrid-fish-made-human-cardiac-cells-swims-heart-beats #### Calmbots — Yuga Tsukuda, Yoichi Ochiai (2022) - Type: Research prototype · Organisms: Insects - Idea: Living insects as a swarm interface for creative work. - What it is: Groups of three to five cockroaches with small electronic backpacks are steered by electrical stimulation toward goals, where they draw, carry objects, form displays or give haptic feedback. - How it works: AR markers on the backpacks are tracked by a camera; a radio base station sends stimulation to steer each insect, with at least 60% reaching accuracy. - Paper: https://doi.org/10.1145/3491101.3516387 (CHI 2022 EA) - Video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sVw0oJgNg9k - Images: https://figures.semanticscholar.org/d875e2e52af8adbce1d8cc50e032d18262cc6f89/500px/5-Figure2-1.png - Project page: https://doi.org/10.1145/3491101.3516387 #### Integration of body-mounted ultrasoft organic solar cell on cyborg insects with intact mobility — Kenjiro Fukuda, Hirotaka Sato (2022) - Type: Paper · Organisms: Insects - Idea: Design electronics thin enough that the animal's own body still works. - What it is: Madagascar hissing cockroaches carry a 3D-printed backpack and a 4-micrometre-thick solar film on their abdomen, which recharges the battery that steers them without stopping them from moving or righting themselves. - How it works: An ultrathin organic photovoltaic film with adhesive and non-adhesive stripes follows abdominal segments; a wireless module stimulates the cerci to steer. - Paper: https://doi.org/10.1038/s41528-022-00207-2 (npj Flexible Electronics) - Video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kaTWbghsweI - Images: https://www.riken.jp/news-pubs-en/research-news-en/2022-research-en/20220905_2_twitter.png - Project page: https://www.riken.jp/en/news_pubs/research_news/pr/2022/20220905_2/index.html #### Living skin on a robot — Shoji Takeuchi (2022) - Type: Paper · Organisms: Cells & tissue, Human body - Idea: A robot that can be wounded and heal, with skin like ours. - What it is: A robotic finger was covered in cultured human skin that stretched as it bent, repelled water like real skin and healed a cut when a collagen bandage was applied. - How it works: The finger was dipped into a solution of collagen and human dermal fibroblasts that shrank to fit, then seeded with keratinocytes to form an epidermis. - Paper: https://doi.org/10.1016/j.matt.2022.05.019 (Matter) - Video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1fvlYZ0zwa0 - Images: https://www.u-tokyo.ac.jp/content/400189277.png https://www.u-tokyo.ac.jp/content/400189276.png - Project page: https://www.u-tokyo.ac.jp/focus/en/press/z0508_00225.html #### Necrobotics: Biotic materials as ready-to-use actuators — Daniel Preston (2022) - Type: Paper · Organisms: Insects, Animals - Idea: A dead body can still be a finished, working machine. - What it is: Dead wolf spiders turned into grippers: injecting air into the body extends the legs, and releasing it lets them close to pick up objects heavier than the spider. - How it works: Spiders move legs hydraulically; a needle glued into the cephalothorax connects to a syringe that pressurises the body to open the legs. - Paper: https://doi.org/10.1002/advs.202201174 (Advanced Science) - Video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1JOS6hMHIUM - Images: https://news.rice.edu/sites/g/files/bxs2656/files/2022-07/0718_necro_b_1.jpg https://news.rice.edu/sites/g/files/bxs2656/files/inline-images/0718_NECRO%201%20RN.jpg - Project page: https://news.rice.edu/news/2022/rice-engineers-get-grip-necrobotic-spiders #### plant machete — David Bowen (2022) - Type: Artwork · Organisms: Plants - Idea: Give a plant a weapon to make its hidden electrical life legible, and unsettling. - What it is: A philodendron controls an industrial robot arm holding a machete, deciding how it swings, jabs and slices through the air. - How it works: A microcontroller reads varying resistance across the leaves; custom software maps these signals in real time to the robot's joint angles. - Video: https://vimeo.com/744608966 - Images: https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5509f2e8e4b042d7b1ec6ab5/1662030826726-PWZ9JM9QWQ5K9MF34QOK/plant_machete%28banner%29.jpg - Project page: https://www.dwbowen.com/plant-machete #### A cellular platform for the development of synthetic living machines (Xenobots 2.0) — Douglas Blackiston, Michael Levin, Josh Bongard, Sam Kriegman (2021) - Type: Paper · Organisms: Cells & tissue, Animals - Idea: Let cells self-organise the body, then program behaviour on top. - What it is: Frog stem cells left to self-assemble formed spherical Xenobots that swim with hair-like cilia, work together to gather debris into piles and can record an encounter with a colour-changing memory protein. - How it works: Xenopus animal-cap cells aggregate into spheroids covered in motile cilia; mRNA for the photoconvertible protein EosFP serves as a one-bit memory of blue-light exposure. - Paper: https://doi.org/10.1126/scirobotics.abf1571 (Science Robotics) - Video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=g_eLsiAv8w4 - Images: https://now.tufts.edu/sites/default/files/uploaded-assets/images/2022-04/next-generation-living-robots.jpg https://now.tufts.edu/sites/default/files/inline-images/eofsp2%2520vTN%281%29.jpg - Project page: https://now.tufts.edu/2021/03/31/scientists-create-next-generation-living-robots #### Kinematic self-replication in reconfigurable organisms — Sam Kriegman, Douglas Blackiston, Michael Levin, Josh Bongard (2021) - Type: Paper · Organisms: Cells & tissue, Animals - Idea: A new way for life to reproduce: by building copies from loose parts, like a machine would. - What it is: Xenobots swimming among loose frog stem cells pushed them into piles that matured into new Xenobots; an AI-designed 'Pac-Man' shape kept this replication going for more generations. - How it works: Evolutionary search in simulation found body shapes that maximise pile-making; the designs were tested in dishes of dissociated Xenopus cells. - Paper: https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.2112672118 (PNAS) - Video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aBYtBXaxsOw - Images: https://wyss-prod.imgix.net/app/uploads/2021/11/29104616/Blackiston4.jpg?auto=format%2Ccompress&crop=faces%2Centropy&fit=crop&q=50&w=800&s=91e3c9a5c06a3586953895229a7b6ade https://now.tufts.edu/sites/default/files/uploaded-assets/images/migrated/211129_xenobot_replicating_lg.jpg - Project page: https://wyss.harvard.edu/news/team-builds-first-living-robots-that-can-reproduce/ #### A scalable pipeline for designing reconfigurable organisms (Xenobots) — Sam Kriegman, Douglas Blackiston, Michael Levin, Josh Bongard (2020) - Type: Paper · Organisms: Cells & tissue, Animals - Idea: A computer designs the body, living cells build it: the first organisms designed from scratch by AI. - What it is: An evolutionary algorithm designed body shapes in simulation, and the best designs were built by hand from frog skin and heart cells; the sub-millimetre 'Xenobots' walked, pushed pellets and healed after cuts. - How it works: Designs evolved on a supercomputer were sculpted from Xenopus laevis stem-cell tissue with microsurgery tools; beating cardiomyocytes provided propulsion. - Paper: https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.1910837117 (PNAS) - Video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aQRBCCjaYGE - Images: https://www.uvm.edu/d10-files/styles/default_1920/public/shared/story-photos/xenobot-organism-pair-800x400.jpg.webp?itok=DdsLbXZG https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/a/ad/A_xenobot_in_simulation_and_reality.png - Project page: https://www.uvm.edu/uvmnews/news/team-builds-first-living-robots #### Bricolage — Guy Ben-Ary (2020) - Type: Artwork · Organisms: Cells & tissue, Human body - Idea: Show cellular life at human scale without screens, so the uncanny 'aliveness' of fragments is felt directly. - What it is: Human heart muscle cells, made from donors' blood via stem cells, beat on silk scaffolds inside a clay-and-glass incubator, twitching and self-assembling into living automatons large enough to see with the naked eye. - How it works: White blood cells were reprogrammed into iPS cells and differentiated into cardiomyocytes (Sebastian Diecke), seeded on custom-printed silk scaffolds; with Nathan Thompson. - Video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eAvf270epMU - Images: https://www.guybenary.com/images/bricolage.jpg https://www.guybenary.com/images/bric-1.jpg - Project page: https://www.guybenary.com/projects/bricolage.html #### Explosive sensing with insect-based biorobots — Barani Raman (2020) - Type: Paper · Organisms: Insects, Neurons & organoids - Idea: Read an insect's brain as a chemical detector. - What it is: Locusts fitted with electrodes in their brain and a small backpack could tell apart the vapours of different explosives within milliseconds, and did so while moving on a small cart. - How it works: Recordings from the antennal lobe of Schistocerca americana were decoded; a heat-producing tattoo on the wings was proposed to steer them. - Paper: https://doi.org/10.1016/j.biosx.2020.100050 (Biosensors and Bioelectronics: X) - Video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mpz9Nq-Ud8c - Images: https://source.washu.edu/app/uploads/2020/08/locustsensor.jpg https://source.washu.edu/app/uploads/2016/06/Locusts-for-Source.jpg - Project page: https://source.washu.edu/2020/08/researchers-one-step-closer-to-bomb-sniffing-cyborg-locusts/ #### Low-power microelectronics embedded in live jellyfish enhance propulsion — Nicole Xu, John Dabiri (2020) - Type: Paper · Organisms: Animals - Idea: Augment an animal that is already an efficient swimmer instead of building a new robot. - What it is: A small pacemaker attached to moon jellyfish made them swim up to nearly three times faster while using only a little extra energy, without apparent stress to the animal. - How it works: A self-contained microelectronic stimulator with electrodes in the swimming muscle of Aurelia aurita sets a faster pulse rate than the animal's own. - Paper: https://doi.org/10.1126/sciadv.aaz3194 (Science Advances) - Video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pH5CVb7yjFw - Images: https://caltech-prod.resources.caltech.edu/main/images/Xu-Dabiri-Jellyfish-Illustra.bab43a61.fill-1600x810-c100.jpg - Project page: https://www.caltech.edu/about/news/bionic-jellyfish-swim-faster-and-more-efficiently #### Smellicopter: a bio-hybrid odor-guided autonomous palm-sized air vehicle — Sawyer Fuller (2020) - Type: Paper · Organisms: Insects - Idea: Borrow an insect's sense organ, which beats any artificial sensor, and put it on a machine. - What it is: A palm-sized drone uses a live antenna from a hawk moth as its nose, turning toward an odour source and avoiding obstacles on its own. - How it works: An excised Manduca sexta antenna stays alive for hours between electrodes; its signal spikes when it detects odour, and the drone's plume-tracking algorithm uses that signal. - Paper: https://doi.org/10.1088/1748-3190/abbd81 (Bioinspiration & Biomimetics) - Video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8SGx2qmo9M4 - Images: https://cdn.uw.edu/wp-content/uploads/sites/6/2020/12/07110526/SmellicopterWEB001.jpg https://cdn.uw.edu/wp-content/uploads/sites/6/2020/12/07110529/SmellicopterWEB003-750x500.jpg - Project page: https://www.washington.edu/news/2020/12/07/smellicopter-avoids-obstacles-uses-live-moth-antenna-to-smell/ #### Bacterbrain — Ivan Henriques (2019) - Type: Artwork · Organisms: Bacteria & microbes - Idea: What would a robot do if its 'brain' were a bacterial colony? - What it is: A tensegrity structure that moves and reshapes itself according to electrical fluctuations from photosynthetic bacteria, which also power it. - How it works: Rhodobacter sphaeroides with potassium permanganate form photosynthetic microbial fuel cells; their voltage variations trigger motors that shift weights inside the structure. - Images: https://ivanhenriques.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/11/IMG_3417-1024x683.jpg https://ivanhenriques.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/05/IMG_3406.jpg - Project page: https://ivanhenriques.com/works/bacterbrain/ #### C-DER — Ivan Henriques (2019) - Type: Artwork · Organisms: Algae, Plants - Idea: Design robots whose main job is to breathe and plant for an ecosystem. - What it is: A swarm of autonomous robots that exchange gases with their surroundings through micro-algae photosynthesis while dispersing seeds to restore damaged land. - How it works: Each unit carries micro-algae cultures for photosynthetic gas exchange and a seeding mechanism; developed with VU Amsterdam biophysics, Ghent University CMET, CEFET/RJ and ESA Space Garden. - Images: https://ivanhenriques.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/05/IMG_0405.jpg https://ivanhenriques.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/05/Cderpic_info.jpeg.001.jpeg - Project page: https://ivanhenriques.com/works/c-der/ #### Neuromuscular actuation of biohybrid motile bots — Taher Saif (2019) - Type: Paper · Organisms: Cells & tissue, Neurons & organoids - Idea: Give a biohybrid robot its own nerves. - What it is: A swimmer whose muscle is driven by living motor neurons grown from stem cells, so the nerve cells, not an external pulse, make it move. - How it works: An optogenetic neural cluster from mouse stem cells innervates skeletal muscle on a two-tailed scaffold; light activates the neurons, which drive the muscle. - Paper: https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.1907051116 (PNAS) - Images: https://scx2.b-cdn.net/gfx/news/2019/15-researchersb.jpg - Project page: https://techxplore.com/news/2019-09-microscopic-biohybrid-robots-propelled-muscles.html #### plant drone — David Bowen (2019) - Type: Artwork · Organisms: Plants - Idea: A plant can be a pilot if you read its body as a joystick. - What it is: A live plant rides on a drone and pilots it: signals from its leaves set left-right, forward-back and altitude, while an LED on board draws the flight path in long-exposure night photos. - How it works: An open-source microcontroller reads variable resistance across individual leaves and maps each channel to a flight axis; shown at the Digital Naturalism Conference in Panama (likely 2019). - Video: https://vimeo.com/709247945 - Images: https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5509f2e8e4b042d7b1ec6ab5/1580337699462-XF5KA33HL341CBFZV2MZ/plant_drone_panama1.JPG https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5509f2e8e4b042d7b1ec6ab5/1580337569390-SADHUDIB4KRPD3RUBDC6/drone_cropped.jpg - Project page: https://www.dwbowen.com/plantdrone #### Biohybrid robot powered by an antagonistic pair of skeletal muscle tissues — Shoji Takeuchi (2018) - Type: Paper · Organisms: Cells & tissue, Animals - Idea: Copy the body's paired-muscle layout to make living actuators last. - What it is: A robotic finger joint bent back and forth for a week, driven by two lab-grown rat muscles working against each other like biceps and triceps, and picked up and placed a ring. - How it works: Myoblast-laden hydrogel sheets matured into muscle on a resin skeleton; electrical stimulation contracted each side in turn while the opposite muscle kept tension. - Paper: https://doi.org/10.1126/scirobotics.aat4440 (Science Robotics) - Video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3UXG4xL0S4g - Images: https://scx2.b-cdn.net/gfx/news/2018/5b0eadc3c3428.jpg https://neurosciencenews.com/files/2018/06/muslces-robots-neurosciencnews.jpg - Project page: https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2018/05/180530144132.htm #### Soft erythrocyte-based bacterial microswimmers for cargo delivery — Metin Sitti (2018) - Type: Paper · Organisms: Bacteria & microbes, Cells & tissue - Idea: Use bacteria as motors and blood cells as soft vehicles for robots inside the body. - What it is: Red blood cells loaded with drugs and magnetic particles are pushed along by attached E. coli bacteria, steered by magnets, and can be destroyed on command with light. - How it works: Engineered E. coli bind to red blood cells via biotin–avidin; superparamagnetic nanoparticles enable magnetic steering and near-infrared light triggers self-destruction. - Paper: https://doi.org/10.1126/scirobotics.aar4423 (Science Robotics) - Video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5EIAGsc4cR0 - Images: https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/57ed3edb37c58182f815c65f/1524758481020-IS6JIXV2ZM3NWFMJ64FB/content_Electromicroscopic_image_of_the_RBC_microswimmer.jpg - Project page: https://www.is.mpg.de/news/multifunctional-bacterial-microswimmer-able-to-deliver-cargo-and-destroy-itself #### Toward self-growing soft robots inspired by plant roots and based on additive manufacturing technologies — Barbara Mazzolai (2017) - Type: Paper · Organisms: Plants - Idea: Take plants as the model for robots that grow instead of walk. - What it is: A robot root that follows IIT's earlier Plantoid project and moves into soil by growing: a 3D printer in its tip lays down new material, so it lengthens from the tip like a real root. - How it works: A plant-inspired robot, not a biohybrid: a tip-mounted additive-manufacturing mechanism deposits thermoplastic filament layer by layer as the root advances. - Paper: https://doi.org/10.1089/soro.2016.0080 (Soft Robotics) - Video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mrEAwZJKxzE - Images: https://cdn.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/blobs/bb2a/5649421/145c1144700e/fig-1.jpg https://cdn.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/blobs/bb2a/5649421/171874803de1/fig-13.jpg - Project page: https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC5649421/ #### fly carving device — David Bowen (2017) - Type: Artwork · Organisms: Insects - Idea: Let a swarm drive digital fabrication so the object records their behaviour. - What it is: One hundred houseflies in an acrylic sphere control a five-axis CNC router as it carves a block of foam, deciding where, how fast and how deep it cuts. - How it works: A camera tracks fly motion; custom software maps a single fly or the collective's activity to G-code for the CNC axes (made at Autodesk Pier 9, likely). - Video: https://vimeo.com/223985027 - Images: https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5509f2e8e4b042d7b1ec6ab5/1499028830122-Z6JYXA545WEHGL52X6B2/fly_carving_device%28banner%29.jpg - Project page: https://www.dwbowen.com/fly-carving-device #### Aplysia californica as a novel source of material for biohybrid robots and organic machines — Victoria Webster-Wood (2016) - Type: Paper · Organisms: Animals, Cells & tissue - Idea: Pick a tough animal whose tissue can survive outside the lab. - What it is: A 3D-printed crawler moves using the buccal muscle of the California sea slug, which tolerates wide temperature ranges and is built from biodegradable parts. - How it works: The I2 buccal muscle of Aplysia is attached to a printed polymer body and stimulated electrically; later versions use the animal's own nerve ganglia as controllers. - Paper: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-42417-0_33 (Living Machines 2016, LNCS) - Video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5MJZd1PnqvM - Images: https://www.newswise.com/images/uploads/2016/07/18/biobot.jpg - Project page: https://www.newswise.com/articles/researchers-build-a-crawling-robot-from-sea-slug-parts-and-a-3-d-printed-body #### Caravel — Ivan Henriques (2016) - Type: Artwork · Organisms: Bacteria & microbes, Plants, Ecosystems - Idea: A machine that cleans the water that powers it. - What it is: A hexagonal floating bio-machine that harvests electricity from bacteria in polluted water while its plants and fuel cells filter that water; units can join into a swarm. - How it works: Seven hexagons are microbial fuel cells with carbon-brush anodes and steel-mesh cathodes where Geobacter-dominated bacteria oxidise pollutants; trapezoids hold filtering water plants such as Pistia. - Video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jJg0PEP5Ukc - Images: https://ivanhenriques.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/04/img_1996.jpg https://ivanhenriques.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/04/caravel_korneel-e1517413346684.jpg - Project page: https://ivanhenriques.com/works/caravel/ #### Optogenetic skeletal muscle-powered adaptive biological machines — Ritu Raman, Rashid Bashir (2016) - Type: Paper · Organisms: Cells & tissue, Animals - Idea: Machines that train and grow stronger, like athletes. - What it is: Biobots with light-sensitive muscle walk when blue light pulses, and their muscle gets stronger with repeated 'exercise'. - How it works: Channelrhodopsin-expressing mouse myoblasts form muscle rings on hydrogel skeletons; light pulses set the gait and repeated stimulation increases force. - Paper: https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.1516139113 (PNAS) - Video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BwMT_ok4WW0 - Images: https://media.news.illinois.edu/wp-content/uploads/2024/12/19140142/84871-1140x760.jpg - Project page: https://news.illinois.edu/light-illuminates-the-way-for-bio-bots/ #### Phototactic guidance of a tissue-engineered soft-robotic ray — Kit Parker (2016) - Type: Paper · Organisms: Cells & tissue, Animals - Idea: Steer a living machine with light by making its muscle light-sensitive. - What it is: A 16-millimetre robotic stingray with a gold skeleton and 200,000 genetically modified rat heart cells swims and follows pulses of light through an obstacle course. - How it works: Optogenetically engineered cardiomyocytes on an elastomer body contract in response to blue light; left and right fins are triggered by different light frequencies. - Paper: https://doi.org/10.1126/science.aaf4292 (Science) - Video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=E8YwpECaHdw - Images: https://i.ytimg.com/vi/-D_XrRo0h20/maxresdefault.jpg https://i.ytimg.com/vi/E8YwpECaHdw/hqdefault.jpg - Project page: https://www.science.org/content/article/robotic-stingray-powered-light-activated-muscle-cells #### flora robotica — mixed societies of symbiotic robot–plant bio-hybrids — Heiko Hamann (2015) - Type: Research prototype · Organisms: Plants - Idea: Architecture that is grown by plants and steered by robots over months. - What it is: An EU project in which robots with lights and sensors steer the growth of climbing plants along braided scaffolds, so robots and plants shape architecture together. - How it works: Distributed robot nodes emit blue light to attract plant growth toward chosen directions and sense plant position; plants in turn stiffen the scaffold. - Paper: https://doi.org/10.1109/SSCI.2015.158 (IEEE Symposium Series on Computational Intelligence (SSCI) 2015) - Video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Byo55asQUwM - Images: http://www.florarobotica.eu/wp-content/uploads/2016/11/CITA_M18-review-prototypes.jpg http://www.florarobotica.eu/wp-content/uploads/2016/11/CITA_M18-review-prototype_detail.jpg - Project page: http://www.florarobotica.eu #### A self-propelled biohybrid swimmer at low Reynolds number — Taher Saif (2014) - Type: Paper · Organisms: Cells & tissue, Animals - Idea: Let cells coordinate among themselves through the body's mechanics. - What it is: A sperm-like swimmer with a polymer tail and a head of heart cells swims on its own, as neighbouring cells coordinate their beating along the tail. - How it works: Cardiomyocytes grow on a flexible PDMS filament; mechanical coupling synchronises their contractions into a travelling wave. - Paper: https://doi.org/10.1038/ncomms4081 (Nature Communications) - Video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7XbElMI6OaA - Images: https://scx2.b-cdn.net/gfx/news/hires/2014/tinyswimming.jpg - Project page: https://phys.org/news/2014-01-tiny-bio-bots-boldly-bot-swum.html #### Fish on Wheels — Studio diip (2014) - Type: Research prototype · Organisms: Animals - Idea: Off-the-shelf computer vision is enough to give an animal a vehicle. - What it is: A pet goldfish drives its tank around a room on a wheeled robot base: when it swims toward a side of the tank, the vehicle moves that way. - How it works: A camera above the tank tracks the fish's position with computer vision software and maps it to motor commands of a small robot car. - Video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YbNmL6hSNKw - Images: https://i.ytimg.com/vi/YbNmL6hSNKw/maxresdefault.jpg - Project page: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YbNmL6hSNKw #### Symbiotic Machine — Ivan Henriques (2014) - Type: Artwork · Organisms: Algae - Idea: A machine that lives off its environment the way an animal grazes. - What it is: A floating bio-machine that collects algae from the water, harvests energy from their photosynthesis and uses it to move and collect more algae. - How it works: A worm-screw 'mouth' pulls in Spirogyra; the algae feed a photosynthetic energy cell (likely a bio-photovoltaic design by VU Amsterdam biophysicists) whose current drives the floating robot. - Images: https://ivanhenriques.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/03/dsc07923.jpg https://ivanhenriques.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/03/dsc07940_edit.jpg - Project page: https://ivanhenriques.com/works/symbiotic-machine/ #### Three-dimensionally printed biological machines powered by skeletal muscle — Rashid Bashir (2014) - Type: Paper · Organisms: Cells & tissue, Animals - Idea: Switch from heart to skeletal muscle so the machine moves only when told. - What it is: Bio-bots powered by a ring of skeletal muscle move only when stimulated by electrical pulses, giving the first on-command control of walking biobots. - How it works: Mouse myoblasts in a hydrogel ring differentiate into muscle around 3D-printed pillars; the pulse frequency sets the walking speed. - Paper: https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.1401577111 (PNAS) - Video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=skCzl7FlM34 - Images: https://bioengineering.illinois.edu/_sitemanager/viewphoto.aspx?id=36457&s=1200 https://scx2.b-cdn.net/gfx/news/hires/2014/musclepowere.jpg - Project page: https://bioengineering.illinois.edu/news/muscle-powered-biobots-walk-command #### Odour-tracking capability of a silkmoth driving a mobile robot — Ryohei Kanzaki (2013) - Type: Paper · Organisms: Insects - Idea: Let an insect drive a vehicle to see how its brain adapts. - What it is: A male silkmoth walks on a ball mounted on a small wheeled robot, and its steps drive the robot toward a female pheromone source, even when the robot's response is delayed or biased. - How it works: The moth's walking on a trackball is read by optical sensors and converted into wheel speed; delays and turning bias are introduced to test adaptation. - Paper: https://doi.org/10.1088/1748-3182/8/1/016008 (Bioinspiration & Biomimetics) - Video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n2k1T2X7_Aw - Images: https://scx1.b-cdn.net/csz/news/800a/2013/ytfguk.jpg https://scx1.b-cdn.net/csz/news/800a/2013/l87ngkuyf.jpg - Project page: https://phys.org/news/2013-02-insect-robot-track-video.html #### RoboRoach — Backyard Brains (2013) - Type: Product & platform · Organisms: Insects - Idea: A cyborg-insect kit as a way to teach neuroscience, and a public test of where the ethical line lies. - What it is: A consumer kit that lets students attach a Bluetooth backpack to a cockroach's antennae and turn it left or right with a smartphone app. - How it works: Wires inserted into the antennae deliver small pulses that the cockroach perceives as touching an obstacle, so it turns the other way. - Video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=L0jBzi-gKco - Images: https://backyardbrains.com/cdn/shop/products/RoboRoach_iPod.jpg?v=1734628912 https://backyardbrains.com/cdn/shop/products/roboRoachGoRight.jpg?v=1741629247 - Project page: https://backyardbrains.com/products/roboroach #### fly revolver — David Bowen (2013) - Type: Artwork · Organisms: Insects - Idea: Hand a consequential decision to an indifferent organism to make agency and responsibility visible. - What it is: Houseflies in an acrylic sphere with a target backdrop control a robotic mount that aims a revolver; when a fly lands on the bullseye, the trigger is pulled. - How it works: Video tracking of fly positions on the target is mapped in real time to pan and tilt of the gun mount and to the trigger. - Video: https://vimeo.com/71826503 - Images: https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5509f2e8e4b042d7b1ec6ab5/1427032238572-TBX3H2Z6J161LGKP7QZM/banner_sized_fly_revolver%28full%29.jpg - Project page: https://www.dwbowen.com/fly-revolver #### A tissue-engineered jellyfish with biomimetic propulsion (Medusoid) — Kit Parker, John Dabiri (2012) - Type: Paper · Organisms: Cells & tissue, Animals - Idea: Reverse-engineer an animal by rebuilding it from different cells. - What it is: A flat, eight-armed 'Medusoid' made of silicone and rat heart muscle cells swims like a juvenile moon jellyfish when an electric field makes the cells contract. - How it works: Rat cardiomyocytes were patterned on a silicone sheet to copy the muscle alignment of Aurelia aurita; field stimulation produces synchronous strokes. - Paper: https://doi.org/10.1038/nbt.2269 (Nature Biotechnology) - Video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gfC3eVjmpfo - Images: https://media.springernature.com/full/springer-static/image/art%3A10.1038%2Fnature.2012.11046/MediaObjects/41586_2012_Article_BFnature201211046_Figa_HTML.jpg https://wyss-prod.imgix.net/app/uploads/2016/08/05180605/artificial.jellyfish-275x257.jpg?auto=format%2Ccompress&crop=faces%2Centropy&fit=crop&q=50&w=800&s=8004ee7bfeccacb58da6f8451f10b92f - Project page: https://www.nature.com/news/artificial-jellyfish-built-from-rat-cells-1.11046 #### Development of miniaturized walking biological machines — Rashid Bashir, Taher Saif (2012) - Type: Paper · Organisms: Cells & tissue, Animals - Idea: Print a skeleton, seed it with cells, and let the heartbeat become a gait. - What it is: Half-centimetre 3D-printed hydrogel cantilevers covered with beating rat heart cells 'walked' across a surface, the first of the Illinois bio-bots. - How it works: A stereolithography-printed asymmetric hydrogel beam with a layer of cardiomyocytes bends with each beat, moving the bot forward. - Paper: https://doi.org/10.1038/srep00857 (Scientific Reports) - Video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LZgdOelmIVw - Images: https://scx2.b-cdn.net/gfx/news/hires/2012/thesebotswer.jpg - Project page: https://phys.org/news/2012-11-bots-cells-power-biological-machines.html #### Skinsucka — Clive van Heerden (2011) - Type: Speculative design · Organisms: Bacteria & microbes, Human body - Idea: Living appliances may take over servile work, and we should ask who pays for it. - What it is: A design film in which swarms of bacteria-powered micro-robots clean the home and the skin, then extrude the digested dirt as threads woven into the wearer's clothes. - How it works: Imagines microbial fuel cells that let autonomous micro-devices feed on household dirt; made by Van Heerden Mama with Nancy Tilbury, Bart Hess and others. - Images: http://thisisalive.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/03/DSC_9177SkinSucka-760x501.jpg http://thisisalive.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/04/DSC_8994_SkinSucka.jpg - Project page: http://thisisalive.com/skin-sucka/ #### EcoBot-III: a robot with guts — Ioannis Ieropoulos (2010) - Type: Research prototype · Organisms: Bacteria & microbes - Idea: A robot that eats, digests and excretes, powered by the metabolism of its microbes. - What it is: A robot powered by 48 microbial fuel cells that collected its own food and water from an arena, digested it with bacteria, excreted the waste and kept itself running for seven days. - How it works: Anaerobic bacteria in a stack of microbial fuel cells oxidise organic feedstock and release electrons to the anodes; a pump circulates food, water and waste like a digestive tract. - Video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qU6zi1_aZiw - Images: https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/7/71/Image_eco_bot_-III.jpg - Project page: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/EcoBot #### fly blimps — David Bowen (2010) - Type: Artwork · Organisms: Insects - Idea: A tiny collective can be the flight brain of a vehicle. - What it is: Three to five helium blimps wander through a space, each steered by up to 50 houseflies living in a chamber underneath. - How it works: Sensors detect changing light patterns caused by the flies' movement and an on-board microcontroller drives the propellers accordingly; the chambers hold food and water. - Video: https://vimeo.com/20967084 - Images: https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5509f2e8e4b042d7b1ec6ab5/1427108608464-38ZMA1OIH9EHA5TYCMWQ/banner_fly_blimps%28web4%29.jpg - Project page: https://www.dwbowen.com/fly-blimps #### Remote radio control of insect flight — Hirotaka Sato (2009) - Type: Paper · Organisms: Insects - Idea: Instead of building a flying robot, steer an insect that already flies. - What it is: Large flower beetles fitted with a radio backpack could be made to take off, turn and stop flying on command, by stimulating their brain and flight muscles. - How it works: Electrodes implanted in the optic lobes and basalar muscles of Mecynorrhina torquata connect to a microcontroller and radio receiver on the back. - Paper: https://doi.org/10.3389/neuro.07.024.2009 (Frontiers in Integrative Neuroscience) - Video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UhPbln4vnvw - Images: https://content.time.com/time/photoessays/2009/50_best_inventions/inventions_cyborg_beetle.jpg - Project page: https://content.time.com/time/specials/packages/article/0,28804,1934027_1934003_1933968,00.html #### Plantas Nómadas (Nomadic Plants) — Gilberto Esparza (2008) - Type: Artwork · Organisms: Bacteria & microbes, Plants - Idea: Design a new 'species' whose metabolism is shared between robot, microbes and plants, and which repairs its habitat. - What it is: An autonomous walking robot sucks polluted river water into microbial fuel cells; the bacteria clean the water and produce electricity, and the cleaned water feeds plants growing on the robot's back. - How it works: Microbial fuel cells with native bacteria biodegrade waste and charge batteries, photovoltaics drive locomotion, and the robot voices high pollution through sound; tested on the Lerma river. - Video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=137KANbB1FA - Images: https://gilbertoesparza.net/wp-content/uploads/2021/02/proceso176-1024x683.jpg https://gilbertoesparza.net/wp-content/uploads/2021/02/MG_4156.jpg - Project page: https://gilbertoesparza.net/portfolio/plantas-nomadas/ #### Perejil Buscando al Sol (Parsley Looking for the Sun) — Gilberto Esparza (2007) - Type: Artwork · Organisms: Plants - Idea: Give a plant wheels so it can act on its need for light. - What it is: A small robot carrying a living parsley plant moves by itself to escape the shade of the city and find sunlight. - How it works: Photovoltaic cells, motors and a methacrylate body with soil and a living plant; the solar cells steer the vehicle toward brighter light (likely a simple light-seeking circuit). - Images: https://gilbertoesparza.net/wp-content/uploads/2016/01/PEREJIL.jpg - Project page: https://gilbertoesparza.net/portfolio/perejil-buscando-al-sol/ #### Preliminary design of an autonomous microrobot propelled by magnetotactic bacteria — Sylvain Martel (2007) - Type: Paper · Organisms: Bacteria & microbes - Idea: Use swimming bacteria as the motor and electronics only as the steering wheel. - What it is: Design of a sub-millimetre autonomous robot pushed by magnetotactic bacteria, with an on-chip coil that generates a magnetic field to steer the bacteria and so the robot. - How it works: MC-1 magnetotactic bacteria align with a field produced by a CMOS-based 3D solenoid; photovoltaic cells power the electronics. - Paper: https://doi.org/10.1109/AIM.2007.4412427 (IEEE/ASME AIM 2007) - Images: https://biodigitalviz.github.io/images/MTB_microrobot.png - Project page: https://doi.org/10.1109/AIM.2007.4412427 #### Autoinducer_Ph-1 (cross-cultural chemistry) — Andy Gracie (2006) - Type: Artwork · Organisms: Bacteria & microbes, Plants - Idea: Let a microbial symbiosis, read through software, run an agricultural machine. - What it is: A robotic rice-farming installation whose arms decide whether to fertilise a rice paddy based on the state of the symbiosis between the water fern Azolla and the cyanobacterium Anabaena. - How it works: Azolla-Anabaena cultures are monitored by video microscope and sensors, a software 'bacterium' (Generalized Cellular Signaling System) interacts with the data as symbiont or parasite, and the outcome drives two robot arms; made with Brian Lee Yung Rowe. - Images: https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5c51d5fa9772aea91d1c75bf/1584292964716-G7KGT5R0SSMBTSYRVG6B/autoinducer_1.jpg https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5c51d5fa9772aea91d1c75bf/1584293008350-91OGTO9HDWNKESLOLD6T/autoinducer_ars_3.jpg - Project page: https://www.hostprods.net/autoinducer_ph1-copy-1/ #### EcoBot-II: An Artificial Agent with a Natural Metabolism — Ioannis Ieropoulos (2005) - Type: Paper · Organisms: Bacteria & microbes - Idea: A robot can eat: let bacterial digestion be its battery. - What it is: A small robot that powers itself with microbial fuel cells full of sewage-sludge bacteria; fed with flies and other raw food, it senses light, processes data, communicates and moves. - How it works: Eight microbial fuel cells with mixed bacterial cultures oxidise organic substrate at the anode and use oxygen from air at the cathode, charging capacitors that drive the robot in bursts. - Paper: https://doi.org/10.5772/5777 (International Journal of Advanced Robotic Systems 2005) - Video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6M6i0GM2nsY - Images: https://biodigitalviz.github.io/images/ecobot.jpg - Project page: https://doi.org/10.5772/5777 #### Augmented Fish Reality — Ken Rinaldo (2004) - Type: Artwork · Organisms: Animals - Idea: Interactive art for animals: the fish are the users, humans are part of their environment. - What it is: Five rolling robotic fishbowls are steered by the Siamese fighting fish inside them, which drive toward each other, toward visitors or away as they choose. - How it works: Each bowl has four infrared sensors; when a fish swims in front of one, a microcontroller drives the motorised wheels forward, back, left or right, and plants in the bowl absorb fish waste. - Video: https://www.kenrinaldo.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/08/Augmented-Fish-Reality-web.mp4 - Images: https://www.kenrinaldo.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/08/fish_robot_004.jpg https://www.kenrinaldo.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/08/AugmentedFishRealityArsElectronica.jpg - Project page: https://www.kenrinaldo.com/portfolio/augmented-fish-reality/ #### Cockroach Controlled Mobile Robot — Garnet Hertz (2004) - Type: Artwork · Organisms: Insects - Idea: Use a living insect as the robot's CPU and close the loop with feedback to its body. - What it is: A Madagascar hissing cockroach stands on a trackball on top of a three-wheeled robot; its walking steers the robot, and distance sensors feed back to the insect so it can avoid obstacles. - How it works: The cockroach's leg movements rotate a ping-pong-ball trackball whose motion is converted into wheel commands; front distance sensors trigger lights that likely nudge the insect away from walls (three versions, 2004–2008). - Video: https://vimeo.com/2668250 - Images: http://www.conceptlab.com/roachbot/v1-whitebackdrop/IMG_1834.JPG - Project page: http://www.conceptlab.com/roachbot/ #### A-positive — Eduardo Kac (1997) - Type: Artwork · Organisms: Human body, Cells & tissue - Idea: A robot that depends on human blood turns the human-machine relation into mutual feeding. - What it is: A human and a robot are joined by intravenous lines: the person donates blood to the 'biobot', which extracts oxygen from it to keep a small flame alive, and in return feeds dextrose into the person's vein. - How it works: A 'phlebot' circulated donated red blood cells to extract oxygen for a small flame and delivered dextrose intravenously; made with Ed Bennett. - Images: https://www.ekac.org/apositive-yank.jpg https://www.ekac.org/apositive-machine.jpg - Project page: https://www.ekac.org/apositive-info.html #### Delicate Balance — Ken Rinaldo (1989) - Type: Artwork · Organisms: Animals - Idea: Give an animal the steering of a vehicle and let its gaze decide where it goes. - What it is: A Siamese fighting fish in a small tank decides which way the tank travels along a stainless-steel tightrope, letting it look beyond the glass and at itself in a mirror. - How it works: The betta crosses infrared break-beams inside the tank, which switch a motor that moves the tank along the wire toward the side it faces; a rear-view mirror at one end lets it see its reflection. - Video: https://www.kenrinaldo.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/08/Delicate-Balance-web.mp4 - Images: https://www.kenrinaldo.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/08/delicate-balance.jpg https://www.kenrinaldo.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/06/delicate-balance-09.jpg - Project page: https://www.kenrinaldo.com/portfolio/delicate-balance-1989/ ### DNA & Molecular Computing Computing and storing information with DNA, proteins and chemical reactions. #### Supervised learning in DNA neural networks — Lulu Qian (2025) - Type: Paper · Organisms: DNA & molecules - Idea: Molecules that can learn, not only execute a program we give them. - What it is: A DNA neural network learned from examples inside the test tube: training molecules stored weights, and the network then classified new molecular patterns without a computer calculating the weights first. - How it works: Training examples activate DNA strands that set molecular weights in place; test patterns are then processed by the same strand-displacement network. - Paper: https://doi.org/10.1038/s41586-025-09479-w (Nature) - Images: https://caltech-prod.resources.caltech.edu/main/images/Liquid_learning_3200x1620.27baed7e.fill-1600x810-c100.jpg https://caltech-prod.resources.caltech.edu/main/images/Liquid_learning_2.5dad4ab6.width-450.jpg - Project page: https://www.caltech.edu/about/news/dna-based-neural-network-learns-from-examples-to-solve-problems #### A primordial DNA store and compute engine — Albert Keung (2024) - Type: Paper · Organisms: DNA & molecules - Idea: Keep storage and computation together in DNA, as in a computer. - What it is: A soft polymer 'dendricolloid' holds DNA files that can be stored, read, erased, rewritten and used to solve small sudoku and chess problems in one device. - How it works: DNA is loaded onto a branched polymer scaffold that protects it; enzymes and strand operations read and modify data in place. - Paper: https://doi.org/10.1038/s41565-024-01771-6 (Nature Nanotechnology) - Video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IThHS5rkTPw - Images: https://media.springernature.com/full/springer-static/image/art%3A10.1038%2Fs41565-024-01771-6/MediaObjects/41565_2024_1771_Fig1_HTML.png - Project page: https://news.ncsu.edu/2024/08/functional-dna-computing/ #### Biomemory DNA Card — Biomemory (2024) - Type: Product & platform · Organisms: DNA & molecules, Bacteria & microbes - Idea: Package DNA as a familiar object, a card in a rack, so it fits existing infrastructure. - What it is: Biomemory stores data in DNA and presented a credit-card-sized DNA storage cartridge for data-centre racks; in 2021 it stored the French declarations of human and women's rights in DNA for the Archives nationales. - How it works: Data-encoding DNA is produced biologically with engineered cells rather than purely chemical synthesis, then dried and sealed in a cartridge. - Video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-Rdh31Cs3gs - Images: https://next.ink/wp-content/uploads/2024/06/image-43.png https://next.ink/wp-content/uploads/2024/06/image-46-1024x576.png - Project page: https://www.biomemory.com/ #### Between the Lines — Sarah Selby (2022) - Type: Artwork · Organisms: DNA & molecules, Human body - Idea: DNA storage can smuggle human experience into systems that reduce people to risk scores. - What it is: Stories of people subjected to the UK border regime are encoded in synthetic DNA and slipped back into the bureaucratic paperwork that governs them. - How it works: Testimonies are converted to DNA sequences, synthesised and mixed into ink used on administrative forms. - Images: https://ars.electronica.art/starts-prize/files/2023/06/BetweenTheLines_btl_lab-1024x512.jpg https://ars.electronica.art/starts-prize/files/2023/06/BetweenTheLines_installation-1024x512.jpg - Project page: https://www.betweenthelines.org.uk #### Nonlinear decision-making with enzymatic neural networks — Yannick Rondelez (2022) - Type: Paper · Organisms: DNA & molecules - Idea: Chemistry that makes non-linear decisions opens the way to smart diagnostics. - What it is: DNA and enzyme reactions formed neural networks that classify inputs into regions of any shape, the kind of non-linear decisions earlier molecular networks could not make. - How it works: Enzyme-driven DNA templates act as neurons with activation and inhibition, and are run in thousands of microdroplets to map their decision boundaries. - Paper: https://doi.org/10.1038/s41586-022-05218-7 (Nature) - Images: https://media.springernature.com/full/springer-static/image/art%3A10.1038%2Fs41586-022-05218-7/MediaObjects/41586_2022_5218_Fig1_HTML.png - Project page: https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-022-05218-7 #### Perhaps, art begins with the fireflies — Nelo Akamatsu, Yuichi Oba (2022) - Type: Artwork · Organisms: Insects, DNA & molecules - Idea: Molecular reconstruction can let us see what an extinct animal's world looked like. - What it is: In a dark room, many small green glows move in the dark: the light of fireflies from about 100 million years ago, recreated with a luciferase enzyme resurrected from their ancestral gene sequence. - How it works: Luciferase genes from living fireflies were used to infer the ancestral sequence computationally; the resurrected enzyme was produced and mixed with luciferin and oxygen to emit green light; an anteroom shows models, CT scans, specimens and prints. - Paper: https://doi.org/10.1126/sciadv.abc5705 (Science Advances 2020) - Video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kw8gMZNHUFw - Images: http://www.neloakamatsu.jp/images/Hotal_9414aS.jpg https://archive.aec.at/asset/3365702/preview/ - Project page: http://www.neloakamatsu.jp/works/works_art_begins.html #### Urban Data Forest — Cyrus Clarke, Monika Seyfried (2022) - Type: Speculative design · Organisms: Plants, DNA & molecules, Ecosystems - Idea: Imagine city greenery as infrastructure that both captures carbon and keeps memory. - What it is: A speculative plan for The Hague in 2050 in which trees and shrubs store public archives and citizens' personal data in their DNA, as a 'Breathing Museum' and neighbourhood 'Living Archives'. - How it works: Architectural visualisation and site research based on plant DNA data storage via synthetic biology; the data-storing forest is proposed, not built. - Video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4Om_DU1ZadE - Images: https://growyourown.cloud/wp-content/uploads/2022/10/Banner_UDF_Breathing_Museum.jpg https://growyourown.cloud/wp-content/uploads/2022/10/UDF_Dune_Eyelvl_01.jpg - Project page: https://growyourown.cloud/urban-data-forest/ #### Baitul Ma'mur: House of Angels — Joe Davis (2021) - Type: Artwork · Organisms: DNA & molecules - Idea: Use DNA's storage density to make an old question about angels on a pin literally countable. - What it is: Synthetic DNA molecules each hold 19.5 nested encodings of the Arabic invocation 'Subhan Allah', so that a thin layer of DNA on a pin head carries more than two hundred million billion 'angels'. - How it works: A recursive coding scheme, inspired by Islamic geometric calligraphy, reads each base triplet as several numbers at once; the sequence was chemically synthesised in bulk; made with artist Sarah Khan. - Images: https://archive.aec.at/asset/3028497/preview/ https://archive.aec.at/asset/3028540/preview/ - Project page: https://archive.aec.at/prix/255812/ #### Towards proteinoid computers — Andrew Adamatzky (2021) - Type: Paper · Organisms: DNA & molecules - Idea: Proto-life chemistry, older than cells, may already be able to compute. - What it is: A hypothesis paper proposing that proteinoids, thermal proteins that self-assemble into microspheres and produce electrical spikes, could be wired into networks that compute. - How it works: Heating amino acids produces proteinoid microspheres whose spontaneous electrical oscillations are proposed as signals in neuromorphic circuits. - Paper: https://doi.org/10.1016/j.biosystems.2021.104480 (BioSystems) - Images: https://ars.els-cdn.com/content/image/1-s2.0-S0303264721001295-gr1.jpg - Project page: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0303264721001295 #### Data Garden — Cyrus Clarke, Monika Seyfried (2020) - Type: Artwork · Organisms: Plants, DNA & molecules - Idea: A data centre can be a garden that is read by sequencing instead of switched on. - What it is: An installation of plants whose DNA holds encoded messages; a liquid sample is loaded into a nanopore sequencer on site and the decoded texts, images and sounds are displayed in the space. - How it works: Data were encoded into synthetic DNA carried by plants and read back in real time with portable nanopore sequencing (likely Oxford Nanopore MinION), then decoded to files. - Video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LaU1QDKcLcw - Images: https://growyourown.cloud/wp-content/uploads/2020/04/datagarden_opt_banner.jpg https://growyourown.cloud/wp-content/uploads/2020/04/decodingdata1.jpg - Project page: https://growyourown.cloud/data-garden/ #### A DNA-of-things storage architecture to create materials with embedded memory — Robert Grass, Yaniv Erlich (2019) - Type: Paper · Organisms: DNA & molecules - Idea: Objects that carry their own blueprint, like living things do. - What it is: A 3D-printed Stanford bunny carries the file for printing itself in DNA inside its plastic; a piece cut from it can be used to print a new bunny, repeated over five generations. - How it works: DNA encoding the STL file is sealed in silica nanobeads and mixed into the printing polymer; DNA is extracted from a fragment and sequenced. - Paper: https://doi.org/10.1038/s41587-019-0356-z (Nature Biotechnology) - Video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yo5Q1WfpMtw - Images: https://ethz.ch/en/news-and-events/eth-news/news/2019/12/dna-of-things-storing-data-in-everyday-objects/_jcr_content/pageimages/imageCarousel.imageformat.lightbox.1104599190.jpg https://ethz.ch/en/news-and-events/eth-news/news/2019/12/dna-of-things-storing-data-in-everyday-objects/_jcr_content/wide_content/textimage_774183200/image.imageformat.text50percent.607066266.jpg - Project page: https://ethz.ch/en/news-and-events/eth-news/news/2019/12/dna-of-things-storing-data-in-everyday-objects.html #### Catalog: English Wikipedia in DNA — Catalog (2019) - Type: Product & platform · Organisms: DNA & molecules - Idea: Make DNA writing cheap by assembling data from prefabricated pieces, like movable type. - What it is: Catalog encoded the roughly 16 GB text of English Wikipedia into synthetic DNA using its own writing machine, and later built a platform for searching and computing over data stored in DNA. - How it works: Instead of synthesising each base, data are encoded as combinations of a library of pre-made DNA fragments joined by an inkjet-style machine. - Video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HzCTP6rZI7s - Images: https://www.cnet.com/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/263029fd-eb98-4097-a824-0ef8e58449f7.jpg?resize=1200,675 https://www.cnet.com/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/7a15c31e-bdcc-450e-925e-119241a0249b.jpg?resize=1200,675 - Project page: https://www.cnet.com/news/startup-packs-all-16gb-wikipedia-onto-dna-strands-demonstrate-new-storage-tech/ #### Data Flower Shop — Cyrus Clarke, Monika Seyfried (2019) - Type: Speculative design · Organisms: Plants, DNA & molecules, Human body - Idea: Replace the server with a houseplant, so owning and caring for data becomes caring for a living thing. - What it is: A pop-up flower shop run as a biological data centre: visitors had their files converted into DNA sequences, watched lab techniques for putting that DNA into a plant, and left with an encoded plant and a kit to send a sample back for reading. - How it works: Digital files (JPEG, MP3) were translated from binary into A, C, G, T sequences for synthetic DNA; on-site 'data florists' and a lab scientist demonstrated plant transformation methods, likely as a staged service rather than full encoding for every visitor. - Video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tGW4F36hAeU - Images: https://growyourown.cloud/wp-content/uploads/2020/04/banner_029A8997_375_opt.jpg https://growyourown.cloud/wp-content/uploads/2020/04/IMG_5547.jpg - Project page: https://growyourown.cloud/the-flowershop/ #### Diverse and robust molecular algorithms using reprogrammable DNA self-assembly — Damien Woods, Erik Winfree (2019) - Type: Paper · Organisms: DNA & molecules - Idea: Reprogram molecules by changing which pieces are in the mix, like software on hardware. - What it is: One set of 355 DNA tiles ran 21 different algorithms, such as counting, sorting and electing a leader, by choosing which tiles went into the tube; the result grows as a patterned DNA ribbon. - How it works: Single-stranded tiles bind by sticky-end matching to implement Boolean cellular automata row by row on a DNA origami seed; AFM images reveal the computation. - Paper: https://doi.org/10.1038/s41586-019-1014-9 (Nature) - Video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fphgFhAn4tA - Images: https://caltech-prod.resources.caltech.edu/main/images/Winfree-Algorithmic-Molecular-Self.d0f1a612.max-1400x800.jpg - Project page: https://www.caltech.edu/about/news/computer-scientists-create-reprogrammable-molecular-computing-system #### Biological optical-to-chemical signal conversion interface — Laura Grebenstein (2018) - Type: Paper · Organisms: Bacteria & microbes, DNA & molecules - Idea: Let bacteria translate between light-controlled electronics and chemical communication. - What it is: A microscale modulator in which engineered E. coli turn LED light into a chemical signal by pumping protons and changing the local pH. - How it works: E. coli express the light-driven proton pump gloeorhodopsin; LED pulses make them export protons, modulating pH as a molecular-communication signal. - Paper: https://doi.org/10.1145/3233188.3233203 (ACM NanoCom 2018) - Images: https://encrypted-tbn0.gstatic.com/images?q=tbn:ANd9GcSxqxW52V4BUk-uskpJMVuvT1kTnNl1XLpPRw&s - Project page: https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3233188.3233203 #### Prpl Vlvt (Troping Turner) — Bartaku (2018) - Type: Artwork · Organisms: Plants, Bacteria & microbes - Idea: Let a plant and its microbes power the viewing of a human masterpiece. - What it is: A bio-solar panel that copies J. M. W. Turner's painting 'Snow Storm' uses dyes from the Aronia plant and its endophytic bacteria to turn sunlight into electricity that lights the original painting. - How it works: Natural colourants from Aronia m. 'Babe' and bacteria living in its tissues sensitise dye solar cells arranged as the painting; developed with physicists and microbiologists at Aalto University (Janne Halme). - Images: https://bartaku.net/wp-content/uploads/2025/10/PDJ4023-copy-768x469.jpg https://bartaku.net/wp-content/uploads/2025/10/PDJ4017-copy-1366x765.jpg - Project page: https://bartaku.net/prpl-vlvt/ #### Random access in large-scale DNA data storage — Molecular Information Systems Lab (MISL), Luis Ceze, Karin Strauss (2018) - Type: Paper · Organisms: DNA & molecules - Idea: DNA storage becomes usable when you can open one file without reading the whole library. - What it is: More than 200 MB, including an OK Go music video and the Universal Declaration of Human Rights in 100 languages, were stored in DNA, and individual files could be retrieved without reading everything. - How it works: Each file's strands carry a primer pair used as an address; PCR amplifies only the requested file before sequencing, with error-correcting codes. - Paper: https://doi.org/10.1038/nbt.4079 (Nature Biotechnology) - Video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qloX87Apz2o - Images: https://news.cs.washington.edu/wp-content/uploads/2018/02/MISL-wetlab-1.jpg https://news.cs.washington.edu/wp-content/uploads/2018/02/Ok-Go-video-snapshot.jpg - Project page: https://news.cs.washington.edu/2018/02/19/uw-and-microsoft-researchers-achieve-random-access-in-large-scale-dna-data-storage #### Scaling up molecular pattern recognition with DNA-based winner-take-all neural networks — Lulu Qian (2018) - Type: Paper · Organisms: DNA & molecules - Idea: Molecules that recognise patterns could let materials and cells classify their surroundings. - What it is: A DNA neural network recognised 'molecular handwriting': handwritten digits encoded as mixtures of DNA strands were classified correctly in the test tube. - How it works: Each 10×10 digit image maps to 20 of 100 DNA strands; weight multiplication, summation and a winner-take-all layer decide between two digit classes, reported by fluorescence. - Paper: https://doi.org/10.1038/s41586-018-0289-6 (Nature) - Video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=idCjH20I65M - Images: https://caltech-prod.resources.caltech.edu/main/images/LQian_WTA-Neural-Networks-Made-fro.ce986c20.max-1400x800.jpg https://www.qianlab.caltech.edu/media_WTA_1_300px.png - Project page: https://www.caltech.edu/about/news/test-tube-artificial-neural-network-recognizes-molecular-handwriting-82679 #### e-SEED — Ivan Henriques (2018) - Type: Speculative design · Organisms: Plants, Bacteria & microbes - Idea: Package a seed with its own biological power supply. - What it is: A seed encased in a bio-solar cell that uses electricity from photosynthetic components to stimulate its own growth, proposed as a tool to revive barren land. - How it works: A bio-solar cell likely built from photosynthetic proteins of bacteria generates current that is applied to the seed; developed with VU Amsterdam biophysics and ESA Space Garden. - Images: https://ivanhenriques.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/05/eseed02_hres.jpg https://ivanhenriques.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/05/IMG_3457.jpg - Project page: https://ivanhenriques.com/works/e-seed/ #### Bixels DNA Tetris — Helene Steiner (2017) - Type: Research prototype · Organisms: DNA & molecules - Idea: Teach biology the way pixels taught computing: through a tiny programmable display. - What it is: An 8x8 'bio-pixel' display cartridge whose pixels are fluorescent proteins made with cell-free DNA circuits, lit by an LED matrix so people can play Tetris and learn to program with DNA. - How it works: Cell-free transcription-translation reactions express proteins such as GFP in each well; an LED matrix with filters excites them and an app toggles bio-pixels. - Video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GZgTMy8Kumo - Images: https://cdn.prod.website-files.com/636fcb7db73c8d53ca64117c/637a8f8f4a80ddb6abe77a42_Screenshot%202022-11-20%20at%2021.35.23.png - Project page: https://www.helenesteiner.com/project/bixels #### CRISPR–Cas encoding of a digital movie into the genomes of a population of living bacteria — Seth Shipman, George Church (2017) - Type: Paper · Organisms: Bacteria & microbes, DNA & molecules - Idea: Living cells can act as recorders that write their experience into DNA. - What it is: Frames of Eadweard Muybridge's galloping-horse film were written into the genomes of living E. coli over several days, and later read back from the bacterial population. - How it works: Pixel values were encoded in short DNA snippets delivered frame by frame; the Cas1–Cas2 integrase stored them in order in the CRISPR array, so their order encodes time. - Paper: https://doi.org/10.1038/nature23017 (Nature) - Video: https://vimeo.com/224354684 - Images: https://wyss-prod.imgix.net/app/uploads/2017/07/11111818/Encoding-Memories-in-Living-Cells-with-CRISPR-Listing-Image.jpg?auto=format%2Ccompress&crop=faces%2Centropy&fit=crop&q=50&w=800&s=e9a58d3d21ace4dc0d3b3bd5fca1e085 https://wp.technologyreview.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/07/horsegif_0-3.gif - Project page: https://wyss.harvard.edu/news/taking-cells-out-to-the-movies-with-new-crispr-technology #### DNA Fountain enables a robust and efficient storage architecture — Yaniv Erlich (2017) - Type: Paper · Organisms: DNA & molecules - Idea: Borrow codes from video streaming to pack DNA almost to its limit. - What it is: An operating system, a short film, an Amazon gift card and a computer virus were stored in DNA with a fountain code, close to the theoretical maximum of bits per nucleotide. - How it works: Luby-transform fountain codes create many droplets from the data; droplets that would give hard-to-synthesise sequences are discarded, and the rest are synthesised. - Paper: https://doi.org/10.1126/science.aaj2038 (Science) - Video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kXHfQ1KafK4 - Images: https://sciinitprod.wpengine.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/04/NYGC_lab_500.jpg - Project page: https://science.fas.columbia.edu/news/researchers-store-computer-operating-system-and-short-movie-on-dna/ #### Genetic circuit design automation (Cello) — Christopher Voigt (2016) - Type: Paper · Organisms: Bacteria & microbes, DNA & molecules - Idea: A programming language for living cells. - What it is: Cello compiles a circuit written in Verilog, the language used for electronic chips, into a DNA sequence that makes E. coli perform that logic; 45 of the 60 circuits built worked as designed. - How it works: Logic is mapped to a library of characterised repressor-based NOT/NOR gates, assembled into a plasmid and inserted into bacteria. - Paper: https://doi.org/10.1126/science.aac7341 (Science) - Video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SLn_SkL7vkQ - Images: https://news.mit.edu/sites/default/files/images/201603/MIT-Program-Bacteria.jpg - Project page: https://news.mit.edu/2016/programming-language-living-cells-bacteria-0331 #### The America Project — Paul Vanouse (2016) - Type: Artwork · Organisms: DNA & molecules, Human body - Idea: Pool everyone's DNA so the data can only speak about a collective, never an individual. - What it is: Visitors spit saline into a fountain-like spittoon; their pooled DNA is extracted and run through electrophoresis gels to form projected icons of power such as a crown, warplanes and a flag. - How it works: Cheek-cell DNA from hundreds of donors was extracted as one composite sample and cut and sized so that gel electrophoresis bands draw recognisable images, filmed live; made with scientist Solon Morse. - Video: https://vimeo.com/333800042 - Images: https://www.paulvanouse.com/ap/ap-install-crop-2-med.jpg https://www.paulvanouse.com/ap/crown-med.jpg - Project page: https://www.paulvanouse.com/ap/ #### ReBioGeneSys – Origins of Life — Adam W. Brown, Robert Root-Bernstein (2015) - Type: Artwork · Organisms: DNA & molecules - Idea: Build a sculpture that can, in principle, evolve its own chemistry toward life. - What it is: A self-running installation that combines origin-of-life experiments, from Miller-Urey sparks to freeze-thaw cycles, into minimal chemical ecosystems meant to produce self-organising molecules and perhaps protocells. - How it works: Automated glassware applies electrical discharge, heat, UV and freeze-thaw cycles to prebiotic mixtures, with selection steps built into the process; a collaboration with physiologist Robert Root-Bernstein. - Video: https://vimeo.com/122202785 - Images: https://adamwbrown.net/wp-content/uploads/2020/06/RBGS-960x640.jpg https://adamwbrown.net/wp-content/uploads/2015/02/RBGS-full-shelf.jpg - Project page: https://adamwbrown.net/projects-2_previous/rebiogenesys-origins-of-life/ #### The Sequence Project — Anna Dumitriu (2015) - Type: Artwork · Organisms: Bacteria & microbes, DNA & molecules - Idea: Your own microbes' genome becomes personal data you can wear and walk inside. - What it is: A series including a dress stained with Staphylococcus aureus from the artist's body and a VR piece, both driven by the 2.8 million base pairs of that strain's genome, which the artist sequenced herself. - How it works: Whole-genome sequencing of a strain from the artist's body with the Modernising Medical Microbiology project; the raw and assembled sequence data were video-mapped onto the dress and rendered in VR with Alex May. - Video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hh4p66NHyZQ - Images: https://annadumitriu.co.uk/wp-content/uploads/2020/01/SequenceVR-1-e1585757486968.jpg - Project page: https://annadumitriu.co.uk/portfolio/the-sequence-project/ #### Malus ecclesia — Joe Davis (2014) - Type: Speculative design · Organisms: Plants, DNA & molecules - Idea: Store the sum of human knowledge in the organism that myth calls the forbidden fruit. - What it is: An ongoing plan, with George Church's lab at Harvard, to encode the English Wikipedia into the DNA of an ancient apple strain and create a literal tree of knowledge. - How it works: Wikipedia text would be converted into DNA sequences and inserted into the genome of a roughly 4,000-year-old Malus strain using synthetic biology; the full encoding is proposed and was likely only partly realised. - Images: https://media.newyorker.com/photos/59095144019dfc3494e9d972/16:9/w_1280,c_limit/480896859-580.jpg - Project page: https://www.newyorker.com/tech/annals-of-technology/object-of-interest-the-twice-forbidden-fruit #### Towards practical, high-capacity, low-maintenance information storage in synthesized DNA — Nick Goldman (2013) - Type: Paper · Organisms: DNA & molecules - Idea: Design the code around the medium's weaknesses and DNA becomes a reliable archive. - What it is: All 154 Shakespeare sonnets, a PDF of Watson and Crick's paper, a photo and an audio clip of Martin Luther King's 'I have a dream' were stored in DNA and recovered without errors. - How it works: Data were converted to base-3 and encoded so that no base repeats, avoiding sequencing errors; overlapping fragments gave fourfold redundancy. - Paper: https://doi.org/10.1038/nature11875 (Nature) - Video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tBvd7OSDGgQ - Images: https://acxngcvroo.cloudimg.io/v7/https://content.embl.org/sites/default/files/2021-10/NEWS_Nick_Goldman_DNA_storage.jpg?w=1000&h=600 - Project page: https://www.ebi.ac.uk/about/news/press-releases/DNA-storage #### Next-generation digital information storage in DNA — George Church (2012) - Type: Paper · Organisms: DNA & molecules - Idea: DNA is the densest, longest-lasting storage medium we know. - What it is: Church's team wrote a 53,000-word book, with images and a JavaScript program, into DNA and read it back, storing about 5.5 petabits per cubic millimetre. - How it works: Bits were mapped to bases (one bit per base), split into 96-bit blocks with addresses, synthesised on microarrays and read back by next-generation sequencing. - Paper: https://doi.org/10.1126/science.1226355 (Science) - Video: https://vimeo.com/47615970 - Images: https://wyss-prod.imgix.net/app/uploads/2016/08/30133118/16991-e1472738750194.jpeg?auto=format%2Ccompress&crop=faces%2Centropy&fit=crop&q=50&w=800&s=0a41ae74fcc99c355ede938cc4c69f77 https://i.vimeocdn.com/video/330548088-f385c4265826dadcfbc4ef350a9eb421e5fcddc0a29ca03ba045060c9e3228c5-d_1280 - Project page: https://wyss.harvard.edu/news/writing-the-book-in-dna/ #### Searching for the Ubiquitous Genetically Engineered Machine — ArtScienceBangalore (2012) - Type: Artwork · Organisms: Bacteria & microbes, Ecosystems, DNA & molecules - Idea: Turn synthetic biology's standard parts into a citizen tool for reading the environment. - What it is: Standard BioBrick primers are used as random PCR probes on soil samples in a self-built public lab, producing gel 'signatures' of soil biodiversity as a baseline for a future full of engineered parts. - How it works: Random-primed PCR with BioBrick prefix and suffix primers on DNA from soil samples, visualised as bands in gel electrophoresis; blueprints for the public lab published online. - Images: https://archive.aec.at/asset/1496200/preview/ https://archive.aec.at/asset/1530126/preview/ - Project page: https://archive.aec.at/prix/194301/ #### Neural network computation with DNA strand displacement cascades — Lulu Qian, Erik Winfree (2011) - Type: Paper · Organisms: DNA & molecules - Idea: Neural computation can be written in molecules, with no electronics at all. - What it is: A test-tube neural network of 112 DNA strands played a 'mind-reading' game: given partial answers to yes/no questions, it recalled which of four scientists the answers matched. - How it works: Seesaw gates built from DNA strand displacement implement weighted sums and thresholds of a Hopfield-type network; fluorescence reports the output. - Paper: https://doi.org/10.1038/nature10262 (Nature) - Video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=N_VisNOKQMc - Images: https://caltech-prod.resources.caltech.edu/main/images/CT_Winfree-Qian_Nature-SPOTLIGHT.16890135.max-1400x800.jpg - Project page: https://www.caltech.edu/about/news/caltech-researchers-create-first-artificial-neural-network-out-dna-1703 #### Suspect Inversion Center — Paul Vanouse (2011) - Type: Artwork · Organisms: DNA & molecules, Human body - Idea: If anyone's DNA can be made to match an image, the 'DNA fingerprint' is a picture, not an identity. - What it is: An open working lab in which the artist and collaborators use his own DNA to reproduce, band for band, the DNA 'fingerprint' image of O.J. Simpson shown at the 1995 murder trial. - How it works: DNA extraction, PCR amplification, restriction digestion and gel electrophoresis performed live in the gallery, with fragment sizes chosen to reverse-engineer the historical image. - Video: https://vimeo.com/755693440 - Images: https://www.paulvanouse.com/Transmediale%20-%2006.jpg https://www.paulvanouse.com/SIC-clipboard3-med.jpg - Project page: https://www.paulvanouse.com/sic.html #### Ocular Revision — Paul Vanouse (2010) - Type: Artwork · Organisms: DNA & molecules, Human body - Idea: Change the geometry of a scientific instrument and the data it produces becomes a picture. - What it is: A circular electrophoresis rig pulls DNA outward from the centre, so the bands slowly form images of Earth's hemispheres instead of the usual barcode-like strips. - How it works: Custom radial gel electrophoresis polarised from inside to outside, with human DNA fragments cut to chosen sizes and imaged under blue-light transillumination and a camera. - Video: https://vimeo.com/337648262 - Images: https://www.paulvanouse.com/or-ARS-2-med-res.jpg https://www.paulvanouse.com/OR-Rig-med-res.jpg - Project page: https://www.paulvanouse.com/or.html #### Temporary PhotoElectric Digestopians (Lab Series) — Bartaku (2010) - Type: Artwork · Organisms: Plants, Human body - Idea: Make a solar cell you can eat, so energy technology becomes something grown and shared at the table. - What it is: A series of participatory labs around a table where people build dye-sensitised solar cells from edible ingredients such as Aronia berry juice, then test and taste them. - How it works: Anthocyanin dyes from Aronia melanocarpa sensitise titanium dioxide cells that convert light into tiny currents (under 0.1% efficiency); 14 labs held across Europe since 2010. - Images: https://bartaku.net/wp-content/uploads/2025/10/Phoef_dig-03-1366x642.png https://bartaku.net/wp-content/uploads/2025/10/Phoef_dig-02-1150x768.png - Project page: https://bartaku.net/temporary-photoelectric-digestopians-lab-series/ #### Cypher — Eduardo Kac (2009) - Type: Artwork · Organisms: Bacteria & microbes, DNA & molecules - Idea: Reading becomes an act of making life: the reader decides whether the poem comes alive. - What it is: A stainless-steel book that opens into a DIY transgenic kit: following the protocol, the reader inserts synthetic DNA encoding a poem into bacteria and grows the 'poem' as living colonies. - How it works: The kit holds Petri dishes, agar, nutrients, loops, pipettes, a transformation protocol and synthetic DNA written with a letter-to-base code Kac devised, likely transformed into E. coli. - Images: https://www.ekac.org/cypher.photo1.jpg https://www.ekac.org/cypher.poem.jpg - Project page: https://www.ekac.org/cypher.text.html #### RuBisCo Stars — Joe Davis (2009) - Type: Artwork · Organisms: DNA & molecules, Plants - Idea: Send life's own code, not human symbols, as the greeting to other worlds. - What it is: A message based on the genetic sequence of RuBisCO, the most abundant protein on Earth, was beamed from the Arecibo radio telescope toward nearby stars on the 35th anniversary of the 1974 Arecibo message. - How it works: The DNA and amino-acid sequence of a RuBisCO subunit was encoded into a radio signal and transmitted by the Arecibo Observatory radar in November 2009. - Images: https://centauri-dreams.org/wp-content/uploads/2009/11/joe_davis_3.jpg https://centauri-dreams.org/wp-content/uploads/2009/11/joe_davis_4.jpg - Project page: https://www.centauri-dreams.org/2009/11/18/%e2%80%9crubisco-stars%e2%80%9d-and-the-riddle-of-life/ #### Programming living cells to function as massively parallel computers — Jeffrey J. Tabor (2007) - Type: Paper · Organisms: Bacteria & microbes, DNA & molecules - Idea: A lawn of bacteria is a massively parallel computer with one processor per cell. - What it is: Engineered E. coli are spread as a lawn that acts as photographic film: projected light patterns switch pigment production on, and cell-to-cell signalling lets the lawn compute the edges of the image. - How it works: A red-light sensor rewired to a pigment-producing enzyme turns each cell into a pixel; a quorum-sensing circuit adds edge detection. - Paper: https://doi.org/10.1145/1278480.1278642 (DAC 2007) - Images: https://biodigitalviz.github.io/images/parallel_computers.png - Project page: https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/1278480.1278642 #### Folding DNA to create nanoscale shapes and patterns (DNA origami) — Paul Rothemund (2006) - Type: Paper · Organisms: DNA & molecules - Idea: Design a shape on a computer and have molecules fold themselves into it. - What it is: A long viral DNA strand was folded by about 200 short 'staple' strands into smiley faces, stars and a map of the Americas, each about 100 nanometres wide. - How it works: Staple sequences are computed to bind distant parts of the M13 scaffold; mixing and cooling makes the structure self-assemble, imaged by atomic force microscopy. - Paper: https://doi.org/10.1038/nature04586 (Nature) - Video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WhGG__boRxU - Images: https://media.springernature.com/full/springer-static/image/art%3A10.1038%2Fnature04586/MediaObjects/41586_2006_BFnature04586_Fig2_HTML.jpg https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/7/73/DNA_Origami.png - Project page: https://www.nature.com/articles/nature04586 #### Medium scale integration of molecular logic gates in an automaton (MAYA-II) — Milan Stojanovic (2006) - Type: Paper · Organisms: DNA & molecules - Idea: Molecular logic you can play against. - What it is: MAYA-II is a DNA computer that plays tic-tac-toe against a human on a 3×3 plate of wells: the player adds a DNA strand for each move and the well where the machine plays lights up. - How it works: 128 deoxyribozyme logic gates distributed across nine wells cleave a fluorescent substrate when their input strands are present. - Paper: https://doi.org/10.1021/nl0620684 (Nano Letters) - Project page: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MAYA-II #### Move 36 — Eduardo Kac (2002) - Type: Artwork · Organisms: Plants, DNA & molecules - Idea: Write a statement about the mind into a mindless organism and place it where a machine out-thought a human. - What it is: A plant stands on a chessboard of earth and sand at the square where Deep Blue made move 36 against Kasparov; its genome carries a 'Cartesian gene' that spells 'Cogito ergo sum' in DNA. - How it works: Descartes' sentence was converted to 8-bit ASCII and mapped to bases (A=00, C=01, G=10, T=11), giving a 52-base gene that was coupled with a gene that makes the leaves curl so its expression is visible. - Images: https://www.ekac.org/move.36.room.with.table.jpg https://www.ekac.org/move36.left.side.jpg - Project page: https://www.ekac.org/move36-info.html #### A synthetic oscillatory network of transcriptional regulators (the repressilator) — Michael Elowitz (2000) - Type: Paper · Organisms: Bacteria & microbes, DNA & molecules - Idea: Design a biological behaviour from parts, the way engineers design circuits. - What it is: Three genes that switch each other off in a loop made E. coli cells blink green on and off, a genetic clock designed from scratch. - How it works: LacI, TetR and cI repressors are arranged in a ring of negative feedback on a plasmid; a GFP reporter shows the oscillation. - Paper: https://doi.org/10.1038/35002125 (Nature) - Video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qD7hUZ5pVP4 - Images: https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/0/03/Repressilator_%28representation_based_on_Elowitz_%26_Liebler_2000%29.png https://media.springernature.com/full/springer-static/image/art%3A10.1038%2F35002125/MediaObjects/41586_2000_Article_BF35002125_Fig1_HTML.gif - Project page: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Repressilator #### Construction of a genetic toggle switch in Escherichia coli — James J. Collins (2000) - Type: Paper · Organisms: Bacteria & microbes, DNA & molecules - Idea: Give a cell one bit of memory. - What it is: Two genes that repress each other gave bacteria a stable on/off state that can be flipped with a chemical or heat pulse and is remembered afterwards. - How it works: Two repressor–promoter pairs repress each other; transient IPTG or temperature signals switch the dominant state, read by a fluorescent reporter. - Paper: https://doi.org/10.1038/35002131 (Nature) - Video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Sde4U1VTaaU - Images: https://media.springernature.com/full/springer-static/image/art%3A10.1038%2F35002131/MediaObjects/41586_2000_Article_BF35002131_Fig1_HTML.gif - Project page: https://www.nature.com/articles/35002131 #### Molecular computation of solutions to combinatorial problems — Leonard Adleman (1994) - Type: Paper · Organisms: DNA & molecules - Idea: Chemistry can compute by trying every answer at once in parallel. - What it is: Adleman solved a seven-city Hamiltonian path problem in a test tube: DNA strands coding cities and roads combined in all possible ways, and lab steps filtered out the one valid route. - How it works: Oligonucleotides for vertices and edges were ligated; PCR, gel electrophoresis and affinity purification selected paths of the right length that visit every vertex. - Paper: https://doi.org/10.1126/science.7973651 (Science) - Video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Bhqf8M5yYIw - Images: https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/a/af/Len-mankin-pic.jpg - Project page: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DNA_computing ### Body & Biosignals Interfaces that couple the human body directly with other living systems. #### A Plurality of More-than-Humanness: Feminist Speculations for Designing with the Vaginal Microbiome — Nadia Campo Woytuk, Fiona Bell, Mirela Alistar (2024) - Type: Speculative design · Organisms: Bacteria & microbes, Human body - Idea: Designing with body microbes raises feminist questions about who controls intimate ecosystems. - What it is: Four speculative provocations—self-tests, smart sensors, home microbiology labs, microbiome influencers, microbial donation and fermented foods—imagine futures where vaginal microbes are central to interactive technology. - How it works: Speculative design fiction and critical analysis drawing on feminist HCI, Bio-HCI and more-than-human design. - Paper: https://doi.org/10.1145/3686169.3686170 (Halfway to the Future 2024) #### Biodegradable Implant Antenna Utilized for Real-Time Sensing Through Genetically Modified Bacteria — Sema Dumanli (2024) - Type: Paper · Organisms: Bacteria & microbes, Human body - Idea: Let living cells rewrite an antenna's shape, and read the chemistry from outside the body. - What it is: A wireless sensing implant made of a biodegradable antenna and genetically modified bacteria that speed up its degradation when a target molecule is present; a wearable reader tracks the antenna's frequency shift. - How it works: Engineered bacteria degrade the passive reflector antenna at a rate set by the analyte; the changing geometry shifts its resonance, measured by an on-body reader antenna. - Paper: https://doi.org/10.23919/EuCAP60739.2024.10501075 (EuCAP 2024) - Images: https://encrypted-tbn0.gstatic.com/images?q=tbn:ANd9GcRKoSwDpCerybK5dWA7kXFC0fHba5rLM66QxA&s - Project page: https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/document/10501075 #### µMe: Exploring the Human Microbiome as an Intimate Material for Living Interfaces — Fiona Bell, Mirela Alistar (2023) - Type: Paper · Organisms: Bacteria & microbes, Human body - Idea: Your skin microbiome is already an interface; make it visible. - What it is: The wearer's own skin microbes are grown until visible, their colours tuned by temperature and growth medium, and worn in wearables that reveal how exercise, hugging or typing change the microbiome. - How it works: Skin swabs cultured on selective and pigment-promoting media; a design space maps environmental parameters to colony colour. - Paper: https://doi.org/10.1145/3563657.3596133 (DIS 2023) - Video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RpQ2ZPLoFCQ - Project page: https://www.colorado.edu/atlas/microbial-interfaces #### CyberBiome — Pat Pataranutaporn (2022) - Type: Research prototype · Organisms: Bacteria & microbes, Human body - Idea: Wear a tiny living factory that makes the medicine your body needs, when it needs it. - What it is: A wearable 'bio-digital organ' for astronauts: small 3D-printed bioreactors of engineered cells worn on the body produce therapeutics on demand, switched on digitally with light. - How it works: Engineered microbes with optogenetic circuits in wearable bioreactors; light pulses select which biomolecule is expressed. - Images: https://dam-prod.media.mit.edu/thumb/2022/10/02/PTPfTvzo.jpg.1400x1400.jpg - Project page: https://www.media.mit.edu/projects/cyber-biome/overview/ #### Tranquillity at Home — Michi Kanda (2021) - Type: Research prototype · Organisms: Plants, Human body - Idea: Couple your biosignals to a plant's growth to reflect on your own wellbeing. - What it is: A plant whose grow light is set by its owner's mental fatigue, estimated from eye blinks, so the plant's health slowly mirrors the owner's wellbeing. - How it works: Browser-based face-landmark detection measures blink frequency; daily fatigue scores set the intensity and quality of a grow LED over the plant. - Paper: https://doi.org/10.1145/3458709.3458978 (AHs 2021) - Images: https://figures.semanticscholar.org/67b9ccf3e40eb963cc723fb31f70bb0fde8c371f/500px/1-Figure1-1.png - Project page: https://doi.org/10.1145/3458709.3458978 #### Deep Learning Insole — Orkan Telhan (2018) - Type: Research prototype · Organisms: Bacteria & microbes, Human body - Idea: Use living microbes as wearable biochemical sensors that sit where the body sweats. - What it is: Disposable silicone insoles hold microbial cultures that respond to sweat during running and report chemical markers of fatigue and well-being to the runner. - How it works: Microbial cultures in insole cavities react to skin and sweat chemistry, and their changes are digitised into benchmarks; a PUMA and MIT Design Lab project powered by Biorealize, shown at Milan Design Week. - Images: https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5258ba2be4b0804fa254bd19/1677462533075-3Z7V8518GETXEPKZ5TW6/image-asset.png - Project page: https://www.orkantelhan.com/biodesign #### Earthlink — Saša Spačal (2018) - Type: Artwork · Organisms: Bacteria & microbes, Human body, Plants - Idea: Show breathing as an exchange with microbes that technology can mediate and control. - What it is: A system of installations about breathing with the planet: visitors inhale soil bacteria in rhythm with resuscitator bags, exhale their microbiome into artificial lungs, and meet a clover–bacteria symbiosis. - How it works: Inspiration delivers Mycobacterium vaccae aerosol paced by resuscitator bags; Expiration collects exhaled microbes in external lungs washed with cypress extract; Symbiome links Trifolium pratense and Rhizobium. - Video: https://vimeo.com/411971525 - Images: https://www.agapea.si/wp-content/uploads/2019/02/Inspirij_II_Miha-Godec.jpg https://www.agapea.si/wp-content/uploads/2019/02/Ekspirij_II_Miha_Godec.jpg - Project page: https://www.agapea.si/en/projects/earthlink #### 3D Printing of Living Responsive Materials and Devices (Living Tattoo) — Xuanhe Zhao (2017) - Type: Paper · Organisms: Bacteria & microbes, Human body - Idea: Print living sensors directly into patterns you can wear. - What it is: A 'living tattoo' printed from ink containing engineered bacteria: stuck onto skin, the patterned cells light up when they sense specific chemicals. - How it works: Hydrogel ink with genetically programmed E. coli is 3D printed into multi-layer patterns; cells in each branch respond to different inducers by expressing fluorescent proteins. - Paper: https://doi.org/10.1002/adma.201704821 (Advanced Materials) - Images: https://news.mit.edu/sites/default/files/images/201712/MIT-3D.jpg - Project page: https://news.mit.edu/2017/engineers-3-d-print-living-tattoo-1205 #### Mind Controlled Spermatozoa — Ani Liu (2017) - Type: Artwork · Organisms: Cells & tissue, Human body - Idea: A brain–computer interface can hand control over living cells to the body that is usually controlled. - What it is: A woman steers live human sperm under a microscope with her thoughts: an EEG headset drives electric fields on a glass slide that move the sperm. Made in response to the 2016 US election. - How it works: EEG signals are mapped to a custom electrode circuit on a slide, where sperm move by galvanotaxis (movement along an electric field). - Video: https://vimeo.com/722621970 - Images: https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/52cd9799e4b00ae3ac706ed4/1495639466976-VZU7PUAOW6GIM5D494BW/image-asset.png https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/52cd9799e4b00ae3ac706ed4/1495639332073-KCZW7RRDU4JZYB6WZJT5/image-asset.jpeg https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/52cd9799e4b00ae3ac706ed4/1487091924486-E8L5XTNOPJ7RVRSJEQJC/image-asset.png - Project page: https://ani-liu.com/pussygrabsback #### Estrofem! Lab — Mary Maggic (2016) - Type: Artwork · Organisms: Cells & tissue, Human body - Idea: Hand people a living sensor for the hormones in their bodies and surroundings. - What it is: A mobile 'estrogen hack lab' of tools, protocols and engineered yeast that lets workshop participants detect estrogen in their own urine and in environmental samples. - How it works: YES-HER yeast carrying the human estrogen receptor reports estrogen presence, and samples are prepared with DIY solid-phase extraction (cigarette filters, silica gel) and column chromatography. - Images: https://hackteria.org/wiki/images/b/bd/Plasticextractorresize.jpg https://hackteria.org/wiki/images/9/92/Giphy.gif - Project page: https://hackteria.org/wiki/Open_Source_Estrogen #### Future Flora — Giulia Tomasello (2016) - Type: Research prototype · Organisms: Bacteria & microbes, Human body - Idea: Treat the body as a microbial ecosystem and wear the microbes that keep it healthy. - What it is: A harvesting kit that lets women grow beneficial bacteria at home and wear them in textile pads to treat and prevent vaginal infections; it won the STARTS Prize 2018 and is in the MAK Vienna collection. - How it works: Targeted lactic acid bacteria are grown on agar and microencapsulated into a non-woven fabric scaffold that is worn as a pad. - Video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oWN8VToG5es - Images: https://cortex.persona.co/w/320/h/320/c/0/0/320/320/i/fa7c91a4e51a384a49320bd5f32def069b34144ffd867b82508fba71b6bd0b82/16464742_382879488737904_8919630051306110976_a.jpg - Project page: https://artifact-archive.org/whole-archive #### Second Skin: Biological Garment Powered by and Adapting to Body in Motion — Lining Yao, Helene Steiner (2016) - Type: Research prototype · Organisms: Bacteria & microbes, Human body - Idea: A garment can breathe with the body through living cells. - What it is: A running suit whose vents are lined with living microbial cells: as the body heats and sweats, the flaps open, and genetically tractable cells can also glow. Published in Science Advances as biohybrid wearables. - How it works: Humidity-responsive cell–latex bilayers (natto bacteria or engineered E. coli / yeast) pattern the garment's vents; fluorescent proteins add light output. - Paper: https://doi.org/10.1126/sciadv.1601984 (Science Advances 2017 (CHI 2016 Video Showcase)) - Video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=twe-RAN2Dcc #### until I die — Dmitry Morozov (::vtol::) (2016) - Type: Artwork · Organisms: Human body - Idea: Make an instrument that literally runs on the maker's vitality. - What it is: A generative synthesizer runs on batteries that use the artist's own blood as electrolyte, about 4.5 litres collected over 18 months, the last portion drawn during the opening. - How it works: Five batteries of copper and aluminium electrodes in diluted, preserved blood give about 3 V, powering an Axoloti sound module and speaker. - Video: https://vimeo.com/206472719 - Images: https://payload.cargocollective.com/1/11/376496/12528446/4_3_670.jpg https://payload.cargocollective.com/1/11/376496/12528446/6_670.jpg - Project page: https://vtol.cc/until-I-die #### The Surface Dynamics of Adhesion — Tarsh Bates (2015) - Type: Artwork · Organisms: Fungi, Human body - Idea: Stage a human-microbe relationship as a living ornament that refuses to stay in line. - What it is: Living Candida albicans grows on agar made with the artist's blood in acrylic boxes, forming a wallpaper pattern that the yeast slowly escapes during the exhibition. - How it works: C. albicans is inoculated on blood agar containing the artist's blood in a pattern adapted from Charles Philippe Robin's 1853 drawing of the organism. - Images: https://dvqlxo2m2q99q.cloudfront.net/000_clients/4282800/page/bates-2018-surface-dynamics-of-adhesion-resurrected-detailsm-a380d8.jpg https://dvqlxo2m2q99q.cloudfront.net/000_clients/4282800/page/20160419-sda-1-td-c3490d.webp - Project page: https://www.tarshbates.com/sda #### Solaris — Dmitry Morozov (::vtol::) (2014) - Type: Artwork · Organisms: Human body - Idea: Map inner states onto a living-looking material so people see their mind as matter. - What it is: A visitor wearing an EEG headset moves two liquids, a ferrofluid and a fluorescent fluid, inside a sphere through magnets, so brain activity and mood become visible as shifting surfaces. - How it works: An Emotiv EPOC headset sends EEG data via OSC and Pure Data to Arduino-controlled motors and a permanent magnet; made with Julia Borovaya and Edward Rakhmanov, neurophysiology advice by Prof. Alexander Kaplan. - Video: https://vimeo.com/105677765 - Images: https://payload.cargocollective.com/1/11/376496/8530133/Screen-Shot-2014-09-08-at-18.57.jpg - Project page: https://vtol.cc/solaris #### Chroma + Phy — Theresa Schubert (2013) - Type: Speculative design · Organisms: Slime mould, Animals, Human body - Idea: Imagine clothing made of living cells that signal the wearer's state to others. - What it is: A speculative living wearable that would combine slime mould protoplasm with chameleon colour cells, so the garment changes colour with the wearer's mood. - How it works: Prototype glassware with Physarum polycephalum, colour experiments and an HD film present the concept; the chromatophore hybrid is fictional. - Video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MDbyLfbxHCc - Images: https://www.theresaschubert.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/06/chromaphy_videostill_2.jpg https://www.theresaschubert.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/06/chromaphy_prototype-600x400.jpg - Project page: https://www.theresaschubert.com/works/kromapy/ #### Myconnect — Saša Spačal (2013) - Type: Artwork · Organisms: Fungi, Human body - Idea: Make a person part of a feedback loop with another organism, so the boundary of the body blurs. - What it is: A visitor lies in a capsule while their heartbeat is sent through mycelium, altered by it, and returned to the body as sound, light and vibration. - How it works: Heart-rate sensors fed a signal through a mycelium culture, likely read as changes in its electrical response, which modulated sound, light and haptic actuators; made with Mirjan Švagelj and Anil Podgornik. - Video: https://vimeo.com/238714637 - Images: https://www.agapea.si/wp-content/uploads/2015/05/S3D3092-WB2.jpg - Project page: https://www.agapea.si/en/projects/myconnect #### The Plasmorph: Living Information — Ann-Kristin Abel (2013) - Type: Speculative design · Organisms: Cells & tissue, Human body - Idea: When mobility becomes informational, the interface might be a living organism on the body. - What it is: A short film about a semi-living device that connects to the wearer's nervous system and lets nomadic users ingest information instantly, acting as a living diary. - How it works: Speculative design film with a prop device made for the En Vie / Alive exhibition. - Video: https://vimeo.com/64243284 - Project page: https://vimeo.com/64243284 #### Blood Wars — Kathy High (2010) - Type: Artwork · Organisms: Cells & tissue, Human body - Idea: Turn a lab assay into a game, so people argue about inheritance and 'blood traits' through their own cells. - What it is: Participants' white blood cells are set against each other in a petri dish in a mock World Cup tournament; the 'winning' cells advance to the next round and blood trophies are awarded. - How it works: Blood is drawn from pairs of participants, white blood cells are isolated, stained and co-cultured, and their interaction is filmed with time-lapse microscopy to judge which population dominates; developed in a residency at SymbioticA. - Video: https://vimeo.com/20903389 - Images: https://www.kathyhigh.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/06/blood-wars-t.jpg - Project page: https://www.kathyhigh.com/projects/blood-wars/ ## Organoid Computing Design Brain organoids and living neurons as computers: research, platforms, art and the design and ethics questions they raise. ### Organoid Intelligence Research that uses brain organoids for learning, memory and computation. #### Goal-directed learning in cortical organoids — Braingeneers (2026) - Type: Paper · Organisms: Neurons & organoids - Idea: Use AI to choose how to teach the living tissue, not to replace it. - What it is: Mouse cortical organoids were placed in a closed loop with the 'cartpole' task of balancing a virtual pole. Training stimulation chosen by a reinforcement-learning agent improved their balancing more than random or no training, though gains faded after rest. - How it works: Pole angle was encoded as stimulation on an HD-MEA, spikes were decoded into force, and an RL agent selected training pulses; blocking AMPA and NMDA receptors abolished learning. - Paper: https://doi.org/10.1016/j.celrep.2026.116984 (Cell Reports 2026) - Images: https://cdn.zmescience.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/03/2-18-26-Braingeneers-Mircea-CL-010-2048x1366-1.jpg #### Encoding Tactile Stimuli for Braille Recognition with Organoids — Benjamin Ward-Cherrier, FinalSpark (2025) - Type: Paper · Organisms: Neurons & organoids - Idea: Organoids can serve as the 'sensory cortex' of a robot's sense of touch. - What it is: Touch data from an event-based robotic fingertip reading Braille was turned into electrical pulses for human forebrain organoids on FinalSpark's platform, and the organoids' responses were used to tell letters apart. - How it works: Tactile events from the Evetac sensor were mapped to stimulation parameters (pulse number, amplitude, duration, delay); spike counts and shifts in the centre of activity were classified. - Paper: https://arxiv.org/abs/2508.20850 (arXiv 2025) - Images: https://arxiv.org/html/2508.20850v3/M1_finalspark.png #### Human neural organoid microphysiological systems show the building blocks necessary for basic learning and memory — Lena Smirnova, Thomas Hartung (2025) - Type: Paper · Organisms: Neurons & organoids - Idea: Before asking organoids to compute, check that they have the parts that make learning possible. - What it is: Johns Hopkins researchers showed that mature human neural organoids have the molecular and electrophysiological ingredients of learning, including short- and long-term plasticity and immediate-early gene responses. - How it works: Organoids were grown for weeks, then tested with gene-expression analysis and MEA recordings of plasticity after patterned stimulation. - Paper: https://doi.org/10.1038/s42003-025-08632-5 (Communications Biology 2025) - Images: https://media.springernature.com/full/springer-static/image/art%3A10.1038%2Fs42003-025-08632-5/MediaObjects/42003_2025_8632_Figa_HTML.png #### Brainoware: Brain organoid reservoir computing for artificial intelligence — Feng Guo (2023) - Type: Paper · Organisms: Neurons & organoids - Idea: Use the tissue as-is: let the organoid's own dynamics transform inputs and train only a simple readout. - What it is: A living brain organoid on a microelectrode array served as the 'reservoir' of a reservoir-computing system and helped recognise Japanese vowels from different speakers and predict a chaotic equation. - How it works: Audio features were encoded as spatiotemporal electrical stimulation; the organoid's evoked activity was recorded and a linear readout was trained, with unsupervised plasticity in the tissue improving accuracy over time. - Paper: https://doi.org/10.1038/s41928-023-01069-w (Nature Electronics 2023) - Images: https://media.springernature.com/full/springer-static/image/art%3A10.1038%2Fs41928-023-01069-w/MediaObjects/41928_2023_1069_Fig1_HTML.png #### Organoid intelligence (OI): the new frontier in biocomputing and intelligence-in-a-dish — Lena Smirnova, Thomas Hartung, Brett J. Kagan (2023) - Type: Paper · Organisms: Neurons & organoids - Idea: A research agenda that names a field, its tools and its ethics in one document. - What it is: The paper that named Organoid Intelligence. It proposes scaling up brain organoids, interfacing them with 3D electrodes, and training them with machine learning to build biocomputers, with ethics built into the programme. - How it works: Roadmap paper combining organoid biology, 3D microelectrode arrays, big-data and AI methods, and an embedded ethics approach. - Paper: https://doi.org/10.3389/fsci.2023.1017235 (Frontiers in Science 2023) - Video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=A1fXvgKVTmk - Images: https://www.frontiersin.org/api/ipx/w=1200&f=png/https://www.frontiersin.org/files/Articles/1017235/fsci-01-1017235-HTML-r9/image_m/fsci-01-1017235-g001.jpg #### The technology, opportunities, and challenges of Synthetic Biological Intelligence — Brett J. Kagan, Cortical Labs (2023) - Type: Paper · Organisms: Neurons & organoids - Idea: A map of the full stack of a biological computer, from cells to software. - What it is: A review that defines Synthetic Biological Intelligence, surveys the hardware, cell sources and training methods needed to make living neurons compute, and lists open problems. - How it works: Literature review covering stem-cell derived neurons, microelectrode arrays, closed-loop feedback, and the software and ethics layers around them. - Paper: https://doi.org/10.1016/j.biotechadv.2023.108233 (Biotechnology Advances 2023) - Images: https://cdn.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/blobs/256f/10804936/ac4bfda9d037/gr1.jpg #### Complex Oscillatory Waves Emerging from Cortical Organoids Model Early Human Brain Network Development — Alysson R. Muotri (2019) - Type: Paper · Organisms: Neurons & organoids - Idea: Organoids can produce brain-like rhythms, which makes both their promise and their ethics more pressing. - What it is: Human cortical organoids grown for ten months developed increasingly complex network oscillations; a machine-learning model trained on EEG from preterm babies could not reliably tell organoid activity from infant brain activity. - How it works: Organoids were recorded weekly on multi-well MEAs for months; oscillation features were compared with preterm neonatal EEG using a regression model. - Paper: https://doi.org/10.1016/j.stem.2019.08.002 (Cell Stem Cell 2019) - Video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rkpo7R8UOlc - Images: https://cdn.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/blobs/ca6e/6778040/b7f263d3f8c1/nihms-1537695-f0001.jpg ### Neurons that Learn & Play Neural cultures trained in closed loop to play games or control bodies. #### Living human neurons play DOOM on a CL1 — Cortical Labs (2026) - Type: Research prototype · Organisms: Neurons & organoids - Idea: Once neurons have an API, 'can it run DOOM?' becomes a test anyone can try on living tissue. - What it is: About 200,000 human neurons on a CL1 chip were connected to Freedoom, a free version of the 1993 shooter. The culture moved through corridors, met enemies and fired, clumsily and with frequent deaths; an independent developer built the setup in about a week using the public API. - How it works: Game screen information was translated into patterns of electrical stimulation, and spiking responses were decoded into movement and firing commands in a closed loop running on the CL1. - Video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yRV8fSw6HaE - Images: https://static.scientificamerican.com/dam/m/5615652e83eaa237/original/GettyImages-2187865154.jpg?m=1774653169.265&w=1200 - Project page: https://corticallabs.com/doom.html #### Biological Neurons Compete with Deep Reinforcement Learning in Sample Efficiency in a Simulated Gameworld — Cortical Labs, Brett J. Kagan (2024) - Type: Paper · Organisms: Neurons & organoids - Idea: Measured per sample, neurons are efficient learners; this matters when data and energy are scarce. - What it is: DishBrain cultures and three deep reinforcement learning agents (DQN, A2C, PPO) were given the same limited number of Pong rallies. With so few samples, the living cultures learned faster than the algorithms. - How it works: Learning curves of in vitro networks on an HD-MEA were compared with time-matched training of DQN, A2C and PPO agents in the same simplified Pong environment. - Paper: https://arxiv.org/abs/2405.16946 (arXiv 2024) - Images: https://arxiv.org/html/2405.16946v1/Figures/Figure_1.png #### MetaBOC: open-source brain-on-chip robot control — Tianjin University Haptics & Brain-Computer Interface Team (2024) - Type: Research prototype · Organisms: Neurons & organoids - Idea: Pair a living organoid with AI decoding so each makes up for the other's limits. - What it is: Researchers from Tianjin University and the Southern University of Science and Technology connected a human brain organoid on a chip to a small robot, which it steered to avoid obstacles and track targets; the software was released as open source. - How it works: Robot sensor data was encoded into stimulation of an organoid on an electrode chip, and AI algorithms decoded its activity into motor commands (details from press reports, likely simplified). - Video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o_zsjINNHBE - Images: https://assets.newatlas.com/dims4/default/c7765d5/2147483647/strip/true/crop/1412x741+0+26/resize/1200x630!/quality/90/?url=https%3A%2F%2Fnewatlas-brightspot.s3.ap-southeast-2.amazonaws.com%2F91%2Fd2%2Fac3230994d44a2861b102f2729b0%2F087b1f8897b844be95049e0d436dece6-1.jpg&na.image_optimisation=0 - Project page: https://newatlas.com/robotics/brain-organoid-robot/ #### Organoid-controlled virtual butterfly — FinalSpark (2024) - Type: Research prototype · Organisms: Neurons & organoids - Idea: Let the public touch a living computer through a browser, with a gentle and legible metaphor. - What it is: A public web demo in which visitors click in a 3D scene and a butterfly flies toward the click or not, depending on how a remote brain organoid responds to the stimulus. - How it works: Clicks inside the butterfly's field of view become electrical stimuli sent to an organoid on the Neuroplatform; its evoked spikes are decoded into flight direction in real time. - Video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5wILRLhAq1g - Images: https://image.theregister.com/257569.jpg?imageId=257569&panox=0&panoy=0&panow=0&panoh=0&width=1200&height=683 - Project page: https://butterfly.finalspark.com/ #### Critical dynamics arise during structured information presentation within embodied in vitro neuronal networks — Cortical Labs, Brett J. Kagan (2023) - Type: Paper · Organisms: Neurons & organoids - Idea: Criticality in a culture is a response to meaningful input, not something it has on its own. - What it is: Using DishBrain recordings, the team showed that neural cultures move close to a 'critical' state, balanced between order and chaos, only when they receive structured game information, and that this state goes with better play. - How it works: Neuronal avalanches and related criticality metrics were computed from high-density MEA spike data recorded during gameplay and rest. - Paper: https://doi.org/10.1038/s41467-023-41020-3 (Nature Communications 2023) - Images: https://media.springernature.com/full/springer-static/image/art%3A10.1038%2Fs41467-023-41020-3/MediaObjects/41467_2023_41020_Fig1_HTML.png #### Experimental validation of the free-energy principle with in vitro neural networks — Takuya Isomura (2023) - Type: Paper · Organisms: Neurons & organoids - Idea: A theory of the brain can be tested, and used predictively, on neurons in a dish. - What it is: Using cultured neurons that learn to separate signals, the study showed that changes in their connections followed the predictions of the free-energy principle, and that the theory could forecast how learning would unfold. - How it works: Rat cortical cultures on MEAs were trained on blind source separation; recorded responses were fitted to a canonical neural network equivalent to variational Bayesian inference. - Paper: https://doi.org/10.1038/s41467-023-40141-z (Nature Communications 2023) - Images: https://media.springernature.com/full/springer-static/image/art%3A10.1038%2Fs41467-023-40141-z/MediaObjects/41467_2023_40141_Fig1_HTML.png #### Growing living rat neurons to play DOOM — The Thought Emporium (2023) - Type: Research prototype · Organisms: Neurons & organoids - Idea: Neural computing experiments can be done, documented and shared openly outside institutions. - What it is: A DIY video series in which a hobbyist lab cultures rat neurons, builds its own electrode array and stimulation hardware, and works toward letting the culture play DOOM. - How it works: Primary rat neurons were grown on a home-made multi-electrode array, with custom electronics to encode game frames as stimulation and read out spikes. - Video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bEXefdbQDjw - Project page: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bEXefdbQDjw #### DishBrain: In vitro neurons learn and exhibit sentience when embodied in a simulated game-world — Cortical Labs, Brett J. Kagan (2022) - Type: Paper · Organisms: Neurons & organoids - Idea: Neurons in a dish can learn a game if the world answers them in a predictable way when they succeed. - What it is: About 800,000 mouse and human neurons on a high-density electrode array were connected to a simulated game of Pong. Within five minutes of play the cultures hit the ball more often when the game gave them predictable feedback for hits and unpredictable noise for misses. - How it works: Ball position was encoded as electrical stimulation at sensory electrodes, paddle movement was decoded from activity in motor regions, and misses triggered random stimulation, following the free-energy principle. - Paper: https://doi.org/10.1016/j.neuron.2022.09.001 (Neuron 2022) - Video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9ksLuRoEq6A - Images: https://cdn.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/blobs/fc9c/9747182/12018c84d073/fx1.jpg https://corticallabs.com/images/neuron-on-chip.jpg - Project page: https://corticallabs.com #### Physical reservoir computing with FORCE learning in a living neuronal culture — Hirokazu Takahashi (2021) - Type: Paper · Organisms: Neurons & organoids - Idea: Treat the neuron culture as a physical material that computes, and let its own stability solve the task. - What it is: A living neuronal culture was used as a physical reservoir that produced a coherent output signal through FORCE learning; mounted on a vehicle robot, this closed loop gave the robot a homeostasis-like behaviour that let it solve a maze. - How it works: Activity recorded on a microelectrode array was linearly read out and trained online with FORCE learning, and the output was fed back by optically releasing caged compounds onto the culture. - Paper: https://doi.org/10.1063/5.0064771 (Applied Physics Letters 2021) #### Neurobot: organoid-driven robots — Alysson R. Muotri (2019) - Type: Research prototype · Organisms: Neurons & organoids - Idea: Give an organoid a body early, even a simple one, and see what changes. - What it is: Muotri's lab and a high-school student built a small legged robot that moves according to electrical signals recorded from brain organoids, as a first step toward giving organoids a body. - How it works: Spontaneous activity recorded from organoids on an MEA was translated by a computer into motor commands for the robot. - Video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NxKKLaz2c9M - Project page: https://muotri.ucsd.edu #### Cultured Cortical Neurons Can Perform Blind Source Separation According to the Free-Energy Principle — Takuya Isomura (2015) - Type: Paper · Organisms: Neurons & organoids - Idea: Neurons in a dish can infer hidden causes behind their input, not only react to it. - What it is: Cultured rat neurons received two mixed hidden signals through electrodes and, over training, groups of neurons came to respond to each source separately, like picking out one voice at a party. - How it works: Two hidden sources were probabilistically mixed into stimulation patterns delivered through MEA electrodes; evoked responses were analysed against free-energy-principle predictions. - Paper: https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pcbi.1004643 (PLOS Computational Biology 2015) - Images: https://journals.plos.org/ploscompbiol/article/figure/image?size=inline&id=10.1371/journal.pcbi.1004643.g001 #### Modular Neuronal Assemblies Embodied in a Closed-Loop Environment: Toward Future Integration of Brains and Machines — Michela Chiappalone (2012) - Type: Paper · Organisms: Neurons & organoids - Idea: How you shape the network in the dish changes how well its body behaves. - What it is: Hippocampal neurons grown as linked modules on electrode arrays controlled a virtual robot avoiding obstacles, and modular networks performed better than uniform ones. - How it works: Polymer masks confined neurons into interconnected clusters on MEAs; a closed-loop system encoded robot sensors as stimulation and decoded spikes into wheel speeds, with tetanic stimulation as training. - Paper: https://doi.org/10.3389/fncir.2012.00099 (Frontiers in Neural Circuits 2012) - Images: https://www.frontiersin.org/api/ipx/w=1200&f=png/https://www.frontiersin.org/files/Articles/33917/fncir-06-00099-r2/image_m/fncir-06-00099-g001.jpg #### Gordon: a robot with a biological brain — Kevin Warwick (2008) - Type: Research prototype · Organisms: Neurons & organoids - Idea: A robot's personality can depend on how its living brain happened to grow. - What it is: A wheeled robot at the University of Reading was driven entirely by 50,000 to 100,000 rat neurons on a 60-electrode array. It learned to steer away from walls using its ultrasound sensor. - How it works: Cultured neurons in an incubator talked to the robot over Bluetooth; sonar distance was delivered as stimulation and neural responses turned the wheels. - Paper: https://doi.org/10.14429/dsj.60.11 (Defence Science Journal 2010) - Video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1-0eZytv6Qk - Images: https://spectrum.ieee.org/media-library/image.png?id=26772063&width=1200&height=600&coordinates=0%2C16%2C0%2C17 #### Adaptive flight control with living neuronal networks on microelectrode arrays — Thomas B. DeMarse (2005) - Type: Paper · Organisms: Neurons & organoids - Idea: A brain in a dish can learn a control task when feedback is built into the loop. - What it is: About 25,000 rat cortical neurons on an electrode array were connected to a flight simulator and learned to keep a simulated F-22 jet level in pitch and roll under changing wind. - How it works: Aircraft attitude was encoded as stimulation frequency on MEA electrodes, network responses set control surfaces, and high-frequency training pulses adjusted the network until flight stabilised. - Paper: https://doi.org/10.1109/IJCNN.2005.1556108 (IJCNN 2005) - Video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1w41gH6x_30 #### Hybrot: the rat-brained robot — Steve M. Potter (2002) - Type: Research prototype · Organisms: Neurons & organoids - Idea: A hybrid robot: part living culture, part machine, linked across the room or the world. - What it is: A few thousand rat neurons in a dish in Atlanta steered a small wheeled robot, which approached a target and kept its distance; sensor readings travelled back to the neurons as stimulation. - How it works: Activity from a 60-electrode MEA was mapped to motor commands for a Koala robot, and its infrared sensor data was converted into electrical stimulation. - Video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=E8l3_kAUe0w - Project page: https://potterlab.gatech.edu/labs/potter/animat/ #### Learning in Networks of Cortical Neurons — Shimon Marom (2001) - Type: Paper · Organisms: Neurons & organoids - Idea: Removing an annoying stimulus can work as a reward for a network with no body. - What it is: Cultured rat cortical networks were stimulated until they produced a chosen response, and stimulation was then switched off. Over repeated trials the networks produced the response faster. - How it works: Focal electrical stimulation through a multi-electrode array was stopped whenever a target electrode showed the desired response, a stimulus-removal learning rule. - Paper: https://doi.org/10.1523/JNEUROSCI.21-22-08782.2001 (Journal of Neuroscience 2001) - Images: https://cdn.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/blobs/e8b1/6762268/967dfc708340/ns2215834001.jpg #### The Neurally Controlled Animat: Biological Brains Acting with Simulated Bodies — Steve M. Potter, Thomas B. DeMarse (2001) - Type: Paper · Organisms: Neurons & organoids - Idea: A neuron culture needs a body, even a virtual one, to show behaviour. - What it is: A culture of rat cortical neurons controlled a simulated animal moving in a virtual room, and the animal's sensory input was fed back to the neurons as stimulation. - How it works: Real-time MEA recording and stimulation software closed the loop between the culture and a simulated body, the first 'animat'. - Paper: https://doi.org/10.1023/A:1012407611130 (Autonomous Robots 2001) - Images: https://figures.semanticscholar.org/fdffd7bf6f1cf0e8d5ceca6725dbccd22413d2d6/2-Figure1-1.png https://figures.semanticscholar.org/fdffd7bf6f1cf0e8d5ceca6725dbccd22413d2d6/3-Figure2-1.png ### Wetware Platforms Commercial and open biocomputers you can program or rent. #### Biological data centres — Cortical Labs (2026) - Type: Product & platform · Organisms: Neurons & organoids - Idea: What would a server room look like if its processors needed feeding? - What it is: Cortical Labs announced two data centres built from racks of CL1 units, one in Melbourne and one in Singapore, the latter with researchers at the National University of Singapore. - How it works: Many CL1 units, each carrying living human neurons on a multi-electrode array, are networked in server racks with shared life support and remote access. - Video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mwISkfdRN4o - Images: https://gizmodo.com/app/uploads/2025/03/CorticalLabs-1200x675.jpg - Project page: https://gizmodo.com/the-company-that-made-a-dish-of-neurons-play-doom-is-getting-into-brain-cell-powered-data-centers-2000731875 #### CL1 biological computer — Cortical Labs (2025) - Type: Product & platform · Organisms: Neurons & organoids - Idea: A biological computer packaged like a lab instrument: life support, electrodes and an SDK in one box. - What it is: A self-contained unit that keeps about 800,000 human neurons alive on a silicon electrode chip for up to six months and runs user code against them in real time. It was launched in Barcelona in March 2025 at about US$35,000. - How it works: Human iPSC-derived neurons grow on a planar multi-electrode array; a built-in perfusion system with filtration, gas mixing and temperature control keeps them alive, and a Python API sends stimuli and reads spikes with sub-millisecond latency. - Video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3KeC8gxopio - Images: https://corticallabs.com/images/footer-device.jpg https://corticallabs.com/images/card-device.png - Project page: https://corticallabs.com/cl1 #### Cortical Cloud — Cortical Labs (2025) - Type: Product & platform · Organisms: Neurons & organoids - Idea: Wetware-as-a-service: living neurons offered like cloud GPUs. - What it is: A remote-access service where developers rent time on racks of CL1 units and run experiments on living neurons through the browser, without owning a wet lab. - How it works: Server stacks of networked CL1 units are exposed through a cloud interface and Python SDK, so user code is deployed to cultures maintained by the company. - Images: https://corticallabs.com/images/c-share.jpg - Project page: https://corticallabs.com/cloud.html #### Neuroplatform: open and remotely accessible wetware computing — FinalSpark (2024) - Type: Product & platform · Organisms: Neurons & organoids - Idea: Organoids as a shared, always-on instrument that you log into rather than grow yourself. - What it is: An online platform where 16 human forebrain organoids sit on multi-electrode arrays in incubators in Switzerland, and researchers anywhere stimulate and record them through Python notebooks. The paper reports more than 1,000 organoids kept over three years. - How it works: iPSC-derived forebrain organoids on 8-electrode MEAs are kept alive by microfluidic perfusion; stimulation, recording, UV-uncaging of molecules and live video are exposed through a remote API. - Paper: https://doi.org/10.3389/frai.2024.1376042 (Frontiers in Artificial Intelligence 2024) - Video: https://filedn.eu/lRqRnQL0KhFYX3vj9AlOhUF/neuroplatform.mp4 - Images: https://www.frontiersin.org/api/ipx/w=1200&f=png/https://www.frontiersin.org/files/Articles/1376042/frai-07-1376042-HTML-r1/image_m/frai-07-1376042-g001.jpg https://finalspark.com/wp-content/themes/divi-creative-agency/images/organoid-5.png - Project page: https://finalspark.com/neuroplatform/ #### IoT cloud laboratory: Internet of Things architecture for cellular biology — Braingeneers (2022) - Type: Paper · Organisms: Neurons & organoids, Cells & tissue - Idea: A cell culture becomes a networked device with an address, logs and remote controls. - What it is: An open architecture that connects incubators, cameras, pumps and electrode arrays to the internet so organoid experiments can be run, watched and controlled remotely. - How it works: Lab devices publish and subscribe to messages through a cloud message broker, with data stored in the cloud and experiments scripted in software. - Paper: https://doi.org/10.1016/j.iot.2022.100618 (Internet of Things 2022) - Images: https://cdn.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/blobs/cec6/10305744/14dab88d76f4/nihms-1898546-f0001.jpg - Project page: https://braingeneers.ucsc.edu - Code: https://github.com/braingeneers #### Konikore — Koniku (2017) - Type: Product & platform · Organisms: Neurons & organoids - Idea: Borrow a biological sense directly by building living receptor cells into a device. - What it is: A palm-sized device that combines living neurons engineered with olfactory receptors and silicon electronics to detect and classify smells, such as explosives. It was unveiled at TEDGlobal 2017. - How it works: Neurons derived from mouse stem cells and engineered to express odorant receptors sit on electrodes; their responses to airborne molecules are read and classified by software. - Video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-brCBnjq1Uc - Images: https://koniku.com/meta-img.jpg - Project page: https://koniku.com ### Interfaces for Organoids Electrodes, 3D MEAs, visualisation and interaction design for living neural tissue. #### Kirigami electronics for long-term electrophysiological recording of human neural organoids and assembloids — Zhenan Bao, Sergiu P. Pașca (2024) - Type: Paper · Organisms: Neurons & organoids - Idea: Paper-cutting patterns can turn a flat circuit into a soft cradle for living tissue. - What it is: Thin electrode sheets cut in a kirigami pattern open into a basket that holds a human neural organoid, and record its activity for months without damaging it. - How it works: Stretchable polymer electronics were patterned with kirigami cuts so they deform into 3D and conform to organoids and assembloids during long-term culture. - Paper: https://doi.org/10.1038/s41587-023-02081-3 (Nature Biotechnology 2024) - Images: https://media.springernature.com/full/springer-static/image/art%3A10.1038%2Fs41587-023-02081-3/MediaObjects/41587_2023_2081_Fig1_HTML.png #### Functional neuronal circuitry and oscillatory dynamics in human brain organoids — Kenneth S. Kosik (2022) - Type: Paper · Organisms: Neurons & organoids - Idea: High-density electrodes turn an organoid's activity into a readable circuit map. - What it is: Slices of human brain organoids placed on high-density CMOS electrode arrays revealed thousands of individual neurons, their connections and rhythmic oscillations. - How it works: Organoid slices were recorded on CMOS HD-MEAs with thousands of electrodes; spike sorting and connectivity inference mapped circuits and oscillations. - Paper: https://doi.org/10.1038/s41467-022-32115-4 (Nature Communications 2022) - Images: https://media.springernature.com/full/springer-static/image/art%3A10.1038%2Fs41467-022-32115-4/MediaObjects/41467_2022_32115_Fig1_HTML.png #### Maturation and circuit integration of transplanted human cortical organoids — Sergiu P. Pașca (2022) - Type: Paper · Organisms: Neurons & organoids, Animals - Idea: A living body can be the best interface for an organoid, which also raises new ethical questions. - What it is: Human cortical organoids transplanted into the brains of newborn rats matured, connected to rat circuits, responded to whisker touch, and could drive reward-seeking behaviour when stimulated with light. - How it works: Organoids were transplanted into rat somatosensory cortex; imaging, electrophysiology and optogenetic stimulation tested integration and behavioural effects. - Paper: https://doi.org/10.1038/s41586-022-05277-w (Nature 2022) - Images: https://media.springernature.com/full/springer-static/image/art%3A10.1038%2Fs41586-022-05277-w/MediaObjects/41586_2022_5277_Fig1_HTML.png #### Shell microelectrode arrays (MEAs) for brain organoids — David H. Gracias, Lena Smirnova (2022) - Type: Paper · Organisms: Neurons & organoids - Idea: Fit the interface to the organism's shape, not the organism to the interface. - What it is: Tiny self-folding shells lined with electrodes close around a spherical brain organoid like a clam, recording activity from its whole surface instead of only the underside that touches a flat chip. - How it works: Photolithographically patterned polymer bilayers with gold electrodes self-fold into 3D shells when released, enclosing organoids for stimulation and recording. - Paper: https://doi.org/10.1126/sciadv.abq5031 (Science Advances 2022) - Images: https://cdn.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/blobs/fa27/9385157/0854adb5aee1/sciadv.abq5031-f1.jpg #### Stretchable Mesh Nanoelectronics for 3D Single-Cell Chronic Electrophysiology from Developing Brain Organoids — Jia Liu (2022) - Type: Paper · Organisms: Neurons & organoids - Idea: An interface that stays with the same cells for their whole development, like a long-term diary. - What it is: Mesh electronics grown into human brain organoids tracked the same individual neurons for months as the organoids developed, revealing how their firing patterns mature. - How it works: Tissue-like stretchable mesh electrodes were integrated during organoid formation, enabling chronic 3D single-unit recordings over months. - Paper: https://doi.org/10.1002/adma.202106829 (Advanced Materials 2022) - Images: https://cdn.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/blobs/6816/8930507/78285ced508d/nihms-1778930-f0001.jpg #### Three-dimensional, multifunctional neural interfaces for cortical spheroids and engineered assembloids — John A. Rogers, Sergiu P. Pașca (2021) - Type: Paper · Organisms: Neurons & organoids - Idea: A tiny architecture, built around the tissue, that carries sensors and stimulators. - What it is: Pop-up 3D frameworks carrying microelectrodes wrap around human cortical spheroids, so researchers can stimulate and record from many sides at once. - How it works: Mechanically guided 3D assembly buckles 2D thin-film circuits into mesoscale cages that hold recording and stimulation electrodes around spheroids. - Paper: https://doi.org/10.1126/sciadv.abf9153 (Science Advances 2021) - Images: https://cdn.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/blobs/4ad7/7968849/e1a78af1732b/abf9153-F1.jpg #### Cyborg Organoids: Implantation of Nanoelectronics via Organogenesis for Tissue-Wide Electrophysiology — Jia Liu (2019) - Type: Paper · Organisms: Neurons & organoids, Cells & tissue - Idea: Let the tissue build the device into itself as it grows. - What it is: A stretchable mesh of electronics is laid on a flat sheet of stem cells; as the sheet folds into a 3D organoid, the mesh is folded inside it, leaving sensors spread through the grown tissue. - How it works: Ultra-flexible, stretchable nanoelectronic meshes were placed on 2D stem-cell sheets that self-assembled into 3D organoids through organogenesis. - Paper: https://doi.org/10.1021/acs.nanolett.9b02512 (Nano Letters 2019) - Video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nCU3xlZw3xo #### Macroporous nanowire nanoelectronic scaffolds for synthetic tissues — Charles M. Lieber, Jia Liu (2012) - Type: Paper · Organisms: Cells & tissue, Neurons & organoids - Idea: Make the electronics the scaffold that tissue grows on, so sensing happens everywhere inside. - What it is: 3D porous scaffolds made of nanowire transistors were seeded with neurons, heart cells and muscle cells, producing 'cyborg tissues' that could be sensed from within. - How it works: Free-standing macroporous networks of silicon nanowire field-effect transistors were combined with extracellular matrix and cells to form 3D hybrid tissues. - Paper: https://doi.org/10.1038/nmat3404 (Nature Materials 2012) - Images: https://media.springernature.com/full/springer-static/image/art%3A10.1038%2Fnmat3404/MediaObjects/41563_2012_Article_BFnmat3404_Fig1_HTML.jpg ### Neural Culture Art Artworks in which living neurons draw, compose or perform. #### Cortical Echoes — Amy Karle, Eduardo Reck Miranda, Cortical Labs (2026) - Type: Artwork · Organisms: Neurons & organoids - Idea: A three-way conversation between people, code and living neurons. - What it is: A live performance-installation in which human performers' voices and sounds stimulate living neurons cultured with Cortical Labs, and the neurons' spikes are turned into music, synthetic speech and light. - How it works: Audio and MIDI input is encoded as stimulation of neurons on a multi-electrode array; rule-based systems translate spike activity into generative music, phonetic speech and lighting. - Video: https://vimeo.com/1171672567 - Images: https://www.amykarle.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/03/cortical-echoes-concept-rendering-a.png - Project page: https://www.amykarle.com/project/cortical_echoes/ #### Biobot: Code of Diversity — Zoran Srdić Janežič (2025) - Type: Artwork · Organisms: Neurons & organoids - Idea: Design a body that confuses human-written algorithms, so a living brain has room to find its own way of moving. - What it is: A robot with a body resembling no animal learns to cross a linear track in Kapelica Gallery; its gaits come from algorithms today, and a neural organoid on an electrode is meant to take over control in the next generation. - How it works: A modified RoboGrammar generates atypical robot skeletons; the DIAYN (Diversity Is All You Need) algorithm, guided by computer vision of the robot's position, learns varied gaits from motor signals, while a neuronal organoid on an electrode translates signals between neurons and the joint controller. - Images: https://kersnikova.org/wp-content/uploads/2025/12/2_1_zoran.png - Project page: https://kersnikova.org/posts/events/all/eudigitaldeal-zoran-srdic-janezic-code-of-diversity #### Revivification — Guy Ben-Ary (2025) - Type: Artwork · Organisms: Neurons & organoids, Human body - Idea: An in-vitro 'brain' of a dead composer as a living, ongoing performance. - What it is: In a dark chamber lined with 20 brass plates, cerebral organoids grown from Alvin Lucier's blood strike the plates through motorised mallets, composing a new work in real time throughout the exhibition at the Art Gallery of Western Australia. - How it works: Lucier's white blood cells were reprogrammed at Harvard into iPS cells and grown into cerebral organoids on electrodes; their activity drives mallets, and the resulting sound is fed back as stimulation. - Video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ysGUO5vsRJE - Images: https://guybenary.com/images/revivification.jpg https://guybenary.com/images/reviv-1-installation.jpg - Project page: https://guybenary.com/projects/revivification.html #### SOMA — Tuurm, FinalSpark (2025) - Type: Research prototype · Organisms: Neurons & organoids, Human body - Idea: Replace keyboard and screen with touch when the computer is alive, and design for its uncertainty. - What it is: Visitors touch a soft artificial membrane; the touch becomes electrical pulses sent to living brain organoids, and the organoids' response is shown as movement in the same membrane. - How it works: A tactile membrane with sensors and actuators is linked to neural organoids on FinalSpark's remotely accessible Neuroplatform MEAs, forming a closed stimulation-response loop; made at Zurich University of the Arts (ZHdK). - Images: https://cdn.prod.website-files.com/69ddeb3810b924d8ff7556d0/6a177608fd6b6da72123d0d2_people-touching-soma-interactive-installation.webp https://cdn.prod.website-files.com/69ddeb3810b924d8ff7556d0/6a1777c391ce79a3d4d3c2a7_brain-organoid-on-mea.webp - Project page: https://tuurm.ch/soma #### Simulacra Naturae: Generative Ecosystem driven by Agent-Based Simulations and Brain Organoid Collective Intelligence — Nefeli Manoudaki (2025) - Type: Artwork · Organisms: Neurons & organoids, Plants - Idea: Treat organoid signals as a co-creative influence on a system, not as a remote control. - What it is: A media installation where recorded brain organoid activity shapes a generative ecosystem of visuals, spatial sound, living plants and clay objects, inspired by termite colonies and slime moulds. - How it works: Pre-recorded organoid spike data is streamed in real time to modulate agent-based simulations that drive projections, audio and fabricated artefacts. - Paper: https://arxiv.org/abs/2509.02924 (arXiv 2025) - Video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NZdfTDe8SCI - Images: https://arxiv.org/html/2509.02924v1/teaser.png #### NeuroDOOM – Knee-Deep in the Alive — hOrO mO X, FinalSpark (2024) - Type: Artwork · Organisms: Neurons & organoids - Idea: Three kinds of intelligence, organoid, artificial and human, share one game loop. - What it is: Part of the MindWare series: brain organoids on FinalSpark's platform in Switzerland 'play' DOOM, while the artist in Paris acts as their eyes, turning organoid signals into AI-generated game frames. - How it works: Organoid spikes from the Neuroplatform are interpreted by language models into prompts, image models render game frames, and the artist's meditative 'telepathic' input closes the loop. - Video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FISzAn5GU5g - Images: https://horomox.com/doomthumb.jpg https://horomox.com/doomschema.jpg - Project page: https://horomox.com/neurodoom #### Plato's Prisoners — Cody Lukas (2024) - Type: Artwork · Organisms: Neurons & organoids, Human body - Idea: Make a two-way conversation between a person and a mini-brain, so its moral status is felt rather than debated. - What it is: Visitors speak into a microphone; their voices become vibrations in the liquid around a living cerebral organoid, and the organoid's neural response shapes the light and sound filling the room. - How it works: Human stem-cell-derived cerebral organoids (about 90 days old) are stimulated by voice-driven vibration and their recorded activity controls light and sound; the displayed organoid is swapped every three days from a sibling colony kept in an incubator; made with Marie Sejberg Øhlenschlæger, Pia Jensen and Martin Røssel Larsen (University of Southern Denmark). - Video: https://www.codylukas.com/eden/platos-prisoners.mp4 - Images: https://codylukas.com/eden/gallery/13.png https://archive.aec.at/asset/3850271/preview/ - Project page: https://www.codylukas.com/portfolio/ #### Music for Surrogate Performer — Guy Ben-Ary (2023) - Type: Artwork · Organisms: Neurons & organoids, Human body - Idea: A composer's cells can keep performing his work after his death, with his consent. - What it is: A live performance in which neurons grown from the late composer Alvin Lucier's blood play percussion, extending his 1965 brainwave piece Music for Solo Performer. Premiered in the Venice Biennale Music programme. - How it works: Lucier's blood cells were reprogrammed into stem cells and grown into neural cultures; their electrical activity triggers mallets on percussion instruments. - Video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=O2sWa23PyTU - Images: https://www.guybenary.com/images/music-for-surrogate-performer.jpg https://guybenary.com/images/mfsp-32-music-for-surrogate-performer-kontejner20251009.jpg - Project page: https://guybenary.com/projects/music-for-surrogate-performer.html #### Biobot: AI ARThropods — Zoran Srdić Janežič (2022) - Type: Artwork · Organisms: Neurons & organoids, Human body - Idea: Let a living 'brain on a chip' decide what body it should have, not only how that body moves. - What it is: Neurons reprogrammed from the artist's own fat cells grow on an electrode array; their electrical signals drive a robot, and an AI compares them with arthropod leg movements to propose ever-new zoomorphic bodies. - How it works: Adipose-derived cells are reprogrammed into neurons on a multi-electrode array; analogue spikes are digitised, amplified and fed to an AI that matches them to a library of arthropod gaits and suggests joint and limb counts, from which the artist builds the robot; earlier stages (Biobot 1.1, 1.2) looped robot motion back to the neurons. - Images: https://ars.electronica.art/planetb/files/2022/07/Biobot-AI-ARThropods-Zoran-Srdic-Janezic-SI-photo-Florian-Voggeneder.jpg https://kersnikova.org/wp-content/uploads/2022/08/BIOBOT_header_small@Zoran-Srdic-Janezic-min-scaled.jpg https://kersnikova.org/wp-content/uploads/2022/12/20221214_192126-1.jpg - Project page: https://ars.electronica.art/planetb/en/biobot/ #### FlaNeuron — Zoran Srdić Janežič (2019) - Type: Research prototype · Organisms: Neurons & organoids - Idea: Treat a neuron-robot hybrid as a new kind of creature whose care has to be designed, not only its function. - What it is: A knitted, 3D-printed robotic 'walker' is coupled to a culture of neuronal cells on a multi-electrode array, presented at BioTehna in Ljubljana as a semi-living cybernetic creature that needs care protocols. - How it works: Neuronal cells grown by Kristijan Tkalec (BioTehna) on a Multi Channel Systems MEA are linked through custom electronics to a stereolithography-printed and knitted walking mechanism; the exact control loop is likely still experimental at this stage. - Images: https://kersnikova.org/wp-content/uploads/2019/01/flaneuron.jpg - Project page: https://kersnikova.org/posts/events/all/zoran-srdic-janezic-flaneuron #### Snowflake — Guy Ben-Ary (2017) - Type: Artwork · Organisms: Neurons & organoids, Human body - Idea: Treat plasticity as a material: write an image into living neurons, then freeze the memory as an object. - What it is: A neural network grown from Guy Ben-Ary's own cells, repeatedly stimulated with the image of a snowflake, is displayed frozen in a liquid-nitrogen container as a 'memory' kept for a cryonic future. - How it works: Revisits a 2004-2006 experiment in Steve Potter's Georgia Tech lab where mouse neurons on 60-electrode MEAs were trained with a snowflake pattern and cryopreserved; the new version uses the artist's own neurons; with Boryana Rossa and Oleg Mavromatti. - Video: https://vimeo.com/128319458 - Images: https://www.guybenary.com/images/snowflake.jpg https://www.guybenary.com/images/snow-013.jpg - Project page: https://www.guybenary.com/projects/snowflake.html #### cellF — Guy Ben-Ary (2015) - Type: Artwork · Organisms: Neurons & organoids, Human body - Idea: A self-portrait as a living instrument that improvises with other players. - What it is: A neural synthesizer whose 'brain' is a network of about 100,000 neurons grown from the artist's own skin cells. It plays analog modular synthesizers in live improvisation with human musicians. - How it works: Skin cells were reprogrammed into iPS cells and differentiated into neurons on an MEA; their spikes control analog synth voltages, and the musicians' sound is fed back as stimulation. - Video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1G-vk5QWRsg - Images: https://guybenary.com/images/cellf.jpg https://guybenary.com/images/cellf-neurons.jpg - Project page: https://guybenary.com/projects/cellf.html #### In-Potentia — Guy Ben-Ary (2012) - Type: Artwork · Organisms: Neurons & organoids, Human body - Idea: A 'brain' can be grown from almost any part of a body, which unsettles ideas of personhood. - What it is: Human foreskin cells were reprogrammed into stem cells and grown into a small functioning neural network inside a sculptural bioreactor, whose activity was turned into sound. - How it works: Foreskin fibroblasts were reprogrammed via iPS technology into neurons, cultured on an MEA inside a custom incubator and sonified in real time. - Video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=99S6TEDT0w8 - Images: https://guybenary.com/images/in-potentia.jpg https://guybenary.com/images/ip-2.jpg - Project page: https://guybenary.com/projects/in-potentia.html #### PANCREAS — Thomas Feuerstein (2012) - Type: Artwork · Organisms: Neurons & organoids, Bacteria & microbes - Idea: Translate information into food: a book literally becomes the metabolism of a brain in a vat. - What it is: A processual sculpture shreds copies of Hegel's Phenomenology of Spirit, lets bacteria digest the paper into glucose, and feeds that sugar to human brain cells growing in a glass tank. - How it works: Paper pulp is fermented by cellulose-degrading bacteria in an artificial intestine, the glucose is filtered and purified, then supplied to cultured human brain cells; realised with Thomas Seppi, Medical University of Innsbruck. - Images: https://thomasfeuerstein.net/50_WORKS/75_LABORATORY/72_PANCREAS.jpg https://thomasfeuerstein.net/50_WORKS/75_LABORATORY/71_BRAIN_IN_A_VAT.jpg https://thomasfeuerstein.net/50_WORKS/10_CANDYLAB/08_Pancreas.jpg - Project page: https://thomasfeuerstein.net/50_WORKS/75_LABORATORY/72_PANCREAS #### Silent Barrage — Guy Ben-Ary, Steve M. Potter (2009) - Type: Artwork · Organisms: Neurons & organoids - Idea: The audience becomes part of a feedback loop that may soothe or agitate a living network. - What it is: Tall robotic poles in a gallery mark walls with ink, driven by a rat neural culture in Atlanta; visitors' movements are sent back as stimulation, trying to calm the culture's epilepsy-like bursts. - How it works: Cameras track visitors and convert their positions into stimulation of a remote MEA culture; recorded activity drives 32 robotic pole-drawers. - Video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aaIJoXlXHZM - Images: https://guybenary.com/images/silent-barrage.jpg https://guybenary.com/images/sb-how-it-works.jpg - Project page: https://guybenary.com/projects/silent-barrage.html #### Tree of Knowledge — Marta de Menezes (2005) - Type: Artwork · Organisms: Neurons & organoids - Idea: Represent a living structure with the living material itself, so the artwork keeps changing like its subject. - What it is: Live sculptures of neurons made from neurons: scaffolds and glass tubes are covered with living nerve cells that keep growing, connecting and pruning while on display. - How it works: Neurons are cultured on Matrigel-coated scaffolds and in glass tubes inside an incubator; developed at SymbioticA with Giles Plant's group, Oron Catts and Ionat Zurr, with help from Miguel Vaz Afonso. - Images: https://martademenezes.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/08/Fig09c-Tree-of-Knowledge.jpg https://martademenezes.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/08/Fig09a-tree-of-knowledge-incubator.jpg - Project page: https://martademenezes.com/art/cultures/tree-of-knowledge/ #### MEART – the semi-living artist — Guy Ben-Ary, Steve M. Potter (2003) - Type: Artwork · Organisms: Neurons & organoids - Idea: Brain and body can be on different continents and still form one artist. - What it is: A robotic drawing arm in a gallery was controlled over the internet by rat cortical neurons living in a lab in Atlanta; a camera fed the drawing back to the neurons so they could 'see' their work. - How it works: Cultured rat neurons on a 60-electrode MEA exchanged data over the internet with a pneumatic drawing arm; a camera image of the drawing was converted into stimulation patterns. - Paper: https://doi.org/10.3389/neuro.12.005.2007 (Frontiers in Neurorobotics 2007) - Video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PM5Ui5KwmXQ - Images: https://guybenary.com/images/meart.jpg https://guybenary.com/images/ma-1.jpg - Project page: https://guybenary.com/projects/meart.html #### Fish & Chips — Guy Ben-Ary, Steve M. Potter (2001) - Type: Artwork · Organisms: Neurons & organoids, Animals - Idea: What happens to authorship when the 'artist' is a few thousand fish neurons? - What it is: SymbioticA's first 'semi-living artist': neurons from a goldfish, grown on a silicon chip, drove a robotic arm that drew on paper, while music stimulated the cells. Shown at Ars Electronica 2001. - How it works: Goldfish neural tissue on a multi-electrode array was recorded and its activity mapped to movements of a pen-holding robotic arm. - Images: https://live.staticflickr.com/5179/5415033341_dfd93ef118_b.jpg - Project page: https://www.flickr.com/photos/arselectronica/5415033341 ### Ethics & Futures Consciousness, consent and the futures of computing with living brains. #### Ethical concerns about embodied brain organoids shaped by foundational distinctions and perceptions of consciousness — J. Lomax Boyd (2026) - Type: Paper · Organisms: Neurons & organoids, Human body - Idea: Public intuitions about embodiment should inform how organoid systems are designed and presented. - What it is: A survey study of how people judge brain organoids that are connected to bodies, robots or games, showing that views on consciousness and on what counts as a 'body' shape their concerns. - How it works: Survey experiment measuring ethical concern across scenarios of organoid embodiment, analysed against beliefs about consciousness. - Paper: https://doi.org/10.1038/s41598-026-43243-y (Scientific Reports 2026) - Images: https://media.springernature.com/full/springer-static/image/art%3A10.1038%2Fs41598-026-43243-y/MediaObjects/41598_2026_43243_Fig1_HTML.png #### Organoid Array Computing: The Design Space of Organoid Intelligence — Jenn Leung (2025) - Type: Book & essay · Organisms: Neurons & organoids - Idea: Design organoid computers as ecologies you cultivate, not machines you specify. - What it is: An essay for the Antikythera journal that maps the design space of networked organoid arrays and argues that organoid intelligence will develop through guided evolution of living matter rather than top-down engineering. - How it works: Speculative design research drawing on organoid biology, distributed computing and planetary computation theory. - Paper: https://doi.org/10.1162/anti.5czm (Antikythera Digital Journal 2025) - Project page: https://ualresearchonline.arts.ac.uk/id/eprint/24036/ #### Brain organoids and organoid intelligence from ethical, legal, and social points of view — Thomas Hartung, Lena Smirnova (2024) - Type: Paper · Organisms: Neurons & organoids, Human body - Idea: Every biocomputer starts with a person who donated cells. - What it is: A review of ethical, legal and social issues for Organoid Intelligence, from donor consent and ownership of cells to possible consciousness and public trust. - How it works: Structured literature review organised around the lifecycle of organoid research. - Paper: https://doi.org/10.3389/frai.2023.1307613 (Frontiers in Artificial Intelligence 2024) - Images: https://www.frontiersin.org/api/ipx/w=1200&f=png/https://www.frontiersin.org/files/Articles/1307613/frai-06-1307613-HTML/image_m/frai-06-1307613-g001.jpg #### Consciousness and the Ethics of Human Brain Organoid Research — Karola V. Kreitmair (2023) - Type: Paper · Organisms: Neurons & organoids - Idea: Uncertainty about inner life is itself a design constraint. - What it is: An argument that because we cannot rule out consciousness in brain organoids, research should follow precautionary rules on how organoids are made, used and disposed of. - How it works: Philosophical analysis of theories of consciousness applied to organoid research practice. - Paper: https://doi.org/10.1017/s0963180123000063 (Cambridge Quarterly of Healthcare Ethics 2023) - Images: https://static.cambridge.org/binary/version/id/urn:cambridge.org:id:binary:20230926120648556-0603:S0963180123000063:S0963180123000063_fig1.png?pub-status=live #### The Baltimore declaration toward the exploration of organoid intelligence — Thomas Hartung, Lena Smirnova (2023) - Type: Book & essay · Organisms: Neurons & organoids - Idea: Write the rules before the capability arrives. - What it is: A short statement signed by participants of a 2022 workshop in Baltimore that commits Organoid Intelligence research to ethical guidance, public engagement and responsible scaling. - How it works: Consensus statement drafted by researchers and ethicists at the first Organoid Intelligence workshop. - Paper: https://doi.org/10.3389/fsci.2023.1068159 (Frontiers in Science 2023) - Video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7G6f1JaIg7w #### Neurons Embodied in a Virtual World: Evidence for Organoid Ethics? — Brett J. Kagan, Cortical Labs (2022) - Type: Paper · Organisms: Neurons & organoids - Idea: The builders of a system should also be the first to state its ethical limits. - What it is: An ethics commentary by the DishBrain team asking what moral status, if any, a neural culture that responds to a game world could have, and which safeguards researchers should adopt now. - How it works: Conceptual analysis linking DishBrain's goal-directed behaviour to debates on sentience, consciousness and research governance. - Paper: https://doi.org/10.1080/21507740.2022.2048731 (AJOB Neuroscience 2022) #### The Emerging Field of Human Neural Organoids, Transplants, and Chimeras — National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine (2021) - Type: Book & essay · Organisms: Neurons & organoids, Animals - Idea: A sober baseline for what organoids can do today, useful against both hype and fear. - What it is: A US consensus report concluding that current neural organoids are far from human-like awareness, while recommending ongoing oversight, public engagement and attention to donor consent. - How it works: Expert committee review of the scientific literature with ethical, legal and societal analysis. - Paper: https://doi.org/10.17226/26078 (National Academies Press 2021) - Images: https://nap.nationalacademies.org/cover/26078/150dpi - Project page: https://nap.nationalacademies.org/catalog/26078/the-emerging-field-of-human-neural-organoids-transplants-and-chimeras #### A Taxonomy for Possible Consciousness — Ani Liu (2018) - Type: Artwork · Organisms: Neurons & organoids, Human body - Idea: If a mind is matter, list the matter and see whether a mind appears. - What it is: A portrait of an organic brain broken into its elemental materials and set beside the materials of a computational brain, asking whether sentience could be manufactured in a lab. - How it works: Capsules holding the elemental materials of a human brain are likely displayed next to materials of computers, as a material taxonomy. - Images: https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/52cd9799e4b00ae3ac706ed4/1535513279437-WI2BMUMTAXJSQ3QH1ZMN/image+3.JPG https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/52cd9799e4b00ae3ac706ed4/1535513463532-TRX5W6QNSOS2YPRU3JXK/test+capsules+for+look+ANI+LIU.jpg https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/52cd9799e4b00ae3ac706ed4/1535513393313-3TLD7EXNU29VE0DTIC23/DSCF5558.JPG - Project page: https://ani-liu.com/materiality-for-possible-consciousness #### Cerebral organoids: ethical issues and consciousness assessment — Andrea Lavazza (2018) - Type: Paper · Organisms: Neurons & organoids - Idea: If a system might feel, decide in advance how you would check. - What it is: One of the first papers to argue that cerebral organoids might one day have some form of consciousness, and to propose measuring it with tools such as the perturbational complexity index used in patients. - How it works: Philosophical and neuroscientific analysis borrowing consciousness measures from clinical neurology. - Paper: https://doi.org/10.1136/medethics-2017-104555 (Journal of Medical Ethics 2018) #### The ethics of experimenting with human brain tissue — Nita A. Farahany (2018) - Type: Paper · Organisms: Neurons & organoids, Human body - Idea: Set rules while brain surrogates are still simple. - What it is: A Nature comment by 17 scientists and ethicists calling for guidelines as brain organoids, ex vivo brain tissue and human-animal chimeras become more brain-like. - How it works: Policy commentary identifying capacities (pain, awareness, memory) that should trigger oversight. - Paper: https://doi.org/10.1038/d41586-018-04813-x (Nature 2018) - Images: https://media.nature.com/lw1200/magazine-assets/d41586-018-04813-x/d41586-018-04813-x_15700022.jpg ## Animal–Computer Interaction Technology used by, designed with and designed for animals: pets, working animals, zoo residents, livestock and wildlife, and the ethics of involving them. ### Pets & Companion Animals Devices that let pets call, play, rest and be understood at home. #### Look What the Cat Tapped In: Exploring Digital Interactive Systems Designed for the Cat Cafe Experience — Ilyena Hirskyj-Douglas, Rébecca Kleinberger (2025) - Type: Research prototype · Organisms: Animals - Idea: Give visitors a way to play with cats that does not overload them. - What it is: MewTube is a tablet app for cat cafés that plays curated videos for cats while visitors adjust playback speed to the cats' behaviour. - How it works: Five-month study with 28 people and 16 cats comparing conditions with and without the app. - Paper: https://doi.org/10.1145/3768539.3768541 (ACI 2025) - Images: https://figures.semanticscholar.org/5ebf3d99af2556602768061d3e9754a85db0b4e4/2-Figure1-1.png https://figures.semanticscholar.org/5ebf3d99af2556602768061d3e9754a85db0b4e4/8-Figure4-1.png #### pawH: Colorimetric pH-Sensing Toys for Non-Invasive Pet Health Monitoring — Shuyi Sun, Katia Vega (2025) - Type: Research prototype · Organisms: Animals - Idea: A chew toy can be a diagnostic strip the animal applies by playing. - What it is: pawH are pet toys, a braided rope and a ball, that change colour with the pH of the pet's saliva as it chews. - How it works: Colorimetric pH biosensors embedded in pet-safe toy materials; colour read by eye or with a portable spectrometer. - Paper: https://doi.org/10.1145/3715336.3735768 (DIS 2025) #### AI Cat Narrator — Zhenchi Lai (2024) - Type: Research prototype · Organisms: Animals, Human body - Idea: Use AI to imagine the shared home as the cat might tell it. - What it is: An AI tool that writes alternative stories of everyday moments between a cat and its people, told from the cat's side, based on sensor data from cats, cat literature and interviews with owners. - How it works: Data logged from cats is combined with literature and interview material in a large language model that generates first-person cat narratives. - Paper: https://doi.org/10.1145/3656156.3663692 (DIS 2024 Companion) - Images: https://figures.semanticscholar.org/af2fb6ee6691ecb1fc2efcf7fe27c8c218caed4b/4-Figure4-1.png https://figures.semanticscholar.org/af2fb6ee6691ecb1fc2efcf7fe27c8c218caed4b/2-Figure2-1.png - Project page: https://artifact-archive.org/whole-archive #### Call of the Wild Web: Comparing Parrot Engagement in Live vs. Pre-Recorded Video Calls — Ilyena Hirskyj-Douglas, Jennifer Cunha, Rébecca Kleinberger (2024) - Type: Paper · Organisms: Animals - Idea: For social animals, a live connection is worth more than content. - What it is: A six-month study in which pet parrots could trigger either live video calls with other parrots or recorded calls; they chose live calls much more. - How it works: Parrot-operated tablet system logging triggers, engagement and behaviour for live vs pre-recorded calls. - Paper: https://doi.org/10.1145/3613904.3641938 (CHI 2024) - Video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bjoJToyC9_0 #### GluCAT: A Feline Biofluids IoT Hub for Electrochemical Glucose Biosensing — Shuyi Sun, Katia Vega (2024) - Type: Research prototype · Organisms: Animals - Idea: A pet's body fluids can become a data stream for its care. - What it is: GluCAT is a 'feline biofluids IoT hub' that senses glucose in cat urine with an electrochemical biosensor and links the data to connected home devices. - How it works: Glucose biosensing in a litter-box setup, integrated with an IoT system for continuous monitoring. - Paper: https://doi.org/10.1145/3623509.3635250 (TEI 2024) #### No More Angry Birds: Investigating Touchscreen Ergonomics to Improve Tablet-Based Enrichment for Parrots — Rébecca Kleinberger, Ilyena Hirskyj-Douglas (2024) - Type: Paper · Organisms: Animals - Idea: Human touchscreen standards do not fit parrots; measure their bodies to design for them. - What it is: A study of how 20 pet parrots touch tablet screens with their beaks and tongues, used to derive interface guidelines for parrot apps. - How it works: Touch-target experiments on tablets, tested against HCI models such as Fitts's law. - Paper: https://doi.org/10.1145/3613904.3642119 (CHI 2024) - Video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EY5GiklaplM - Images: https://i.ytimg.com/vi/EY5GiklaplM/maxresdefault.jpg - Project page: https://doi.org/10.1145/3613904.3642119 #### Prototyping an Immersive Screen Interfaces for Dogs' to Control Screens in Their Home — Ilyena Hirskyj-Douglas (2024) - Type: Research prototype · Organisms: Animals - Idea: Give the dog the remote and see what it actually wants to watch. - What it is: A home system that lets a dog switch on videos on an immersive screen setup, studied over six months with one dog. - How it works: Dog-triggered video playback with logging of attention and content features over a long home deployment. - Paper: https://doi.org/10.1145/3702336.3702342 (ACI 2024) #### Birds of a Feather Video-Flock Together: Design and Evaluation of an Agency-Based Parrot-to-Parrot Video-Calling System for Interspecies Ethical Enrichment — Rébecca Kleinberger, Ilyena Hirskyj-Douglas (2023) - Type: Research prototype · Organisms: Animals - Idea: Social technology for animals should let them choose whether and whom to call. - What it is: Pet parrots learned to ring a bell to request a call and then chose which other parrot to video-call on a tablet; many formed preferences for particular partners. - How it works: Tablet video calls initiated by the birds, with caregivers supervising; usage and behaviour analysed over months. - Paper: https://doi.org/10.1145/3544548.3581166 (CHI 2023) - Video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=R8BlvicJfJM - Images: https://news.northeastern.edu/wp-content/uploads/2023/04/neu_4f18zf631.jpg https://news.northeastern.edu/wp-content/uploads/2023/04/041023_MM_Jennifer_Cunha_010.jpg - Project page: https://news.northeastern.edu/2023/04/21/parrots-talking-video-calls #### KitBit: An Instrumented Collar for Indoor Pets — Melody Moore Jackson (2023) - Type: Research prototype · Organisms: Animals - Idea: Design pet trackers for cats' bodies and homes, not as shrunken dog trackers. - What it is: KitBit is a light collar-mounted activity tracker for indoor cats that classifies their activity level with machine learning. - How it works: IMU on the collar with wireless transmission; an LSTM model classifies activity from play sessions in 11 homes. - Paper: https://doi.org/10.1145/3637882.3637894 (ACI 2023) #### Quantified Canine: Inferring Dog Personality From Wearables — Daniele Quercia (2023) - Type: Research prototype · Organisms: Animals - Idea: Activity data can stand in for a costly personality test, for example to match shelter dogs. - What it is: Patchkeeper, a chest-worn sensor, collected 1,300 hours of activity data from 12 dogs and inferred their personality traits. - How it works: Accelerometer and gyroscope data modelled against validated dog personality questionnaires. - Paper: https://doi.org/10.1145/3544548.3581088 (CHI 2023) - Video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jQeBh000krw - Images: https://arxiv.org/html/2301.06964v2/figures/device_diagram.png #### Squeeker: The Mouse Coach — Jiabao Li (2023) - Type: Product & platform · Organisms: Animals - Idea: Reverse the lab-mouse relation: let the mouse set the human's health routine. - What it is: An app and installation in which a pet mouse is your running coach: when the mouse starts running on its smart wheel you get a notification, and if you match its distance you both get a reward. - How it works: A sensor-equipped running wheel streams the mouse's distance to a mobile app; rewards are treats for the mouse and social-media scroll time for the human. - Paper: https://doi.org/10.1145/3731459.3779140 (TEI 2026) - Video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UvfkYPLJAaw - Images: https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/58688c8a6a496327e937e35b/b7f95c0a-871a-4b29-a615-02a0f0a098bd/Jiabao+Li+Squeeker+Mouse+Coach+2.jpg https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/58688c8a6a496327e937e35b/c9dc1a34-a6c8-4773-9b65-9c17244ee166/jiabao+li+mouse+coach+idfa+5.jpg https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/58688c8a6a496327e937e35b/34f8125f-977a-4b14-b437-81b59a8fc08b/jiabao+li+squeeker+mouse+coach+app.jpg - Project page: https://www.jiabaoli.org/mouse-coach #### cirCAT: PURRtentio: a Litter Box that Monitors Feline Urine using Electrochemical Biosensors — Shuyi Sun, Katia Vega (2023) - Type: Research prototype · Organisms: Animals - Idea: Turn a daily habit, using the litter box, into health monitoring without a vet visit. - What it is: cirCAT: PURRtentio is a litter box with an electrochemical biosensor that analyses a cat's urine at home each time it is used. - How it works: A DIY three-electrode sensor, potentiostat, microcontroller and distance sensor detect the cat and measure urine analytes, shown in a mobile app. - Paper: https://doi.org/10.1145/3637882.3637887 (ACI 2023) #### Automated recognition of pain in cats — Anna Zamansky (2022) - Type: Paper · Organisms: Animals - Idea: A camera can read pain on a cat's face that owners often miss. - What it is: Compares two machine-learning approaches, landmark-based and deep learning, that recognise pain in photos of cats' faces. - How it works: Facial images of 29 cats before and after surgery analysed with geometric landmarks and with deep neural networks. - Paper: https://doi.org/10.1038/s41598-022-13348-1 (Scientific Reports 2022) - Images: https://media.springernature.com/full/springer-static/image/art%3A10.1038%2Fs41598-022-13348-1/MediaObjects/41598_2022_13348_Fig1_HTML.jpg #### MeowPlayLive: Enhancing Animal Live Streaming Experience Through Voice Message-Based Real-Time Viewer-Animal Interaction — Woohun Lee (2022) - Type: Research prototype · Organisms: Animals - Idea: Let the animal decide which viewer gets through. - What it is: MeowPlayLive lets live-stream viewers send voice messages that appear as moving objects on a cat's tablet; a message is heard only if the cat taps it. - How it works: Live-streaming platform linked to a cat-facing tablet game, deployed in real streams. - Paper: https://doi.org/10.1145/3532106.3533553 (DIS 2022) - Video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Op7IIU355T4 #### Forming the Dog Internet: Prototyping a Dog-to-Human Video Call Device (DogPhone) — Ilyena Hirskyj-Douglas, Roosa Piitulainen (2021) - Type: Research prototype · Organisms: Animals - Idea: Give animals control over when to connect, and see what an animal-initiated internet looks like. - What it is: DogPhone lets a dog start a video call to its owner by picking up and shaking a soft ball; it was tested for 16 days with the first author's Labrador, Zack. - How it works: An accelerometer inside a ball triggers a laptop video call; the owner can also call, and the dog may ignore it. - Paper: https://doi.org/10.1145/3488539 (PACM HCI (ISS) 2021) - Video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LLNrNAMnA6M - Images: https://www.gla.ac.uk/media/Media_819888_smxx.jpg https://www.gla.ac.uk/media/Media_819889_smxx.jpg - Project page: https://www.gla.ac.uk/news/archiveofnews/2021/november/headline_819757_en.html #### Meow Meow Call: Prototype Design for Building Interactive Connection between Human and Deaf Cat — Hongyi Zhang (2021) - Type: Research prototype · Organisms: Animals - Idea: Design for animals with disabilities by switching the sense, as in accessible design for people. - What it is: Meow Meow Call is a prototype for connecting with deaf cats through light and vibration instead of voice. - How it works: A three-part prototype tested for two weeks with two deaf cats and their keepers. - Paper: https://doi.org/10.1145/3411763.3451681 (CHI EA 2021) - Video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bYEm36ORAjQ #### WOOFlex: A Wearable Device to Aid Canine Flexibility Exercises — Shuyi Sun, Katia Vega (2021) - Type: Research prototype · Organisms: Animals - Idea: Put the measuring device on the dog so the person's hands stay free for the exercise. - What it is: WOOFlex is a wearable for dogs that measures joint angles during stretching exercises and gives the owner real-time feedback. - How it works: Flex sensors in a fitted sleeve read joint range of motion and compare it with breed-specific targets in an app. - Paper: https://doi.org/10.1145/3493842.3493903 (ACI 2021) - Video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iUYcwSncXDs #### Understanding the Interaction Between Animals and Wearables: The Wearer Experience of Cats — Patrizia Paci, Clara Mancini (2020) - Type: Paper · Organisms: Animals - Idea: 'Animal-friendly' wearables should be tested on the animal's experience, not the owner's. - What it is: A field study of 13 cats wearing popular GPS trackers that looked for signs of discomfort and wearability problems. - How it works: Behavioural observation and coding of cats with and without trackers during a field study. - Paper: https://doi.org/10.1145/3357236.3395546 (DIS 2020) - Video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3S9_Xfk1xP4 #### AffectiveNemo — Naohiro Isokawa (2019) - Type: Research prototype · Organisms: Animals - Idea: Giving fish a readable 'voice' can keep owners engaged in their care. - What it is: An aquarium system that estimates a pet fish's 'observed emotion' from how it swims and shows it as speech bubbles on a screen behind the tank. - How it works: Camera tracking of fish movement is combined with emotions people attribute to the fish to estimate an 'observed emotion' shown on an LCD behind the aquarium. - Paper: https://doi.org/10.1145/3371049.3371067 (ACI 2019) - Project page: https://doi.org/10.1145/3371049.3371067 #### Buddy's Wearable Is Not Your Buddy: Privacy Implications of Pet Wearables — Dirk van der Linden, Anna Zamansky (2019) - Type: Paper · Organisms: Animals - Idea: A pet tracker is also a tracker of the person holding the leash. - What it is: An analysis of pet wearable privacy policies showing that they collect more data about owners than about pets. - How it works: Document analysis of privacy policies of commercial pet wearables. - Paper: https://doi.org/10.1109/msec.2018.2888783 (IEEE Security & Privacy 2019) - Images: https://figures.semanticscholar.org/04700ad35f7ea5a90e5ff530c00edf07a0f94981/2-Figure1-1.png #### Log My Dog: Perceived Impact of Dog Activity Tracking — Anna Zamansky (2019) - Type: Paper · Organisms: Animals, Human body - Idea: Pet wearables change the human side of the relationship as much as the animal's. - What it is: A study of owners who use a popular dog activity tracker, finding that it mainly motivates the owners to be more active with their dogs. - How it works: Empirical user study of owners of a commercial dog activity tracker. - Paper: https://doi.org/10.1109/mc.2018.2889637 (IEEE Computer 2019) - Images: https://figures.semanticscholar.org/549d1677f6afbb09916edf7bb1e4b1c37c1799b0/2-Figure1-1.png - Project page: https://doi.org/10.1109/mc.2018.2889637 #### On the Internet, Nobody Knows You're a Dog... Unless You're Another Dog — Ilyena Hirskyj-Douglas (2019) - Type: Speculative design · Organisms: Animals - Idea: ACI has built animal–computer interfaces; next is animal–animal communication through computers. - What it is: A design fiction on a dog internet: six co-designed proposals for devices through which dogs could connect with other dogs, not just with computers. - How it works: Co-design workshop producing narratives and concepts, analysed for what a dog internet should and should not be. - Paper: https://doi.org/10.1145/3290605.3300347 (CHI 2019) - Video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ClU087JidS4 #### BubbleTalk — Donghyeon Ko (2018) - Type: Research prototype · Organisms: Animals - Idea: Bridge the glass wall: give people a way to act into the fish's world. - What it is: A fish-tank system that turns a keeper's actions, logged on a phone, into bubbles released into the tank, so the human's presence reaches the fish. - How it works: An air-pump module controlled from a smartphone app releases bubbles into the tank; a user study with guppy keepers observed how behaviour and relationships changed. - Paper: https://doi.org/10.1145/3196709.3196720 (DIS 2018) - Images: https://figures.semanticscholar.org/74c91c4d713fcf5cc364d6d9cf9377a599c6442d/500px/5-Figure3-1.png https://figures.semanticscholar.org/74c91c4d713fcf5cc364d6d9cf9377a599c6442d/500px/1-Figure1-1.png - Project page: https://doi.org/10.1145/3196709.3196720 #### DoggyVision: Examining how dogs (Canis familiaris) interact with media using a dog-driven proximity tracker device. — Ilyena Hirskyj-Douglas (2018) - Type: Research prototype · Organisms: Animals - Idea: A dog's approach can be the on switch. - What it is: DoggyVision is a proximity device that lets a dog turn a TV on and off by approaching it, to study whether dogs would control their own viewing. - How it works: Proximity tracker linked to a TV in home settings, logging activation and viewing time. - Paper: https://doi.org/10.26451/abc.05.04.06.2018 (Animal Behavior and Cognition 2018) - Images: https://figures.semanticscholar.org/e282c3c6f45832811df1f9883368fc4c2471792d/5-Figure1-1.png #### Dogs using touchscreens in the home: a case study for assistance dogs operating emergency notification systems — Ceara Byrne, Clint Zeagler, Melody Moore Jackson (2018) - Type: Paper · Organisms: Animals - Idea: An assistance dog without its vest still needs an interface; put it on the wall. - What it is: Medical alert dogs were trained to operate wall-mounted touchscreens at home to call for help in an emergency. - How it works: Home field study with three medical alert dogs performing a specific touch pattern on randomly timed virtual targets. - Paper: https://doi.org/10.1145/3295598.3295610 (ACI 2018) - Images: https://figures.semanticscholar.org/a55f3dc48b983560bb10c2b39cd3d33e89b10644/3-Figure3-1.png https://figures.semanticscholar.org/a55f3dc48b983560bb10c2b39cd3d33e89b10644/2-Figure2-1.png #### A dog centred approach to the analysis of dogs' interactions with media on TV screens — Ilyena Hirskyj-Douglas (2017) - Type: Paper · Organisms: Animals - Idea: To know what dogs watch, let them choose among screens rather than forcing one. - What it is: A study of how dogs move their attention between three TV screens showing different videos, using a dog-centred method. - How it works: Three-screen setup with video coding of each dog's gaze and position in a relatively uncontrolled environment. - Paper: https://doi.org/10.1016/j.ijhcs.2016.05.007 (IJHCS 2017) #### AquaPrism: Dynamically Altering the Color of Aquatic Animals without Injury by Augmenting Aquarium — Jun Rekimoto (2017) - Type: Research prototype · Organisms: Animals - Idea: Change how an animal looks by designing the light, not the animal. - What it is: AquaPrism makes translucent aquarium animals appear coloured and glowing in the dark without dyes or injury, using polarised light behind a normal tank. - How it works: Polarising sheets on the front and back of the tank darken it; the birefringent bodies of translucent animals rotate polarised light from a monitor and show colour. - Paper: https://doi.org/10.1145/3152130.3152138 (ACI 2017) - Video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=g6WLiyPzES0 #### K9-Blyzer: Towards Video-Based Automatic Analysis of Canine Behavior — Anna Zamansky (2017) - Type: Research prototype · Organisms: Animals - Idea: Automated video analysis lets behaviour be measured without a human coder for every second. - What it is: K9-Blyzer is a tool that automatically analyses videos of dogs to quantify their behaviour. - How it works: Computer-vision tracking of dogs in video, producing movement-based behavioural measures. - Paper: https://doi.org/10.1145/3152130.3152142 (ACI 2017) - Video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1QQIaMYI2l8 #### A dog using skype — Alexandre Pongrácz Rossi (2016) - Type: Research prototype · Organisms: Animals - Idea: Dogs can learn to treat a screen voice as their owner. - What it is: A trainer describes teaching a dog to respond correctly to an owner's verbal cues given over a video call. - How it works: Stepwise training with video chat software until the dog followed cues from a remote owner. - Paper: https://doi.org/10.1145/2995257.3012019 (ACI 2016) - Video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qzdnZ2SKG28 #### TalkingNemo — Naohiro Isokawa (2016) - Type: Research prototype · Organisms: Animals - Idea: Translate tank conditions into the fish's first-person voice. - What it is: An aquarium that watches its fish and water with a camera and sensors and 'speaks' for the fish in speech balloons, telling owners when something is wrong. - How it works: Camera and water sensors detect fish condition and tank state; rules convert them into messages from the fish's perspective. - Paper: https://doi.org/10.1145/2995257.3012017 (ACI 2016) - Video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IXqRVKZHpfA - Project page: https://doi.org/10.1145/2995257.3012017 #### UbiComp for animal welfare: envisioning smart environments for kenneled dogs — Clara Mancini (2014) - Type: Paper · Organisms: Animals - Idea: Smart environments for animals should start from welfare, not from data collection. - What it is: An ethnographic study at a dog rehoming centre that proposes a welfare-centred framework for smart kennel environments. - How it works: Four months of fieldwork with staff and dogs, leading to a framework joining monitoring, interaction and information management. - Paper: https://doi.org/10.1145/2632048.2632073 (UbiComp 2014) - Images: https://figures.semanticscholar.org/f21c3dad887f9a82342d1754adabc81b213d5f28/6-Figure2-1.png https://figures.semanticscholar.org/f21c3dad887f9a82342d1754adabc81b213d5f28/5-Figure1-1.png #### Exploring pet video chat: the remote awareness and interaction needs of families with dogs and cats — Carman Neustaedter (2013) - Type: Paper · Organisms: Animals - Idea: Families treat pets as members they want to call, not just watch. - What it is: A survey of dog and cat owners on how they would like to monitor and interact with their pets over video when away from home. - How it works: Online survey analysed for awareness and interaction needs, with design implications for pet video chat. - Paper: https://doi.org/10.1145/2441776.2441953 (CSCW 2013) #### DOGTV — DOGTV (2012) - Type: Product & platform · Organisms: Animals - Idea: Media can be designed for a non-human audience's senses. - What it is: DOGTV is a television channel for dogs left at home alone, with footage and sound edited for dogs' colour vision and hearing. - How it works: Programming grouped into relaxation, stimulation and exposure segments, with colour and frequency choices based on canine perception. - Images: https://www.dogtv.com/wp-content/uploads/2025/08/JRT_Watching-3-scaled-e1754077958681.jpg - Project page: https://www.dogtv.com #### Exploring interspecies sensemaking: dog tracking semiotics and multispecies ethnography — Clara Mancini (2012) - Type: Paper · Organisms: Animals - Idea: Tracking devices change both the dog and the person; study the pair. - What it is: An ethnography of GPS dog tracking that shows how tracking reshapes relations between dogs and owners and proposes an interspecies semiotics. - How it works: Multispecies ethnography combining owners' accounts, animal researchers' views and observation of tracked dogs. - Paper: https://doi.org/10.1145/2370216.2370239 (UbiComp 2012) - Images: https://figures.semanticscholar.org/686461c76c7633ce5143ae38c7ca280381e35382/5-Figure1-1.png #### PetPace — PetPace (2012) - Type: Product & platform · Organisms: Animals - Idea: Make an animal's bodily state legible to the humans who care for it. - What it is: A smart collar for dogs and cats that continuously tracks vital signs such as pulse, respiration, temperature, activity and posture, and alerts owners and vets when readings suggest pain or illness. - How it works: Non-invasive sensors in the collar stream physiological data to a cloud platform, where algorithms flag abnormal patterns and send alerts to an app. - Video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DGbrYUXW_Bk - Images: https://petpace.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/08/pic-dog.png - Project page: https://artifact-archive.org/whole-archive #### Communication technology for human-dog interaction: exploration of dog owners' experiences and expectations — Oskar Juhlin (2011) - Type: Paper · Organisms: Animals - Idea: Hunters and pet owners want different things from dog technology; design for the context. - What it is: Studies of dog owners and hunters on how they use communication technology with their dogs and what they expect from future devices. - How it works: Interviews and surveys with two user groups about current devices and desired services. - Paper: https://doi.org/10.1145/1978942.1979329 (CHI 2011) - Images: https://figures.semanticscholar.org/6aa579e460a6b322a751066084494b4cb8a2e2c6/3-Figure3-1.png https://figures.semanticscholar.org/6aa579e460a6b322a751066084494b4cb8a2e2c6/3-Figure1-1.png #### Cat@Log: sensing device attachable to pet cats for supporting human-pet interaction — Jun Rekimoto (2009) - Type: Research prototype · Organisms: Animals - Idea: A cat's day becomes a social media feed the owner can follow. - What it is: Cat@Log is a set of sensing devices worn by pet cats that recognise their behaviour and post it to Twitter. - How it works: Accelerometer, camera and other sensors on a collar feed a classifier that posts high-level behaviours. - Paper: https://doi.org/10.1145/1690388.1690414 (ACE 2009) - Video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sY01SRLlD24 #### Augmented Animals (LED Dog Tail Communicator) — Auger-Loizeau (2006) - Type: Speculative design · Organisms: Animals - Idea: Ask what gadgets would exist if animals were the users, to expose how human-centred technology is. - What it is: A series of devices imagining technology designed for animals' own use; the LED Dog Tail Communicator reads the speed of a dog's wagging tail and spells out its message in words for people. - How it works: An automated wagging tail fitted with programmed LEDs maps tail speed to text; other concepts in the series include rodent night-vision goggles and bird-mounted anti-collision radar. - Images: https://www.moma.org/interactives/exhibitions/2008/elasticmind/assets/images/LEDDogTailCommunicator/ledtaillight.jpg - Project page: https://www.moma.org/interactives/exhibitions/2008/elasticmind/ #### Poultry.Internet: A mobile pet wearable computer and mixed reality system for human-poultry interaction through the internet — Adrian David Cheok (2006) - Type: Research prototype · Organisms: Animals - Idea: Remote touch can extend human-animal companionship across distance. - What it is: A chicken wears a jacket with vibration motors; when its owner strokes a sensor-equipped chicken doll at the office, the touch is sent over the internet to the live bird. - How it works: Tactile sensing doll, internet link, vibrotactile pet jacket and a webcam-tracked mixed-reality view of the chicken (first author Shang Ping Lee). - Paper: https://doi.org/10.1007/s00779-005-0051-6 (Personal and Ubiquitous Computing 2006) - Video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1x-8EzuMiqU - Project page: https://mixedrealitylab.org/projects/all-projects/poultry-internet/ #### Supporting interspecies social awareness: using peripheral displays for distributed pack awareness (PAWSABILITIES) — Jennifer Mankoff (2005) - Type: Research prototype · Organisms: Animals - Idea: Remote awareness can include the dog as a member of the household. - What it is: PAWSABILITIES is a set of peripheral displays that keep a family and their dog aware of each other's activities when apart. - How it works: Sensors and ambient displays for 'pack' activity shared between remote people and a dog at home. - Paper: https://doi.org/10.1145/1095034.1095076 (UIST 2005) - Images: https://figures.semanticscholar.org/da1b85caa894166a17c77ce38d4e062fb28318e7/1-Figure1-1.png ### Play, Games & Robots with Animals Interspecies games and robots that play with, feed or care for animals. #### Provoking Public Reflection on Robotics and AI through Cat Royale, an Artistic Installation — Steve Benford (2026) - Type: Paper · Organisms: Animals - Idea: Ambiguous art about animals and robots makes abstract AI debates tangible. - What it is: Studies how audiences responded to Cat Royale and argues that presenting an artwork as a deliberately ambiguous interface helps people move beyond for-or-against views of AI. - How it works: Analysis of audience engagement data and comments around the livestreamed installation. - Paper: https://doi.org/10.1145/3803784.3807545 (Creativity & Cognition 2026) - Images: https://arxiv.org/html/2402.15431v1/Figures/CR_System_Components.png #### Charting the Ecosystem of Trust in Cat Royale, or What It Takes to Trust a Robot to Play with Cats — Steve Benford (2025) - Type: Paper · Organisms: Animals - Idea: Trust in a social robot is built in layers far beyond the robot itself. - What it is: A case study of everything behind a trustworthy robot that plays with cats — from the control room and welfare experts to ethics review and public engagement — summarised as five layers of an 'ecosystem of trust'. - How it works: Framework of five layers: personal workspace, orchestration, wider workspace, organisational culture and the public sphere. - Paper: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-95-2398-6_42 (Social Robotics (LNCS), 2025) - Images: https://arxiv.org/html/2402.15431v1/Figures/CR_Brisbane.jpg #### Wax Arts With Honeybees – Taking First Steps Toward Multispecies Co-Creation — Stephan Huber (2025) - Type: Artwork · Organisms: Insects - Idea: Treat bees as co-creators and the hive becomes a studio. - What it is: Over one season, researchers placed human-made wax shapes in hives and let honeybees build on them, producing sculptures that go beyond the bees' usual comb forms. - How it works: Wax starter shapes introduced into Apis mellifera colonies for four months, with documentation of how bees deviated from regular comb. - Paper: https://doi.org/10.1145/3689050.3705990 (TEI 2025) #### Designing Multispecies Worlds for Robots, Cats, and Humans — Steve Benford, Blast Theory (2024) - Type: Paper · Organisms: Animals - Idea: Design the whole world around the animal, not just the robot's interaction with it. - What it is: CHI 2024 Best Paper reflecting on the design of Cat Royale: the enclosure, the robot and its autonomous system, custom end-effectors and the humans-in-the-loop, plus key moments from the twelve-day deployment. - How it works: Design case study of a deployed robot–cat installation, with video analysis and reflections from artists, engineers and welfare experts. - Paper: https://doi.org/10.1145/3613904.3642115 (CHI 2024) - Images: https://arxiv.org/html/2402.15431v1/Figures/CatRoyale_Overview_v3a.png https://arxiv.org/html/2402.15431v1/Figures/Cats_Portrait_v2.png #### Cat Royale — Blast Theory, Steve Benford (2023) - Type: Artwork · Organisms: Animals - Idea: Test trust in autonomous care systems with the most honest judges: cats. - What it is: Three cats lived for six hours a day over twelve days in a purpose-built 'cat utopia' where a robot arm played with them and offered treats, while an AI learned their preferences; the livestreamed work asked whether we should trust robots with care. Premiered at the World Science Festival Brisbane. - How it works: A robot arm (likely a Kinova) with custom toys was driven by a computer-vision and learning system that ranked games by the cats' engagement, supervised by humans in the loop and animal-welfare experts. - Paper: https://doi.org/10.1145/3636499 (ACM Interactions 2024) - Video: https://vimeo.com/1183715660 - Images: https://www.blasttheory.co.uk/wp-content/uploads/2024/05/Cat-Royale-by-Blast-Theory_Image-Credit_RULER_SDQ_0604-800x450.jpg https://www.blasttheory.co.uk/wp-content/uploads/2023/05/Cat-Royale-by-Blast-Theory_Image-Credit_Stephen-Daly_DSC_9976-800x450.jpg https://www.blasttheory.co.uk/wp-content/uploads/2024/01/Cat-Royale-by-Blast-Theory_Image-Credit_RULER_SDQ_0612-800x450.jpg - Project page: https://www.blasttheory.co.uk/projects/cat-royale/ #### TAS for Cats: An Artist-led Exploration of Trustworthy Autonomous Systems for Companion Animals — Steve Benford, Blast Theory (2023) - Type: Paper · Organisms: Animals - Idea: An autonomous system for animals is only as trustworthy as the human network around it. - What it is: Presents Cat Royale as an autonomous system built with the TAS Hub's creative ambassadors Blast Theory, and unpacks how many human and animal stakeholders were needed to run it responsibly. - How it works: System description and responsible research and innovation (RRI) reflection on autonomy, trustworthiness and responsibility. - Paper: https://doi.org/10.1145/3597512.3597517 (TAS 2023) - Images: https://arxiv.org/html/2402.15431v1/Figures/Environment_design_V3.png #### Designing for Trust: Autonomous Animal-Centric Robotic & AI Systems — Steve Benford (2022) - Type: Paper · Organisms: Animals - Idea: Trust in home robots must be designed for animals as well as for people. - What it is: An ACI 2022 paper that frames the questions behind Cat Royale: how trust works when pets, people and domestic robots such as robot arms share a home. - How it works: Position paper using a responsible research and innovation approach to animal-centric autonomous systems. - Paper: https://doi.org/10.1145/3565995.3566046 (ACI 2022) #### Dog Driven Robot: Towards Quantifying Problem-Solving Abilities in Dogs — Ceara Byrne, Melody Moore Jackson (2019) - Type: Research prototype · Organisms: Animals - Idea: Let a dog steer a robot and you can measure how it solves problems. - What it is: Dogs remotely drove a small robot through a maze by pulling, pressing or approaching an input device, as a test of problem-solving ability. - How it works: Three affordances (tug, button, proximity) on a raised platform trigger robot movement with visual feedback. - Paper: https://doi.org/10.1145/3371049.3371063 (ACI 2019) #### Exploring the Reactions of Companion Animals as Unintended Users of Social Robots — Ehud Sharlin (2019) - Type: Paper · Organisms: Animals - Idea: Pets are unintended users of home robots; introduce robots in a way that respects their senses. - What it is: An exploratory study of how two house cats reacted to a small social robot placed in their home, comparing sudden and gradual introduction. - How it works: Informal design research with observation of cat behaviour around a social robot under two introduction strategies. - Paper: https://doi.org/10.1145/3301019.3323891 (DIS 2019) - Images: https://figures.semanticscholar.org/ebe372ebd67fb62ba7f936aa35806027587ddd92/4-Figure5-1.png https://figures.semanticscholar.org/ebe372ebd67fb62ba7f936aa35806027587ddd92/2-Figure1-1.png #### Umamimi robotic horse ears: using configurable code profiles to replicate individuality in equine animatronics — Steve North (2018) - Type: Research prototype · Organisms: Animals - Idea: Borrow the animal's own body language as the interface. - What it is: Umamimi are programmable robotic horse ears that a person can wear to 'talk' to horses with ear signals, or that can act as a companion for a solitary horse. - How it works: Servo-driven animatronic ears with configurable code profiles for user-triggered and random movements. - Paper: https://doi.org/10.1145/3295598.3295606 (ACI 2018) - Video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=90oS6pgYEsY #### Designing interspecies playful interactions: studying children perceptions of games with animals — Patricia Pons (2017) - Type: Paper · Organisms: Animals - Idea: Children are natural co-designers for games with animals. - What it is: Children designed games to be played between humans and animals, with and without technology, to show how they imagine interspecies play. - How it works: Design sessions with children analysed for game mechanics, roles and attitudes to the animals. - Paper: https://doi.org/10.1145/3152130.3152139 (ACI 2017) - Video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lfP8sqALWlg #### CleverPet Hub — CleverPet (2016) - Type: Product & platform · Organisms: Animals - Idea: A lab learning task, packaged as a home product, can keep a dog busy while people are out. - What it is: CleverPet Hub is a home game console for dogs: three touch pads light up and the dog earns food by pressing them in the right patterns, with games getting harder over time. - How it works: Light-up touch pads, a food dispenser and adaptive software that runs operant learning games, controlled by an app. - Video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Cm08jEklfKY #### Designing Mediated Nurturing Play with Dogs to Alleviate Workplace Stress — Florian 'Floyd' Mueller (2016) - Type: Research prototype · Organisms: Animals - Idea: Remote play can bring the benefits of animal-assisted activity into places animals cannot go. - What it is: A system that connects office workers with rescued dogs at a distance for short nurturing play sessions, aimed at both workplace stress and dog wellbeing. - How it works: Human–computer–animal play system linking a worker's actions to toys and treats for remote shelter dogs. - Paper: https://doi.org/10.1145/2908805.2909412 (DIS 2016) #### Dog-drone interactions: towards an ACI perspective — Anna Zamansky (2016) - Type: Paper · Organisms: Animals - Idea: Drones will meet dogs; design that meeting from the dog's side. - What it is: A short note calling for an animal-centred approach to how dogs encounter drones, so that the interactions are safe and not stressful. - How it works: Position paper with observations of dog responses to drones. - Paper: https://doi.org/10.1145/2995257.3012021 (ACI 2016) - Video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wOvXHugXKNo #### Exploring human perceptions of dog-tablet playful interactions — Anna Zamansky (2016) - Type: Paper · Organisms: Animals - Idea: Whether a dog is 'playing' a tablet game depends on who is watching and how. - What it is: An exploratory study of how people perceive dogs playing with tablets, and whether they see it as real play. - How it works: Online study showing videos of dog–tablet interaction and collecting people's interpretations. - Paper: https://doi.org/10.1145/2995257.3012023 (ACI 2016) - Video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ig6SQIaPss0 #### RoboFish — Tim Landgraf (2016) - Type: Research prototype · Organisms: Animals - Idea: A robot can join an animal group as a participant, and in doing so test how the group decides. - What it is: RoboFish is a robotic guppy moved by a magnet under the tank that live guppies accept as a group member, especially when it has realistic eyes and moves naturally. - How it works: Replica fish on a magnetic base driven by a wheeled robot below the tank, with closed-loop video tracking of live fish. - Paper: https://doi.org/10.1088/1748-3190/11/1/015001 (Bioinspiration & Biomimetics 2016) #### Towards the Creation of Interspecies Digital Games: An Observational Study on Cats' Interest in Interactive Technologies — Patricia Pons (2016) - Type: Paper · Organisms: Animals - Idea: Study what the animal is curious about before designing play for it. - What it is: An observational study of which technological stimuli - projected lights, moving objects, sounds, tablets - actually interest cats, to inform games for cats and people. - How it works: Sessions with cats and different interactive stimuli, recorded and coded for interest and engagement. - Paper: https://doi.org/10.1145/2851581.2892381 (CHI 2016 Extended Abstracts) - Video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ie6xe3v70kQ - Images: https://i.ytimg.com/vi/ie6xe3v70kQ/maxresdefault.jpg - Project page: https://doi.org/10.1145/2851581.2892381 #### Developing a depth-based tracking system for interactive playful environments with animals — Patricia Pons (2015) - Type: Research prototype · Organisms: Animals - Idea: Games for animals need to know where the animal is and what its body is doing. - What it is: A depth-camera tracking system that detects where animals are and how they are posed so that playful environments can respond to them. - How it works: Microsoft Kinect depth data processed to detect cats and their postures in a play space. - Paper: https://doi.org/10.1145/2832932.2837007 (ACE 2015) - Images: https://figures.semanticscholar.org/85e6e37164808c42c01b2645d253401ff35ddcf2/4-Figure3-1.png #### Purrfect Crime: Exploring Animal Computer Interaction through a Digital Game for Humans and Cats — Rui Trindade (2015) - Type: Research prototype · Organisms: Animals - Idea: Asymmetric roles let two species share one game. - What it is: Purrfect Crime is a tablet game in which a person and a cat play together with different roles on the same screen. - How it works: Tablet game where the cat chases moving targets while the human plays a strategic role; tested with cats and people. - Paper: https://doi.org/10.1145/2702613.2728660 (CHI EA 2015) #### Animal Ludens: Building Intelligent Playful Environments for Animals — Patricia Pons (2014) - Type: Paper · Organisms: Animals - Idea: Play is the most natural way into interaction design for animals. - What it is: Proposes intelligent playful environments for animals: spaces that sense animals and adapt games to them, rather than single-device games. - How it works: Framework for playful, sensor-rich environments that adapt to the animals and people in them. - Paper: https://doi.org/10.1145/2693787.2693794 (ACE 2014 Workshops (ACI)) #### Pig Chase (Playing with Pigs) — Clemens Driessen, Kars Alfrink (2012) - Type: Research prototype · Organisms: Animals - Idea: Play can make farm animals visible as individuals with minds, and give them something to do. - What it is: Pig Chase is a game in which pigs in a farm pen and a person on an iPad play together: the pigs follow a ball of light on a large touch display with their snouts. - How it works: A touch-sensitive wall display in the pen is linked over the internet to a tablet game for a human player. - Video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CsuMkHJxoak #### Cat Cat Revolution: An Interspecies Gaming Experience — Frank Noz (2011) - Type: Research prototype · Organisms: Animals - Idea: Pets can be real players in a shared game when the interface suits their species. - What it is: An iPad game of cat and mouse in which the cat chases a virtual mouse on screen while its owner controls the mouse. - How it works: Tablet game with a species-appropriate interface for cats and a controller for the human player. - Paper: https://doi.org/10.1145/1978942.1979331 (CHI 2011) - Images: https://figures.semanticscholar.org/28a1dbe45ae7b36a3df1e40a7df0306967c95e58/1-Figure1-1.png - Project page: https://doi.org/10.1145/1978942.1979331 #### Games for Cats (Friskies) — Nestlé Purina PetCare (2011) - Type: Product & platform · Organisms: Animals - Idea: A mass-market app made screens something cats could play with. - What it is: Friskies' Games for Cats are tablet apps in which cats chase fish, lasers and bugs on screen with their paws. - How it works: Touchscreen games with high-contrast moving targets and simple touch detection sized for paws. - Video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ed06WBmxrp8 #### Metazoa Ludens: Mixed-Reality Interaction and Play for Small Pets and Humans — Adrian David Cheok (2011) - Type: Research prototype · Organisms: Animals - Idea: Humans and small pets can play one game together through mixed reality. - What it is: A hamster running in a physical arena controls an avatar in a computer game, while the human player's avatar moves a physical bait in the arena that the hamster chases. - How it works: Camera tracking of the hamster, a motorised bait under the arena and a shared virtual game; the pet's wellbeing was checked with standard scoring methods. - Paper: https://doi.org/10.1109/tsmca.2011.2108998 (IEEE Transactions on Systems, Man, and Cybernetics 2011) - Video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7o7UIpOy5LA - Project page: https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/document/5740616/ #### Early explorations of CAT: canine amusement and training — Chadwick A. Wingrave (2010) - Type: Research prototype · Organisms: Animals, Human body - Idea: Games can shape the everyday routines that humans and dogs share. - What it is: A serious-games prototype meant to get people to spend calm, healthy and enjoyable play time with their dogs. - How it works: Prototype game system combining dog training and play, designed with a serious-games approach. - Paper: https://doi.org/10.1145/1753846.1753849 (CHI 2010 Extended Abstracts) - Project page: https://doi.org/10.1145/1753846.1753849 ### Working & Assistance Animals Interfaces for detection dogs, guide dogs, service animals and their handlers. #### Towards Enactivist ACI - Sensor-Rich Olfactory Workstation and Suit for Detection Dogs — Dognosis (2024) - Type: Research prototype · Organisms: Animals - Idea: Treat the dog's sniffing as an active, embodied process and record all of it. - What it is: A sensor-rich sniffing workstation and wearable suit for cancer-detection dogs that captures how a dog's actions and senses are coupled during scent tasks. - How it works: Infrared sensors, IMUs and other streams synchronised around sample ports, grounded in enactive cognition. - Paper: https://doi.org/10.1145/3702336.3702351 (ACI 2024) #### Towards Robotic Companions: Understanding Handler-Guide Dog Interactions for Informed Guide Dog Robot Design — Hochul Hwang (2024) - Type: Paper · Organisms: Animals - Idea: Before building a robot dog guide, learn what a real dog guide team does. - What it is: Interviews with guide dog handlers and trainers on how handlers and dogs work together, to inform the design of legged guide dog robots. - How it works: Qualitative study of handler–guide dog interaction, translated into robot design requirements. - Paper: https://doi.org/10.1145/3613904.3642181 (CHI 2024) - Video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=skMHdNmyN68 - Images: https://arxiv.org/html/2402.06790v1/f1-harness.png #### WAG’D: Towards a Wearable Activity and Gait Detection Monitor for Sled Dogs — Charles Ramey, Thad Starner (2022) - Type: Research prototype · Organisms: Animals - Idea: Instrument the harness to catch injuries mushers cannot see. - What it is: WAG'D is a wearable that measures pull force and gait in sled dogs to spot injuries during training and races. - How it works: Load and inertial sensors in the harness with data logging, designed with Iditarod mushers and vets. - Paper: https://doi.org/10.1145/3565995.3566042 (ACI 2022) - Images: https://figures.semanticscholar.org/30b00e3ea188e16c95c128e82d88eb431d0a5c84/4-Figure2-1.png https://figures.semanticscholar.org/30b00e3ea188e16c95c128e82d88eb431d0a5c84/3-Figure1-1.png #### From Ideation to Deployment: A Narrative Case Study of Citizen Science Supported Wearables for Raising Guide Dogs — Alper Bozkurt, David L. Roberts (2021) - Type: Research prototype · Organisms: Animals - Idea: Scaling an animal wearable means designing for the volunteers who put it on the dog. - What it is: A case study of scaling a wearable sensor system for guide dog puppies from a lab prototype to deployment with volunteer puppy raisers. - How it works: Smart harness and app developed with guide dog schools and deployed through citizen science. - Paper: https://doi.org/10.1145/3493842.3493890 (ACI 2021) - Video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VU92LHenQZk #### Wearable Sensors for Canine Nosework Sniffing Interaction — Melody Moore Jackson (2021) - Type: Research prototype · Organisms: Animals - Idea: Hear the sniff: audio can reveal what a detection dog is doing. - What it is: A dog wearable with a microphone and motion sensors that classifies sniffing and search behaviour in nosework dogs. - How it works: Cardioid microphone and two IMUs feed machine-learning classifiers of nosework behaviours. - Paper: https://doi.org/10.1145/3493842.3493892 (ACI 2021) - Video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wLxENa1Ui0Y #### Canine Co-design: Investigating Buttons as an Input Modality for Dogs — Charlotte L. Robinson (2020) - Type: Paper · Organisms: Animals - Idea: Before building a dog interface, co-design its buttons with dogs. - What it is: A two-phase study with dogs on how button size, force and placement affect how they press, as input for canine interfaces. - How it works: Prototype buttons of different properties tested with dogs; pressing behaviour recorded and analysed. - Paper: https://doi.org/10.1145/3357236.3395462 (DIS 2020) - Images: https://figures.semanticscholar.org/ab18e90710614ccbabecd83cdcb4e6dac027ec09/1-Figure1-1.png https://figures.semanticscholar.org/ab18e90710614ccbabecd83cdcb4e6dac027ec09/7-Figure3-1.png #### Tricks and Treats: Designing Technology to Support Mobility Assistance Dogs — Charlotte L. Robinson (2020) - Type: Research prototype · Organisms: Animals - Idea: Support the relationship between person and dog, not replace the dog's labour with technology. - What it is: An accessible treat dispenser that lets people with tetraplegia reward and train their mobility assistance dogs themselves. - How it works: Interviews with owners and a case study of an accessible, remotely triggered treat dispenser. - Paper: https://doi.org/10.1145/3313831.3376188 (CHI 2020) #### Dogs Can Understand Haptic Communication — Yoav Golan (2019) - Type: Research prototype · Organisms: Animals - Idea: Touch can carry commands where voice and gesture fail, such as in noise or at a distance. - What it is: A vest with vibration motors was used to train a dog to tell apart four vibration patterns and follow the matching commands. - How it works: Vibration patterns differing in location and timing, taught by operant conditioning. - Paper: https://doi.org/10.1145/3371049.3371066 (ACI 2019) #### Predicting the Suitability of Service Animals Using Instrumented Dog Toys — Ceara Byrne, Melody Moore Jackson (2018) - Type: Research prototype · Organisms: Animals - Idea: Play objects can measure temperament and save years of training on unsuitable dogs. - What it is: Instrumented dog toys recorded how young service-dog candidates bite and tug; the data predicted which dogs would succeed in advanced training. - How it works: Pressure and motion sensors in toys, used over a two-year longitudinal study; classifiers predict placement success. - Paper: https://doi.org/10.1145/3161184 (IMWUT 2018) - Images: https://figures.semanticscholar.org/c8ebb46bcf71c2576827ee13fda84c9350ec36b7/6-Figure4-1.png #### Mobile Collaboration for Human and Canine Police Explosive Detection Teams — Joelle Alcaidinho, Melody Moore Jackson (2017) - Type: Research prototype · Organisms: Animals - Idea: Design for the whole human–dog team and the agencies around it. - What it is: A mobile communication system for multi-agency police explosive-detection searches carried out by officers and their dogs. - How it works: Fieldwork with detection teams and a mobile app that shares search areas and dog alerts. - Paper: https://doi.org/10.1145/2998181.2998271 (CSCW 2017) - Images: https://figures.semanticscholar.org/31c9545d90cc909e0019152994790fcde89b242e/4-Figure2-1.png #### Search and rescue: dog and handler collaboration through wearable and mobile interfaces — Clint Zeagler, Ceara Byrne, Melody Moore Jackson (2016) - Type: Research prototype · Organisms: Animals - Idea: The dog finds the person; the vest tells the handler what the dog found. - What it is: A wearable interface for search-and-rescue dogs that sends information to the handler's mobile app, with a framework that treats dogs as active participants. - How it works: Dog-activated wearable (bite or tug sensors) linked to a mobile app, developed with heuristics from SAR handlers. - Paper: https://doi.org/10.1145/2995257.2995390 (ACI 2016) - Images: https://figures.semanticscholar.org/f78db44329980b7ed65a472771bcc5bd28d3d9e9/5-Figure4-1.png https://figures.semanticscholar.org/f78db44329980b7ed65a472771bcc5bd28d3d9e9/2-Figure1-1.png #### The impact of training approaches on experimental setup and design of wearable vibrotactiles for hunting dogs — Ann Morrison (2016) - Type: Research prototype · Organisms: Animals - Idea: How an animal is trained decides what an interface for it must be. - What it is: The VibroTactile Vest gives commands to hunting dogs through vibrating motors, and the study shows how training methods shape the design. - How it works: Variable-intensity vibration motors mounted in a modified shirt, tested with dogs trained by different approaches. - Paper: https://doi.org/10.1145/2995257.2995391 (ACI 2016) - Images: https://figures.semanticscholar.org/0f2a4313ea9834038b233b0cb5d2a3c941392936/1-Figure1-1.png https://figures.semanticscholar.org/0f2a4313ea9834038b233b0cb5d2a3c941392936/5-Figure3-1.png #### Training collar-sensed gestures for canine communication — Joelle Alcaidinho, Melody Moore Jackson (2016) - Type: Research prototype · Organisms: Animals - Idea: Training and sensing must be designed together for a dog to 'speak' through a device. - What it is: Two dogs were trained to perform precise gestures that a collar sensor detects and relays to a handler's phone, for example 'wait' versus 'go around'. - How it works: IMU on a collar, gesture classifier and companion smartphone app; training protocol described step by step. - Paper: https://doi.org/10.1145/2995257.3012020 (ACI 2016) - Video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JOaAISSvwxg #### Designing an emergency communication system for human and assistance dog partnerships — Charlotte L. Robinson, Clara Mancini (2015) - Type: Research prototype · Organisms: Animals - Idea: The dog is an end user of the alarm, so involve it in every design step. - What it is: An alarm system that assistance dogs can activate to call for help for their owners, co-designed with dogs and owners throughout. - How it works: High-fidelity canine-operated alarm prototype, tested for the level of support dogs need across emergency types. - Paper: https://doi.org/10.1145/2750858.2805849 (UbiComp 2015) - Images: https://figures.semanticscholar.org/f4bd7555288643a4a569500cd8988f77391b3485/7-Figure3-1.png https://figures.semanticscholar.org/f4bd7555288643a4a569500cd8988f77391b3485/5-Figure2-1.png #### Re-Centering Multispecies Practices: A Canine Interface for Cancer Detection Dogs — Clara Mancini (2015) - Type: Research prototype · Organisms: Animals - Idea: Design the interface around how the dog works, and it can report what the dog knows. - What it is: Sensor-equipped sample holders record how long and how hard a medical detection dog sniffs each sample, so the dog's own confidence can be read without relying on the handler. - How it works: Pressure and proximity sensors in the sample stands, developed with the charity Medical Detection Dogs. - Paper: https://doi.org/10.1145/2702123.2702562 (CHI 2015) - Video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MyHjq8Od-Xg - Images: https://i.ytimg.com/vi/MyHjq8Od-Xg/maxresdefault.jpg - Project page: https://oro.open.ac.uk/42640/1/pn2412-mancini.pdf #### Towards a canine-human communication system based on head gestures — Giancarlo Valentin, Melody Moore Jackson, Thad Starner (2015) - Type: Research prototype · Organisms: Animals - Idea: A dog's head movements can be a vocabulary if the device can read them reliably. - What it is: A system in which a dog sends messages to a person with trained head gestures, sensed by a collar-worn motion sensor. - How it works: Inertial sensing on the collar and gesture detection evaluated against minimum criteria for a canine gesture set. - Paper: https://doi.org/10.1145/2832932.2837016 (ACE 2015) - Images: https://figures.semanticscholar.org/0dc7d6107fdc524be5f6c7742446db6af35ddffe/3-Figure3-1.png https://figures.semanticscholar.org/0dc7d6107fdc524be5f6c7742446db6af35ddffe/1-Figure1-1.png #### Towards the non-visual monitoring of canine physiology in real-time by blind handlers — Sean Mealin, Alper Bozkurt (2015) - Type: Research prototype · Organisms: Animals - Idea: Canine body signals can reach a handler who cannot see them, through sound or touch. - What it is: A wearable system that lets visually impaired guide dog handlers monitor their dog's physiology in real time through non-visual feedback. - How it works: Wireless harness with heart rate and other sensors, relayed as audio or haptic feedback. - Paper: https://doi.org/10.1145/2832932.2837018 (ACE 2015) - Images: https://figures.semanticscholar.org/5c383cd77df958b11d2c021da7faa8a906236c68/3-Figure1-1.png #### Canine-centered interface design: supporting the work of diabetes alert dogs — Charlotte L. Robinson, Clara Mancini (2014) - Type: Research prototype · Organisms: Animals, Human body - Idea: Shape the interface to the dog's body and skills, not to human buttons. - What it is: Prototype alarm interfaces that diabetes alert dogs can press or pull to summon help when their person's blood sugar is dangerously low. - How it works: Iterative prototyping of canine-operable alarm devices tested with trained assistance dogs. - Paper: https://doi.org/10.1145/2556288.2557396 (CHI 2014) - Video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_vYdDrMHC0U - Images: https://i.ytimg.com/vi/_vYdDrMHC0U/maxresdefault.jpg - Project page: https://www.open.ac.uk/blogs/ACI/ #### Going to the Dogs: Towards an Interactive Touchscreen Interface for Working Dogs — Melody Moore Jackson, Thad Starner (2014) - Type: Research prototype · Organisms: Animals - Idea: Measure an animal's pointing ability before designing its buttons. - What it is: A touchscreen interface sized and spaced for dogs' nose touches so that assistance dogs could, for example, call for help. - How it works: Target-size and spacing experiments with trained dogs on a wall-mounted touchscreen (first author Clint Zeagler). - Paper: https://doi.org/10.1145/2642918.2647364 (UIST 2014) - Video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AZzJkar5h_g - Images: https://i.ytimg.com/vi/AZzJkar5h_g/maxresdefault.jpg - Project page: https://doi.org/10.1145/2642918.2647364 #### Understanding guide dog team interactions: design opportunities to support work and play — Sabrina Hauser, Carman Neustaedter, Ron Wakkary (2014) - Type: Paper · Organisms: Animals - Idea: Design for the play of a working team, not only its work. - What it is: A study of guide dog teams' everyday work and leisure that identifies design opportunities for both. - How it works: Interviews and observations with guide dog handlers across work and leisure activities. - Paper: https://doi.org/10.1145/2598510.2598531 (DIS 2014) - Images: https://figures.semanticscholar.org/83df06b28f8fd32c102b06b58295c075aa68e379/5-Figure2-1.png https://figures.semanticscholar.org/83df06b28f8fd32c102b06b58295c075aa68e379/4-Figure1-1.png #### FIDO - Facilitating Interactions for Dogs with Occupations: Wearable Dog-Activated Interfaces — Melody Moore Jackson, Thad Starner (2013) - Type: Research prototype · Organisms: Animals - Idea: Give working dogs a way to talk back through the gear they already wear. - What it is: Service-dog vests with sensors that the dog can bite, tug or nose-touch to send a message, such as calling emergency services or alerting a deaf handler. - How it works: Bite, tug and proximity sensors on a vest connected to a phone; tested with trained dogs. - Paper: https://doi.org/10.1145/2493988.2494334 (ISWC 2013) - Video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1iaIQktV26M - Images: https://media.npr.org/assets/img/2015/01/09/fido---sky-bite_wide-88de11020f6692986694f8215ddf563e0d7a7e8a.jpeg?s=1400&c=85&f=jpeg https://media.npr.org/assets/img/2015/01/09/fido---schubert-bite-sensor_wide-52bb7f044d9e9eff4931b5ce54bfca2f8a27307b.jpeg?s=1400&c=85&f=jpeg - Project page: https://www.npr.org/2015/01/17/376198998/sit-stay-call-911-fido-vest-gives-service-dogs-an-upgrade #### Understanding people and animals: the use of a positioning system in ordinary human-canine interaction — Alexandra Weilenmann, Oskar Juhlin (2011) - Type: Paper · Organisms: Animals - Idea: Study what people and dogs do together with a device, not what the device claims to show. - What it is: An ethnographic study of how hunters use a GPS dog-tracking device and how it changes the interaction between hunters and dogs. - How it works: Video-based fieldwork on moose hunts analysed with an ethnomethodological view of anthropomorphism. - Paper: https://doi.org/10.1145/1978942.1979328 (CHI 2011) - Images: https://figures.semanticscholar.org/70a7817049d65c2ec606dd750935cda5ef3db41b/6-Figure2-1.png https://figures.semanticscholar.org/70a7817049d65c2ec606dd750935cda5ef3db41b/7-Figure3-1.png #### Project Pigeon — B. F. Skinner (1943) - Type: Research prototype · Organisms: Animals - Idea: An early animal-operated interface shows how quickly animal labour can be put to human, and violent, uses. - What it is: During World War II, Project Pigeon trained pigeons to peck at a target image on a screen in a missile's nose cone so that their pecks would steer it. - How it works: Operant conditioning of pigeons to peck a projected target; peck position on the screen was translated into steering signals. - Paper: https://doi.org/10.1037/h0045345 (American Psychologist 1960) - Video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-GdmfDuzQvM ### Zoo & Captive Enrichment Interactive enrichment for primates, elephants, birds and other animals in care. #### BearBubbles: Interactive Olfactory Enrichment to Encourage Foraging in Zoo Animals — Rébecca Kleinberger (2026) - Type: Research prototype · Organisms: Animals - Idea: Smell is a rich enrichment channel that the animal can switch on. - What it is: BearBubbles releases scented bubbles when two American black bears approach, giving them control over olfactory enrichment and encouraging foraging. - How it works: Proximity-activated scented bubble machine deployed for three weeks at Zoo New England. - Paper: https://doi.org/10.1145/3772318.3790842 (CHI 2026) - Video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ubS81hMRPZI #### CreatureConnect: Exploring Shared Control of Multimodal Displays Between People and Lemurs — Jiaqi Wang, Ilyena Hirskyj-Douglas (2026) - Type: Research prototype · Organisms: Animals - Idea: Shared control can make zoo animals and people co-users of one system. - What it is: CreatureConnect is a distributed device through which lemurs and zoo visitors jointly control sounds, smells and visuals on both sides of the enclosure. - How it works: Linked controls inside and outside the enclosure; 541 lemur interactions and 16,139 visitors observed over 20 days. - Paper: https://doi.org/10.1145/3772318.3790643 (CHI 2026) - Images: https://figures.semanticscholar.org/d1c2277eca76c1ec38b99a76fc72e8825467c02f/6-Figure4-1.png https://figures.semanticscholar.org/d1c2277eca76c1ec38b99a76fc72e8825467c02f/5-Figure2-1.png #### Outfoxed: Design and Evaluation of a Modular Interactive Puzzle for Cognitive Enrichment of Zoo Animals — Rébecca Kleinberger (2026) - Type: Research prototype · Organisms: Animals - Idea: Adaptive difficulty keeps a puzzle engaging without a keeper resetting it. - What it is: Outfoxed is a modular puzzle feeder with adjustable difficulty and multisensory feedback, deployed with an Arctic fox and piloted with coatis. - How it works: Modular sensor-equipped puzzle levels deployed over four weeks, analysed with HCI and animal science measures. - Paper: https://doi.org/10.1145/3772318.3791644 (CHI 2026) - Video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pSsLSRJ-7JQ #### Colobus Curio Cabinet: A Modular, Mirror-Based, Co-Designed Enrichment Proposal for Colobus guereza — Rébecca Kleinberger, Ilyena Hirskyj-Douglas (2025) - Type: Research prototype · Organisms: Animals - Idea: Build enrichment around what the animals already find fascinating. - What it is: A wall-mounted 'curio cabinet' of modular mirror and screen inserts designed with keepers for colobus monkeys, who are drawn to reflective surfaces. - How it works: Modular cabinet with swappable mirror and screen modules behind natural-looking covers, co-designed with zoo staff. - Paper: https://doi.org/10.1145/3768539.3768555 (ACI 2025) - Video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EU0SGAQKnoI #### Exploring the Cockatoo's Engagement with Audiovisual Stimuli: An Inclusive Avian-IoT Interaction Design — Hill Hiroki Kobayashi (2025) - Type: Research prototype · Organisms: Animals - Idea: Enrichment can be voluntary, remote and light-touch. - What it is: A low-effort avian IoT system that lets a captive salmon-crested cockatoo engage voluntarily with audio and visual stimuli, monitored remotely. - How it works: Mobile app, central server and in-enclosure devices delivering multimodal stimuli and logging engagement. - Paper: https://doi.org/10.1145/3768539.3768553 (ACI 2025) - Images: https://figures.semanticscholar.org/f8300d44282f318af469ff548e6e92d872ce9e57/4-Figure3-1.png #### Reshaping Human-Animal Relationships: Exploring Lemur and Human Enrichment through Smell, Sound, and Sight — Jiaqi Wang, Ilyena Hirskyj-Douglas (2025) - Type: Research prototype · Organisms: Animals - Idea: Show visitors what the animals chose, instead of letting them interact directly. - What it is: A device that lets lemurs trigger smells, sounds and visuals in their enclosure, plus a matching device that shows visitors the lemurs' choices. - How it works: 63-day lemur deployment comparing modalities, then a 20-day visitor deployment in several conditions. - Paper: https://doi.org/10.1145/3706598.3713311 (CHI 2025) - Video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v8kiUKrVLq0 #### Swing it On: Design of Responsive Acoustic Environments for Zoo-housed Colobus Monkeys — Rébecca Kleinberger, Ilyena Hirskyj-Douglas (2025) - Type: Research prototype · Organisms: Animals - Idea: Turn an object the animal already uses into the controller. - What it is: An interactive acoustic system that turns a colobus monkeys' swing into an interface: the higher they swing, the more soundscape layers play. - How it works: Motion sensing on the swing mapped to layered stream, insect and bird sounds, with an evaluation protocol at Zoo New England. - Paper: https://doi.org/10.1145/3768539.3768551 (ACI 2025) - Video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_mxHsUzPxHs #### LemurLounge: Lemurs' Individual-Level, Group, and Cross-Species Use of an Interactive Audio Device in Zoos — Vilma Kankaanpää, Ilyena Hirskyj-Douglas (2024) - Type: Research prototype · Organisms: Animals - Idea: Design group enrichment that individuals can choose to use alone. - What it is: LemurLounge is an audio device that lemurs in a mixed-species group can trigger and listen to on their own; the study follows 14 lemurs of three species. - How it works: Enclosed listening space with sensor-triggered audio, deployed in the lemurs' habitat with individual-level logging. - Paper: https://doi.org/10.1145/3613904.3641888 (CHI 2024) - Video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rzL0KoFrBEI #### Play That Trunky Music: Development of an Auditory Enrichment Device for Elephants in Zoos — Arianna Mastali, Charles Ramey (2024) - Type: Research prototype · Organisms: Animals - Idea: Add a new sense to existing enrichment instead of building from scratch. - What it is: An audio enrichment system added to the feeding wall of African elephants at Zoo Atlanta, playing sounds when elephants reach into its holes. - How it works: Sensors in the trunk holes trigger audio; usage logged and compared with food-only enrichment. - Paper: https://doi.org/10.1145/3702336.3702343 (ACI 2024) - Video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ANlIAhp4YTs #### Shelling Out the Fun: Quantifying Otter Interactions with Instrumented Enrichment Objects — Charles Ramey (2024) - Type: Research prototype · Organisms: Animals - Idea: Instrument the toy, not the animal. - What it is: Sensors hidden inside enrichment toys measure how individual sea otters at Georgia Aquarium play with them over time. - How it works: Waterproof sensor packages in enrichment objects transmit motion data wirelessly to a base station. - Paper: https://doi.org/10.1145/3702336.3702346 (ACI 2024) #### Co-designing Enrichment Toys with Bottlenose Dolphins: Playfulness as a Corrective to Anthropocentrism — Aphrodite Theodora Andreou (2023) - Type: Research prototype · Organisms: Animals - Idea: Play with the animal while designing and it will push back on your assumptions. - What it is: Enrichment toys co-designed in playful collaboration with bottlenose dolphins at a marine park in Malta, with reflection on moments of interspecies friction. - How it works: Iterative toy prototypes tested in play sessions with dolphins and trainers at Mediterraneo Marine Park. - Paper: https://doi.org/10.1145/3637882.3637885 (ACI 2023) #### Hum-ble Beginnings: Developing Touch- and Proximity-Input-Based Interfaces for Zoo-Housed Giraffes’ Audio Enrichment — Ilyena Hirskyj-Douglas, Vilma Kankaanpää (2023) - Type: Research prototype · Organisms: Animals - Idea: Choose the input mode to fit the animal's body and behaviour. - What it is: Touch-based and proximity-based interfaces that let zoo giraffes play giraffe humming or white noise; over two months they used the proximity one more. - How it works: Requirements from keepers, prototyping with giraffes, then two interfaces deployed and compared. - Paper: https://doi.org/10.1145/3626470 (PACM HCI (ISS) 2023) #### Prototyping with Monkeys: Uncovering What Buttons for Monkeys Look Like — Vilma Kankaanpää, Ilyena Hirskyj-Douglas (2023) - Type: Research prototype · Organisms: Animals - Idea: A 'button' for a monkey may be a rope, not a push switch. - What it is: Rapid prototyping with zoo monkeys to find out what physical buttons for monkeys should look like; they preferred pulling and swinging over pushing. - How it works: Series of low-fidelity tangible input prototypes tested with white-faced sakis, varying colour and interaction type. - Paper: https://doi.org/10.1145/3569009.3572735 (TEI 2023) - Video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t4AWeWoZHNs #### Apex and ApeTouch: Development of a Portable Touchscreen System and Software for Primates at Zoos — Christopher Flynn Martin (2022) - Type: Product & platform · Organisms: Animals - Idea: Lower the barrier and more zoos will offer cognitive enrichment. - What it is: Apex is a portable touchscreen system and ApeTouch its software, built so that zoos can offer primates touchscreen tasks without custom engineering. - How it works: Weatherproof touchscreen unit with a reward dispenser, running open task software, deployed with apes at zoos. - Paper: https://doi.org/10.3390/ani12131660 (Animals 2022) - Video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JWfEYJogvLo - Images: https://pub.mdpi-res.com/animals/animals-12-01660/article_deploy/html/images/animals-12-01660-g001.png #### Do Monkeys Want Audio or Visual Stimuli? Interactive Computers for Choice with White-Faced Sakis in Zoos — Ilyena Hirskyj-Douglas (2022) - Type: Research prototype · Organisms: Animals - Idea: Offer animals several options, not one, and measure their experience through their choices. - What it is: A 'monkey media player' tunnel lets sakis choose between videos and sounds; over several weeks they triggered audio about twice as often as video. - How it works: A tunnel with three infrared zones plays a chosen video or sound for as long as the monkey stays; interactions are logged over weeks. - Paper: https://doi.org/10.1145/3532106.3533577 (DIS 2022) - Video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_rB1FVmks4g - Images: https://www.gla.ac.uk/media/Media_853879_smxx.jpeg https://cdn.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/blobs/f7ba/7924172/b4b3a0f72383/animals-11-00557-g001.jpg - Project page: https://www.gla.ac.uk/news/archiveofnews/2022/june/headline_853821_en.html #### An evaluation of interactive projections as digital enrichment for orangutans — Marcus Carter, Sarah Webber (2021) - Type: Research prototype · Organisms: Animals - Idea: Digital enrichment can be intrinsically rewarding for great apes. - What it is: Evaluates the interactive projection system in Melbourne Zoo's orangutan exhibit as enrichment that works without food rewards. - How it works: Behavioural observation of orangutans using projected interactive games over time. - Paper: https://doi.org/10.1002/zoo.21587 (Zoo Biology 2021) - Video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WObQaW2JYSs - Images: https://i.ytimg.com/vi/WObQaW2JYSs/maxresdefault.jpg - Project page: https://doi.org/10.1002/zoo.21587 #### Soundyssey: Hybrid Enrichment System for Elephants in Managed Care — Harpreet Sareen (2021) - Type: Research prototype · Organisms: Animals - Idea: Enrichment works better when the animal decides when it happens. - What it is: Soundyssey is an enrichment system for two elephants at the San Diego Zoo that lets them trigger sounds and gives them choice and control. - How it works: Hybrid physical–digital device with trunk-accessible triggers and audio output, deployed at the zoo. - Paper: https://doi.org/10.1145/3430524.3442469 (TEI 2021) - Video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4PfeYJp5X1Y #### Co-Designing with Orangutans: Enhancing the Design of Enrichment for Animals — Sarah Webber, Marcus Carter (2020) - Type: Research prototype · Organisms: Animals - Idea: Animals can be generative co-designers when their responses decide the next prototype. - What it is: The design journey of an interactive projection installation for orangutans at Melbourne Zoo, in which the orangutans' responses steered each iteration. - How it works: Iterative co-design with orangutans, keepers and designers using projections and Kinect sensing. - Paper: https://doi.org/10.1145/3357236.3395559 (DIS 2020) - Video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u9WZbdMHam0 #### Interspecies Interactions Mediated by Technology: An Avian Case Study at the Zoo — Rébecca Kleinberger (2020) - Type: Research prototype · Organisms: Animals - Idea: Give a zoo animal control over its soundscape, not just a recording to hear. - What it is: Two interactive sound systems at the San Diego Zoo let Sampson, a hyacinth macaw, choose and control music in his enclosure. - How it works: Perch- and touch-based interfaces triggering audio, deployed and observed with the macaw and keepers. - Paper: https://doi.org/10.1145/3313831.3376858 (CHI 2020) - Video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sr5HA6pMxBU #### More Than Human Aesthetics: Interactive Enrichment for Elephants — Fiona French, Clara Mancini (2020) - Type: Paper · Organisms: Animals - Idea: Aesthetics are species-specific; design for the senses and body of the animal in front of you. - What it is: Explores what an elephant-specific aesthetic of interaction might be, drawing on the authors' work designing interactive sound and play devices for captive elephants. - How it works: Applies existing aesthetic dimensions and design principles to elephant enrichment prototypes. - Paper: https://doi.org/10.1145/3357236.3395445 (DIS 2020) - Video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=G7Eh4owhNFk - Images: https://i.ytimg.com/vi/G7Eh4owhNFk/maxresdefault.jpg - Project page: https://doi.org/10.1145/3357236.3395445 #### Music for Monkeys: Building Methods to Design with White-Faced Sakis for Animal-Driven Audio Enrichment Devices — Roosa Piitulainen, Ilyena Hirskyj-Douglas (2020) - Type: Research prototype · Organisms: Animals - Idea: Let the animal choose the stimulus and log its choices to learn what it prefers. - What it is: White-faced sakis at Korkeasaari Zoo in Helsinki could choose to play music, rain or traffic sounds by entering a tunnel fitted with infrared sensors. - How it works: Low-fidelity form tests in the enclosure led to a tunnel with IR sensors that triggers audio and logs every interaction. - Paper: https://doi.org/10.3390/ani10101768 (Animals 2020) - Images: https://cdn.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/blobs/c9af/7601504/2b0b2725a0f8/animals-10-01768-g001.jpg https://cdn.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/blobs/c9af/7601504/827a0dddfaa4/animals-10-01768-g002.jpg - Project page: https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC7601504/ #### Platypus Surfing: In Search of the Perfect Wave — Ann Morrison (2020) - Type: Research prototype · Organisms: Animals - Idea: Even a platypus can be given a switch. - What it is: A wave machine that Sam, a platypus at Melbourne Zoo, can switch on by swimming near a sensor, giving him choice over when waves run. - How it works: Underwater proximity sensor triggering programmed wave sequences, developed with keepers and welfare specialists. - Paper: https://doi.org/10.1145/3446002.3446052 (ACI 2020) - Video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HM4AQE6pe-8 #### Animal-Centred Sonic Interaction Design: Musical Instruments and Interfaces for Grey Parrots — Reinhard Gupfinger (2019) - Type: Research prototype · Organisms: Animals - Idea: Design the instrument for the beak and the ear of the player. - What it is: Musical instruments and interfaces designed around grey parrots' bodies, hearing and curiosity, tested as auditory enrichment. - How it works: Iterative prototypes of tangible sound instruments evaluated with a parrot group, following an animal-centred process. - Paper: https://doi.org/10.1145/3371049.3371062 (ACI 2019) - Video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5tY7D6zpsB8 #### Computer tasks for great apes promote functional naturalism in a zoo setting — Christopher Flynn Martin (2018) - Type: Paper · Organisms: Animals - Idea: A screen task can be natural if the thinking it demands is natural. - What it is: Argues that touchscreen tasks for apes in zoos offer 'functional naturalism', mental challenges similar to those wild apes face. - How it works: Review of automated methods in ape research and their use at Indianapolis Zoo. - Paper: https://doi.org/10.1145/3295598.3295605 (ACI 2018) - Images: https://figures.semanticscholar.org/808effb799bdd2010ad6a561c74bfcb0e9adec0e/3-Figure1-1.png https://figures.semanticscholar.org/808effb799bdd2010ad6a561c74bfcb0e9adec0e/4-Figure3-1.png #### Gorilla game lab: exploring modularity, tangibility and playful engagement in cognitive enrichment design — Stuart Gray (2018) - Type: Research prototype · Organisms: Animals - Idea: Modular puzzles let keepers change the challenge so enrichment stays interesting. - What it is: Gorilla Game Lab designed and tested modular, tangible puzzle devices with seven western lowland gorillas at Bristol Zoo. - How it works: Modular hardware puzzles with embedded sensing to log use, evaluated with the gorilla troop. - Paper: https://doi.org/10.1145/3295598.3295604 (ACI 2018) - Images: https://figures.semanticscholar.org/67413398b4dccc17ff321d7e0ec6155faad8036c/7-Figure3-1.png https://figures.semanticscholar.org/67413398b4dccc17ff321d7e0ec6155faad8036c/5-Figure1-1.png #### Digital Enrichment with Captive Siamang: Video Showcase of Primate Preference — Melanie Ford (2017) - Type: Research prototype · Organisms: Animals - Idea: Give small apes their own tech corner and let preference show itself. - What it is: Two captive siamangs were given tablet computers in a permanent technology area and filmed to document what they chose to use. - How it works: Tablets with apps in a protected station, video recording of voluntary use. - Paper: https://doi.org/10.1145/3152130.3152150 (ACI 2017) - Video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xlNYO-J1Pv0 #### Interactive technology and human–animal encounters at the zoo — Sarah Webber, Marcus Carter (2017) - Type: Paper · Organisms: Animals - Idea: Zoo technology always serves several species at once; design for all of them. - What it is: A study of interactive systems at Melbourne Zoo that shows how technology shapes encounters between visitors, keepers and animals. - How it works: Observation and interviews around digital installations at the zoo. - Paper: https://doi.org/10.1016/j.ijhcs.2016.05.003 (IJHCS 2017) - Images: https://figures.semanticscholar.org/aece725a072f3397c50502a190ffc4507f60756e/8-Figure2-1.png #### Kinecting with Orangutans: Zoo Visitors' Empathetic Responses to Animals' Use of Interactive Technology — Sarah Webber, Marcus Carter (2017) - Type: Research prototype · Organisms: Animals, Human body - Idea: Technology for animals is also a window through which people see animals differently. - What it is: Kinect-driven projections at Melbourne Zoo let orangutans play with light; the study looked at how watching them play changed visitors' empathy. - How it works: Microsoft Kinect depth sensing drives floor projections in the orangutan enclosure; visitor responses were observed and surveyed. - Paper: https://doi.org/10.1145/3025453.3025729 (CHI 2017) - Video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l7OyfuidBI0 - Images: https://i.ytimg.com/vi/l7OyfuidBI0/maxresdefault.jpg - Project page: https://doi.org/10.1145/3025453.3025729 #### Sonic Experiments with Grey Parrots: A Report on Testing the Auditory Skills and Musical Preferences of Grey Parrots in Captivity — Reinhard Gupfinger (2017) - Type: Paper · Organisms: Animals - Idea: Find out what a parrot hears and likes before building it an instrument. - What it is: Experiments testing the hearing and musical preferences of captive grey parrots, as groundwork for sonic enrichment. - How it works: Playback and interactive sound experiments with a group of grey parrots at a rescue facility. - Paper: https://doi.org/10.1145/3152130.3152137 (ACI 2017) - Video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5tY7D6zpsB8 #### Don't cut to the chase: hunting experiences for zoo animals and visitors — Fiona French, Sarah Webber, Heli Väätäjä (2016) - Type: Paper · Organisms: Animals - Idea: Link an animal's hunting enrichment to a visitor game and both sides gain. - What it is: A workshop exploring technology that supports hunting behaviour in zoo animals while giving visitors a parallel game experience. - How it works: Workshop format with zoo briefs on predator enrichment and visitor engagement. - Paper: https://doi.org/10.1145/2995257.3014066 (ACI 2016) #### Sound to your objects: a novel design approach to evaluate orangutans' interest in sound-based stimuli — Patricia Pons, Marcus Carter (2016) - Type: Research prototype · Organisms: Animals - Idea: Give apes control over what they hear by making sound respond to objects. - What it is: A design for zoo orangutans in which handling tangible objects triggers sounds, to test their interest in controlling auditory stimuli. - How it works: Tangible, non-digital-looking objects linked to sound playback, planned with Melbourne Zoo orangutans. - Paper: https://doi.org/10.1145/2995257.2995383 (ACI 2016) - Images: https://figures.semanticscholar.org/13ea313b13fc9e225249ca4d64ce808476662e20/2-Figure1-1.png #### Designing Interactive Toys for Elephants — Fiona French, Clara Mancini (2015) - Type: Paper · Organisms: Animals - Idea: Play is a route to enrichment and a method for designing with any species. - What it is: Early research on digital toys and games as playful cognitive enrichment for captive elephants. - How it works: Design research with keepers and elephants to develop playful interactive devices. - Paper: https://doi.org/10.1145/2793107.2810327 (CHI PLAY 2015) - Project page: https://doi.org/10.1145/2793107.2810327 #### Designing for intuitive use for non-human users — Hanna Wirman (2015) - Type: Paper · Organisms: Animals - Idea: Intuitive use for animals comes from what their bodies already know. - What it is: Argues, from touchscreen games made for orangutans, that tangible interfaces and familiar actions can make digital technology intuitive for animals. - How it works: Reflection on orangutan game design, drawing on knowledge transfer from domains familiar to the animal. - Paper: https://doi.org/10.1145/2832932.2837008 (ACE 2015) #### Naturalism and ACI: augmenting zoo enclosures with digital technology — Marcus Carter, Sarah Webber (2015) - Type: Paper · Organisms: Animals - Idea: Digital enrichment in zoos has to fit an ideal of naturalism; hide the tech, keep the behaviour natural. - What it is: Discusses how zoos value naturalistic enclosures and what this means for putting digital technology into them, based on interviews with zoo staff. - How it works: Literature review and interviews with Zoos Victoria staff within a digital enrichment project. - Paper: https://doi.org/10.1145/2832932.2837011 (ACE 2015) - Images: https://figures.semanticscholar.org/ea8a88dc2ccd2833b221e11329d893ab07398add/2-Figure2-1.png #### The Arena System: a novel shared touch-panel apparatus for the study of chimpanzee social interaction and cognition — Christopher Flynn Martin (2013) - Type: Research prototype · Organisms: Animals - Idea: A shared screen turns individual cognitive tests into social ones. - What it is: The Arena System is a shared touch-panel apparatus in which two chimpanzees work side by side, used to study their social interaction and cognition. - How it works: Two linked touch-panels with feeders and a master PC, controlled by custom software at the Primate Research Institute, Kyoto University. - Paper: https://doi.org/10.3758/s13428-013-0418-y (Behavior Research Methods 2013) - Images: https://media.springernature.com/m685/springer-static/image/art%3A10.3758%2Fs13428-013-0418-y/MediaObjects/13428_2013_418_Fig1_HTML.gif #### Apps for Apes — Orangutan Outreach (2012) - Type: Product & platform · Organisms: Animals - Idea: Off-the-shelf tablets can become enrichment, and a public story about ape minds. - What it is: Apps for Apes gives iPads to zoos so that orangutans can use drawing, music and video apps as enrichment, with keepers holding the tablet. - How it works: Donated iPads with human-facing apps, used through the mesh during keeper-led sessions. - Video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZsSIKj5ULp4 #### Primate Cinema: Apes as Family — Rachel Mayeri (2012) - Type: Artwork · Organisms: Animals - Idea: Design media for another species' attention, then watch them watching. - What it is: A short drama made for chimpanzees, with actors in chimp costume, first screened to the chimpanzees at Edinburgh Zoo; the film cuts between the story and the apes watching it. - How it works: Plot and cues were developed with primatologists from chimp social behaviour; the film was shown on a large screen in the zoo enclosure and the audience was filmed. - Video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4871rINIAeQ - Images: https://artlaboratory-berlin.org/wp-content/uploads/2021/05/apes-as-family_remote-control2-1.jpg - Project page: https://artlaboratory-berlin.org/exhibitions/nonhuman-subjectivities-on-animals/ #### S.E.A. Aquarium — Resorts World Sentosa (2012) - Type: Product & platform · Organisms: Animals, Ecosystems - Idea: A designed habitat can host encounters without sharing space. - What it is: A large public aquarium in Singapore that recreates marine habitats with tailored lighting and water systems, so people meet sea life through glass while the two worlds stay apart. - How it works: Artificial marine habitats with lighting that mimics natural conditions; cited by Foth and Caldwell as media architecture that addresses nonhuman inhabitants. - Paper: https://doi.org/10.1145/3284389.3284495 (MAB 2018) - Images: https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/f/f4/Shark_Seas%2C_S.E.A._Aquarium%2C_Resorts_World_Sentosa%2C_Singapore_-_20180220.jpg/1920px-Shark_Seas%2C_S.E.A._Aquarium%2C_Resorts_World_Sentosa%2C_Singapore_-_20180220.jpg https://figures.semanticscholar.org/0d5f03907558d13705935ba024d412f84d729508/5-Figure6-1.png - Project page: https://artifact-archive.org/whole-archive ### Interspecies Communication Decoding and exchanging signals with whales, dolphins, birds and other species. #### AI-powered playbacks engage in flexible vocal interactions with zebra finches — Earth Species Project, Aza Raskin (2026) - Type: Paper · Organisms: Animals - Idea: Test meaning by talking back: an interactive AI partner is an experiment, not only a translator. - What it is: Zebra finches were put in conversation with a generative AI that answered their calls in real time; the birds adjusted their timing and call choice to the machine partner, allowing researchers to test the rules of their exchanges. - How it works: A generative model of zebra finch calls runs in closed loop with microphones and speakers, varying its replies to probe the birds' responses. - Paper: https://doi.org/10.64898/2026.02.12.705387 (bioRxiv 2026) - Images: https://earthspecies.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/08/Copy-of-Braid-weave-2.png - Project page: https://earthspecies.org/2026/08/27/meet-the-researchers-unlocking-the-future-of-animal-communication-research/ #### Ancestral iconicity: the dance language of bees revisited — Earth Species Project (2026) - Type: Paper · Organisms: Insects - Idea: Some animal signals may mean by resemblance, like gestures, rather than by arbitrary code. - What it is: Linguists and ESP researchers reread the honeybee waggle dance with tools from sign-language semantics, arguing that it is iconic: the dance's form resembles the flight it describes. - How it works: Formal semantic analysis of dance components compared across bee species and phylogeny. - Paper: https://doi.org/10.1002/brv.70164 (Biological Reviews 2026) - Project page: https://earthspecies.org/what-we-do/publications/ #### Animal Language Processing (ALP) — Earth Species Project (2026) - Type: Book & essay · Organisms: Animals - Idea: Naming a field is a design move that gathers tools, people and questions into one place. - What it is: ESP's name for a new field: studying animal communication with AI at scale, species-agnostically and data-first, the way natural language processing studies human text. - How it works: A framework essay organising the pipeline from data and encoders to detection, repertoire discovery and interactive playback. - Video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8bJzA1EySck - Images: https://earthspecies.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/04/Braid-weave-5.png - Project page: https://earthspecies.org/2026/04/02/animal-language-processing-an-ai-convergence-in-animal-communication/ #### Approaching an unknown communication system by latent space exploration and causal inference — Project CETI (2026) - Type: Paper · Organisms: Animals - Idea: Use a generative model as an experimental animal you can manipulate freely. - What it is: A method for finding which acoustic properties matter in an unknown signal system: train a generative network on whale codas, then intervene on its hidden variables and see what changes. - How it works: Generative adversarial networks with interpretable latent codes, combined with causal inference over the latent space. - Paper: https://doi.org/10.1098/rsos.250829 (Royal Society Open Science 2026) - Project page: https://royalsocietypublishing.org/rsos/article/13/8/250829/483032/Approaching-an-unknown-communication-system-by #### BirdCODE: Detecting bird communication at scale — Earth Species Project (2026) - Type: Paper · Organisms: Animals - Idea: Precise timing of every call, across every species, opens questions about who answers whom. - What it is: A zero-shot sound event detection model that finds and times the calls of more than 9,000 bird species without retraining, applied to over one million recordings. - How it works: Trained on weakly labelled recordings, synthetic soundscapes and pseudo-labels; weights and detections released openly. - Paper: https://doi.org/10.64898/2026.07.31.742086 (bioRxiv 2026) - Images: https://earthspecies.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/08/Feature-Image-Great-Tit.png - Project page: https://earthspecies.org/2026/08/20/birdcode-scaling-zero-shot-sound-event-detection-for-bioacoustics/ - Code: https://github.com/earthspecies/sound-event-detection #### Repertoire-behavior mapping reveals signal functions in cooperatively breeding crows — Earth Species Project (2026) - Type: Paper · Organisms: Animals - Idea: Meaning can be approached by mapping sounds onto behaviour at scale. - What it is: Follow-up study on the León crows that links each call type in the family's repertoire to what the birds were doing when they made it, to infer what the calls are for. - How it works: Unsupervised clustering of tag-recorded calls, aligned with accelerometer-derived and observed behaviours. - Paper: https://doi.org/10.64898/2026.04.02.715916 (bioRxiv 2026) - Images: https://www.cooperativecrows.com/img/visore_1.jpg - Project page: https://www.cooperativecrows.com/index.htm #### The phonology of sperm whale coda vowels — Project CETI (2026) - Type: Paper · Organisms: Animals - Idea: Once units are found, look for the rules that organise them. - What it is: A follow-up that describes the rules governing sperm whale 'coda vowels': which vowel types occur, how they combine and how they shift within exchanges between whales. - How it works: Phonological analysis of annotated coda vowels in multi-whale recordings from Dominica. - Paper: https://doi.org/10.1098/rspb.2025.2994 (Proceedings of the Royal Society B 2026) - Video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=L59pNqxvFdw - Project page: https://www.projectceti.org/research/index #### Towards Interface Design for Parrot-Human Communication: Investigating Parrot Selections of Speech Board Representations — Clara Mancini (2026) - Type: Paper · Organisms: Animals - Idea: Interface design variables that matter for humans also shape what a parrot says. - What it is: A four-year study of a Goffin's cockatoo using three successive speech board interfaces, examining how interface design affects her selections. - How it works: Longitudinal in-the-wild analysis of selections across button size, layout and representation type. - Paper: https://doi.org/10.1145/3772318.3791196 (CHI 2026) - Images: https://figures.semanticscholar.org/177dbf68535b1babe83624f3cee7e2c01bda1452/4-Figure1-1.png https://figures.semanticscholar.org/177dbf68535b1babe83624f3cee7e2c01bda1452/8-Figure2-1.png #### alp-data — Earth Species Project (2026) - Type: Product & platform · Organisms: Animals - Idea: Shared infrastructure turns scattered recordings into a commons for a whole field. - What it is: A pip-installable Python package that gives one consistent interface to more than 35 bioacoustic datasets, plus a visual Data Explorer for browsing cross-species recordings. - How it works: Dataset loaders with harmonised metadata and licences, hosted by ESP. - Images: https://earthspecies.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/07/Braid-weave-4.png - Project page: https://earthspecies.org/2026/07/22/introducing-alp-data-a-shared-data-layer-for-animal-language-processing/ - Code: https://github.com/earthspecies/alp-data #### AVEX: What Matters for Animal Vocalization Encoding — Earth Species Project (2025) - Type: Paper · Organisms: Animals - Idea: Diverse sound, including non-animal audio, makes better listeners for animals. - What it is: A large study of 19 models on 26 datasets that finds the training recipe for general animal-sound encoders, released as the open AVEX model library. - How it works: Self-supervised pretraining followed by supervised post-training on mixed bioacoustic and general audio, with new tasks for individual identification and repertoire discovery. - Paper: https://arxiv.org/abs/2508.11845 (ICLR 2026) - Images: https://earthspecies.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/01/68c8820edb511ede36444b76_Cover.png https://arxiv.org/html/2508.11845v3/figures/Fig1_updated.png - Project page: https://earthspecies.org/2025/09/15/what-matters-for-bioacoustic-encoding-a-practical-training-recipe-for-building-generalizable-models/ - Code: https://github.com/earthspecies/avex #### Attuning to song duels facilitates song-matching in nightingales — Daniela Vallentin (2025) - Type: Paper · Organisms: Animals - Idea: An interactive playback system can hold a real exchange with a bird, not just broadcast at it. - What it is: Researchers duetted with wild nightingales in real time by playing back song types; the birds matched the song types they heard, showing they attend to and answer the content of a rival's song. - How it works: Interactive playback in the field, likely with real-time song-type classification choosing the reply during night-time singing. - Paper: https://doi.org/10.1101/2025.04.12.648496 (bioRxiv 2025) - Project page: https://coller-dolittle-24.sites.tau.ac.il/2025 #### Capturing vocal communication in a free-living corvid — Earth Species Project (2025) - Type: Paper · Organisms: Animals - Idea: Put the microphone on the animal, and the quiet family conversation becomes audible. - What it is: Tiny tags on wild, cooperatively breeding carrion crows in northern Spain recorded more than 127,000 soft calls that directional microphones miss; ESP's Voxaboxen found and sorted them by caller. - How it works: MiniDTAG bio-loggers with audio and accelerometers, combined with video and machine-learning detection of calls. - Paper: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10071-025-02018-0 (Animal Cognition 2025) - Video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2MipvgUzO6M - Images: https://earthspecies.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/01/69417a419b5107d41885cfa4_CarrionCrowBiologger-1.png https://media.springernature.com/m685/springer-static/image/art%3A10.1007%2Fs10071-025-02018-0/MediaObjects/10071_2025_2018_Fig1_HTML.png - Project page: https://earthspecies.org/2025/12/15/unlocking-avian-secrets-how-tiny-biologgers-are-revealing-the-hidden-communication-of-carrion-crows/ #### Cuttlefish interact with multimodal 'arm wave sign' displays — Sophie Cohen-Bodénès (2025) - Type: Paper · Organisms: Animals - Idea: A signal can be seen and felt at once; design playback for more than one sense. - What it is: Cuttlefish perform four distinct arm-waving gestures ('up', 'side', 'roll', 'crown'); when shown videos or played vibrations of these signs, other cuttlefish wave back. - How it works: Video playback and underwater vibration playback of recorded displays, with responses scored in the lab. - Paper: https://doi.org/10.1101/2025.04.13.648584 (bioRxiv 2025) - Video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EMCZXANfWGM - Project page: https://coller-dolittle-24.sites.tau.ac.il/2025 #### DRASDIC: Synthetic data enables context-aware bioacoustic sound event detection — Earth Species Project (2025) - Type: Paper · Organisms: Animals - Idea: When real labelled data is scarce, build the training world yourself. - What it is: A detector that finds a target call type after seeing only a few examples, trained on millions of synthetic soundscapes assembled from real recordings. - How it works: Domain randomisation: calls and backgrounds are mixed at random to create labelled scenes, and a transformer learns to detect events given example clips in context. - Paper: https://arxiv.org/abs/2503.00296 (arXiv 2025) - Images: https://arxiv.org/html/2503.00296v2/figures/figures_v1.003.jpeg - Project page: https://earthspecies.org/what-we-do/publications/ - Code: https://github.com/earthspecies/drasdic_api #### Decoding Killer Whale Communication From Above and Below — Earth Species Project (2025) - Type: Research prototype · Organisms: Animals - Idea: Look and listen at the same time: synchronised views reveal who calls while doing what. - What it is: A pilot with Raincoast Conservation Foundation that pairs aerial drone video of known killer whale matrilines with underwater hydrophone recordings, to link calls to coordinated behaviour and to ship noise. - How it works: Drone footage with individual photo-ID synchronised to hydrophone arrays, analysed with ESP's detection and encoder models. - Video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Xhr5SvDipUc - Images: https://earthspecies.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/01/6862918677532c8e6325f948_Orcas.png - Project page: https://earthspecies.org/2025/06/27/decoding-killer-whale-communication-from-above-and-below/ #### DolphinGemma — Google DeepMind, Wild Dolphin Project, Thad Starner (2025) - Type: Research prototype · Organisms: Animals - Idea: A language model for another species' sounds, running on a phone underwater. - What it is: An open AI model that learns the structure of wild Atlantic spotted dolphin sounds from 40 years of Wild Dolphin Project recordings and predicts the next sounds in a sequence, small enough to run on a Pixel phone in the field. - How it works: A roughly 400M-parameter Gemma-based audio model using SoundStream tokens, paired with Georgia Tech's CHAT wearable for two-way whistle experiments. - Video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jH98kvC9f1s - Images: https://storage.googleapis.com/gweb-uniblog-publish-prod/images/DolphinGemma_SocialExplainers_16x9_DolphinGem.width-1300.png - Project page: https://blog.google/technology/ai/dolphingemma/ #### Evidence of social learning across symbolic cultural barriers in sperm whales — Project CETI, Shane Gero (2025) - Type: Paper · Organisms: Animals - Idea: Cultures can borrow freely while guarding the signs of who they are. - What it is: Clans of sperm whales that share waters also share more of their non-identity codas, suggesting they learn from each other while keeping their clan markers distinct. - How it works: Variable-length Markov chains model coda sequences, and repertoires are compared across clans and geographic overlap. - Paper: https://doi.org/10.7554/eLife.96362 (eLife 2025) - Images: https://arxiv.org/html/2307.05304v4/figure_one_final.png - Project page: https://elifesciences.org/articles/96362 #### Extensive compositionality in the vocal system of bonobos — Mélissa Berthet (2025) - Type: Paper · Organisms: Animals - Idea: Measure meaning from context, and grammar-like structure can be found in another ape's calls. - What it is: Wild bonobos combine calls into sequences whose meaning is built from the meanings of the parts, including non-trivial combinations where one call modifies another, as adjectives do in human language. - How it works: Hundreds of contextual features recorded with each call, distributional semantics to place calls in a meaning space, and tests of compositionality. - Paper: https://doi.org/10.1126/science.adv1170 (Science 2025) - Video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Rt6LauFHVBw - Project page: https://coller-dolittle-24.sites.tau.ac.il/2026 #### First evidence for widespread sharing of stereotyped non-signature whistle types by wild dolphins — Laela Sayigh (2025) - Type: Paper · Organisms: Animals - Idea: Shared calls that are not names may be the first candidate 'words' of dolphins. - What it is: Recordings of the Sarasota Bay dolphins revealed about 20 whistle types, apart from each dolphin's signature whistle, shared across many individuals; playback of two of them drew distinct responses. It won the first Coller-Dolittle Prize. - How it works: Suction-cup hydrophone tags on temporarily caught dolphins over decades, machine-learning whistle classification and field playback experiments. - Paper: https://doi.org/10.1101/2025.04.21.647658 (bioRxiv 2025) - Video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8KCWr2yVq08 - Project page: https://coller-dolittle-24.sites.tau.ac.il/2025 #### Listening with the Fishes: Aquatic Audio Interfaces to Experience Acoustic Underwater Worlds — Rébecca Kleinberger, Ilyena Hirskyj-Douglas (2025) - Type: Research prototype · Organisms: Animals - Idea: Make people hear the noise they add to an animal's world. - What it is: A pilot aquarium installation that lets visitors hear the underwater soundscape and fish sounds, as a first step toward acoustic enrichment for fish. - How it works: Hydrophone-based audio interface in a public aquarium, part of a proposed three-stage system. - Paper: https://doi.org/10.1145/3768539.3768552 (ACI 2025) - Video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=P4oZcewlZn8 #### Robust detection of overlapping bioacoustic sound events — Earth Species Project (2025) - Type: Paper · Organisms: Animals - Idea: Communication is often simultaneous; tools must hear two voices at once. - What it is: A detection model for dense bird choruses where calls overlap, tested on zebra finch colonies and other species where standard detectors merge simultaneous calls. - How it works: An onset/offset prediction scheme that allows events to overlap, trained with synthetic mixtures and evaluated on several bioacoustic datasets. - Paper: https://arxiv.org/abs/2503.02389 (arXiv 2025) - Images: https://arxiv.org/html/2503.02389v2/synth_results.png - Project page: https://earthspecies.org/what-we-do/publications/ #### Ultrasonic signals support a large-scale communication landscape in wild mice — Nicolas Mathevon (2025) - Type: Paper · Organisms: Animals - Idea: Take the recorder out of the cage and a species' communication looks entirely different. - What it is: Ultrasonic recorders across a semi-natural enclosure of wild house mice captured a busy landscape of calls far beyond the lab's mating songs, tied to social contexts across the whole population. - How it works: Long-term ultrasonic recording across the enclosure, likely combined with individual tracking, and automated call detection and classification. - Paper: https://doi.org/10.1016/j.cub.2025.08.028 (Current Biology 2025) - Project page: https://coller-dolittle-24.sites.tau.ac.il/2026 #### Vowel- and Diphthong-Like Spectral Patterns in Sperm Whale Codas — Project CETI (2025) - Type: Paper · Organisms: Animals - Idea: Listen for timbre, not only rhythm; hidden layers of a signal appear when you change what you measure. - What it is: Analysing codas as sound rather than rhythm, linguists find recurring spectral patterns that behave like vowels and diphthongs, a second layer of structure on top of click timing. - How it works: Spectral analysis of recorded click trains using methods from acoustic phonetics, such as formant-like peak tracking across a coda. - Paper: https://doi.org/10.1162/opmi.a.252 (Open Mind 2025) - Images: https://cdn.prod.website-files.com/644849cc07ba153932ff365d/663a463fc47f734a633292fb_Amanda%20Cotton%20-%20reflection%20(1).jpg - Project page: https://www.projectceti.org/research/index #### WhAM: Towards A Translative Model of Sperm Whale Vocalization — Project CETI (2025) - Type: Paper · Organisms: Animals - Idea: A generative model of a species' voice becomes both a research instrument and a possible playback partner. - What it is: The Whale Acoustics Model generates realistic sperm whale codas from prompts and can turn other sounds into coda-like audio; its learned features also classify codas better than earlier methods. - How it works: A VampNet-style masked acoustic token transformer fine-tuned on Dominica coda recordings after pretraining on music and animal audio. - Paper: https://arxiv.org/abs/2512.02206 (arXiv 2025) - Video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ccphRKVQnA4 - Images: https://arxiv.org/html/2512.02206v1/main_figure.png - Project page: https://www.projectceti.org/research/index #### Whale song shows language-like statistical structure — Inbal Arnon (2025) - Type: Paper · Organisms: Animals - Idea: Tools built to study how human babies learn can reveal structure in another species' culture. - What it is: Eight years of humpback whale song from New Caledonia, segmented with methods used to study how infants find words, contain recurring parts whose frequencies follow Zipf's law, as words in human languages do. - How it works: Transitional-probability segmentation of symbolically transcribed song, and frequency-rank analysis of the resulting units. - Paper: https://doi.org/10.1126/science.adq7055 (Science 2025) - Video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=goZA5SlXx-g - Project page: https://doi.org/10.1126/science.adq7055 #### African elephants address one another with individually specific name-like calls — Mickey Pardo (2024) - Type: Paper · Organisms: Animals - Idea: Machine learning can find structure humans cannot hear, then field playbacks test whether animals care. - What it is: A machine-learning model could predict which elephant a rumble was addressed to, and elephants in Kenya reacted more strongly to playbacks of calls addressed to them: evidence of names that are not imitations. - How it works: Random-forest classification of rumbles from Samburu and Amboseli recordings, followed by playback experiments with free-ranging elephants. - Paper: https://doi.org/10.1038/s41559-024-02420-w (Nature Ecology & Evolution 2024) - Video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YDFhPeYl4Ck - Images: https://media.springernature.com/full/springer-static/image/art%3A10.1038%2Fs41559-024-02420-w/MediaObjects/41559_2024_2420_Fig1_HTML.png - Project page: https://www.nature.com/articles/s41559-024-02420-w #### Biodenoising: Animal Vocalization Denoising without Access to Clean Data — Earth Species Project (2024) - Type: Paper · Organisms: Animals - Idea: Borrow a denoiser trained on human speech and let it bootstrap its own animal training data. - What it is: A method and open tool that removes wind, rain, boat engines and lab hum from animal recordings, even though no perfectly clean animal recordings exist to learn from. - How it works: A speech-enhancement model creates pseudo-clean targets, which are remixed with noise to train a new model iteratively. - Paper: https://doi.org/10.1109/icassp49660.2025.10889313 (ICASSP 2025) - Images: https://earthspecies.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/01/67ae625135b978ff6aa16e7a_29275630206_512b1888b9_5k.jpg - Project page: https://earthspecies.org/2024/12/05/biodenoising-a-novel-method-for-noise-reduction-in-animal-vocalizations/ - Code: https://github.com/earthspecies/biodenoising #### BirdAVES — Earth Species Project (2024) - Type: Product & platform · Organisms: Animals - Idea: A foundation model tuned for one richly vocal group can serve a whole community of field ornithologists. - What it is: A family of self-supervised audio models specialised for birds, released openly; it improves on AVES by more than 20% on bird datasets and tasks. - How it works: HuBERT and BEATs-style encoders pretrained on large bird recording collections such as Xeno-canto, compared with BirdNET and Perch. - Images: https://earthspecies.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/01/6674594a2cb3b5a535caf742_mario-mendez-JNK1R53FeYw-unsplash.jpg - Project page: https://earthspecies.org/2024/06/20/introducing-birdaves-self-supervised-audio-foundation-model-for-birds/ - Code: https://github.com/earthspecies/aves #### Contextual and combinatorial structure in sperm whale vocalisations — Project CETI (2024) - Type: Paper · Organisms: Animals - Idea: Look for combinatorial structure in nonhuman signals instead of mapping them onto human words. - What it is: Analysing about 9,000 codas from Eastern Caribbean sperm whales, the team found that rhythm, tempo, 'rubato' and 'ornamentation' combine into a large, structured set of calls, a so-called sperm whale phonetic alphabet. - How it works: Statistical and visual analysis of coda timing recorded by the Dominica Sperm Whale Project across social contexts. - Paper: https://doi.org/10.1038/s41467-024-47221-8 (Nature Communications 2024) - Video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5N60yrXdgUM - Project page: https://www.projectceti.org/ #### Ellie Talks About the Weather: Toward Evaluating the Expressive and Enrichment Potential of a Tablet-Based Speech Board in a Single Goffin’s Cockatoo — Jennifer Cunha (2024) - Type: Paper · Organisms: Animals - Idea: Evaluate an animal's AAC use both as communication and as enrichment. - What it is: Seven months of a single cockatoo's use of a tablet speech board, with a framework for evaluating its expressive potential and enrichment value. - How it works: 129 sessions over 190 days coded with a new schema for expressive and enrichment measures. - Paper: https://doi.org/10.1145/3613904.3643654 (CHI 2024) - Video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u95r1Hjozpk #### ISPA: Inter-Species Phonetic Alphabet for Transcribing Animal Sounds — Earth Species Project (2024) - Type: Paper · Organisms: Animals - Idea: Transcription is a design decision: choose a notation and animal sound becomes text that language tools can use. - What it is: A proposal to write down any animal sound as text, like the International Phonetic Alphabet does for human speech, so that language models can read and learn from animal vocalisations. - How it works: Acoustic features are clustered into discrete phoneme-like units, and the resulting transcripts are used to train text-based models for classification. - Paper: https://doi.org/10.1109/icasspw62465.2024.10669911 (ICASSP Workshops 2024) - Images: https://arxiv.org/html/2402.03269v1/fig_phoneme_cluster.png - Project page: https://earthspecies.org/what-we-do/publications/ - Code: https://github.com/earthspecies/ispa #### NatureLM-audio: an Audio-Language Foundation Model for Bioacoustics — Earth Species Project (2024) - Type: Paper · Organisms: Animals - Idea: Turn animal sound analysis into a conversation with a model anyone can query. - What it is: An open audio-language model that can be asked questions about animal sounds, such as which species is calling or what kind of call it is, and that generalises to species it was not trained on. - How it works: A large language model paired with an audio encoder, trained on bioacoustic, speech and music data with text prompts. - Paper: https://arxiv.org/abs/2411.07186 (arXiv 2024) - Video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Z4smEsWqNnk - Images: https://earthspecies.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/02/60c32f095ea1f56d181d7ed41a99cd7519f518fa-Large.jpeg - Project page: https://www.earthspecies.org/ #### Rosetta Bone - Bridging the Language Gap Between Dogs and Humans with a QR Code-Enabled Communication System — Melody Moore Jackson (2024) - Type: Research prototype · Organisms: Animals - Idea: Translate for the human, not for the dog. - What it is: Rosetta Bone is a QR-code tag on a dog's collar that tells a new caretaker the commands and language the dog already knows. - How it works: Collar QR tag linked to a web app that plays the owner's recorded cues in the dog's familiar language. - Paper: https://doi.org/10.1145/3702336.3702348 (ACI 2024) #### Soundboard-trained dogs (FluentPet buttons) — Federico Rossano, FluentPet (2024) - Type: Paper · Organisms: Animals - Idea: A consumer device can become a large-scale research instrument when owners share data. - What it is: A study of soundboard-trained dogs, which press recordable buttons such as FluentPet's, finding that their two-button combinations are not accidental, random or copies of their owners. - How it works: Button-press logs from many households' FluentPet boards analysed statistically for combination patterns. - Paper: https://doi.org/10.1038/s41598-024-79517-6 (Scientific Reports 2024) - Video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cTnVSJ8V4wk - Images: https://fluent.pet/cdn/shop/files/Homepage_Social_Share_Image.jpg?v=1666021558&width=2048 - Project page: https://fluent.pet #### The Animal Whisperer Project — Oliver Bendel (2024) - Type: Research prototype · Organisms: Animals - Idea: A phone that reads an animal's signals can prevent conflicts on a walk. - What it is: Apps that use multimodal generative AI to read the body language of animals such as cows, horses and dogs from a phone camera and advise people how to behave. - How it works: GPT-4-based prompts with species-specific knowledge applied to images of animals in context. - Paper: https://doi.org/10.1145/3702336.3702347 (ACI 2024) - Video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cSd_UAOCQFg #### Vocal labeling of others by nonhuman primates (marmoset names) — David Omer (2024) - Type: Paper · Organisms: Animals - Idea: Names may not need words; they can be a pattern inside a call. - What it is: Marmosets exchanging 'phee' calls embed information that addresses a specific partner, and they respond more to calls aimed at them: the first evidence of name-like calls in a nonhuman primate. - How it works: Recorded natural dialogues between pairs of marmosets, machine-learning classification of addressee, and playback experiments. - Paper: https://doi.org/10.1126/science.adp3757 (Science 2024) - Video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aeLDYcyaQCE - Project page: https://coller-dolittle-24.sites.tau.ac.il/2025 #### 'Conversing' with an Alaskan humpback whale (Twain) — Whale-SETI (2023) - Type: Paper · Organisms: Animals - Idea: Treat a playback as a turn in a conversation and measure whether the animal takes the next turn. - What it is: In 2021 the Whale-SETI team played a recorded humpback 'whup' contact call into the sea off Alaska; a whale named Twain approached and answered 36 times over 20 minutes, matching the intervals between calls. - How it works: Underwater speaker and hydrophone playback of a single call type, with inter-call intervals analysed for turn-taking. - Paper: https://doi.org/10.7717/peerj.16349 (PeerJ 2023) - Video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3cvSLNn8RZk - Images: https://dfzljdn9uc3pi.cloudfront.net/2023/16349/1/fig-1-1x.jpg - Project page: https://peerj.com/articles/16349/ #### AVES: Animal Vocalization Encoder based on Self-Supervision — Earth Species Project (2023) - Type: Paper · Organisms: Animals - Idea: Let a model listen to vast unlabelled nature recordings before asking it anything specific. - What it is: The first self-supervised foundation model for animal vocalisations: it learns general features of animal sound from unlabelled recordings and can then be fine-tuned for many species and tasks. - How it works: A HuBERT transformer pretrained on curated animal sounds from FSD50K, AudioSet and VGGSound, evaluated on BEANS. - Paper: https://arxiv.org/abs/2210.14493 (ICASSP 2023) - Video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9i-_CEhoCzw - Images: https://earthspecies.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/01/647795b555df52d1f2e00f4d_rene-riegal-qAts81pZrbg-unsplash-1-min.jpg - Project page: https://earthspecies.org/2023/05/31/finding-the-signal-in-the-noise-how-machine-learning-can-help-us-perceive-understand-and-protect-other-species/ - Code: https://github.com/earthspecies/aves #### BEANS: The Benchmark of Animal Sounds — Earth Species Project (2023) - Type: Paper · Organisms: Animals, Insects - Idea: A shared test lets a scattered field measure progress on many species at once. - What it is: A public benchmark of 12 datasets covering birds, mammals, amphibians and insects, used to compare how well machine-learning models classify and detect animal sounds. - How it works: Standardised classification and detection tasks with fixed splits and baselines (from logistic regression to pretrained audio networks). - Paper: https://doi.org/10.1109/ICASSP49357.2023.10096686 (ICASSP 2023) - Video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nY1-N1M-rxk - Images: https://earthspecies.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/01/637e04ed3e538d1047f965e3_bee-and-flowers.jpg - Project page: https://earthspecies.org/what-we-do/publications/ - Code: https://github.com/earthspecies/beans #### Using machine learning to decode animal communication — Christian Rutz, Earth Species Project, Aza Raskin (2023) - Type: Paper · Organisms: Animals - Idea: Decoding is a scientific claim that needs criteria, experiments and ethics, not only bigger models. - What it is: A Science perspective by biologists and ESP researchers that lays out what machine learning can realistically do for animal communication research, and warns about overclaiming and about effects on animals. - How it works: A review of supervised, self-supervised and generative methods, with playback experiments proposed as the test of meaning. - Paper: https://doi.org/10.1126/science.adg7314 (Science 2023) - Images: https://earthspecies.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/01/656cb45ee88deb55269fee96_Burrowing-Owls.jpg - Project page: https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/science.adg7314 #### Voxaboxen — Earth Species Project (2023) - Type: Product & platform · Organisms: Animals - Idea: Automate the slowest step of bioacoustics, annotation, so that studies can scale to whole seasons. - What it is: An open-source tool that finds and labels every animal call in long field recordings with precise start and end times, so biologists no longer mark each call by hand. - How it works: Built on the AVES encoder with a detection head that predicts bounding boxes in time, trained on a few annotated files. - Images: https://earthspecies.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/01/64f0505eba7a72f147af1c09_joshua-j-cotten-Y_OxRWJFvuw-unsplash-1.jpg - Project page: https://earthspecies.org/2023/08/31/voxaboxen-new-tool-to-support-annotation-of-large-audio-files/ - Code: https://github.com/earthspecies/voxaboxen #### Chimpanzees produce diverse vocal sequences with ordered and recombinatorial properties — Catherine Crockford (2022) - Type: Paper · Organisms: Animals - Idea: Count combinations at scale and a structured 'code' emerges. - What it is: Nearly 5,000 recorded utterances from wild Taï chimpanzees contain hundreds of distinct call sequences with consistent order and recombined parts, suggesting a structured system rather than random strings. - How it works: Long-term focal recordings, call-type annotation and sequence analysis for ordering and recombination. - Paper: https://doi.org/10.1038/s42003-022-03350-8 (Communications Biology 2022) - Video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZIsrIt470mI - Images: https://media.springernature.com/full/springer-static/image/art%3A10.1038%2Fs42003-022-03350-8/MediaObjects/42003_2022_3350_Fig1_HTML.png - Project page: https://coller-dolittle-24.sites.tau.ac.il/2026 #### Evidence from sperm whale clans of symbolic marking in non-human cultures — Shane Gero, Project CETI (2022) - Type: Paper · Organisms: Animals - Idea: Animal cultures may use symbols to mark 'us' and 'them'. - What it is: Across 23,000 codas from the Pacific, 'identity codas' that mark clan membership differ most where clans overlap, the way human groups sharpen symbols of belonging where they meet. - How it works: Statistical comparison of coda repertoires across 23 locations with agent-based models of cultural transmission. - Paper: https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.2201692119 (PNAS 2022) - Project page: https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.2201692119 #### Modeling Animal Vocalizations through Synthesizers — Earth Species Project (2022) - Type: Paper · Organisms: Animals - Idea: Describe an animal call as a synth patch that a person can read and tweak. - What it is: Instead of generating animal calls with a black-box network, this work fits the knobs of a differentiable sound synthesiser to reproduce recorded calls, so each call is described by a few readable parameters. - How it works: Gradient-based and black-box optimisation of modular synthesiser parameters to match target vocalisations. - Paper: https://arxiv.org/abs/2210.10857 (arXiv 2022) - Images: https://arxiv.org/html/2210.10857v1/fig_overview.png - Project page: https://earthspecies.org/what-we-do/publications/ #### TamagoPhone: A Framework for Augmenting Artificial Incubators to Enable Vocal Interaction Between Bird Parents and Eggs — Rébecca Kleinberger (2022) - Type: Speculative design · Organisms: Animals - Idea: Incubators save eggs but cut a conversation; technology can reconnect it. - What it is: TamagoPhone proposes adding two-way audio streaming to artificial incubators so that bird parents and embryos can hear each other before hatching. - How it works: Research design for low-latency audio links between a nest and an incubator, based on a review of prenatal vocal learning in birds. - Paper: https://doi.org/10.1145/3565995.3566036 (ACI 2022) - Images: https://figures.semanticscholar.org/377ee7cc830e44af9aac2c55b0b5976950ca4cf5/3-Figure2-1.png #### The (m)Otherhood of Meep (the bat translator) — Alinta Krauth (2022) - Type: Artwork · Organisms: Animals - Idea: Translation between species can be poetic rather than literal, and still build empathy. - What it is: An AI interpreter that turns the calls of grey-headed flying foxes into poetic text in real time, drawing on the artist's experience as a bat rescuer. - How it works: A machine-learning model trained on categorised flying-fox vocalisations maps calls to phrases, displayed via TensorFlow visuals. - Images: https://ars.electronica.art/starts-prize/files/2023/06/Meep-Translator_Image2-1024x512.jpg https://ars.electronica.art/starts-prize/files/2023/06/Meep-Translator_OutdoorTest3-1024x512.jpg - Project page: https://www.alintakrauth.com/otherhood #### The Sounds of Life: How Digital Technology Is Bringing Us Closer to the Worlds of Animals and Plants — Karen Bakker (2022) - Type: Book & essay · Organisms: Animals, Plants - Idea: Listening technologies can extend our senses but also extend our power over other species. - What it is: Karen Bakker's book on digital bioacoustics: how networks of cheap microphones and AI reveal the communication of whales, bats, bees, corals, turtles and plants, and the ethical risks of listening in. - How it works: A synthesis of field research and interviews across bioacoustics, ecology and machine learning. - Video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Fwd3SB_YYZc - Images: https://covers.openlibrary.org/b/id/14645234-L.jpg - Project page: https://karenbakker.org #### BioCPPNet: automatic bioacoustic source separation with deep neural networks — Earth Species Project (2021) - Type: Paper · Organisms: Animals - Idea: Solve the animal 'cocktail party problem' before trying to understand what anyone is saying. - What it is: A neural network that pulls apart overlapping animal calls in one recording, separating the voices of individual macaques, bats and dolphins so each can be analysed on its own. - How it works: A lightweight U-Net–style network trained on synthetic mixtures of known individuals' calls predicts a separate waveform for each speaker. - Paper: https://doi.org/10.1038/s41598-021-02790-2 (Scientific Reports 2021) - Video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TGWFr-6JCDk - Images: https://earthspecies.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/01/632ce7a5951bc104d2297aed_631d410ba6a75c58e6d8b259_0_hPfNeo5RHL-slH_D.jpeg - Project page: https://earthspecies.org/2022/09/22/solving-the-cocktail-party-problem/ - Code: https://github.com/earthspecies/cocktail-party-problem #### Project CETI — Project CETI (2020) - Type: Product & platform · Organisms: Animals - Idea: Build the listening infrastructure first: to understand another species you need years of context-rich recordings. - What it is: A long-term programme off Dominica that records sperm whales with hydrophone arrays, tags and drones and uses machine learning to find structure in their clicking codas. - How it works: Moored and floating hydrophones, soft robotic suction tags, aerial drones and deep learning on coda sequences. - Paper: https://doi.org/10.1016/j.isci.2022.104393 (iScience 2022) - Video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Qm02X0aE8uU - Images: https://cdn.prod.website-files.com/643ddd7ffdf12273933a8cec/645d54121f8f4ccd41b28907_CETI%20OG%20-%201%20-%20Home.png - Project page: https://www.projectceti.org/ #### Roadmaps towards decoding non-human languages (ESP Technical Roadmap) — Earth Species Project, Aza Raskin (2020) - Type: Book & essay · Organisms: Animals - Idea: Treat decoding another species as a staged engineering roadmap that others can follow and criticise. - What it is: Earth Species Project's public research plan for decoding animal communication, first published on GitHub in 2020 and expanded as a technical roadmap in 2022: from building benchmarks and foundation models to testing meaning with generative playback. - How it works: It borrows the idea from unsupervised machine translation that languages share a latent geometry, and proposes aligning embeddings of animal signals and behaviour. - Video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rjvsl0mhqTk - Images: https://earthspecies.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/01/638f8b23f186af7be3328294_Roadmap-Hero.png - Project page: https://earthspecies.org/2022/12/02/esp-technical-roadmap/ - Code: https://github.com/earthspecies/project #### Use of a Tablet-Based Communication Board and Subsequent Choice and Behavioral Correspondences in a Goffin's Cockatoo (Cacatua goffiana) — Jennifer Cunha (2020) - Type: Paper · Organisms: Animals - Idea: Augmentative communication devices made for people can give a bird a voice. - What it is: A Goffin's cockatoo learned to use a commercial tablet communication board to request foods, activities and interactions, and her requests were checked for consistency. - How it works: Associative training on an Android picture board; responses verified with follow-up questions and body language. - Paper: https://doi.org/10.1145/3446002.3446063 (ACI 2020) - Video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=szGajjmctXg #### Deep Machine Learning Techniques for the Detection and Classification of Sperm Whale Bioacoustics — Project CETI, Shane Gero (2019) - Type: Paper · Organisms: Animals - Idea: If a network can tell clans and individuals apart, the codas carry identity worth decoding. - What it is: The study that seeded Project CETI: neural networks detect sperm whale clicks in raw audio and classify codas, vocal clans and even individual whales from the Dominica recordings. - How it works: Convolutional networks on spectrograms for click detection and recurrent networks on inter-click intervals for coda, clan and individual classification. - Paper: https://doi.org/10.1038/s41598-019-48909-4 (Scientific Reports 2019) - Images: https://media.springernature.com/m685/springer-static/image/art%3A10.1038%2Fs41598-019-48909-4/MediaObjects/41598_2019_48909_Fig1_HTML.png - Project page: https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-019-48909-4 - Code: https://github.com/earthspecies/sperm-whale-clan-and-coda-detection #### DeepSqueak — Kevin Coffey (2019) - Type: Product & platform · Organisms: Animals - Idea: Make inaudible animal voices searchable and they become data about welfare and emotion. - What it is: DeepSqueak is open software that uses deep learning to find and classify the ultrasonic calls of rats and mice in recordings. - How it works: Faster R-CNN object detection on spectrograms, with clustering of call types, in a MATLAB interface. - Paper: https://doi.org/10.1038/s41386-018-0303-6 (Neuropsychopharmacology 2019) - Video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uBB1tdUaCsE - Images: https://media.springernature.com/full/springer-static/image/art%3A10.1038%2Fs41386-018-0303-6/MediaObjects/41386_2018_303_Fig1_HTML.png - Project page: https://github.com/DrCoffey/DeepSqueak #### Pattern Radio: Whale Songs — Google Creative Lab (2019) - Type: Product & platform · Organisms: Animals - Idea: Open a scientific archive as a playable interface and non-experts can help find patterns. - What it is: A web tool that lets anyone scroll through 15 years of humpback whale recordings from the Pacific, with a machine-learning model highlighting where songs occur and letting users annotate patterns. - How it works: A spectrogram viewer for NOAA hydrophone data with a convolutional humpback detector, built with NOAA's Ann Allen. - Video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JE3-LkMqBfM - Images: https://patternradio.withgoogle.com/assets/share.jpg - Project page: https://patternradio.withgoogle.com/ #### Telling the Bees: Designing for Immersion, Mediation, and Ritual — Jihan Sherman (2019) - Type: Research prototype · Organisms: Insects - Idea: An old ritual of talking to animals can guide how we design conversational interfaces with them. - What it is: Telling the Bees is an immersive prototype based on the old custom of beekeepers telling their bees family news; visitors speak to and touch a hive-like interface that answers with sound and images. - How it works: Tactile and vocal inputs drive procedural audio-visual feedback in an installation that invites ritual body postures. - Paper: https://doi.org/10.1145/3294109.3301001 (TEI 2019) #### RoboBee: a dancing honeybee robot — Tim Landgraf (2018) - Type: Research prototype · Organisms: Insects - Idea: To speak with bees, a robot has to dance in their language. - What it is: RoboBee is a robotic honeybee that performs the waggle dance inside a hive; live bees follow its dance and some fly to the location it signals. - How it works: A bee replica on a robotic arm reproduces waggle-dance movement and vibration in an observation hive, with tracking of recruited foragers. - Paper: https://arxiv.org/abs/1803.07126 (arXiv 2018) - Video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zp9_T9YK0Hk #### Everyday bat vocalizations contain information about emitter, addressee, context, and behavior — Yossi Yovel (2016) - Type: Paper · Organisms: Animals - Idea: Everyday noise between animals can carry who, to whom and why. - What it is: From about 15,000 recorded squabbles among Egyptian fruit bats, a machine-learning model could tell who was calling, often to whom, and whether the argument was about food, sleeping spots or mating. - How it works: Continuous audio-video monitoring of a captive colony for 75 days and likely classification of spectral call features with Gaussian mixture models. - Paper: https://doi.org/10.1038/srep39419 (Scientific Reports 2016) - Video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7lMR-umhfko - Images: https://media.springernature.com/full/springer-static/image/art%3A10.1038%2Fsrep39419/MediaObjects/41598_2016_Article_BFsrep39419_Fig1_HTML.jpg - Project page: https://www.nature.com/articles/srep39419 #### Individual, unit and vocal clan level identity cues in sperm whale codas — Shane Gero, Project CETI (2016) - Type: Paper · Organisms: Animals - Idea: A whale's 'accent' can say which culture it belongs to. - What it is: Long-term recordings of known Dominica sperm whale families show that some codas mark clan membership while others vary by family unit and by individual. - How it works: Coda rhythm analysis across photo-identified individuals recorded by the Dominica Sperm Whale Project since 2005. - Paper: https://doi.org/10.1098/rsos.150372 (Royal Society Open Science 2016) - Images: https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/55eeeda0e4b019a083e86fe6/1441721935423-2KQECM5DU4SR54IDRT8M/Whale+research.jpg - Project page: https://thespermwhaleproject.org/ #### The vocal repertoire of the domesticated zebra finch — Julie Elie (2016) - Type: Paper · Organisms: Animals - Idea: Before decoding meaning, draw the dictionary: list every sound and the context it belongs to. - What it is: A complete catalogue of the zebra finch's call types, from distance calls to begging and alarm calls, with the acoustic features that carry each one's information; Julie Elie's work on the zebra finch 'language' won the 2026 Coller-Dolittle Prize. - How it works: Recordings of known contexts, supervised classifiers and acoustic feature analysis to find which features distinguish call types. - Paper: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10071-015-0933-6 (Animal Cognition 2016) - Images: https://media.springernature.com/m685/springer-static/image/art%3A10.1007%2Fs10071-015-0933-6/MediaObjects/10071_2015_933_Fig1_HTML.gif - Project page: https://coller-dolittle-24.sites.tau.ac.il/2026 #### Birdflute — Li Jönsson, Tau Ulv Lenskjold (2015) - Type: Research prototype · Organisms: Animals, Human body - Idea: Let people who cannot go outside start a conversation with birds through the window. - What it is: A whistle-like device for elderly residents of a care home: blowing into it broadcasts bird calls outside the building, and birds in the park may call back. - How it works: Breath on the mouthpiece likely triggers recorded or synthesised bird calls played through an outdoor speaker; made in the co-design project Urban Animals and Us. - Paper: https://doi.org/10.21606/nordes.2015.001 (Nordes 2015) - Images: https://figures.semanticscholar.org/5fd61e6deb23128c6e9fe32b48b96773871e8287/3-Figure1-1.png - Project page: https://artifact-archive.org/whole-archive #### An underwater wearable computer for two way human-dolphin communication experimentation (CHAT) — Thad Starner, Denise Herzing (2013) - Type: Research prototype · Organisms: Animals - Idea: Build a small shared vocabulary so dolphins can ask humans for things. - What it is: Divers wear CHAT, an underwater computer that plays synthetic whistles labelled for objects such as sargassum or a scarf and listens for wild dolphins mimicking them. - How it works: Underwater wearable with hydrophones and real-time whistle recognition, used with wild Atlantic spotted dolphins in the Bahamas (Wild Dolphin Project, Georgia Tech). - Paper: https://doi.org/10.1145/2493988.2494346 (ISWC 2013) - Video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YhopeQKbpZA - Images: https://www.wilddolphinproject.org/wp-content/uploads/2016/01/DeniseJonChat1-of-1.jpg https://www.wilddolphinproject.org/wp-content/uploads/2016/01/chatandAdamresized_photoby-1024x683.jpg - Project page: https://www.wilddolphinproject.org/our-research/chat-research/ #### No More Woof — Nordic Society for Invention and Discovery (2013) - Type: Speculative design · Organisms: Animals - Idea: The wish to hear pets speak is strong enough to fund devices science cannot yet back. - What it is: No More Woof is a crowdfunded EEG headset for dogs that claimed to translate a dog's brain activity into short spoken phrases such as 'I'm hungry'. - How it works: EEG sensors, a microcomputer and a loudspeaker mapping rough brain-state patterns to prerecorded phrases. - Video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-Y4DHu8DAqg #### The Interspecies Internet — Interspecies Internet (2013) - Type: Speculative design · Organisms: Animals - Idea: Think of interspecies communication as networking: design channels, not only translations. - What it is: Diana Reiss, Peter Gabriel, Neil Gershenfeld and Vint Cerf proposed at TED 2013 an internet that includes other intelligent species, starting with touch-screen and sound interfaces for dolphins, apes and elephants. - How it works: Talk and demonstrations of animal-operated interfaces (a dolphin touchscreen, bonobo keyboards, remote music with apes), later a think tank. - Video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wGMLhaa98GI - Images: http://static1.squarespace.com/static/605c864c19d54b09302a9bb2/t/6a1257862105591a5f4c07c0/1779586950694/Social+Sharing+Image+-+Interspecies+Internet.png?format=1500w - Project page: https://www.interspecies.io/ #### Chasing Doctor Dolittle: Learning the Language of Animals — Con Slobodchikoff (2012) - Type: Book & essay · Organisms: Animals - Idea: Popular science and a pet-tech product raise the question of what 'translating' an animal should promise. - What it is: Con Slobodchikoff's book arguing that many animals have language-like communication, drawing on his prairie dog research; it led to Zoolingua, a start-up that aims to build AI 'translators' for pet dogs' barks and body language. - How it works: A synthesis of field studies of referential calls, extended into a product concept using machine learning on dog video and sound. - Images: https://covers.openlibrary.org/b/id/7592769-L.jpg https://zoolingua.com/wp-content/uploads/2025/11/dalmation1-1024x684.jpg - Project page: https://zoolingua.com/ #### Dolphin Diaries: My 25 Years with Spotted Dolphins in the Bahamas — Denise Herzing, Wild Dolphin Project (2011) - Type: Book & essay · Organisms: Animals - Idea: Instead of teaching animals our language, build a small third language both sides can learn. - What it is: Denise Herzing's book about a quarter-century of living alongside one dolphin society, and her 2013 TED talk proposing a shared human–dolphin vocabulary built with an underwater keyboard. - How it works: Field memoir plus the design of symbol and whistle keyboards later developed into CHAT. - Video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CQ5dRyyHwfM - Images: https://covers.openlibrary.org/b/id/6917022-L.jpg - Project page: https://www.wilddolphinproject.org/ #### Prairie dog alarm calls encode labels about predator colors — Con Slobodchikoff (2009) - Type: Paper · Organisms: Animals - Idea: Controlled field stimuli can reveal how much detail a 'simple' alarm call carries. - What it is: Gunnison's prairie dogs gave different alarm calls when the same person walked through the colony wearing shirts of different colours, part of Slobodchikoff's evidence that their calls describe predators in detail. - How it works: Human walkers in blue, green, yellow and grey shirts, recorded calls and discriminant analysis of acoustic features. - Paper: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10071-008-0203-y (Animal Cognition 2009) - Images: https://media.springernature.com/m685/springer-static/image/art%3A10.1007%2Fs10071-008-0203-y/MediaObjects/10071_2008_203_Fig1_HTML.gif - Project page: https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s10071-008-0203-y #### The Alex Studies: Cognitive and Communicative Abilities of Grey Parrots — Irene Pepperberg (1999) - Type: Book & essay · Organisms: Animals - Idea: The training method is a design: two humans model the exchange so the bird learns by watching. - What it is: Irene Pepperberg's account of 30 years with Alex, an African grey parrot who learned English labels for more than 50 objects, seven colours and quantities up to six, and answered questions about same and different. - How it works: The model/rival technique, in which one trainer asks and another answers, rewarding with the named object itself. - Video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=w8LepYR8v9A - Images: https://covers.openlibrary.org/b/id/411886-L.jpg - Project page: https://alexfoundation.org #### Kanzi and the lexigram keyboard — Sue Savage-Rumbaugh (1994) - Type: Book & essay · Organisms: Animals - Idea: An interface of arbitrary symbols can become a shared language between species. - What it is: The bonobo Kanzi learned to communicate by pressing abstract symbols on a keyboard, largely by watching his mother's lessons, and understood spoken English sentences; the work is told in the book 'Kanzi: The Ape at the Brink of the Human Mind'. - How it works: A board of several hundred geometric lexigrams (later portable and speech-output versions) used in everyday life rather than drills. - Video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0Myl142PvH8 - Images: https://www.bonobohope.org/KanziSlideshow/KanziAndKeyboard2.jpg https://covers.openlibrary.org/b/id/305815-L.jpg - Project page: https://www.bonobohope.org/ #### Underwater keyboard for dolphins — Diana Reiss (1993) - Type: Research prototype · Organisms: Animals - Idea: Give animals a choice interface with sounds attached and they may adopt the sounds. - What it is: An underwater keyboard let bottlenose dolphins press symbols to get balls, rings or rubs; each key also played a computer-generated whistle, which the dolphins began to imitate. - How it works: Underwater keys with visual symbols, each paired with a synthetic whistle and a reward, at Marine World Africa USA. - Paper: https://doi.org/10.1037/0735-7036.107.3.301 (Journal of Comparative Psychology 1993) - Video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zMjEo3qOqd8 #### Wild Dolphin Project: 40 years with the spotted dolphins of the Bahamas — Wild Dolphin Project, Denise Herzing (1985) - Type: Research prototype · Organisms: Animals - Idea: Decades of non-invasive presence build the trust and the data that any translation needs. - What it is: Since 1985 Denise Herzing's team has returned each summer to the same community of wild Atlantic spotted dolphins, filming and recording them underwater and cataloguing generations of individuals and their sounds. - How it works: Underwater video and audio with photo-identification of individuals, linking sounds such as signature whistles and squawks to behaviour. - Video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=R7jNuUMpws4 - Images: https://www.wilddolphinproject.org/wp-content/uploads/2016/02/home-main-photo.jpg - Project page: https://www.wilddolphinproject.org/ #### Dolphin Embassy — Ant Farm (1974) - Type: Speculative design · Organisms: Animals - Idea: Treat another intelligent species as a diplomatic partner that deserves its own embassy. - What it is: An unbuilt floating research station where humans and dolphins would live and communicate together, with a land/water living room, chutes for dolphins to swim between floors and a shared navigation pod. - How it works: Drawings, a booklet and research trips to Australia developed a triangular floating structure, influenced by John C. Lilly's human-dolphin communication research. - Video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=29y1NB6ELao - Images: https://designmuseum.org/image/b188fbcf-985f-4656-9c27-dc6864996fb8?width=1200 - Project page: https://designmuseum.org/exhibitions/more-than-human/10-unmissable-highlights-from-more-than-human #### LANA project and the Yerkish lexigram keyboard — Duane Rumbaugh (1973) - Type: Research prototype · Organisms: Animals - Idea: One of the first computer interfaces built for another species treated an ape as a user. - What it is: In the LANA project, a chimpanzee named Lana used a computer keyboard of abstract symbols, lexigrams, to request food and activities and to complete sentences; the lexigram keyboard later let the bonobo Kanzi communicate with people. - How it works: A computer-controlled keyboard of lighted lexigram keys following Yerkish grammar, logging every key press. - Paper: https://doi.org/10.1126/science.182.4113.731 (Science 1973) - Video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wRM7vTrIIis - Images: https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/f/f9/Kanzi_in_the_indoor_test_apparatus.jpg ### Wildlife, Farm & Tracking Sensing, tracking and living alongside wild and farmed animals. #### A Sperm Whale Is Born (collaborative birth and Whale Tales) — Project CETI, Shane Gero (2026) - Type: Paper · Organisms: Animals - Idea: Pairing video of behaviour with sound turns a rare event into evidence of how a society talks when it matters. - What it is: Drone footage of a 2023 sperm whale birth off Dominica, analysed with CETI's Whale Tales computer-vision software, shows two families working together to lift the newborn, while their coda styles shift at key moments. - How it works: Segmentation and tracking of whales in drone video, synchronised with hydrophone recordings and multiscale network analysis. - Paper: https://doi.org/10.1038/s41598-025-27438-3 (Scientific Reports 2026) - Video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eV7VRURo4sY - Images: https://media.springernature.com/m685/springer-static/image/art%3A10.1038%2Fs41598-025-27438-3/MediaObjects/41598_2025_27438_Fig1_HTML.png - Project page: https://www.projectceti.org/whalebirth #### 4D Bioforming with Bees: An Industry-Compatible Prototyping Method for Polymorphic Honeycomb Creation — Yixiong Wang (2025) - Type: Research prototype · Organisms: Insects - Idea: Design with the bees' building behaviour instead of printing the form yourself. - What it is: A prototyping method in which beekeepers give bees shaped scaffolds so the colony builds honeycomb into new, polymorphic forms, while keeping standard hive practice. - How it works: Four steps: scaffold creation, quadrilateral shape division, placement in hives and colony building; tested with beekeepers. - Paper: https://doi.org/10.1145/3706598.3713696 (CHI 2025) #### Designing Urban Noticing Probes for Community Animals and Cohabitation in Türkiye — Sena Cucumak (2025) - Type: Paper · Organisms: Animals - Idea: Probes can decentre the human by directing attention to animals in the street. - What it is: Design probes based on the 'arts of noticing' that help residents in Türkiye notice community street animals and rethink cohabitation. - How it works: Probe kits deployed with residents and analysed through noticing theory. - Paper: https://doi.org/10.1145/3706598.3713977 (CHI 2025) #### Ewe’ve Got Nerve: Electronic Headwear System for Sheep Group Behavior Dynamics — Josiah Hester (2025) - Type: Research prototype · Organisms: Animals - Idea: Understand the flock by listening to each sheep. - What it is: Electronic headwear for sheep that records microclimate, head and eye movement and bleating to study how individuals shape flock behaviour. - How it works: Head-mounted sensor package with environmental, inertial and audio sensing, prototyped for field use. - Paper: https://doi.org/10.1145/3768539.3768560 (ACI 2025) - Images: https://figures.semanticscholar.org/76f2f4ed4d8b8f43b6f4ac9577f92a4bb35a4f8d/5-Figure3-1.png https://figures.semanticscholar.org/76f2f4ed4d8b8f43b6f4ac9577f92a4bb35a4f8d/4-Figure2-1.png #### ANIMO: WildLife Priority Mode — Jiabao Li (2024) - Type: Speculative design · Organisms: Animals - Idea: Autonomous vehicles have passenger and pedestrian modes; animals deserve one too. - What it is: A proposal for a 'wildlife priority mode' in self-driving cars, shown with carpets printed from photos of flattened roadkill and an autonomous sweeping robot. - How it works: Computer-vision detection of crossing animals is proposed for autonomous cars; the installation uses documentary roadkill photography printed on rugs. - Images: https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/58688c8a6a496327e937e35b/2fc2aae7-8f62-4309-b375-8f6779296ab4/Jiabao+Li+Duende+71.jpg https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/58688c8a6a496327e937e35b/df2a3adf-c7ed-4df1-9f5f-840133065a82/jiabao+li+design+art+tokyo+3.jpg https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/58688c8a6a496327e937e35b/1726187021872-P7ZMBYHIGGN10GI5TFP8/Jiabao+Li+animo+7.jpg - Project page: https://www.jiabaoli.org/animo #### BEBE: The Bio-logger Ethogram Benchmark — Earth Species Project (2024) - Type: Paper · Organisms: Animals - Idea: Behaviour, not only sound, is part of what an animal says. - What it is: A benchmark of nine animal-borne sensor datasets, from sea turtles and crows to dogs and polar bears, for testing how well models turn raw motion data into behaviours; it grew out of ESP's National Geographic-funded self-supervised ethogram discovery project. - How it works: Accelerometer, gyroscope and depth data from bio-loggers, labelled with behaviours and used to compare deep and classical classifiers, including self-supervised pretraining. - Paper: https://doi.org/10.1186/s40462-024-00511-8 (Movement Ecology 2024) - Images: https://media.springernature.com/m685/springer-static/image/art%3A10.1186%2Fs40462-024-00511-8/MediaObjects/40462_2024_511_Fig1_HTML.png https://earthspecies.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/01/632ce7a53477ec726d657d53_631935de159912e0f26b5c47_1_XK47qdmOs-DOQmaPzWLsAA.jpeg - Project page: https://earthspecies.org/2022/09/22/self-supervised-ethogram-discovery/ - Code: https://github.com/earthspecies/BEBE #### Reinforcement learning-based framework for whale rendezvous via autonomous sensing robots — Project CETI (2024) - Type: Paper · Organisms: Animals - Idea: Plan robot behaviour around an animal's schedule instead of chasing it. - What it is: A system that predicts where a diving sperm whale will surface and guides drones and boats to meet it, so tags and recordings can be collected with less disturbance. - How it works: Reinforcement learning over sensor streams from VHF tags, hydrophones and aerial vision, tested in field trials off Dominica (the AVATARS framework). - Paper: https://doi.org/10.1126/scirobotics.adn7299 (Science Robotics 2024) - Video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AQlCiAUfXXI - Images: https://cdn.prod.website-files.com/644849cc07ba153932ff365d/66c39c71855b08b215025fa0_Amanda%20Cotton%20for%20Project%20CETI%20(1).jpeg - Project page: https://www.projectceti.org/blog-posts/new-methods-for-whale-tracking-and-rendezvous-using-autonomous-robots #### WildWatch — WildWatch team (NID Ahmedabad) (2024) - Type: Research prototype · Organisms: Animals - Idea: Roads can be designed to notice other species. - What it is: A speed-control and wildlife-detection system for animal crossings on forest roads: proximity sensors detect approaching animals and trigger lights and warnings to prevent collisions. - How it works: Roadside sensor posts detect animal movement and activate illumination and driver warnings in low visibility. - Images: https://img2.storyblok.com/960x0/smart/filters:format(jpeg)/f/109506/666x720/5f7e1845c6/wildwatch.png - Project page: https://www.sustainable-markets.org/tcdl/2024-terra-carta-design-lab-winners/ #### Advancing Cattle Health Monitoring through ACI-Driven Wearable Sensor Technology: A Case Study of Leg-Worn System Development — Fangyuan Chang (2023) - Type: Research prototype · Organisms: Animals - Idea: Livestock wearables should be designed for the cow's comfort and the farm's routines. - What it is: The design of a leg-worn health sensor for dairy cattle, developed with ACI principles and with the needs of cows and farmers in mind. - How it works: Iterative leg-band design, field observation on a farm, and sensor data for disease detection. - Paper: https://doi.org/10.1145/3637882.3637893 (ACI 2023) #### Lions out of Bounds? Reflections on Digital Technology and Matristic Design to address Human-Wildlife Conflict — Margarita Grinko (2023) - Type: Paper · Organisms: Animals - Idea: Coexistence tech works only when it fits local practices and needs. - What it is: LionAlert warns cattle farmers in Botswana's Okavango Delta when collared lions cross invisible geofences; the paper reflects on building it with a Matristic Design approach grounded in local cooperation. - How it works: Geofence-based alert system developed with CLAWS Conservancy and farmers, reflected on through Matristic Design. - Paper: https://doi.org/10.1145/3628096.3628742 (AfriCHI 2023) - Project page: https://doi.org/10.1145/3628096.3628742 #### Towards Harmonious Coexistence: A Bioacoustic-Driven Animal-Computer Interaction System for Preventing Ship Collisions with North Atlantic Right Whales — Mirjana Erceg (2023) - Type: Research prototype · Organisms: Animals - Idea: Let the whale's voice change the ship's course. - What it is: A system that recognises North Atlantic right whale calls with a neural network and alerts nearby ships to avoid collisions. - How it works: Spectrograms of whale vocalisations classified by a CNN; detections feed a ship-facing warning interface. - Paper: https://doi.org/10.1145/3637882.3637890 (ACI 2023) #### Bat House — Ferne Edwards (2022) - Type: Research prototype · Organisms: Animals - Idea: Design habitat so that sheltering an animal and meeting it become the same object. - What it is: An urban bat shelter designed so that bats roost safely while people can watch them; the two living worlds stay separate but allow one-sided encounters. - How it works: A student design project at NTNU in Trondheim, developed from bat ecology requirements and cohabitation goals for the more-than-human city. - Paper: https://doi.org/10.21606/drs.2022.770 (DRS 2022) - Project page: https://artifact-archive.org/whole-archive #### Chicken Coop Design — Ferne Edwards (2022) - Type: Research prototype · Organisms: Animals - Idea: Treat backyard animals as neighbours whose space overlaps with ours. - What it is: A chicken coop for urban gardens shaped around the chickens' needs, giving them safe shelter while letting chickens and people meet in both directions. - How it works: A student design project at NTNU developed within a study of cohabitation with birds, bees and bats in the city. - Paper: https://doi.org/10.21606/drs.2022.770 (DRS 2022) - Project page: https://artifact-archive.org/whole-archive #### HIIVE — Philip Potthast (2021) - Type: Product & platform · Organisms: Insects - Idea: Design the hive for the bees first and the beekeeper second. - What it is: A beehive designed around the natural behaviour of honeybees and built from sustainable materials, with low-energy sensors that let beekeepers monitor the colony without opening the hive often. - How it works: A thick, insulated, tree-cavity-like body houses sensors for temperature, humidity and weight. - Images: https://www.jamesdysonaward.org/Document/05423d37-dcfc-48b7-9842-9ba9122d3cc7/dyson001.jpg https://www.jamesdysonaward.org/Document/642cf8e3-9139-49b3-9ed8-f2447e7634f1/dyson002.jpg - Project page: https://www.jamesdysonaward.org/en-GB/2021/project/hiive/ #### Smart Bee Houses — Nancy Smith (2021) - Type: Research prototype · Organisms: Insects - Idea: Design for bees first, and ask whether the digital layer is needed at all. - What it is: Three houses for solitary mason bees with environmental sensors, colour-coded nesting tubes and modular parts, designed to support urban pollinators and record climate data. - How it works: Wood and cardboard nesting tubes are paired with Arduino-based temperature and humidity sensing; the paper reflects on materials and outdoor constraints. - Paper: https://doi.org/10.1145/3493842.3493894 (ACI 2021) - Video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=w6rjtsi2ve0 - Images: https://figures.semanticscholar.org/6fb7ac369198630d8e57193c5113071586c55ca2/500px/2-Figure1-1.png https://figures.semanticscholar.org/6fb7ac369198630d8e57193c5113071586c55ca2/500px/4-Figure5-1.png - Project page: https://doi.org/10.1145/3493842.3493894 #### Beewise BeeHome — Beewise (2020) - Type: Product & platform · Organisms: Insects - Idea: Robotic care can watch a colony continuously, but it also changes the beekeeper's relationship to bees. - What it is: BeeHome is a solar-powered container of beehives in which cameras and a robotic arm inspect frames and treat colonies, with beekeepers working remotely. - How it works: Computer vision on frame images, a gantry robot arm and climate control inside a multi-hive unit. - Video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8V5nPvq-DVc - Images: https://26497807.fs1.hubspotusercontent-eu1.net/hubfs/26497807/Hive%201%20(1).webp - Project page: https://www.beewise.ag #### Halter virtual fencing collars — Halter (2020) - Type: Product & platform · Organisms: Animals - Idea: When cows learn to follow cues from a collar, the fence becomes software. - What it is: Halter's solar-powered GPS collars keep cattle inside virtual fences and move them between paddocks, using sound and vibration cues instead of wire. - How it works: GPS and sensor collars trained with audio and vibration cues, managed through a farmer's app; low electric pulses as a last resort. - Video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BSIq-rrGGX4 - Project page: https://www.halterhq.com #### Smart Habitat: A Wildlife Rehabilitation System — K. Cassie Kresnye (2020) - Type: Research prototype · Organisms: Animals - Idea: Wild animals in care need monitoring that keeps humans at a distance. - What it is: A sensor-equipped habitat for rehabilitating orphaned Virginia opossum joeys that lets volunteers monitor them with less human contact. - How it works: Microcontroller, environmental sensors and an Android app, designed from interviews and six months of observation. - Paper: https://doi.org/10.1145/3334480.3383093 (CHI EA 2020) - Images: https://figures.semanticscholar.org/261755d753550402aeacd415b5bcf3a3dc7b7d11/4-Figure3-1.png https://figures.semanticscholar.org/261755d753550402aeacd415b5bcf3a3dc7b7d11/3-Figure2-1.png #### Whale Safe — Benioff Ocean Science Laboratory (2020) - Type: Product & platform · Organisms: Animals - Idea: Make whales present in shipping decisions with live data and public report cards. - What it is: Whale Safe combines an acoustic buoy that detects whale calls, whale-presence models and sightings to warn ships in the Santa Barbara Channel and grade how well they slow down. - How it works: Near-real-time AI detection of whale calls on a buoy, blended with ocean models and sightings, plus AIS ship-speed tracking. - Video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bNf3C3C9Kw8 - Images: https://whalesafe.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/09/og-image.png - Project page: https://whalesafe.com #### Listening to Save Wildlife — Margot Brereton (2019) - Type: Paper · Organisms: Animals, Ecosystems - Idea: Conservation technology needs design attention to the team's culture, time and knowledge, not only to sensors. - What it is: A DIS paper by Jessica Oliver and colleagues based on three years of fieldwork with the recovery team of an endangered Australian bird, the Eastern bristlebird, trialling acoustic monitoring in their conservation work. - How it works: Ethnographic fieldwork and design research, including trials of acoustic recorders, analysed thematically. - Paper: https://doi.org/10.1145/3322276.3322360 (DIS 2019) - Images: https://figures.semanticscholar.org/102f548b1c6f4e9866c7fb5ea7477c12b7e8fd25/1-Figure1-1.png #### Animal-to-Animal Data Sharing Mechanism for Wildlife Monitoring in Fukushima Exclusion Zone — Hill Hiroki Kobayashi (2018) - Type: Research prototype · Organisms: Animals - Idea: Let animals be the network where there are no roads, power or signal. - What it is: Sensor collars on wild animals in the Fukushima exclusion zone exchange data when animals meet, so that the animals themselves carry monitoring data out of an area without infrastructure. - How it works: Wildlife-borne sensor nodes that wake to communicate only when several animals are together, to save battery. - Paper: https://doi.org/10.3390/mti2030040 (Multimodal Technologies and Interaction 2018) - Video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VSrdnvHMMJA #### AudioMoth — Open Acoustic Devices (2018) - Type: Product & platform · Organisms: Animals - Idea: Cheap open hardware lets many more people listen to wildlife. - What it is: AudioMoth is a small, low-cost, open-source acoustic logger that researchers and volunteers leave in the field to record bats, birds, insects and whole soundscapes. - How it works: Programmable microcontroller board with a MEMS microphone recording audible and ultrasonic sound to a memory card, with on-board detection options. - Paper: https://doi.org/10.1111/2041-210X.12955 (Methods in Ecology and Evolution 2018) - Images: https://static.wixstatic.com/media/b31671_67e68b8896e14434a8f2a6d2178bc148~mv2.jpg/v1/fill/w_2500,h_2500,al_c/b31671_67e68b8896e14434a8f2a6d2178bc148~mv2.jpg - Project page: https://www.openacousticdevices.info/audiomoth #### Confronting People's Fears about Bats: Combining Multi-modal and Environmentally Sensed Data to Promote Curiosity and Discovery — Yvonne Rogers (2018) - Type: Research prototype · Organisms: Animals - Idea: Real-time data from a feared animal can turn fear into curiosity. - What it is: PlayBat is a public display that combines a tangible interface, a quiz-like story and live bat-call data from sensors in a London park. - How it works: Multimodal physical display fed by IoT bat detectors, evaluated with members of the public. - Paper: https://doi.org/10.1145/3196709.3196783 (DIS 2018) - Images: https://figures.semanticscholar.org/a935689af652fb94571a34338899d45eaca19ebd/2-Figure1-1.png https://figures.semanticscholar.org/a935689af652fb94571a34338899d45eaca19ebd/5-Figure3-1.png #### Nest Box — Marcus Foth (2018) - Type: Product & platform · Organisms: Animals - Idea: The simplest multispecies architecture: a box that makes room for another species. - What it is: A wooden nest box fixed to a house gives a possum or bird a protected home inside the human world, with few points of contact and little change to human space. - How it works: A standard nest box installed on a building; Foth and Caldwell use it to contrast low-tech habitat provision with media-heavy architecture. - Paper: https://doi.org/10.1145/3284389.3284495 (MAB 2018) - Images: https://figures.semanticscholar.org/0d5f03907558d13705935ba024d412f84d729508/6-Figure8-1.png - Project page: https://artifact-archive.org/whole-archive #### Animal Crossing (wildlife overpass) — Nancy Smith (2017) - Type: Product & platform · Organisms: Animals, Ecosystems - Idea: Coexistence by separation: give animals their own route instead of changing human routines. - What it is: A wildlife bridge over a highway, discussed by Smith, Bardzell and Bardzell, lets animals cross roads safely while human traffic below carries on unchanged. - How it works: Vegetated overpasses and fencing guide animals over roads; the review uses it as an example of designing separate spaces that avoid encounters. - Paper: https://doi.org/10.1145/3025453.3025948 (CHI 2017) - Images: https://figures.semanticscholar.org/5199e6db93ec019099841e745a18e18b9f2122da/6-Figure1-1.png - Project page: https://artifact-archive.org/whole-archive #### Bee2Bee – Pollination of Monocultures — Julian Schwarze (2016) - Type: Research prototype · Organisms: Insects - Idea: Pollination services need care infrastructure that moves with the crops. - What it is: A mobile, quick-to-assemble tent-like system for honeybee colonies in monoculture farmland, with sensors that track hive temperature, weight and flight activity. - How it works: Sensor data on colony health help beekeepers time treatments without opening hives. - Images: http://web.archive.org/web/2019im_/https://www.jamesdysonaward.org/Document/fb5c3143-cdd8-4a71-908b-34cb216a442f/usr-3365-img-1468686529-48b3e.jpg - Project page: http://web.archive.org/web/2019/https://www.jamesdysonaward.org/en-GB/2016/project/bee2bee-pollination-monocultures-new-beekeeper/ #### Designing for wearability in animal biotelemetry — Patrizia Paci, Clara Mancini (2016) - Type: Paper · Organisms: Animals - Idea: The animal that carries a tracker is its user; design for its comfort. - What it is: A preliminary study of a cat wearing off-the-shelf biotelemetry devices, leading to a wearer-centred framework for designing animal trackers. - How it works: Video observation of the cat's reactions to device presence, analysed for signs of discomfort. - Paper: https://doi.org/10.1145/2995257.3012018 (ACI 2016) - Video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oqjeKRgVo5E #### SnotBot — Ocean Alliance (2016) - Type: Research prototype · Organisms: Animals - Idea: Replace invasive sampling with a gentle machine that meets the animal on its terms. - What it is: A drone flies through the spout of a surfacing whale and catches its exhaled breath in petri dishes, collecting DNA, microbiome and hormone samples without touching or chasing the animal. - How it works: Consumer quadcopters (DJI Inspire) with petri dishes, later adapted for tag deployment, disentanglement support and body-condition photogrammetry. - Video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0WTDdWwKbyk - Images: https://whale.org/wp-content/uploads/2024/06/Snotbot_Drone_01.webp - Project page: https://whale.org/snotbot/ #### Wolfland — Antti Tenetz (2016) - Type: Artwork · Organisms: Animals, Ecosystems - Idea: Draw a landscape from an animal's point of movement. - What it is: Part of the Jälestää – Tracing project: GPS tracks of a male wolf are laser-drawn on wood and acrylic, showing how the animal moves through and shapes a Finnish landscape. - How it works: Satellite positioning data from a collared wolf was plotted and laser-engraved, combined with aerial and field footage. - Images: https://hybridmatters-production.s3.eu-central-1.amazonaws.com/photo/image/58283c883ee3ee04e7803545/standard_wolf.jpeg https://hybridmatters-production.s3.eu-central-1.amazonaws.com/photo/image/58283c883ee3ee04e7803544/standard_wolf_traces.jpeg - Project page: https://exhibitions.hybridmatters.net/works/wolfland #### Digital Naturalism — Andrew Quitmeyer (2015) - Type: Research prototype · Organisms: Animals, Insects, Ecosystems - Idea: Build tools in the field, with the animals, instead of in the lab. - What it is: A research practice of 'hiking hacks' in which designers and biologists build electronics in the field to interact with animals such as ants, spiders and frogs. - How it works: Wearable and portable microcontroller kits, performative field workshops and video documentation in Panama and elsewhere. - Paper: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-45289-6_5 (HCI Outdoors (Springer) 2020) - Video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0Q-HbBKC2i4 - Project page: https://www.digitalnaturalism.org/ #### Interfed — Li Jönsson, Tau Ulv Lenskjold (2015) - Type: Research prototype · Organisms: Animals, Human body - Idea: Hand the trigger to birds so that their visits interrupt and enrich human indoor life. - What it is: A feeder-camera set-up that produces paired images of a bird feeding place outdoors and the residents' room indoors; it is triggered by the birds, and people have little control over when it runs. - How it works: Bird visits at a feeder likely trigger cameras that capture both environments and display them side by side; part of Urban Animals and Us. - Paper: https://doi.org/10.21606/nordes.2015.001 (Nordes 2015) - Images: https://figures.semanticscholar.org/5fd61e6deb23128c6e9fe32b48b96773871e8287/6-Figure4-1.png - Project page: https://artifact-archive.org/whole-archive #### Playful rocksalt system: animal-computer interaction design in wild environments — Hill Hiroki Kobayashi (2015) - Type: Research prototype · Organisms: Animals - Idea: A salt lick can be an interface between city dwellers and wild animals. - What it is: Playful Rocksalt lets people in a city interact in real time with wild deer in a forest, which visit a salt lick fitted with sensors and a camera. - How it works: Rock salt fitted with sensors streams deer visits to a handheld device for remote users. - Paper: https://doi.org/10.1145/2832932.2837012 (ACE 2015) - Images: https://figures.semanticscholar.org/b234c9e64c2600d6afc8c81ca350ea6417eebbf8/1-Figure1-1.png #### Utilizing the Cyberforest live sound system with social media to remotely conduct woodland bird censuses in Central Japan — Hill Hiroki Kobayashi (2015) - Type: Research prototype · Organisms: Animals - Idea: Live sound plus social media can turn remote listeners into a census team. - What it is: Cyberforest streams live sound from remote Japanese forests on the internet, and volunteers listening together on social media carried out bird censuses. - How it works: Unmanned microphones streaming 8 hours a day for over five years; censuses run with participants listening simultaneously online. - Paper: https://doi.org/10.1007/s13280-015-0708-y (Ambio 2015) - Images: https://media.springernature.com/m685/springer-static/image/art%3A10.1007%2Fs13280-015-0708-y/MediaObjects/13280_2015_708_Fig1_HTML.gif #### ICARUS and Movebank: an Internet of Animals — Martin Wikelski (2007) - Type: Product & platform · Organisms: Animals - Idea: Animals carrying sensors become a planetary sensing network. - What it is: ICARUS and Movebank track small animals such as birds and bats worldwide with tiny tags read from space, and share the movement data openly as an 'Internet of Animals'. - How it works: Solar tags with GPS and accelerometers uploaded to a receiver on the International Space Station (from 2018) and later satellites; data archived in Movebank. - Paper: https://doi.org/10.1242/jeb.02629 (Journal of Experimental Biology 2007) - Video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=e_KNyhQMjOY - Images: https://www.movebank.org/cms/img/about-us_ChristianZiegler_whitestorks.jpg - Project page: https://www.icarus.mpg.de/en #### PigeonBlog — Beatriz da Costa (2006) - Type: Research prototype · Organisms: Animals - Idea: Work with animals as partners in grassroots environmental sensing. - What it is: Homing pigeons carried small backpacks with air-pollution sensors, GPS and a phone over Southern California, posting real-time pollution readings to an online map. - How it works: Custom lightweight backpacks with CO and NOx sensors, GPS and GSM transmitting to a blog-style map. - Video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XXNh5dKIh18 #### CyberTracker — Louis Liebenberg, Edwin Blake (1996) - Type: Product & platform · Organisms: Animals - Idea: Design the interface around the expert's knowledge, not their literacy. - What it is: CyberTracker is a handheld field computer with an icon-based interface that lets expert trackers who cannot read or write record animal tracks and sightings with GPS. - How it works: Icon-driven data capture sequences on rugged handhelds with GPS, later a free app used by conservation projects worldwide. - Paper: https://doi.org/10.1145/506443.506466 (CHI EA 2002) - Video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rs_fHKLZxr4 - Project page: https://www.cybertracker.org #### Lely Astronaut milking robot — Lely (1992) - Type: Product & platform · Organisms: Animals - Idea: Voluntary milking lets the animal start the interaction with the machine. - What it is: The Lely Astronaut is a milking robot that cows visit on their own schedule; the robot identifies each cow, cleans and attaches cups, and records her data. - How it works: Robot arm with laser teat detection, collar-based cow identification and feed incentives in the milking box. - Video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5cWiEp10ruA - Images: https://linn01mstr1r92oprod.dxcloud.episerver.net/globalassets/international/images---solution-product-or-service/lint---solutions/milking/astronaut-a5-next/product-slider/product-picture-of-lely-astronaut-a5-next.jpg - Project page: https://www.lely.com/solutions/milking/astronaut-a5/ #### Crittercam — Greg Marshall (1986) - Type: Research prototype · Organisms: Animals - Idea: Put the camera on the animal and you see its world, not ours. - What it is: Crittercam is a camera and data logger attached to wild animals, from sharks and seals to penguins, that records video and environmental data from the animal's own position. - How it works: Waterproof video and sensor package with suction, harness or fin attachment and timed release for recovery. - Paper: https://doi.org/10.4031/002533207787442240 (Marine Technology Society Journal 2007) - Video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q-EONusvq_8 ### ACI Theory, Ethics & Methods Manifestos, ethics frameworks and methods for designing with animals as participants. #### Speaking for Animals: Design Opportunities through Tensions in Multispecies Activism — Sena Cucumak (2026) - Type: Paper · Organisms: Animals - Idea: Designers who speak for animals need to face whose voice is heard and whose is silenced. - What it is: A study of community animal rights activists in Türkiye resisting a new law that removes street animals from public space, drawing out design opportunities from the tensions of speaking for animals. - How it works: Qualitative study with activists, analysed through multispecies justice and care. - Paper: https://doi.org/10.1145/3800645.3812970 (DIS 2026) #### Animals' Entanglement with Technology: a Scoping Review — Rébecca Kleinberger, Ilyena Hirskyj-Douglas (2025) - Type: Paper · Organisms: Animals - Idea: Most technology animals meet was never designed for them; ACI has to study that too. - What it is: A scoping review of nearly 800 works on how animals meet technology, whether it is designed for them, with them or only around them. - How it works: Systematic coding of research objectives, technology types and animal contexts across HCI and neighbouring fields. - Paper: https://doi.org/10.1145/3706598.3713384 (CHI 2025) - Video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=elTCuVa7Vak #### Legal & Ethical Principles for Nonhuman Animal Communication Technologies (NACTs) — Project CETI, More-Than-Human Life (MOTH) Program, NYU School of Law (2025) - Type: Book & essay · Organisms: Animals - Idea: Write the ethics before the translator ships. - What it is: Project CETI and NYU's More-Than-Human Life Program drafted principles for technologies that decode or talk to animals: prevent harm, respect privacy and consent-like limits, and use insights to strengthen animals' legal protection. - How it works: A multidisciplinary legal and ethical framework developed by lawyers, scientists and ethicists, building on rights-of-nature law. - Video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PR1wzsLR3ZQ - Images: https://cdn.prod.website-files.com/644849cc07ba153932ff365d/66b298ce875525f9565009ec_project-ceti-x-moth.jpg https://cdn.prod.website-files.com/644849cc07ba153932ff365d/67ed45bce13f8881a440e216_Untitled%20design%20(47).png - Project page: https://www.projectceti.org/blog-posts/legal-ethical-principles-for-nacts #### What the World Thinks About AI and Animal Communication (global survey) — Earth Species Project (2025) - Type: Book & essay · Organisms: Animals, Human body - Idea: Ask the public before building the translator: who should speak to animals, and for what? - What it is: A survey of 1,057 people in 67 countries, run with The Collective Intelligence Project, on what the public hopes and fears from using AI to understand other species. - How it works: An online deliberative survey with open and closed questions on consent, uses, risks and governance. - Images: https://earthspecies.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/01/68dabbc59eab835c2a8c2360_blogcover.png - Project page: https://earthspecies.org/2025/09/29/what-the-world-thinks-about-ai-and-animal-communication-findings-from-our-first-global-survey/ #### Charting Ethical Tensions in Multispecies Technology Research through Beneficiary-Epistemology Space — Steve Benford (2024) - Type: Paper · Organisms: Animals - Idea: Ethical tensions in animal–technology research can be charted by who benefits and whose knowledge counts. - What it is: Reflects on getting Cat Royale through three ethics boards (computer science, veterinary science, animal welfare) and proposes a 'beneficiary-epistemology space' to map who benefits and how knowledge is produced in multispecies research. - How it works: Reflective analysis of the ethics review dialogue, organised as a two-axis framework. - Paper: https://doi.org/10.1145/3613904.3641994 (CHI 2024) - Images: https://arxiv.org/html/2402.15439v1/Figures/Epis_Bene.png #### The Day After: Ethical Considerations for the End of Enriching Animal Research Projects — Jennifer Cunha, Clara Mancini (2024) - Type: Paper · Organisms: Animals - Idea: Plan the end of an animal study as carefully as its start. - What it is: Discusses what happens to animals when a research project that gave them enriching technology ends and the devices are taken away. - How it works: Ethical analysis grounded in long-term parrot tablet studies, proposing obligations for project closure. - Paper: https://doi.org/10.1145/3702336.3702345 (ACI 2024) #### Substituting Animals with Biohybrid Robots: Speculative Interactions with Animal-Robot Hybrids — Ziming Wang (2023) - Type: Speculative design · Organisms: Animals - Idea: If robots replace animals on our plates, what do we still owe to either? - What it is: A speculative concept in which animals are replaced by biohybrid robots that people assemble and eat, used to provoke debate about food and animal futures. - How it works: Design fiction and provocation drawing on developments in biohybrid robotics and human–food interaction. - Paper: https://doi.org/10.1145/3563703.3596641 (DIS 2023) - Video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Y4PcZCEH2fQ #### An Ethics Toolkit to Support Animal-Centered Research and Design — Luisa Ruge, Clara Mancini (2022) - Type: Paper · Organisms: Animals - Idea: Ethics for animal participants works better as a practice you do than a rule you check. - What it is: An ethics toolkit of worksheets that helps researchers and designers reflect on their assumptions and responsibilities when animals take part in their work. - How it works: Structured prompts on the researcher's understanding of the animal, its role and the researcher's own role, used before and during projects. - Paper: https://doi.org/10.3389/fvets.2022.891493 (Frontiers in Veterinary Science) - Images: https://www.frontiersin.org/files/Articles/891493/fvets-09-891493-HTML/image_m/fvets-09-891493-g001.jpg #### Animal-centered design needs dignity: a critical essay on ACI’s core concept — Dirk van der Linden (2022) - Type: Paper · Organisms: Animals - Idea: Being a good user experience for an animal is not the same as respecting the animal. - What it is: A critical essay arguing that 'animal-centred' has come to mean 'animal user-centred', and that ACI should ground its core concept in animal dignity. - How it works: Conceptual analysis of the ACI manifesto and later work, drawing on value-sensitive design and animal ethics. - Paper: https://doi.org/10.1145/3565995.3566028 (ACI 2022) #### Politicising Animal-Computer Interaction: an Approach to Political Engagement with Animal-Centred Design — Clara Mancini (2022) - Type: Paper · Organisms: Animals - Idea: Designing for one animal's needs can reinforce the system that harms many; design has politics. - What it is: Argues that ACI projects operate inside socio-economic systems that are not animal-centred, and proposes a political approach to animal-centred design. - How it works: Draws on political interaction design literature to reframe ACI goals and researcher responsibilities. - Paper: https://doi.org/10.1145/3565995.3566034 (ACI 2022) #### Watching Animal-Computer Interaction: Effects on Perceptions of Animal Intellect — Sarah Webber, Marcus Carter (2022) - Type: Paper · Organisms: Animals - Idea: Animal–computer interaction also acts on the humans who watch it. - What it is: Studies whether seeing orangutans use a digital enrichment installation changes zoo visitors' views of orangutan intelligence and support for conservation. - How it works: Visitor interviews and a survey at Melbourne Zoo comparing attitudes with and without the installation in use. - Paper: https://doi.org/10.1145/3565995.3566035 (ACI 2022) #### Welfare Through Competence: A Framework for Animal-Centric Technology Design — Sarah Webber (2022) - Type: Paper · Organisms: Animals - Idea: Design technology that lets animals exercise their competences, and welfare follows. - What it is: Proposes 'Welfare through Competence', a framework that guides animal technology design by the skills and behaviours an animal needs to use and develop. - How it works: Framework built from animal welfare science and ACI practice, applied to zoos, farms, shelters and kennels. - Paper: https://doi.org/10.3389/fvets.2022.885973 (Frontiers in Veterinary Science) #### Concept Craft Cards: Deck of theoretical and practical suggestions for ACI developers — Fiona French, Clara Mancini (2021) - Type: Paper · Organisms: Animals - Idea: A card deck can carry animal-centred principles into everyday design sessions. - What it is: A deck of Concept Craft Cards that gives ACI developers conceptual, experiential and practical prompts for designing enrichment for non-human clients. - How it works: Cards organised in levels, from design philosophy to sensory topics, used against non-human client briefs. - Paper: https://doi.org/10.1145/3450741.3466816 (C&C 2021) - Images: https://figures.semanticscholar.org/e03a18c4d714b9cf5af9ef01c89315a239cdd4c9/2-Figure1-1.png #### Ethics and Power Dynamics in Playful Technology for Animals: Using speculative design to provoke reflection — Fiona French, Ilyena Hirskyj-Douglas, Heli Väätäjä, Patricia Pons (2021) - Type: Paper · Organisms: Animals - Idea: Speculating about animal play devices exposes who controls the game. - What it is: A workshop that used speculative design to debate the ethics and power relations of playful technology for animals. - How it works: Participants designed speculative interspecies play systems and discussed their implications. - Paper: https://doi.org/10.1145/3464327.3464366 (Academic Mindtrek 2021) - Images: https://figures.semanticscholar.org/3ec9b3e8b2b05b64b387b0b93532321cba0fec27/4-Figure3-1.png https://figures.semanticscholar.org/3ec9b3e8b2b05b64b387b0b93532321cba0fec27/4-Figure2-1.png #### Reflecting on Methods in Animal Computer Interaction: Novelty Effect and Habituation — Ilyena Hirskyj-Douglas, Sarah Webber (2021) - Type: Paper · Organisms: Animals - Idea: A drop in use is not failure; design and evaluate for the long tail after novelty fades. - What it is: Examines why animals often use a new device eagerly and then lose interest, linking HCI's novelty effect with habituation from animal behaviour science. - How it works: Analysis of three ACI enrichment deployments (including monkeys and orangutans) through the lenses of novelty and habituation. - Paper: https://doi.org/10.1145/3493842.3493893 (ACI 2021) - Video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jKV5uoLWlUQ #### A Method for Evaluating Animal Usability (MEAU) — Luisa Ruge, Clara Mancini (2019) - Type: Paper · Organisms: Animals - Idea: Usability can be measured for a dog, if you know what its behaviour means. - What it is: Proposes MEAU, a method for evaluating how usable an interface is for an animal user, by reading the animal's behaviour against its species' capabilities. - How it works: Combines usability constructs from HCI with ethological behaviour coding, tested on dogs using interfaces. - Paper: https://doi.org/10.1145/3371049.3371060 (ACI 2019) - Images: https://figures.semanticscholar.org/9be3adedbb83f2e82eb2f553732a8690126bc568/3-Figure2-1.png #### Opportunities for ACI in PLF: Applying Animal- and User-Centred Design to Precision Livestock Farming — Stacey D. Scott (2019) - Type: Paper · Organisms: Animals - Idea: Farm sensors are designed for animals too; involve them and farmers in the process. - What it is: Argues that precision livestock farming, which grew out of engineering, should adopt animal- and user-centred design methods from ACI. - How it works: Comparison of PLF and ACI literature with design opportunities for livestock technology. - Paper: https://doi.org/10.1145/3371049.3371055 (ACI 2019) #### ZooJamming: Designing Beyond Human Experience — Fiona French, Anna Zamansky, Sarah Webber, Reinhard Gupfinger (2019) - Type: Paper · Organisms: Animals - Idea: A game-jam format gets zoo experts and designers prototyping for animals in a day. - What it is: Reports on three ZooJams, game-jam-style workshops at the ACI conference where mixed teams design enrichment for zoo animals to real briefs. - How it works: Jam format with keeper-written briefs, rapid ideation and crafted prototypes, reflected on by the organisers. - Paper: https://doi.org/10.1145/3316287.3316294 (ICGJ 2019) - Images: https://figures.semanticscholar.org/81a6cedcd947552211a604460019cdce106cd060/3-Figure1-1.png https://figures.semanticscholar.org/81a6cedcd947552211a604460019cdce106cd060/3-Figure3-1.png #### Seven Years after the Manifesto: Literature Review and Research Directions for Technologies in Animal Computer Interaction — Ilyena Hirskyj-Douglas, Patricia Pons (2018) - Type: Paper · Organisms: Animals - Idea: A map of what has been built for animals shows where interaction design for them is still thin. - What it is: A literature review of technologies built for animals in the seven years after the ACI manifesto: tangible, haptic, wearable, olfactory, screen and tracking systems. - How it works: Thematic review organised by interaction modality, with research directions for each. - Paper: https://doi.org/10.3390/mti2020030 (Multimodal Technologies and Interaction 2018) - Images: https://pub.mdpi-res.com/mti/mti-02-00030/article_deploy/html/images/mti-02-00030-g001.png #### The Emerging Nature of Participation in Multispecies Interaction Design — Clara Mancini (2018) - Type: Paper · Organisms: Animals - Idea: Animals can participate in design even if they cannot understand the design process. - What it is: Proposes a model of animal participation in design based on signs, volition and interaction rather than human-style consent and understanding. - How it works: Theoretical model built from examples of dog-computer interaction and indexical semiotics. - Paper: https://doi.org/10.1145/3196709.3196785 (DIS 2018) - Images: https://figures.semanticscholar.org/9bbabb7ea3ee36a739a2360cbffd66ab7009a676/8-Figure5-1.png - Project page: https://doi.org/10.1145/3196709.3196785 #### Animal-Computer Interaction: The emergence of a discipline — Clara Mancini, Shaun Lawson, Oskar Juhlin (2017) - Type: Paper · Organisms: Animals - Idea: ACI became a discipline once it had shared aims and a venue to argue about them. - What it is: The editorial to the first journal special issue on Animal–Computer Interaction, outlining the field's aims, challenges and community. - How it works: Overview of the state of the art and introduction to the special issue papers in IJHCS. - Paper: https://doi.org/10.1016/j.ijhcs.2016.10.003 (IJHCS 2017) #### Exploring Research through Design in Animal Computer Interaction — Fiona French, Clara Mancini (2017) - Type: Paper · Organisms: Animals - Idea: When no interaction idiom exists for a species, making prototypes is how you find one. - What it is: Argues that research through design helps ACI researchers explore situations where no established way of interacting with an animal yet exists, drawing on elephant enrichment prototypes. - How it works: Reflection on iterative prototyping of interactive toys with zoo elephants, framed by research-through-design literature. - Paper: https://doi.org/10.1145/3152130.3152147 (ACI 2017) - Images: https://figures.semanticscholar.org/8c2a2828856875fb4533d9e320f4c8b85fb87de0/7-Figure2-1.png https://figures.semanticscholar.org/8c2a2828856875fb4533d9e320f4c8b85fb87de0/7-Figure1-1.png #### Towards an animal-centred ethics for Animal-Computer Interaction — Clara Mancini (2017) - Type: Paper · Organisms: Animals - Idea: Research ethics for animals should be as participant-centred as HCI ethics for people. - What it is: Argues that animals in ACI research should be treated as consenting participants and design contributors rather than research instruments, and proposes ethical principles to match. - How it works: Critical analysis of animal research regulations and proposal of an animal-centred ethical framework. - Paper: https://doi.org/10.1016/j.ijhcs.2016.04.008 (International Journal of Human-Computer Studies 2017) - Project page: https://www.open.ac.uk/blogs/ACI/ #### Becoming with: towards the inclusion of animals as participants in design processes — Michelle Westerlaken (2016) - Type: Paper · Organisms: Animals - Idea: Animals can shape design outcomes if designers learn to read and follow their responses. - What it is: Proposes involving animals that live in human environments, such as dogs, as participants in design processes, based on the authors' design experiments with dog toys. - How it works: Exploratory design experiments with dogs, interpreted through Haraway's idea of becoming-with. - Paper: https://doi.org/10.1145/2995257.2995392 (ACI 2016) - Images: https://michellewesterlaken.com/2021/09/dog_w.jpg - Project page: https://michellewesterlaken.com/portfolio/robotic-dog-toys/ #### De-computing the pigeon sensorium — John Fass (2016) - Type: Speculative design · Organisms: Animals - Idea: Start from the animal's senses, not from a problem to solve. - What it is: An open-ended design project on how urban pigeons sense the city, arguing that non-goal-driven experiments can open new directions for ACI. - How it works: Design experiments and artefacts exploring pigeon perception of urban space. - Paper: https://doi.org/10.1145/2995257.3012022 (ACI 2016) - Video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PhzLnO11lms #### Power, participation, and the dog internet — Shaun Lawson (2016) - Type: Book & essay · Organisms: Animals - Idea: Pet tech often speaks for the animal without letting it speak. - What it is: An essay on the rise of 'dog internet' products that promise to translate tail wags and barks, and on who holds power in these systems. - How it works: Critical reading of commercial pet devices and apps, drawing on participatory design ideas about power. - Paper: https://doi.org/10.1145/2942442 (ACM Interactions 2016) - Images: https://figures.semanticscholar.org/e3b048e823e348442503208dc33e1eb4ad07e2d5/5-Figure2-1.png https://figures.semanticscholar.org/e3b048e823e348442503208dc33e1eb4ad07e2d5/4-Figure1-1.png #### Problematising Upstream Technology through Speculative Design: The Case of Quantified Cats and Dogs — Shaun Lawson (2015) - Type: Speculative design · Organisms: Animals - Idea: Show speculative products before they are built to surface what might go wrong. - What it is: Uses speculative pet-tracking product concepts to ask pet owners and animal experts about 'quantified' cats and dogs. - How it works: Speculative design concepts presented in an online study with owners and in interviews with animal behaviour experts. - Paper: https://doi.org/10.1145/2702123.2702260 (CHI 2015) - Images: https://figures.semanticscholar.org/edf877083a37c5ef90a58845d1dd50d3a6b5659d/6-Figure3-1.png https://figures.semanticscholar.org/edf877083a37c5ef90a58845d1dd50d3a6b5659d/5-Figure2-1.png #### Animal personas: acknowledging non-human stakeholders in designing for sustainable food systems — Jessica Frawley (2014) - Type: Paper · Organisms: Animals - Idea: Give animals a persona and they enter the design brief. - What it is: Adapts personas, a standard user-centred design tool, to represent farm animals alongside farmers when designing for co-operative and sustainable food systems. - How it works: Personas for livestock built from farming philosophy and animal needs, used in a design process for a food co-operative. - Paper: https://doi.org/10.1145/2686612.2686617 (OzCHI 2014) - Images: https://figures.semanticscholar.org/323644468a6e57f7023385bd1a3e5e1f033123ee/4-Figure2-1.png https://figures.semanticscholar.org/323644468a6e57f7023385bd1a3e5e1f033123ee/2-Figure1-1.png #### Who Is Really In The Center Of Dog Computer Design? — Ilyena Hirskyj-Douglas (2014) - Type: Paper · Organisms: Animals - Idea: Before borrowing HCI methods for animals, check whose needs the method actually serves. - What it is: A position paper asking whether HCI methods such as co-design and grounded theory can move from human users to dogs, and who really sits at the centre of 'dog-centred' design. - How it works: A review of HCI's history of user involvement, mapped onto dog–computer design practices. - Paper: https://doi.org/10.1145/2693787.2693793 (ACE 2014 Workshops (ACI)) - Images: https://figures.semanticscholar.org/3e0d94f298fd68ee72105591e72127f4e6e40f8f/3-Figure2-1.png https://figures.semanticscholar.org/3e0d94f298fd68ee72105591e72127f4e6e40f8f/1-Figure1-1.png #### Ethical issues and guidelines when conducting HCI studies with animals — Heli Väätäjä (2013) - Type: Paper · Organisms: Animals - Idea: Studies with animals need their own ethics checklist, not a copy of human-participant rules. - What it is: A literature-based set of ethical guidelines for HCI studies that involve animals, covering planning, running and reporting such studies. - How it works: A review of animal-research ethics and welfare literature condensed into phase-by-phase guidelines for HCI researchers. - Paper: https://doi.org/10.1145/2468356.2468736 (CHI EA 2013) - Video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b7hrtlKnp1g #### Animal-computer interaction: a manifesto — Clara Mancini (2011) - Type: Paper · Organisms: Animals - Idea: Animals are users too, and technology for them should be designed around their needs. - What it is: The founding text of Animal-Computer Interaction, calling for a user-centred approach to technology that animals use or are affected by. - How it works: Manifesto setting out aims for ACI: studying animal-technology interaction, designing for animal welfare and developing animal-centred methods. - Paper: https://doi.org/10.1145/1978822.1978836 (ACM Interactions 2011) - Video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TMOJSpXfRoI - Project page: https://www.open.ac.uk/blogs/ACI/ #### Mirror self-recognition in the bottlenose dolphin — Diana Reiss (2001) - Type: Paper · Organisms: Animals - Idea: Designing the right test lets an animal show a capacity we assumed was ours. - What it is: Two dolphins marked with ink went to mirrors and turned to inspect the marked parts of their bodies, evidence that they recognised themselves. - How it works: Mark test with sham marks and mirror access in an aquarium, scored from video. - Paper: https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.101086398 (PNAS 2001) - Video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vCSKDjkp6rI - Project page: https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.101086398 ## Human–Nature Interaction Technology that changes how people notice, experience and relate to nature: outdoors, in gardens, through citizen science, extended senses and mediated nature. ### Noticing & Nature Connection Designs that slow people down and help them notice, attend to and feel connected with nature. #### How Can Interactive Technology Help Us to Experience Joy With(in) the Forest? — Ferran Altarriba Bertran (2025) - Type: Paper · Organisms: Plants, Ecosystems, Human body - Idea: Joy is a design goal in its own right for nature technology. - What it is: A CHI paper presenting a taxonomy of 12 ways interactive technology might support joyful forest experiences. - How it works: Reflexive analysis of 104 speculative ideas from a year-long co-design process with more than 250 forest-goers. - Paper: https://doi.org/10.1145/3706598.3713151 (CHI 2025) #### The Entangled Tales that Landscapes Tell — Marta Galvão Ferreira (2025) - Type: Paper · Organisms: Ecosystems, Plants, Human body - Idea: Walking and storytelling can be an HCI method for relating to a landscape. - What it is: A TEI paper that studies how nature walks are experienced through the body and imagination, and turns this into a teaching method for designing locative technologies for natural heritage. - How it works: Study of the lived and sensory experience of nature walks, leading to an organic pedagogy and design implications for locative tools. - Paper: https://doi.org/10.1145/3689050.3705012 (TEI 2025) #### Dear Nature: Data Drawings for Human–Nature Relations — Marta Galvão Ferreira (2024) - Type: Paper · Organisms: Ecosystems, Plants, Human body - Idea: Drawing personal data about nature by hand slows people down and deepens reflection. - What it is: A DIS paper, with Sherry Hsi, in which participants in different places turned their own observations of nature into hand-drawn data drawings over five weeks and compared them. - How it works: Post-humanist design method based on data humanism and cooperative inquiry across geographies. - Paper: https://doi.org/10.1145/3643834.3660732 (DIS 2024) - Images: https://figures.semanticscholar.org/e4b2d4058b135ef625ef77c19038fa10ec48669f/8-Figure1-1.png #### Humming Washer — Marine Zorea (2024) - Type: Research prototype · Organisms: Animals - Idea: Replace appliance beeps with the voices of the neighbours outside. - What it is: A washing machine add-on that records bird song from nearby trees and plays it back when people press the machine's buttons, replacing beeps with the local birds. - How it works: A microphone near trees captures bird calls, which a controller plays in response to button presses. - Paper: https://doi.org/10.1145/3643834.3660686 (DIS 2024) - Images: https://figures.semanticscholar.org/c271744d1a419c5daaad26a7db4dae2c5577be38/8-Figure6-1.png - Project page: https://artifact-archive.org/whole-archive #### I Tell the Moon My Secret and the Moon Tells Me Yours — Zoe Qi-Jing Li (2024) - Type: Artwork · Organisms: Ecosystems, Human body - Idea: Hand part of the making to the moon, so the work depends on a celestial rhythm. - What it is: People whisper a secret into the work; its waveform is exposed onto photographic paper using only moonlight as the light source, so the image appears only on nights when the moon is clearly visible. - How it works: Recorded speech is converted to a waveform pattern and printed by long-exposure photography under moonlight. - Paper: https://doi.org/10.1145/3635636.3660501 (C&C 2024) - Images: https://figures.semanticscholar.org/684c32776cbf56e66846f18eaa05eac1854480f6/2-Figure2-1.png https://figures.semanticscholar.org/684c32776cbf56e66846f18eaa05eac1854480f6/4-Figure4-1.png - Project page: https://artifact-archive.org/whole-archive #### Sound Passage — Marine Zorea (2024) - Type: Research prototype · Organisms: Ecosystems, Animals - Idea: Let the outside world, not the resident, decide when home is quiet. - What it is: A window device that opens by itself to let outside sounds into the home; when it opens depends on changes outdoors, such as people, plants, animals or machines moving. - How it works: An outdoor microphone detects changes in the soundscape and an actuator opens a vent to let sound in. - Paper: https://doi.org/10.1145/3643834.3660686 (DIS 2024) - Images: https://figures.semanticscholar.org/c271744d1a419c5daaad26a7db4dae2c5577be38/8-Figure6-1.png https://figures.semanticscholar.org/c271744d1a419c5daaad26a7db4dae2c5577be38/3-Figure2-1.png - Project page: https://artifact-archive.org/whole-archive #### Stromatolive — Francesca Valsecchi (2024) - Type: Research prototype · Organisms: Bacteria & microbes, Ecosystems - Idea: Listen to deep time recorded by microbes in stone. - What it is: An interactive installation that turns the layered interior of stromatolites, sediment rocks built by microbial mats and banded like tree rings, into images and sound that visitors explore by touching the layers. - How it works: Scans of stromatolite cross-sections are mapped to visuals and sonified; touch sensors let visitors trigger the sound of each layer. - Paper: https://doi.org/10.21606/drs.2024.752 (DRS 2024) - Project page: https://artifact-archive.org/whole-archive #### Flare — Stijn Ossevoort (2023) - Type: Research prototype · Organisms: Ecosystems, Human body - Idea: Let a natural phenomenon, not the wearer, drive an interactive garment. - What it is: A silk dress embroidered with dandelions made of LEDs that light up when the wind blows; the wearer can only partly control it, for example by stepping out of the wind. - How it works: Wind sensing likely drives LED dandelions embroidered on the dress; presented as an evocative object for the concept 'participation of natural phenomena'. - Paper: https://doi.org/10.1145/3569009.3572743 (TEI 2023) - Images: https://figures.semanticscholar.org/e4f87047b7077fc2a7b775c8b90aa097c40e5469/7-Figure7-1.png https://figures.semanticscholar.org/e4f87047b7077fc2a7b775c8b90aa097c40e5469/2-Figure1-1.png - Project page: https://artifact-archive.org/whole-archive #### Playful Inspiration for a New Wave of Joyful Forest Technology — Ferran Altarriba Bertran (2023) - Type: Paper · Organisms: Plants, Ecosystems, Human body - Idea: Forest tech should help people enjoy the forest, not only learn facts about it. - What it is: A DIS paper that explores the playful potential of forests and how technology could respond to it, arguing for forest tech built on joy and care rather than techno-solutionism. - How it works: First-person, speculative and situated design on 16 trips to the forest, yielding 13 play potentials grouped into 5 design directions. - Paper: https://doi.org/10.1145/3563657.3596015 (DIS 2023) - Video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0yogjiLLS90 #### Wild Probes Toolkit — Ferran Altarriba Bertran (2023) - Type: Research prototype · Organisms: Ecosystems, Plants, Human body - Idea: Give co-designers tools to attend to a place before they imagine technology for it. - What it is: A set of probing tools that moves co-design into the forest, helping forest-goers pay attention to, reflect on, ideate around and document their forest experiences. - How it works: Toolkit designed for forestry future-making and used in early outdoor co-design sessions; open for other designers to extend. - Paper: https://doi.org/10.1145/3563657.3596102 (DIS 2023) - Video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=79Zub_3LUL8 #### From-The-Wild: Towards Co-Designing For and From Nature — Ferran Altarriba Bertran (2022) - Type: Paper · Organisms: Ecosystems, Plants, Human body - Idea: Take the design workshop to the forest and let the forest talk back. - What it is: A CHI late-breaking work that proposes co-designing technology outdoors, letting nature itself shape the design session. - How it works: Runs participatory design activities in natural settings and reflects on how place changes the ideas produced. - Paper: https://doi.org/10.1145/3491101.3519811 (CHI EA 2022) - Video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kKCQ8OXCoQQ #### Nature Jar — Xiaoge Wang (2022) - Type: Research prototype · Organisms: Plants, Ecosystems, Human body - Idea: Link the home to the nature just outside it, gently, through an everyday object. - What it is: A home prototype, designed after a cultural probes study, that encourages city dwellers to notice, value and spend more time with the nature near where they live, and brings nature's restorative effects indoors. - How it works: Cultural probes with urban residents, followed by a tangible prototype that likely links indoor life with nearby nature. - Paper: https://doi.org/10.1145/3490149.3502426 (TEI 2022) - Images: https://figures.semanticscholar.org/4c515bbed6f02239204b18c7e5c28e454a978cb8/2-Figure1-1.png #### Nga manawataki o te koiora: Biorhythms — Rewa Wright (2022) - Type: Artwork · Organisms: Plants, Human body - Idea: Let plants and people co-compose a public artwork. - What it is: A projection-mapped video work that merges human- and plant-produced sound with abstracted imagery of Aotearoa New Zealand, premiered on a building facade in Nelson. - How it works: Plant bioelectric data and human sound are combined into a generative audiovisual piece by UnCalculated Studio (Rewa Wright and Simon Howden). - Paper: https://doi.org/10.1145/3610591.3616428 (SIGGRAPH Asia 2023 Art Papers) - Video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q5D8ABeS060 - Images: https://rewawright.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/09/screen-shot-2022-09-20-at-1.54.39-am.png - Project page: https://artifact-archive.org/whole-archive #### Plant Radio — Margrete Lodahl Rolighed, Lone Koefoed Hansen (2022) - Type: Research prototype · Organisms: Plants, Human body - Idea: Remove the power button and the plant gets a permanent voice in the home. - What it is: A radio-like box amplifies a houseplant's electrical signals into sound; it deliberately has no off switch, so the plant keeps sounding into the household's day and night. - How it works: Electrodes pick up the plant's EMG-like signals, which are amplified and played through a speaker styled as a broadcast receiver; informed by mediation theory. - Paper: https://doi.org/10.1145/3532106.3533517 (DIS 2022) - Video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Uabjy9_hhH4 - Project page: https://artifact-archive.org/whole-archive #### Biodiversity Logbook — Liz Edwards (2021) - Type: Research prototype · Organisms: Plants, Ecosystems - Idea: Slow the act of recording nature down so that noticing becomes the point. - What it is: A toolkit of photo-sensitive albums, prompts and maps with which schoolchildren in Morecambe Bay make cyanotype prints of plants they find and record where they found them. - How it works: Specimens are laid on cyanotype paper and exposed to sunlight; children add handwritten notes and the collected images are gathered on a shared map. - Paper: https://doi.org/10.21606/nordes.2021.13 (Nordes 2021) - Images: https://imagination.lancaster.ac.uk/wp-content/uploads/2020/08/20200817_112736-1870x1361.jpg - Project page: https://artifact-archive.org/whole-archive #### Forest Crayons — Playfool (2021) - Type: Product & platform · Organisms: Plants - Idea: Let children learn a forest's species through its colours. - What it is: Crayons pigmented entirely with powdered wood, bark and leaves from Japanese forests, each colour named after its source tree species. - How it works: Forest by-products are dried, milled and mixed with wax binders. - Video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NWkLR_KYm8k - Images: https://static.dezeen.com/uploads/2021/11/1-Deep-turquoise-crayon-made-fro.jpeg https://static.dezeen.com/uploads/2021/09/Forest-Crayons.jpeg - Project page: https://www.dezeen.com/awards/2021/winners/forest-crayons/ #### Circa — Circa (Ted Hunt) (2019) - Type: Product & platform · Organisms: Ecosystems - Idea: What if the Sun were your clock and the Moon your calendar? - What it is: A watch face and app pair: Circa Solar has a single hour hand that turns once a day and follows local solar time, sunrise and sunset; Circa Lunar replaces the calendar with the moon's phases. - How it works: The software geolocates the user to compute apparent solar time, daylight length and lunar phase, and drops minute and second hands. - Video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1ICO5NV4JQg - Images: https://web.archive.org/web/20231209113039im_/http://circa.bio/img/border_applewatch_solar.png - Project page: https://artifact-archive.org/whole-archive #### Contact/Sense — Rewa Wright (2019) - Type: Artwork · Organisms: Plants, Human body - Idea: Treat plants as co-composers in a live performance. - What it is: A mixed-reality performance in which sonified bioelectric signals from plants invite human performers to compose and play together with them. - How it works: Plant signals are captured with electrodes and routed into a mixed-media sound and visual environment; informed by mātauranga Māori. - Paper: https://doi.org/10.1145/3610591.3616428 (SIGGRAPH Asia 2023 Art Papers) - Video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZZh-I8tV3YE - Project page: https://artifact-archive.org/whole-archive #### Nature Scenes — Dean Brown (2019) - Type: Research prototype · Organisms: Animals, Insects - Idea: Design one object for two audiences: the animals who use it and the people who watch. - What it is: Outdoor shelters and feeding stations for urban birds and insects in London's Brompton Design District, whose cameras capture animal moments that are then shown to people in public places such as a bar. - How it works: Interaction Research Studio designed and deployed shelters with feeders and cameras for London Design Festival 2019; images are relayed to screens in nearby venues. - Paper: https://doi.org/10.1145/3569009.3572802 (TEI 2023) - Project page: https://artifact-archive.org/whole-archive #### Sonic Succulents: Plant Sounds and Vibrations — Adrienne Adar (2019) - Type: Artwork · Organisms: Plants - Idea: Amplify what plants already do, so people notice they are affecting another living being. - What it is: A season-long exhibition at Brooklyn Botanic Garden in which live succulents and garden plants are fitted with vibration sensors and amplifiers, so that wind, growth and visitors' touch become audible plant sounds. - How it works: Contact microphones and analog vibration sensors pick up mechanical vibrations in stems and leaves; amplifiers and speakers make them audible in real time. - Images: http://static1.squarespace.com/static/6132729d77b59f573fc273ad/613284eb494a0173635c2266/613284eb494a0173635c2290/1633468288501/IMG_3972.jpeg?format=1500w - Project page: https://artifact-archive.org/whole-archive #### The Ambient Birdhouse — Margot Brereton (2018) - Type: Research prototype · Organisms: Animals, Human body - Idea: A small ambient object can introduce neighbours of other species. - What it is: An IoT birdhouse for the home that plays local bird calls and media to spark curiosity about the birds outside; it was trialled with five families. - How it works: Playful tangible IoT device using recordings of local species, studied in family homes, where children drew the rest of the family in. - Paper: https://doi.org/10.1145/3173574.3173971 (CHI 2018) - Video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=J6f171qRyp8 #### Deep Time Walk App — Deep Time Walk (2016) - Type: Product & platform · Organisms: Ecosystems - Idea: Walk deep time with your body so human history shrinks to its true scale. - What it is: An audio app for a 4.6 km walk through Earth's 4.6-billion-year history at one million years per metre: a dramatised narration tells how the planet and life formed, and humans appear only in the last few centimetres. - How it works: The app tracks walking distance and speed with GPS and plays scripted scientific narration keyed to the geological time reached. - Video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5kY24DUm0VM - Images: https://www.deeptimewalk.org/wp-content/uploads/2018/04/facebook.jpg https://www.deeptimewalk.org/wp-content/uploads/2018/06/devices-mobile-home-june2018.png - Project page: https://artifact-archive.org/whole-archive #### Flora Luma — Raune Frankjær (2016) - Type: Artwork · Organisms: Plants, Human body - Idea: Let people see their own effect on a plant through light. - What it is: Glowing fibre-optic domes set among garden plants light up in response to the plants' electrical signals, which change when visitors touch or approach them. - How it works: Electrodes pick up plant bioelectric responses to touch and proximity and drive LEDs in woven fibre-optic sculptures; built as a participatory design exhibit. - Paper: https://doi.org/10.1145/2948076.2948115 (PDC 2016) - Images: https://figures.semanticscholar.org/d26d0594da623588dd78dbedf7b23c2932db2d5a/1-Figure1-1.png https://figures.semanticscholar.org/d26d0594da623588dd78dbedf7b23c2932db2d5a/2-Figure2-1.png - Project page: https://artifact-archive.org/whole-archive #### Curiosity Cloud — mischer'traxler studio (2015) - Type: Artwork · Organisms: Insects - Idea: Interaction can make people notice species they usually ignore, including declining and invasive insects. - What it is: An installation of hundreds of glass bulbs, each holding a hand-made replica of a different insect species; when visitors approach, the insects start to flutter and tap against the glass, and fall still when people leave. - How it works: Each bulb contains a motor-driven insect replica and a sensor; proximity triggers movement and sound, and the species mix reflects local, rare and invasive insects. - Video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=S4C4zKv1oh4 - Images: https://mischertraxler.com/wp/wp-content/uploads/2017/10/LDF15_VA_CuriosityCloud_MischerTaxler_160915_13_300dpi-EdReeve-1200x800.jpg https://mischertraxler.com/wp/wp-content/uploads/2017/12/mischertraxler_LDF15_VA_CuriosityCloud_detail_insect_photocredits_EdReeve-1200x800.jpg - Project page: https://mischertraxler.com/projects/curiosity-cloud/ #### Forest — Seekrtech (2014) - Type: Product & platform · Organisms: Plants, Human body - Idea: Use a growing tree as a metaphor for attention, and link it to real trees. - What it is: A focus app in which a virtual tree grows while you leave your phone alone and dies if you open another app; coins can fund real trees planted by the partner Trees for the Future. - How it works: Timer-based mobile app with a virtual forest record and a donation link to tree planting. - Video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pVKksUbxkwU - Images: https://forestapp.cc/preview.png - Project page: https://www.forestapp.cc/ #### Future Library — Katie Paterson (2014) - Type: Artwork · Organisms: Plants, Ecosystems, Human body - Idea: Tie a cultural promise to the growth of a forest to think in tree time. - What it is: A 100-year artwork in Oslo: 1,000 trees were planted in Nordmarka forest in 2014, one writer a year contributes an unread manuscript, and in 2114 the trees will be cut to print the books. - How it works: Planted forest, a sealed archive room in the Deichman library, and yearly handover ceremonies in the forest. - Video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=D2BUq2Q8_6M - Project page: https://www.futurelibrary.no/ #### Bio-Electricity — Mileece (2013) - Type: Artwork · Organisms: Plants, Human body - Idea: Make plants audible collaborators in improvised music. - What it is: A live performance in which the electrical signals of plants are turned into sound, and people make music with the plants, shown at MoMA. - How it works: Electrodes on leaves pick up bioelectric changes that software maps to generative sound; people explore how their touch and presence alter it. - Video: https://vimeo.com/60769517 - Images: https://static.wixstatic.com/media/9f7598_c0d8f01bd4e2474fad6783d7d43921eef000.jpg - Project page: https://artifact-archive.org/whole-archive #### FOREST (for a thousand years…) — Janet Cardiff & George Bures Miller (2012) - Type: Artwork · Organisms: Plants, Ecosystems, Human body - Idea: Sound placed among real trees can make a forest feel like a witness to history. - What it is: A 28-minute sound installation for dOCUMENTA (13): visitors sit in a clearing in Kassel's Karlsaue Park while hidden speakers play wind, footsteps, battle and song among the real trees. - How it works: Multichannel audio composition distributed across speakers mounted in trees. - Video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hGqPwaZVPBo - Images: https://cardiffmiller.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/04/forest.jpg - Project page: https://cardiffmiller.com/installations/forest-for-a-thousand-years/ #### Moth Cinema — Natalie Jeremijenko (2012) - Type: Artwork · Organisms: Insects, Plants - Idea: Turn moths into the stars of an outdoor cinema while giving them food and shelter. - What it is: A 20-foot screen lit at night above a planted habitat at Socrates Sculpture Park: the light attracts moths, the plants feed them, and their magnified shadows play out on the screen. - How it works: A mesh screen, lights and moth-attracting host and nectar plants create both a projection surface and a pollinator habitat. - Images: https://web.archive.org/web/2019id_/http://socratessculpturepark.org/wp-content/uploads/1970/01/jeremijenko_mothcinema-1024x768.jpg https://web.archive.org/web/2019id_/http://socratessculpturepark.org/wp-content/uploads/1970/01/jeremikenco_mothcinema2-1024x768.jpg - Project page: https://artifact-archive.org/whole-archive #### Phenology Wall Clock (Sydney) — Tega Brain, Natalie Jeremijenko (2012) - Type: Artwork · Organisms: Plants, Animals, Ecosystems - Idea: Replace hours with the life cycles of the species around you. - What it is: Modified wall clocks whose faces show when local species in Sydney and New York flower, fruit, migrate or breed, so a year is read as a cycle of ecological events. - How it works: Phenology observations for an urban ecosystem are plotted on a rotating annual clock face; part of Natalie Jeremijenko's Phenology Clock project at the Environmental Health Clinic. - Paper: https://doi.org/10.1145/3025453.3025948 (CHI 2017) - Images: https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/96d55b21e4065708d8b77dfbd65244189546091f628de1074d9492c692d04b94/sydney_o.jpg https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/59526d0d7fea6a3f7c53c75b912c5c9bc287b3d0a98456607bfbe919a6860352/clocks_o.jpg - Project page: https://artifact-archive.org/whole-archive #### The Present — Scott Thrift (2012) - Type: Product & platform · Organisms: Ecosystems - Idea: Show time at the scale of the year so people live by seasons instead of minutes. - What it is: A wall clock whose single hand turns once a year: instead of hours it shows the seasons, with the dial coloured from winter white through spring and summer to autumn. - How it works: A slow quartz movement drives one hand through 360 degrees in 365 days over a spectral dial marking solstices and equinoxes. - Video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d-3Vlp9Oodc - Images: https://thepresent.is/cdn/shop/files/thepresent-annual-clock-hero-on-white-wall-scott-thrift-1784w-2025_1200x.webp?v=1765303543 https://thepresent.is/cdn/shop/files/The_Present_Clock-Lifestyle-Home-Bookshelf_865x640.jpg?v=1784831477 - Project page: https://artifact-archive.org/whole-archive #### Kits Beach Soundwalk — Hildegard Westerkamp (1989) - Type: Artwork · Organisms: Ecosystems, Human body - Idea: Selective listening can turn a noisy place back into a living one. - What it is: A soundscape composition in which the composer walks the listener along a Vancouver beach, filtering out city noise to reveal the tiny sounds of barnacles. - How it works: Field recording with spoken narration and studio filtering and equalisation. - Video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hg96nU6ltLk - Project page: https://www.hildegardwesterkamp.ca/ ### Outdoor & Wilderness Technology Interaction design for trails, forests, parks, mountains and water. #### Capra — William Odom (2024) - Type: Research prototype · Organisms: Ecosystems, Human body - Idea: Design for revisiting nature experiences slowly, long after they happen. - What it is: A system that captures hikes from several perspectives (camera, sound, movement, altitude) and lets hikers revisit and compare them at home over years. - How it works: Custom capture device, archive and home exploration interface, designed, built and lived with by the design team over four years. - Paper: https://doi.org/10.1145/3613904.3642284 (CHI 2024) - Video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uEtnBD1TMj4 #### Daddy, You Can Be the Fox — Jon Back (2024) - Type: Research prototype · Organisms: Animals, Ecosystems, Human body - Idea: Playgrounds can tell stories that point children toward the nature around them. - What it is: A permanent playground installation: a small play hut in the landscape with interactive audio stories about local wildlife, developed and evaluated over six years. - How it works: Research through design with a multisectorial team; children re-used the stories in their own play. - Paper: https://doi.org/10.1145/3679318.3685360 (NordiCHI 2024) #### Hokkhi — Jixiang Jiang (2023) - Type: Research prototype · Organisms: Animals, Ecosystems - Idea: Route a religious practice into reef restoration so that devotion also rebuilds habitat. - What it is: Three artificial oyster reef prototypes made from oyster shells that first serve Daoist worshippers in Quanzhou as offerings, then are placed in the sea to help restore oyster reefs. - How it works: Based on field research, expert interviews and the Daoist 'token of honesty' (Fǎ xìn) system, the reef units are co-created with worshippers within a product-service system. - Paper: https://doi.org/10.21606/iasdr.2023.100 (IASDR 2023) - Project page: https://artifact-archive.org/whole-archive #### Dinacon (Digital Naturalism Conference) — Andrew Quitmeyer (2018) - Type: Artwork · Organisms: Animals, Plants, Ecosystems - Idea: Change where the conference happens and the research changes too. - What it is: A self-organised, month-long 'conference' held in jungles and islands (Thailand 2018, Panama 2019, Sri Lanka 2022) where artists, hackers and biologists build projects in nature. - How it works: Open-call residency format with no fees for accepted projects and shared field documentation. - Video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lE5PEEQpXNg - Images: https://www.dinacon.org/wp-content/uploads/2017/10/cropped-Phuket-Beach.jpg - Project page: https://www.dinacon.org/ #### Glaciator — Joaquín Fargas (2018) - Type: Artwork · Organisms: Ecosystems - Idea: Build machines that work for the glacier rather than for people. - What it is: Solar-powered walking robots on an Antarctic glacier whose steps compact and recrystallise snow into ice, adding mass to the glacier as a gesture against its melting. - How it works: Solar-powered robots with compacting feet walk over the snowpack, accelerating the conversion of snow into glacial ice. - Video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PlEHoYRHPQ0 - Images: https://www.joaquinfargas.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/09/Adaggio-Tarjet-IMG_9759-1024x683.jpg - Project page: https://artifact-archive.org/whole-archive #### Designing Children's Digital-Physical Play in Natural Outdoors Settings — Jon Back (2016) - Type: Paper · Organisms: Plants, Ecosystems, Human body - Idea: In nature play, technology should be a light spice, not the main dish. - What it is: A CHI paper in which interaction designers and landscape architects installed interactive play technology as part of a schoolyard and observed how it mixed with play with natural materials. - How it works: Schoolyard field trial of play technology integrated into a natural outdoor setting. - Paper: https://doi.org/10.1145/2851581.2892416 (CHI EA 2016) - Images: https://figures.semanticscholar.org/941758864a19cfca2654a3cf83e01f96ddb55eae/3-Figure4-1.png https://figures.semanticscholar.org/941758864a19cfca2654a3cf83e01f96ddb55eae/4-Figure5-1.png #### Pokémon Go — Niantic (2016) - Type: Product & platform · Organisms: Animals, Human body - Idea: A game about collecting animals can get people outside, but it does not automatically make them notice real animals. - What it is: A location-based AR game that sent hundreds of millions of people outdoors to catch virtual creatures; conservation scientists debated what it meant for interest in real wildlife. - How it works: Smartphone AR over a real-world map of points of interest; the cited paper weighs benefits and costs for conservation. - Paper: https://doi.org/10.1111/conl.12326 (Conservation Letters 2017) - Video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SWtDeeXtMZM - Project page: https://pokemongolive.com/ #### HOBBIT: An Asocial Hiking App — Jonna Häkkilä (2014) - Type: Research prototype · Organisms: Ecosystems, Human body - Idea: Design for being alone in nature: an asocial app. - What it is: A hiking app, by Maaret Posti, Johannes Schöning and Jonna Häkkilä, that generates routes avoiding other people and warns when hikers approach, so users can enjoy solitude in nature. - How it works: Route generator using OpenStreetMap and web data, plus a mobile prototype that scans Wi-Fi signals to detect nearby hikers; concept based on a survey (n = 157) and focus groups. - Paper: https://doi.org/10.1145/2598510.2598592 (DIS 2014) - Images: https://figures.semanticscholar.org/a9409d933171330054a17d49c903837c2214a87d/1-Figure1-1.png #### Central Park (Listen to the Light) — Bluebrain (2011) - Type: Artwork · Organisms: Plants, Ecosystems, Human body - Idea: Composing for a landscape makes the walk itself the performance. - What it is: A location-aware album for iPhone: as listeners walk through New York's Central Park, the music changes with where they are, zone by zone. - How it works: GPS-triggered layers of music mapped onto hundreds of zones across the park. - Video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sAE1xfYl3Q8 #### PeakFinder — PeakFinder (2010) - Type: Product & platform · Organisms: Ecosystems, Human body - Idea: AR that names the landscape can turn a view into a place you know. - What it is: An app that overlays the names and heights of mountains on the view in front of you, working offline from a global elevation model. - How it works: Renders a panorama from the device's GPS position and a digital elevation model and aligns it with the camera and compass. - Video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mDW27pkwOIs - Images: https://cdn2web.peakfinder.com/web/images/peakfinder-banner.jpg - Project page: https://www.peakfinder.com/ #### Ambient Wood — Yvonne Rogers (2004) - Type: Research prototype · Organisms: Plants, Ecosystems, Human body - Idea: Augment a real wood with hidden layers rather than replacing it with a screen. - What it is: An augmented woodland in Sussex where pairs of children explored with probes and PDAs that played sounds and showed hidden processes such as photosynthesis when they reached certain plants. - How it works: Ubiquitous computing kit (PDAs, light and moisture probes, location-triggered audio) deployed with learning scientists from the Equator project. - Paper: https://doi.org/10.1145/1017833.1017834 (IDC 2004) - Images: https://figures.semanticscholar.org/ef1b00133b9690d651e51596e6d54fac51b502e0/4-Figure1-1.png https://figures.semanticscholar.org/ef1b00133b9690d651e51596e6d54fac51b502e0/4-Figure2-1.png https://figures.semanticscholar.org/ef1b00133b9690d651e51596e6d54fac51b502e0/4-Figure3-1.png #### Savannah — Keri Facer (2004) - Type: Research prototype · Organisms: Animals, Human body - Idea: Let children learn animal behaviour by moving through space as the animal. - What it is: A location-based game in which children, carrying handheld computers on a school field, played a pride of lions hunting and surviving on a virtual African savannah. - How it works: GPS-enabled PDAs map a virtual savannah onto a playing field; a 'den' debrief area supports reflection; built by Futurelab with HP Labs and studied with ten children aged 11–12. - Paper: https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1365-2729.2004.00105.x (Journal of Computer Assisted Learning 2004) - Images: https://figures.semanticscholar.org/a3a9dd79e9927794784c1d44b9dd54a2ee7676c3/2-Figure1-1.png #### Environmental Detectives — Eric Klopfer (2002) - Type: Research prototype · Organisms: Ecosystems, Human body - Idea: Put an environmental simulation on top of real terrain so investigation involves walking. - What it is: An augmented reality game in which students roam a real campus or watershed with handhelds, taking simulated water samples to find the source of a toxic spill. - How it works: GPS-located PDAs running a groundwater contamination model; later versions ran on the MIT AR platform. - Paper: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11423-007-9037-6 (Educational Technology Research and Development 2008) - Video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=goPTuUMu_oc #### Geocaching — Geocaching HQ (Groundspeak) (2000) - Type: Product & platform · Organisms: Ecosystems, Human body - Idea: A simple hidden-object game can give people a reason to explore nearby nature closely. - What it is: A worldwide treasure hunt in which players use GPS coordinates to find millions of hidden containers, many placed in parks, forests and other natural sites. - How it works: Began the day after selective availability was turned off in May 2000; runs on a web and app platform with user-hidden caches and logs. - Video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1YTqitVK-Ts - Images: https://www.geocaching.com/play/Content/images/preview-lg.jpg - Project page: https://www.geocaching.com/play #### Forest Walk — Janet Cardiff & George Bures Miller (1991) - Type: Artwork · Organisms: Plants, Ecosystems, Human body - Idea: Layer a recorded walk over a real forest to sharpen attention to it. - What it is: Cardiff's first audio walk: visitors follow her recorded voice and footsteps along a path in the Banff forest, with real and recorded sounds blending. - How it works: Binaural recording played on a portable player while walking the same route. - Images: https://cardiffmiller.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/05/forest_3.jpg - Project page: https://cardiffmiller.com/walks/forest-walk/ ### Citizen Science & Nature Observation Tools that let people identify, record and monitor species and ecosystems. #### NatureMetrics eDNA monitoring — NatureMetrics (2024) - Type: Product & platform · Organisms: DNA & molecules, Ecosystems - Idea: Traces of DNA let many species be counted without seeing them. - What it is: Biodiversity is measured from environmental DNA shed by organisms into water and soil; sequencing a sample identifies which species live there. - How it works: Field kits filter water or soil; lab metabarcoding matches DNA sequences to reference databases. - Video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FkMCZR8M930 - Images: https://earthshotprize.org/wp-content/uploads/2024/09/Nature-Metrics-Hero-1920x1080-@72DPI.jpg - Project page: https://www.naturemetrics.com/ #### Colores del Rio — Melissa Ortiz (2023) - Type: Research prototype · Organisms: Plants, Ecosystems - Idea: Agricultural waste can become a shared instrument for caring for a river. - What it is: A citizen-science tool that uses unwanted red cabbage from local farms so that young people can test river water for pH changes that signal contamination. - How it works: Anthocyanin pigments from dehydrated red cabbage change colour with pH; they are embedded in a hand-held testing tool. - Images: https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/552dc0ffe4b070a9e1a6a215/1687875738957-AB7A77P0PIW9E4HO0G9Q/Olivia+at+river+with+tool+2.jpg https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/552dc0ffe4b070a9e1a6a215/1687875723403-RPY19QL1SAXV1VNR5NIA/ColoresDelRio_CCA-Ortiz_1.jpg - Project page: https://www.biodesignchallenge.org/cca-design-2023 #### Ocean Vision AI / FathomNet — MBARI (2023) - Type: Product & platform · Organisms: Animals, Ecosystems - Idea: The ocean is too big to watch alone; share both the images and the labelling. - What it is: An open, annotated image database of ocean life (FathomNet) and a programme to build AI tools for ocean imagery; the CHI paper maps community needs for these tools. - How it works: 36 in-depth interviews and a workshop with 246 participants from 35 countries around FathomNet, yielding requirements and 12 user archetypes. - Paper: https://doi.org/10.1145/3544548.3580886 (CHI 2023) - Video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PljG1xGn9BE - Project page: https://www.fathomnet.org/ #### Opportunity Map — Geertje Slingerland (2023) - Type: Research prototype · Organisms: Ecosystems, Plants - Idea: Read your street with a biodiversity lens. - What it is: A large street map with transparent overlays on which residents mark where their neighbourhood could be made greener and more biodiverse. - How it works: Paper map and circular overlays used in outdoor co-design sessions during a Biodiversity Urban Living Lab. - Paper: https://doi.org/10.1145/3593743.3593753 (C&T 2023) - Images: https://figures.semanticscholar.org/06c02f734865135e799e20449598b7b645717e0e/7-Figure6-1.png - Project page: https://artifact-archive.org/whole-archive #### Plant listener — Geertje Slingerland (2023) - Type: Research prototype · Organisms: Plants, Ecosystems - Idea: Bring plants and sensors into community co-design as more-than-human participants. - What it is: A sensing device placed with plants in a Rotterdam neighbourhood that reports environmental conditions to help residents make planting and gardening decisions, part of a biodiversity urban living lab. - How it works: Research through design and action research in Oud-Mathenesse, with a pop-up teahouse, a 'Circles of Green' tool and soil and light sensing compared against plant knowledge. - Paper: https://doi.org/10.1145/3593743.3593753 (C&T 2023) - Images: https://figures.semanticscholar.org/06c02f734865135e799e20449598b7b645717e0e/7-Figure4-1.png - Project page: https://doi.org/10.1145/3593743.3593753 #### BirdNET: A deep learning solution for avian diversity monitoring — Stefan Kahl, Cornell Lab of Ornithology (2021) - Type: Paper · Organisms: Animals, Ecosystems - Idea: Let anyone, and any recorder left in a forest, listen for which birds are present. - What it is: A neural network that recognises close to a thousand North American and European bird species from sound, released as a free app and open analyser used for large-scale acoustic monitoring. - How it works: A ResNet-based convolutional network trained on spectrograms of labelled bird recordings. - Paper: https://doi.org/10.1016/j.ecoinf.2021.101236 (Ecological Informatics 2021) - Video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=w8lMxzskWx4 - Project page: https://birdnet.cornell.edu/ #### Engaging with Nature Sounds & Citizen Science — Margot Brereton (2021) - Type: Paper · Organisms: Animals, Ecosystems, Human body - Idea: Audio alone is not enough; connect sounds to other senses and stories to give them meaning. - What it is: A CHI paper that designs and playtests the Bristle Whistle Challenge, a prototype that connects wildlife calls to other senses and experiences to draw people into ecoacoustic citizen science. - How it works: Game-like prototype built from environmental recordings, playtested with ten players. - Paper: https://doi.org/10.1145/3411764.3445390 (CHI 2021) - Video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ub2gmVXqUTE #### Merlin Sound ID — Cornell Lab of Ornithology (2021) - Type: Product & platform · Organisms: Animals - Idea: Make the birds you can hear, but not see, legible in the moment. - What it is: A feature of the free Merlin Bird ID app that listens through the phone microphone and shows, in real time, which birds are singing around you. - How it works: On-device machine learning on live spectrograms, trained on recordings from the Macaulay Library. - Video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xmSUOLxyatY - Project page: https://merlin.allaboutbirds.org/ #### Wildlife Insights — Wildlife Insights (2019) - Type: Product & platform · Organisms: Animals, Ecosystems - Idea: Remove the bottleneck of manual photo sorting so wildlife data can guide action faster. - What it is: A cloud platform where camera-trap projects upload photos and AI models filter blanks and suggest species, with data shared for conservation analysis. - How it works: Google Cloud-hosted classifier trained on millions of labelled camera-trap images from partner organisations. - Video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qKgRbkCkRFY - Project page: https://www.wildlifeinsights.org/ #### Seek by iNaturalist — iNaturalist (2018) - Type: Product & platform · Organisms: Animals, Plants, Insects - Idea: Lower the entry barrier to species ID to almost zero, especially for children. - What it is: A family-friendly app that identifies plants and animals live through the camera without an account, and awards badges for species found. - How it works: On-device image recognition model derived from iNaturalist data, with location-based species suggestions and challenges. - Video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=i56_R8z1N28 - Project page: https://www.inaturalist.org/pages/seek_app #### Sounding Soil — Marcus Maeder (2017) - Type: Artwork · Organisms: Ecosystems, Animals - Idea: Listening to soil makes its hidden life and health audible. - What it is: An art, research and citizen-science project that records the sounds of soil animals, roots and water with needle microphones and shows how soil life sounds different across Switzerland. - How it works: Highly sensitive probe microphones inserted in the ground record soil acoustics; a touring container and participatory recordings share them with the public. - Images: https://ars.electronica.art/starts-prize/files/2020/06/SoundingSoil-1024x512.jpg - Project page: https://ars.electronica.art/starts-prize/en/sounding-soil/ #### Wildbook — Wild Me (2017) - Type: Product & platform · Organisms: Animals - Idea: Treat each wild animal as an individual with its own record, not just a count. - What it is: An open-source platform that identifies individual whales, zebras, whale sharks and other animals from photos by their unique patterns, and builds a life history for each one from researchers' and the public's images. - How it works: Computer vision for individual identification (fin, stripe and spot patterns) combined with crowdsourced images and a research database. - Paper: https://arxiv.org/abs/1710.08880 (arXiv 2017) - Video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JDYI9PT07Js - Images: https://www.wildme.org/assets/social-card.jpg - Project page: https://www.wildme.org/ #### City Nature Challenge — California Academy of Sciences, iNaturalist (2016) - Type: Product & platform · Organisms: Animals, Plants, Ecosystems - Idea: Friendly rivalry between cities gets residents looking at the nature on their own streets. - What it is: An annual four-day bioblitz, started as a contest between San Francisco and Los Angeles, in which cities around the world compete to record the most urban wildlife on iNaturalist. - How it works: Coordinated observation weekend followed by an identification week on iNaturalist. - Video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jmQmdat2Nks - Images: https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/4/43/INaturalist_Introduction_%26_BioBlitz_at_Sugarloaf_Ridge_State_Park_-_Sarah_Stierch_07.jpg/960px-INaturalist_Introduction_%26_BioBlitz_at_Sugarloaf_Ridge_State_Park_-_Sarah_Stierch_07.jpg - Project page: https://www.citynaturechallenge.org/ #### Mosquito Alert — Mosquito Alert (2014) - Type: Product & platform · Organisms: Insects, Human body - Idea: Citizen science also covers the species we fight, not just the ones we love. - What it is: A smartphone app in which people photograph mosquitoes and breeding sites; experts validate the reports to track invasive tiger and yellow fever mosquitoes. - How it works: Photo reports validated by entomologists and AI; data used by public health agencies across Europe. - Paper: https://doi.org/10.1038/s41467-017-00914-9 (Nature Communications 2017) - Video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HCQs_qzKNUo - Images: https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/6/68/Mosquito_Alert_coverage_in_Europe.jpg/960px-Mosquito_Alert_coverage_in_Europe.jpg - Project page: https://www.mosquitoalert.com/en/ #### Penguin Watch — Zooniverse (2014) - Type: Product & platform · Organisms: Animals, Ecosystems - Idea: Clicking on penguins at home can monitor a whole ocean ecosystem. - What it is: A Zooniverse project where volunteers mark adults, chicks and eggs in time-lapse images from cameras at penguin colonies across Antarctica and the Southern Ocean. - How it works: Remote time-lapse cameras run by Oxford's Penguinwatch team; volunteer clicks are clustered and used to train counting models. - Paper: https://doi.org/10.1038/sdata.2018.124 (Scientific Data 2018) - Video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jA95ChRG6P0 - Project page: https://www.zooniverse.org/projects/penguintom79/penguin-watch #### Floracaching (Biotracker) — Anne Bowser, Jennifer Preece (2013) - Type: Research prototype · Organisms: Plants, Human body - Idea: Borrow a popular outdoor game's mechanics to recruit new kinds of volunteers. - What it is: A geocaching-inspired, gamified mobile app (also known as Biotracker) in which players find and record plants to gather phenology data; it was tested with Millennials who were new to citizen science. - How it works: Gamified phenology app with points and social features, evaluated for motivation and learning outcomes at the University of Maryland. - Paper: https://doi.org/10.1145/2583008.2583011 (Gamification 2013) - Video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IWb1y9HHu3o #### Keeping Time (Phenology Studies) — Tega Brain (2013) - Type: Artwork · Organisms: Plants - Idea: People's snapshots, sorted by date, become a record of a plant's own calendar. - What it is: Prints and a video that scrape Flickr for photos of one plant species, such as the jacaranda or Sturt's desert pea, and lay them out by timestamp year by year, so the species' flowering season appears as a coloured band. - How it works: A script collects geotagged, time-stamped Flickr images of a species for 2002–2013 and arranges them in rows per year ordered by date. - Video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NDZMHbjICck - Images: https://freight.cargo.site/w/1200/i/9ac22f143ae9f0dd119c004c5d8357e98babc215d653db08f58345b7116bf5a1/TegaBrain-KeepingTime.jpg https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/ffee0cf6e7f4369a4cad6bdc9227a00f8a6c59e1d816879c110d42c8966bb22f/zgallery_oct2014_02_6.jpg - Project page: https://artifact-archive.org/whole-archive #### Pl@ntNet — Pl@ntNet (2013) - Type: Product & platform · Organisms: Plants - Idea: Identification and data collection can be the same act. - What it is: A free app that identifies plants from photos of leaves, flowers, fruit or bark and adds each confirmed observation to a shared botanical dataset. - How it works: Deep learning models trained on collaborative image collections, with regional floras and expert validation. - Video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=W_cBqaPfRFE - Project page: https://plantnet.org/ #### Virtual Birding — Margot Brereton (2013) - Type: Research prototype · Organisms: Animals, Ecosystems - Idea: Let expert listeners annotate soundscapes remotely. - What it is: A CHI paper by Mark Cottman-Fields, Margot Brereton and Paul Roe that lets birders identify birds in long environmental audio recordings online, extending birding beyond the field. - How it works: Web tool for browsing spectrograms and tagging calls in recordings from acoustic sensors, studied with birders. - Paper: https://doi.org/10.1145/2470654.2466268 (CHI 2013) - Images: https://figures.semanticscholar.org/163694826bc942c9ca1aa0707ae3f684c3683bf2/4-Figure2-1.png #### Leafsnap — Peter N. Belhumeur (2011) - Type: Product & platform · Organisms: Plants - Idea: A phone camera can replace the botanical key for everyday identification. - What it is: An electronic field guide app that identified tree species of the northeastern US from a photo of a single leaf on a white background. - How it works: Leaf segmentation and curvature-based shape features matched against a database of species images, by Columbia, the University of Maryland and the Smithsonian. - Paper: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-33709-3_36 (ECCV 2012) - Video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=k02C7p7mQ_c #### Snapshot Serengeti — Zooniverse (2010) - Type: Product & platform · Organisms: Animals, Ecosystems - Idea: Anyone can become a field researcher by looking through a wildlife camera. - What it is: A Zooniverse project in which volunteers classified millions of camera-trap photos from 225 cameras in Serengeti National Park, identifying species, counts and behaviour. - How it works: Camera-trap grid run by the University of Minnesota Lion Project; multiple volunteer votes per image aggregated into consensus labels. - Paper: https://doi.org/10.1038/sdata.2015.26 (Scientific Data 2015) - Video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ENOORZRxtAg - Project page: https://www.zooniverse.org/projects/zooniverse/snapshot-serengeti #### iNaturalist — iNaturalist (2008) - Type: Product & platform · Organisms: Animals, Plants, Fungi - Idea: Make every nature photo a shared observation that others can help name. - What it is: A social network and app where people post photos of any organism, get identifications from computer vision and other users, and create research-grade biodiversity records. - How it works: Community identification plus a computer vision model trained on the community's own labelled photos; data flows to GBIF. - Video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DUfobESjj6s - Images: https://static.inaturalist.org/sites/1-shareable_image.png - Project page: https://www.inaturalist.org/ #### Budburst — Budburst (Chicago Botanic Garden) (2007) - Type: Product & platform · Organisms: Plants, Ecosystems - Idea: Returning to the same plant again and again builds both data and attachment. - What it is: A programme where volunteers observe the same plants through the year and record when they leaf out, flower and fruit, tracking climate effects on plant timing. - How it works: Web and app protocols for phenophases, run by the Chicago Botanic Garden (originally with NEON and UCAR). - Video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Xzr-T-vjkPs - Images: https://budburst.org/storage/statamic/hero-visual600.png - Project page: https://budburst.org/ #### Globe at Night — NSF NOIRLab (Globe at Night) (2006) - Type: Product & platform · Organisms: Ecosystems, Human body - Idea: The night sky is nature too, and counting stars measures its loss. - What it is: An international campaign in which people compare the stars they can see with star charts and report the result, building a map of light pollution. - How it works: Web app with magnitude charts for chosen constellations; data compared with satellite measurements of sky brightness. - Video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Pssub176uUY - Images: https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/d/d3/City_Lights_2012_-_Flat_map_crop.jpg/960px-City_Lights_2012_-_Flat_map_crop.jpg - Project page: https://globeatnight.org/ #### eBird — Cornell Lab of Ornithology, National Audubon Society (2002) - Type: Product & platform · Organisms: Animals, Ecosystems - Idea: Turn a hobby's personal lists into science by asking for complete checklists and effort data. - What it is: A global online checklist system where birders log what they see and hear; its hundreds of millions of records feed maps of bird distribution and abundance. - How it works: Web and mobile checklists with effort metadata, automated filters and expert reviewers; data modelled into eBird Status and Trends. - Paper: https://doi.org/10.1016/j.biocon.2009.05.006 (Biological Conservation 2009) - Video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-t-0xAjxakw - Project page: https://ebird.org/ #### Great Backyard Bird Count — Cornell Lab of Ornithology, National Audubon Society (1998) - Type: Product & platform · Organisms: Animals - Idea: A short, bounded event makes participation easy and creates a global snapshot. - What it is: An annual four-day event each February in which anyone counts birds for at least 15 minutes and submits the list online; it was the first online citizen science project to report results in near real time. - How it works: Web submission (now via eBird and Merlin) aggregated into live maps during the event. - Video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jW9ew3TKV1E - Project page: https://www.birdcount.org/ #### BioBlitz — Sam Droege (1996) - Type: Product & platform · Organisms: Animals, Plants, Ecosystems - Idea: Time pressure and a shared goal turn a species survey into a festival. - What it is: A 24-hour race in which scientists and the public try to record every species in one area; the first was held at Kenilworth Aquatic Gardens in Washington, DC in 1996. - How it works: Event format co-created by Sam Droege and Susan Rudy of the National Biological Service; later run with National Geographic and the US National Park Service. - Video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yVVIlfNFLhs - Images: https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/5/58/BioBlitz_Auckland_2005.jpg/960px-BioBlitz_Auckland_2005.jpg - Project page: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BioBlitz #### Christmas Bird Count — National Audubon Society (1900) - Type: Product & platform · Organisms: Animals - Idea: Replace a hunting ritual with a counting ritual. - What it is: Started by ornithologist Frank Chapman as an alternative to the Christmas 'side hunt', volunteers count every bird within a 15-mile circle on one winter day; it has run every year since 1900. - How it works: Fixed count circles with teams and compilers; results form one of the longest wildlife datasets. - Video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zkn0rzRfwFw - Images: https://media.audubon.org/2024-01/Web_Aud_CBC-Colombia_231220_39_Photo-Luis-Bernardo-Cano.jpg?width=1200&height=630&auto=webp&quality=90&fit=crop&enable=upscale - Project page: https://www.audubon.org/community-science/christmas-bird-count ### Gardening, Growing & Plant Care Technology for growing food and plants and for caring for them day to day. #### Biomenstrual, Collecting — Nadia Campo Woytuk (2023) - Type: Research prototype · Organisms: Human body, Plants, Ecosystems - Idea: Menstrual blood as a nutrient for other species, not waste. - What it is: Hand-made tools for collecting and storing menstrual blood so it can be diluted and fed to plants, recasting menstruation as part of a shared human-soil-plant livelihood. - How it works: Designed through first-person, feminist posthumanist research; collection vessels and pads made from biomaterials and ceramics, documented in the Biomenstrual project. - Paper: https://doi.org/10.1145/3544548.3581083 (CHI 2023) - Video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=r9TaL5jPR50 - Images: https://figures.semanticscholar.org/2e292002741daf3a0859f0b21eb4dc053aafbbec/5-Figure3-1.png - Project page: https://artifact-archive.org/whole-archive #### Biomenstrual, Composting — Nadia Campo Woytuk (2023) - Type: Research prototype · Organisms: Human body, Plants, Ecosystems - Idea: A pad designed for its afterlife in the soil. - What it is: Biodegradable menstrual pads embedded with seeds are worn and then buried, returning human nutrients and seeds to the earth so plants grow from them. - How it works: Pads made from grown and plant-based biomaterials with seeds, tested in first-person use and garden burial. - Paper: https://doi.org/10.1145/3544548.3581083 (CHI 2023) - Images: https://figures.semanticscholar.org/2e292002741daf3a0859f0b21eb4dc053aafbbec/5-Figure4-1.png https://figures.semanticscholar.org/2e292002741daf3a0859f0b21eb4dc053aafbbec/5-Figure5-1.png - Project page: https://artifact-archive.org/whole-archive #### Garden Planner — Geertje Slingerland (2023) - Type: Research prototype · Organisms: Plants, Insects, Ecosystems - Idea: A planning tool that argues on behalf of the garden's biodiversity. - What it is: A web tool that suggests plants suited to a garden's size and soil, steering residents' planting toward biodiversity and pollinators. - How it works: Residents enter garden dimensions and soil conditions; the planner recommends plant species and layouts, developed within the BULL approach. - Paper: https://doi.org/10.1145/3593743.3593753 (C&T 2023) - Images: https://figures.semanticscholar.org/06c02f734865135e799e20449598b7b645717e0e/7-Figure5-1.png - Project page: https://artifact-archive.org/whole-archive #### Nature Fictions — Margot Brereton (2023) - Type: Paper · Organisms: Plants, Animals, Human body - Idea: Start future-making from the relations in your own garden. - What it is: A DIS paper by Shannon Rodgers, Kellie Vella, Bernd Ploderer and Margot Brereton in which 15 gardeners used a phenology wheel, nature cards and paper prototypes to imagine sustainable futures that include nonhuman stakeholders. - How it works: Co-design workshops situated in gardens; outcomes grouped into three design spaces: community building, multispecies care, and balance in public spaces. - Paper: https://doi.org/10.1145/3563657.3595981 (DIS 2023) - Images: https://figures.semanticscholar.org/f0c1af65e34dda0221b11ad86de4f4a986aeeb03/5-Figure1-1.png https://figures.semanticscholar.org/f0c1af65e34dda0221b11ad86de4f4a986aeeb03/8-Figure3-1.png #### Extended Reality to Connect Experts and Novices in the Garden — Hanuma Teja Maddali (2022) - Type: Research prototype · Organisms: Plants, Human body - Idea: Remote expertise works best when it is anchored to the actual plant in front of the novice. - What it is: A CSCW study that probes how mixed-reality video calls and annotations could let expert gardeners guide novices in their own gardens. - How it works: Two studies with 27 expert and novice gardeners using XR prototypes. - Paper: https://doi.org/10.1145/3555211 (CSCW 2022 (PACM HCI)) - Video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JsML7fET8PQ #### Networked Gardens — Margot Brereton (2022) - Type: Research prototype · Organisms: Plants, Animals, Ecosystems - Idea: Local nature data becomes meaningful when it is shown back in the garden it came from. - What it is: A DIS study by Kellie Vella and colleagues in which eight participants used the Ambient Birdhouse and garden sensors to notice, share and explore data about the nature around their homes. - How it works: IoT birdhouse and sensors, interviews and group discussions; analysis of how media 'remediation' opened different entry points to nature data. - Paper: https://doi.org/10.1145/3532106.3533497 (DIS 2022) - Video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rIY5n2YPJq4 #### Sociality and Skill Sharing in the Garden — Hanuma Teja Maddali (2020) - Type: Paper · Organisms: Plants, Human body - Idea: Gardeners shape their gardens for sociality; the garden itself teaches others who see it. - What it is: A CHI paper, with Amanda Lazar, on how experienced gardeners share embodied skills and help others attune to sensory cues, and what social technology could add. - How it works: Participant observation with nine experienced gardeners aged 22–71. - Paper: https://doi.org/10.1145/3313831.3376246 (CHI 2020) - Images: https://figures.semanticscholar.org/e5182baddcf51372beb85deed5dabaf73f521ae6/6-Figure3-1.png #### Of Smarthomes, IoT Plants, and Implicit Interaction Design — Ilhan Aslan (2019) - Type: Research prototype · Organisms: Plants, Human body - Idea: Keep caring routines that are good for people; augment them instead of automating them. - What it is: A TEI paper by Björn Bittner, Ilhan Aslan and colleagues that augments houseplants' non-verbal signals so they remind people to water them, instead of automating the watering away. - How it works: Field study with 24 participants comparing an augmented-reality design with embedded physical computing on the plants. - Paper: https://doi.org/10.1145/3294109.3295618 (TEI 2019) - Images: https://figures.semanticscholar.org/642b7047817af65b8139f19c6bb9b0079306c143/3-Figure2-1.png #### Insectology: Food for Buzz — Matilde Boelhouwer (2017) - Type: Research prototype · Organisms: Insects - Idea: Design flowers for insect eyes and tongues, not for human taste. - What it is: Five colourful artificial flowers for city walls, each shaped and coloured for one of the 'big five' pollinators (bees, bumblebees, hoverflies, butterflies and moths) and refilled with sugar water as an emergency food source. - How it works: Flower forms, colours and nectar depths were tuned with engineers and biologists to each insect's tongue length and colour vision; a rain-fed reservoir supplies sugar water. - Video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ggnKu3snciM - Images: https://www.matildeboelhouwer.com/storage/media/insectology-food-for-buzz2/matildeboelhouwer-insectology-food-for-buzz_photography-janneke-van-der-pol.jpg https://www.matildeboelhouwer.com/storage/media/insectology-food-for-buzz2/matildeboelhouwer-insectology-food-for-buzz1_photography-janneke-van-der-pol.jpg - Project page: https://artifact-archive.org/whole-archive #### FarmBot — FarmBot (2016) - Type: Product & platform · Organisms: Plants - Idea: Make a garden programmable, then ask what care means when a robot does it. - What it is: An open-source gantry robot that sits over a raised bed and plants seeds, waters, weeds and photographs plants following a garden plan drawn in a web app. - How it works: CNC-style x-y-z gantry with interchangeable tool heads, Raspberry Pi and Arduino control, and open plans and software. - Video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BqYrAWssrrY - Images: https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/b/b1/FarmBot_Genesis_indoors.jpg/960px-FarmBot_Genesis_indoors.jpg - Project page: https://farm.bot/ #### GROW Observatory — GROW Observatory (2016) - Type: Product & platform · Organisms: Plants, Ecosystems, Human body - Idea: Growers' gardens can be a distributed climate observatory. - What it is: A European project in which thousands of growers placed low-cost soil sensors in their gardens and farms and ran planting experiments, providing ground truth for satellite soil-moisture data. - How it works: Parrot Flower Power sensors, online courses (MOOCs) and a data platform linked to the ESA Sentinel-1 mission. - Video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gRkFnRo-WZg - Project page: https://growobservatory.org/ #### Lua Smart Planter — Mu Design (2016) - Type: Product & platform · Organisms: Plants - Idea: Give a plant emotions so its needs are read at a glance, though at the risk of turning it into a pet. - What it is: A planter with a small screen that shows a cartoon face: the plant looks thirsty, cold, or happy depending on soil moisture, temperature and light. - How it works: Sensors in the pot drive animated facial expressions on a small matrix display, with a companion app. - Video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kAPTF25rn4s #### Personal Food Computer (MIT OpenAg) — Caleb Harper (2015) - Type: Research prototype · Organisms: Plants - Idea: A climate can be treated as code, but claims about it need evidence. - What it is: A sealed growth chamber that controls light, humidity, temperature and CO2 to run shareable 'climate recipes' for crops; the project closed in 2020 after criticism that results were overstated. - How it works: Open hardware chamber with sensors, actuators and a data platform from the MIT Media Lab. - Video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LO5Box9phW8 - Project page: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Open_Agriculture_Initiative #### Plantix — Plantix (PEAT) (2015) - Type: Product & platform · Organisms: Plants, Fungi, Insects - Idea: A phone camera can bring plant pathology to farmers who never see an agronomist. - What it is: A crop-health app that diagnoses plant diseases, pests and nutrient problems from a photo and suggests treatments, used mainly by smallholder farmers in India. - How it works: Deep learning on a large crowd-sourced image library of crop symptoms, with community Q&A. - Video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0tQ__k3G17g - Images: https://plantix.net/en/assets/images/hero-farmer-cut-international.png - Project page: https://plantix.net/en/ #### The Talking Plants — Sara Heitlinger (2014) - Type: Research prototype · Organisms: Plants, Human body - Idea: Plants can become storytellers for a community's local knowledge. - What it is: An interactive system at Spitalfields City Farm in London: visitors touch plants with an RFID watering can and hear them talk about their care, uses and histories in the voices of farm staff and volunteers. - How it works: RFID-augmented watering can triggering recorded plant voices, developed with a grassroots food-growing community. - Paper: https://doi.org/10.1145/2559206.2574792 (CHI EA 2014) - Video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ygndjz_Zm-8 #### Parrot Flower Power — Parrot (2013) - Type: Product & platform · Organisms: Plants - Idea: Translate soil and light into simple alerts so beginners stop killing plants. - What it is: A leaf-shaped Bluetooth sensor pushed into a pot or bed that measures soil moisture, fertiliser, light and temperature and tells the owner what the plant needs. - How it works: Battery-powered sensor with a phone app linked to a plant database of several thousand species. - Video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q_5F4w3rWFQ #### "Mate, we don't need a chip to tell us the soil's dry" — William Odom (2010) - Type: Paper · Organisms: Plants, Human body - Idea: Urban growers value hands-on knowledge; design should support their community goals rather than automate the soil check. - What it is: A DIS paper based on ethnographic fieldwork and a participatory design workshop with urban agriculture communities, whose members largely resisted technology in their growing practices. - How it works: Fieldwork with community gardeners and a design workshop, analysed for values and opportunities for sustainable HCI. - Paper: https://doi.org/10.1145/1858171.1858211 (DIS 2010) #### Click & Grow Smart Garden — Click & Grow (2010) - Type: Product & platform · Organisms: Plants - Idea: Pack the gardener's knowledge into the pod and the lamp. - What it is: A countertop garden with pre-seeded soil pods, a water tank and grow lights that runs on a fixed light schedule so herbs and vegetables grow with little skill. - How it works: Wicking 'smart soil' inspired by NASA plant research, timed LED lighting and replaceable seed pods. - Video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dCIFt8qNT3Y - Project page: https://www.clickandgrow.com/ #### Distributed Robotic Garden — Daniela Rus (2010) - Type: Research prototype · Organisms: Plants - Idea: Let plants call for care and let a swarm of robots answer. - What it is: A tomato garden at MIT CSAIL tended by small mobile robots that water, locate and harvest fruit, with each plant networked to request care. - How it works: iRobot Create bases with arms and cameras, plant pots with soil sensors and a wireless mesh network. - Video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Fg0l9ovFpBI ### Sensing Other Worlds Experiences that let people perceive the world as other beings do: echolocation, UV vision, magnetic sense, plant time. #### A Tree's Perspective — Lisa L. Townsend (2026) - Type: Paper · Organisms: Plants, Human body - Idea: The transition into another body may matter as much as the body you arrive in. - What it is: A CHI paper testing a multisensory VR experience that transitions people from their own body into a tree's perspective, and its effect on nature connectedness. - How it works: Mixed-methods VR study (N = 20) varying transitional elements and multisensory stimuli; both raised presence, embodiment and nature connectedness, with emotional effects lasting a week. - Paper: https://doi.org/10.1145/3772318.3790282 (CHI 2026) - Images: https://figures.semanticscholar.org/e0a6e50867b7505c224d5b8c5d623c668abed9a5/6-Figure3-1.png https://figures.semanticscholar.org/e0a6e50867b7505c224d5b8c5d623c668abed9a5/6-Figure4-1.png #### EchoVision + Nocturnal Fugue — Jiabao Li (2024) - Type: Artwork · Organisms: Animals - Idea: To understand another species, borrow its sense, not just its image. - What it is: A mixed-reality bat mask that lets people 'see' by shouting: the echo of their voice is visualised as a bat would sense its surroundings. The companion piece Nocturnal Fugue is a performance built on AI research into bat vocal communication. - How it works: Bat-shaped masks built on the open-source HoloKit headset map voice pitch and loudness to spatial sound visualisation on an iPhone, working in darkness. - Paper: https://doi.org/10.1145/3680530.3695460 (SIGGRAPH Asia 2024 Art Papers) - Video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7LqsKpEZy4g - Images: https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/58688c8a6a496327e937e35b/1755904659620-LJCRS5932ZL5IRIBZXJW/Plasmata__3_2025_Day_3_Pedion_Areos_%40Pinelopi_Gerasimou_High-189.jpg https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/58688c8a6a496327e937e35b/1755904607782-OXJXLC19IRU4NTTN0TEZ/Plasmata_3_EchoVision%40Pinelopi_Gerasimou_High-147.jpg https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/58688c8a6a496327e937e35b/1755904573813-J33L05YVB029R84G4ANJ/Plasmata__3_2025_Day_3_Pedion_Areos_%40Pinelopi_Gerasimou_High-48.jpg - Project page: https://www.jiabaoli.org/nocturnal-fugue #### Seeing Echoes in the Mind of a Whale — Marshmallow Laser Feast (2024) - Type: Artwork · Organisms: Animals - Idea: Experience the ocean as a world mapped by sound rather than sight. - What it is: A large audiovisual installation that immerses visitors in the sound-based perception of bottlenose dolphins, humpback whales and sperm whales recorded along the Spanish coast. - How it works: Hydrophone recordings and scientific data on echolocation are turned into spatial sound and visuals. - Images: https://ars.electronica.art/starts-prize/files/2025/05/seeing_echoes_in_the_mind_of_a_whale_mlf_starts_prize_6-1024x576.jpg - Project page: https://marshmallowlaserfeast.com/project/seeing-echoes-in-the-mind-of-the-whale #### Treesense — Michaela Honauer (2024) - Type: Research prototype · Organisms: Plants, Human body - Idea: Let children understand a tree by becoming one with their bodies. - What it is: A modular costume kit of fabric parts and programmable sensors with which children turn themselves into a tree, feeling sun, wind and water as a tree would through light, sound and vibration. - How it works: Textile modules with embedded sensors and actuators map environmental inputs to haptic, sound and light feedback during role play. - Paper: https://doi.org/10.1145/3628516.3659425 (IDC 2024) - Images: https://figures.semanticscholar.org/e6dcb7c618611e2cf85d21ea37f715babf54cfd0/3-Figure2-1.png https://figures.semanticscholar.org/e6dcb7c618611e2cf85d21ea37f715babf54cfd0/4-Figure4-1.png - Project page: https://artifact-archive.org/whole-archive #### An Immense World — Ed Yong (2022) - Type: Book & essay · Organisms: Animals, Insects - Idea: Designing for other species starts with admitting how narrow human perception is. - What it is: A book that tours the senses of animals, from ultraviolet vision and echolocation to electric and magnetic senses, to show how much of the world humans miss. - How it works: Science journalism built on interviews and lab visits with sensory biologists. - Video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dVPN165wz1Y - Images: https://covers.openlibrary.org/b/id/12835209-L.jpg?default=false - Project page: https://edyong.me/an-immense-world #### VR videos of animal vision — Haruka Kasuga (2020) - Type: Research prototype · Organisms: Animals - Idea: Let people try on another animal's eyes, while being honest that the simulation is approximate. - What it is: 360° VR videos that simulate the eyesight, colour vision and motion vision of turtles, tortoises, geckos and frogs, shown at a zoo workshop and a science festival. - How it works: Footage filmed in real environments is blurred, recoloured or masked by motion detection based on scientific knowledge of each species' vision; 235 visitors answered questionnaires. - Paper: https://doi.org/10.1145/3446002.3446120 (ACI 2020) - Images: https://figures.semanticscholar.org/3ff60a467f128e5a507f697f3d4ffc46df17a371/500px/4-Figure1-1.png https://figures.semanticscholar.org/3ff60a467f128e5a507f697f3d4ffc46df17a371/500px/4-Figure2-1.png - Project page: https://doi.org/10.1145/3446002.3446120 #### Rewilding Wearables (Cyborganic BW-V2) — Patricia (Tricia) Flanagan, Raune Frankjær (2018) - Type: Research prototype · Organisms: Insects, Ecosystems, Human body - Idea: A prosthetic head that makes you perceive a landscape as an insect might. - What it is: A woven bamboo headpiece with sensors and actuators is worn on walks through rewilded land and nudges the wearer toward insect-friendly spots, as if seeing the place through an insect's senses. - How it works: 'Cyborganic' device crafted from bamboo and electronics that seems to act on its own; tested in guided walks in Aarhus green spaces. - Paper: https://doi.org/10.1145/3173225.3173316 (TEI 2018) - Images: https://triciaflanagan.com/wp-content/uploads/FlanaganBambooWhisperLandscape.jpg https://figures.semanticscholar.org/8d087eb7bfc8746894aca72d2a168c7d176219af/3-Figure2-1.png - Project page: https://artifact-archive.org/whole-archive #### Bug's Beat — Yumi Sasaki (2016) - Type: Artwork · Organisms: Insects - Idea: Change the listener's scale and a bug becomes a giant. - What it is: An installation that amplifies the footsteps of a small insect through directional speakers and a vibrating chair, so the listener hears and feels each step. - How it works: Contact microphones under the insect's arena pick up footsteps, fed to directional speakers and vibration transducers. - Video: https://vimeo.com/208145212 - Images: https://ars.electronica.art/starts-prize/files/2017/05/bugsbeat.jpg - Project page: https://ars.electronica.art/starts-prize/en/bugs-beat/ #### GoatMan: A Holiday from Being Human — Thomas Thwaites (2016) - Type: Speculative design · Organisms: Animals, Human body - Idea: Trying and failing to become another animal teaches both humility and humour. - What it is: The designer built prosthetic legs and an artificial rumen and spent days crossing the Swiss Alps with a herd of goats, trying to experience life as a goat. - How it works: Custom prosthetics made with a prosthetist, consultations with neuroscientists and animal behaviourists, and fieldwork in the Alps. - Video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-IPub-Fipz8 - Images: https://www.thomasthwaites.com/folio5/wp-content/uploads/2016/03/GoatMan_cover-web640.jpg - Project page: https://www.thomasthwaites.com/a-holiday-from-being-human-goatman/ #### North Sense — Cyborg Nest (2016) - Type: Product & platform · Organisms: Human body, Animals - Idea: Sell a new sense as something to live with, not a tool to use. - What it is: A small device attached to the chest by piercings that vibrates whenever the wearer faces magnetic north, offering a consumer version of a migratory bird's magnetic sense. - How it works: Compass sensor and vibration motor in a silicone housing attached with titanium bars. - Video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0xPMpKxd1R8 - Project page: https://www.cyborgnest.net/ #### In the Eyes of the Animal — Marshmallow Laser Feast (2015) - Type: Artwork · Organisms: Animals, Insects, Ecosystems - Idea: Step into another creature's Umwelt to see that the human view is one of many. - What it is: A VR journey through Grizedale Forest seen in turn through the senses of a mosquito, a dragonfly, a frog and an owl. - How it works: The forest was captured with LiDAR, drones and 360° cameras and rendered in real time as point clouds, with binaural sound from field recordings and a headset worn with haptics and scent. - Video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XJMA0Nj_zsA - Images: https://marshmallowlaserfeast.com/app/uploads/2024/07/Screenshot-2024-07-24-at-10.52.46-1024x574.jpg - Project page: https://www.marshmallowlaserfeast.com/project/in-the-eyes-of-the-animal/ #### Birdly — Max Rheiner (2014) - Type: Research prototype · Organisms: Animals - Idea: Don't control a machine; become the bird. - What it is: A full-body flight simulator: the user lies face down, flaps their arms as wings and flies over a city as a red kite, with wind in the face. - How it works: Arm and hand movements drive a bird flight model; the platform tilts, rolls and heaves, while a head-mounted display, a fan, sound and scents add to the embodiment. - Video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rzBUvydKUAA - Project page: https://www.rs-online.com/designspark/birdly-making-a-flying-virtual-reality-experience-truly-immersive #### treelab — Marcus Maeder (2014) - Type: Artwork · Organisms: Plants, Ecosystems - Idea: A tree under drought stress can be heard, if you listen with the right sensors. - What it is: An ongoing project that records the acoustic emissions inside trees, such as cavitation when water columns break during drought, and turns them with physiological data into sound works. - How it works: Contact and ultrasonic sensors on trunks combined with sap-flow and climate data, with the Swiss Federal Institute WSL (Roman Zweifel). - Video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-fLrB4l82fY - Images: https://marcusmaeder.ch/wp-content/uploads/2021/04/DSC_3030.jpg - Project page: https://marcusmaeder.ch/ #### Seismic Sense — Moon Ribas (2013) - Type: Artwork · Organisms: Human body, Ecosystems - Idea: Feel the planet's movement continuously through your body. - What it is: Sensors implanted in Ribas's feet, linked to online seismographs, vibrate whenever an earthquake happens anywhere on Earth; she translates them into dance. - How it works: Vibration implants driven by real-time seismic data; performed in the piece 'Waiting for Earthquakes'. - Video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MdDfAdSeRNQ - Images: https://images.hoobaweb.com/8930/imgf-1200-630/moon-ribas.png - Project page: https://www.moonribas.com/ #### Animal Superpowers — Chris Woebken, Kenichi Okada (2007) - Type: Speculative design · Organisms: Animals, Insects, Human body - Idea: Design prosthetics that let people borrow another species' way of perceiving. - What it is: A series of wearable devices that let children experience animal senses: an 'ant' device magnifies what the hands touch fifty times, a 'bird' device senses magnetic north, and a 'giraffe' device raises the eyes to an adult's height. - How it works: Handheld microscope cameras feeding goggles, a compass-driven vibration hat and a periscope helmet, prototyped at the Royal College of Art. - Video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=L9oTcez2CXU - Images: https://freight.cargo.site/w/1200/i/ad1784c02faa9d2afb6614fa878b4982436d2d58292e1349ebee13b3d8c6a682/2232862656_cba3f094c1_o.jpg - Project page: https://www.chriswoebken.com/animal-superpowers #### Vatnajökull (the sound of) — Katie Paterson (2007) - Type: Artwork · Organisms: Ecosystems - Idea: A phone call can put a melting glacier in your ear. - What it is: An underwater microphone in Jökulsárlón lagoon was connected to a phone line so that anyone could call a number and hear Iceland's Vatnajökull glacier melting live. - How it works: Hydrophone, amplifier and mobile phone relay installed at the glacier lagoon; the number was shown in neon in the gallery. - Images: https://i0.wp.com/katiepaterson.org/wp-content/uploads/2022/02/Katie_Paterson_Vatnajokull_3-1.jpg?resize=1920%2C1442&ssl=1 - Project page: https://katiepaterson.org/artwork/vatnajokull-the-sound-of/ #### feelSpace Belt — Peter König (2005) - Type: Research prototype · Organisms: Human body, Animals - Idea: Humans can learn a sense that other animals have, if it is worn long enough. - What it is: A belt of vibration motors in which the motor facing north always buzzes; after weeks of wearing it, participants reported a changed sense of space. - How it works: Electronic compass driving 13 vibrotactile elements; six-week training study with sleep and navigation tests. - Paper: https://doi.org/10.1088/1741-2560/2/4/r02 (Journal of Neural Engineering 2005) - Video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0po8YOA-17U - Project page: https://www.feelspace.de/en/ #### Eyeborg (Cyborg Antenna) — Neil Harbisson (2004) - Type: Artwork · Organisms: Human body - Idea: A new sense can become part of a person's body and identity. - What it is: An antenna osseointegrated in Harbisson's skull that converts light frequencies, including infrared and ultraviolet, into sound vibrations he hears through bone. - How it works: Camera sensor on an antenna feeding a chip that maps hue to pitch, with bone conduction and Bluetooth for remote colour input. - Video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ygRNoieAnzI - Project page: https://www.cyborgarts.com/ #### What Is It Like to Be a Bat? — Thomas Nagel (1974) - Type: Paper · Organisms: Animals, Human body - Idea: Sensory simulation can approach another animal's world but never enter its experience. - What it is: A philosophy essay arguing that even if we knew everything about bat echolocation, we could not know what it is like for the bat. - How it works: Philosophical argument about subjective experience and the limits of physical explanation. - Paper: https://doi.org/10.2307/2183914 (The Philosophical Review 1974) #### Songs of the Humpback Whale — Roger Payne (1970) - Type: Artwork · Organisms: Animals - Idea: Hearing another species' song can change a whole society's relation to it. - What it is: An album of hydrophone recordings of humpback whale songs that sold over 100,000 copies and fuelled the 'Save the Whales' movement. - How it works: US Navy and field hydrophone recordings off Bermuda, released by CRM Records after Payne and McVay's analysis of song structure. - Video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sjkxUA041nM - Project page: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Songs_of_the_Humpback_Whale_(album) #### A Foray into the Worlds of Animals and Humans — Jakob von Uexküll (1934) - Type: Book & essay · Organisms: Animals, Insects, Human body - Idea: Every creature lives in a different world; design can let us visit some of them. - What it is: A short illustrated book describing how a tick, a bee or a dog each lives in its own sensory world, or Umwelt, made only of the signals it can perceive and act on. - How it works: Thought experiments and drawings (with Georg Kriszat) contrasting a scene as perceived by different species. - Images: https://covers.openlibrary.org/b/isbn/9780816659005-L.jpg?default=false - Project page: https://www.upress.umn.edu/9780816659005/a-foray-into-the-worlds-of-animals-and-humans/ ### Environmental Awareness & Eco-feedback Making air, water, soil, climate and biodiversity data felt in everyday life. #### ActuAir — Eleni Margariti (2024) - Type: Research prototype · Organisms: Human body - Idea: Air quality becomes noticeable when it changes the shape of the room. - What it is: A large shape- and colour-changing display in a smart office building that responds to air-quality data, evaluated with the people who work there. - How it works: Three prototype-led studies with 21 occupants over June–August 2022, analysed thematically. - Paper: https://doi.org/10.1145/3613904.3642396 (CHI 2024) - Video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ezX6QCKcnlA #### Hybrid Ecologies — Martín Tironi (2024) - Type: Artwork · Organisms: Ecosystems - Idea: Make the earthly cost of AI tangible at the moment it is used. - What it is: An installation where visitors generate AI images and the machine releases the amount of water that producing each image consumed in data-centre cooling, making the hidden water footprint of AI visible. - How it works: An image-generation interface is coupled to a pump that dispenses water in proportion to estimated per-image water consumption. - Paper: https://doi.org/10.21606/drs.2024.1104 (DRS 2024) - Video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NBnjZc1JOrs - Project page: https://artifact-archive.org/whole-archive #### Salt Minds — College for Creative Studies Biodesign Challenge team (2024) - Type: Speculative design · Organisms: Ecosystems - Idea: A shared colour language can make an invisible pollutant legible. - What it is: An addendum to the Munsell soil colour system that uses colour as evidence of salt damage to freshwater ecosystems, meant to connect scientists, policymakers and the public. - How it works: Soil and sediment samples affected by road salt are catalogued and translated into colour chips. - Images: https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/552dc0ffe4b070a9e1a6a215/1718644770738-RY1DC5B6L3C6GCUKX7TY/Screenshot+2024-06-17+at+1.17.54+PM.png https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/552dc0ffe4b070a9e1a6a215/1718644772306-IQL7KKUG72RJSRO3Q9OH/Screenshot+2024-06-17+at+1.18.07+PM.png - Project page: https://www.biodesignchallenge.org/college-for-creative-studies-2024 #### Me, the Hill and my Browser — Patricia Ciobanu (2022) - Type: Research prototype · Organisms: Ecosystems, Plants - Idea: Let slow natural change leak into fast screen time. - What it is: Sensors on a hill near Stockholm feed a browser extension that alters the look of the websites the designer visits as moisture, light and temperature change outside, sometimes making pages hard to read. - How it works: Humidity, temperature, light and soil-moisture sensors stream to a browser plug-in; studied through autobiographical design and think-aloud walks on the hill. - Paper: https://doi.org/10.1145/3546155.3546651 (NordiCHI 2022) - Images: https://figures.semanticscholar.org/189a15e82d793bc58b9fa07c2cfd30c07253d54e/4-Figure1-1.png - Project page: https://artifact-archive.org/whole-archive #### Foresta-Inclusive — Jane Tingley (2021) - Type: Artwork · Organisms: Plants, Ecosystems - Idea: Build infrastructure for listening to a forest's slow voice. - What it is: Three sculptural sensor pods mounted on forest trees measure soil temperature, rain, CO2, particulate matter and more, and stream the data to interactive gallery installations that make the slow life of trees perceptible. - How it works: WiFi-enabled eco-sensor pods send forest data to an Internet of Things platform that drives several art installations. - Video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9RgymypJYWE - Images: https://janetingley.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/11/Air-Pod-1.png - Project page: https://artifact-archive.org/whole-archive #### Solar Protocol — Tega Brain (2021) - Type: Artwork · Organisms: Ecosystems - Idea: Let the sun, not the user, decide how the web behaves. - What it is: A website hosted on a network of small solar-powered servers around the world; the page is served from whichever server has the most sunlight at that moment. - How it works: Raspberry Pi servers with solar panels and batteries, routing by solar logic; with Benedetta Piantella and Alex Nathanson. - Video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mMYzM4_MZI4 - Images: https://solarprotocol.net/images/full-map.jpeg - Project page: https://solarprotocol.net/ #### SpreeBerlin – The Voice of a River — Jakob Kukula (2021) - Type: Research prototype · Organisms: Ecosystems - Idea: A river can speak for itself if we build it a microphone. - What it is: A sensing buoy, app and website that let Berlin's river Spree report its pollution and state to citizens, giving the river a 'political' voice. - How it works: Measuring devices on a buoy record water quality and stream it to an accessible public interface. - Images: https://ars.electronica.art/starts-prize/files/2022/06/SpreeBerlin_Couple-1024x512.jpg - Project page: https://ars.electronica.art/starts-prize/en/spreeberlin/ #### Unequal Hours — Anna Madeleine Raupach (2021) - Type: Artwork · Organisms: Ecosystems, Animals, Plants - Idea: A clock that keeps more than human time. - What it is: A public clock at the Canberra Museum and Gallery whose coloured ribbons link its hands to the cycles of nonhuman entities, showing how their times interweave with ours. - How it works: Stepper motors, electronics, acrylic, ribbon, swivels and audio drive multiple hands set to ecological cycles. - Video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=W8eVFRb9h4U - Images: https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/54c56d73e4b070722976794a/7730d3e7-ba4e-4c4c-a90a-04426c4c7188/CMAG+Gallery+4_Raupach_02.jpg https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/54c56d73e4b070722976794a/faa5bff0-f5c5-42a9-b17e-2d3cb1285919/AnnaMadeleineRaupach_UnequalHours_2021_03.jpg - Project page: https://artifact-archive.org/whole-archive #### Allochronic Cycles — Cesar & Lois (2020) - Type: Artwork · Organisms: Plants, Ecosystems - Idea: Picture intelligence as learning from the out-of-sync timescales of other life. - What it is: A kinetic wall artwork of spinning disks set to different timescales, from the cosmos and evolution to Arabidopsis growth and virus cycles, while an AI forecasts how fast human activity disturbs them. - How it works: Motorised concentric disks are programmed to distinct natural cycles; a time-forecasting AI modulates them in response to human carbon impact. - Video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yD2J4rlIouA - Images: http://cesarandlois.org/wp-content/uploads/ac-banner.jpg http://cesarandlois.org/wp-content/uploads/AI-1024x755.jpg - Project page: https://artifact-archive.org/whole-archive #### Climate Clock — Climate Clock (Gan Golan & Andrew Boyd) (2020) - Type: Artwork · Organisms: Ecosystems, Human body - Idea: Turn an abstract carbon budget into a deadline on a clock. - What it is: A countdown clock on the Metronome in New York's Union Square showing how long until the world's carbon budget for 1.5 °C is used up, alongside a 'lifeline' of renewable energy share. - How it works: Real-time calculation from Mercator Research Institute (MCC) carbon budget data on a large LED display. - Video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t8uepJMWbuo - Images: https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/7/74/Climate_Clock_NYC.jpg/960px-Climate_Clock_NYC.jpg - Project page: https://climateclock.world/ #### Asunder — Tega Brain, Julian Oliver (2019) - Type: Artwork · Organisms: Ecosystems - Idea: Let an AI optimise the planet and watch the absurdity of treating nature as a system to solve. - What it is: A 'responsible environmental manager' that uses a supercomputer to generate proposals for altering real places, from rerouting rivers to removing cities, to stay within planetary limits. - How it works: Climate and geographic data, a state-of-the-art climate model and generative adversarial imagery running on a supercomputer, with Julian Oliver and Bengt Sjölén. - Video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=emzSsmAIw6E - Images: https://freight.cargo.site/w/300/i/c88f6aeedc51fb4a0cf7c386760011e1c0a64571ea61410a3e436914a9358a7e/asunder.jpeg - Project page: https://tegabrain.com/Asunder #### Atmospheric Forest — Rasa Smite & Raitis Smits (2019) - Type: Artwork · Organisms: Plants, Ecosystems - Idea: Make the invisible breathing of trees under climate stress perceptible. - What it is: An immersive installation that visualises how the Pfynwald pine forest in the Swiss Alps breathes out volatile organic compounds under drought, based on data from a forest turned into a living observatory. - How it works: VOC and tree-physiology data from Swiss research institute WSL are rendered as a 3D visualisation (also in VR). - Video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bvxWbEK0lCY - Project page: https://zkm.de/en/exhibition/2020/05/critical-zones #### Symbiosia — Thijs Biersteker (2019) - Type: Artwork · Organisms: Plants - Idea: Give trees a visual voice about their environment, in human time. - What it is: A real-time installation at the Fondation Cartier, Paris, in which twelve sensors on two trees measure moisture, temperature, CO2 and light, and an algorithm draws a new tree ring every second instead of every year. - How it works: Sensor data from the trees feeds a generative algorithm that renders rings whose shape reflects the trees' responses, with plant neurobiologist Stefano Mancuso. - Video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0AMH239bEG8 - Images: https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5d80d9eeb97e2f5b4a6ceb62/1583048194961-J2B9LFJCZHFAAFR91EK3/2.003.jpeg http://static1.squarespace.com/static/5d80d9eeb97e2f5b4a6ceb62/t/5d8c996d1d33674f2b89377c/1571932498263/websitedesign.001.jpeg?format=1500w - Project page: https://artifact-archive.org/whole-archive #### The Room of Change — Giorgia Lupi (2019) - Type: Artwork · Organisms: Ecosystems - Idea: Layer global and local data at several reading distances so environmental change can be felt from macro to micro scale. - What it is: A 30-metre hand-crafted data tapestry that opened the XXII Triennale di Milano, Broken Nature, showing how land use, climate, species and populations have changed over past centuries and are projected to change; details appear as visitors step closer. - How it works: Multiple environmental and social datasets were drawn as a hand-made woven data visualisation with a timeline from past to future, read as a single long wall. - Images: https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/550de105e4b05c49fa2bba03/1551454743498-G6G390S3BRZ1156W8J5C/FQ6A4519+-+%C2%A9+La+Triennale+di+Milano+-+foto+Gianluca+Di+Ioia.jpg https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/550de105e4b05c49fa2bba03/1551454899607-8OTOGLGYXBBMRC9OPRIW/FQ6A3793+-+%C2%A9+La+Triennale+di+Milano+-+foto+Gianluca+Di+Ioia.jpg - Project page: https://artifact-archive.org/whole-archive #### Thermopower — Maya Livio (2019) - Type: Artwork · Organisms: Animals, Ecosystems - Idea: Borrow a scientific instrument's eye to see a climate-threatened animal's world. - What it is: A short film that follows the American pika's alpine tundra habitat through a year, using footage from a scientists' networked research camera to connect thermoregulation in animals and data centers. - How it works: Repurposes TundraCam, a steerable networked camera used to study the alpine tundra, as the film's main recording apparatus. - Paper: https://doi.org/10.1145/3491102.3501851 (CHI 2022) - Images: https://freight.cargo.site/w/1200/i/465d80e9997af6f883ae4f03c532cd992080d61cc4a494135deaa8fa33906f73/Thermopower_snow.png https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/b40f23f34184b94a6a810a2405a8d2f01ab7a49423c1be4f0b16457892eab338/Pika-cover-photo_darker-bottom.jpg - Project page: https://artifact-archive.org/whole-archive #### BirdCast — Cornell Lab of Ornithology (2018) - Type: Product & platform · Organisms: Animals, Ecosystems - Idea: Forecast birds like weather so people can act when it matters. - What it is: Nightly forecasts and live maps of bird migration across the US, made from weather radar, which power 'Lights Out' alerts asking cities to dim lights on heavy migration nights. - How it works: Machine learning models on NEXRAD radar and weather data, with Colorado State University and UMass Amherst. - Paper: https://doi.org/10.1126/science.aat7526 (Science 2018) - Video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nEyGw1cl1OQ - Project page: https://birdcast.info/ #### Firefly Sign (street lighting switched off for glow worms) — Marcus Foth (2018) - Type: Product & platform · Organisms: Insects - Idea: Sometimes the design move for other species is to turn technology off. - What it is: A roadside sign announces that street lights on a path are switched off from May to September so glow worms can find mates; people cycling or walking there at night must adapt. - How it works: A council policy of dimming street lights in breeding season, communicated by signage in South Gloucestershire, UK; cited by Foth and Caldwell. - Paper: https://doi.org/10.1145/3284389.3284495 (MAB 2018) - Images: https://figures.semanticscholar.org/0d5f03907558d13705935ba024d412f84d729508/6-Figure9-1.png - Project page: https://artifact-archive.org/whole-archive #### Warming Stripes — Ed Hawkins (2018) - Type: Artwork · Organisms: Ecosystems - Idea: Strip a chart down to colour and it can become a shared symbol. - What it is: A graphic of coloured vertical stripes, one per year, from blue (cool) to red (warm), showing temperature change since 1850 without axes or numbers. - How it works: Annual temperature anomalies mapped to a fixed colour scale; open site generates stripes for any country. - Video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1e21KiPMm88 - Images: https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/9/9b/GLOBAL-STRIPES-1850-2025-hires.png/960px-GLOBAL-STRIPES-1850-2025-hires.png - Project page: https://showyourstripes.info/ #### Community-Empowered Air Quality Monitoring System — CMU CREATE Lab (2017) - Type: Research prototype · Organisms: Human body, Ecosystems - Idea: Let communities see, sense and document their air themselves. - What it is: A system that combines time-lapse video of an industrial facility's smoke, community air sensors and smell reports so residents can build evidence of pollution events. - How it works: Web platform linking a high-resolution camera, low-cost sensors and crowdsourced reports, developed with Pittsburgh residents. - Paper: https://doi.org/10.1145/3025453.3025853 (CHI 2017) - Video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6JPGIyz42JY #### Pollution Pods — Michael Pinsky (2017) - Type: Artwork · Organisms: Human body - Idea: Let the body feel air-quality statistics. - What it is: Five linked geodesic domes that recreate the air of Tautra (Norway), London, New Delhi, Beijing and São Paulo, so visitors walk from clean to polluted air. - How it works: Safe mixtures of humidity, temperature and scent recreate each city's pollutant profile inside the domes. - Video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=I7nMME-3aC8 - Project page: https://www.michaelpinsky.com/project/pollution-pods/ #### Harvest — Julian Oliver (2016) - Type: Artwork · Organisms: Ecosystems - Idea: Tie computation directly to weather and to the problem it contributes to. - What it is: A wind turbine whose electricity powers computers that mine cryptocurrency; the profits are donated to climate change research. - How it works: Small wind turbine, battery bank and mining hardware in a field installation, first shown in Sweden. - Video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cuTGW0EUV6M - Images: https://julianoliver.com/projects/harvest/images/harvest.jpg - Project page: https://julianoliver.com/projects/harvest/ #### Pigeon Air Patrol — Plume Labs (2016) - Type: Research prototype · Organisms: Animals, Human body - Idea: An urban animal can become a messenger for the air everyone breathes. - What it is: Racing pigeons in London wore tiny backpacks measuring NO2 and ozone, and people could tweet the birds to get live air-quality readings. - How it works: Lightweight sensor and GPS backpacks with a Twitter bot, made with DigitasLBi and Twitter UK. - Video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=azAvor72l0w #### Smell Pittsburgh — CMU CREATE Lab (2016) - Type: Product & platform · Organisms: Human body - Idea: The human nose is a pollution sensor, and collective reports become evidence. - What it is: An app in which residents report bad odours with a rating and description; reports are mapped with air-monitor data and sent to the county health department. - How it works: Mobile reporting app, map visualisation and machine learning that predicts smell events from sensor data. - Paper: https://doi.org/10.1145/3301275.3302293 (IUI 2019) - Video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aOPyPfjJhBs - Project page: https://smellpgh.org/ #### Treepedia — MIT Senseable City Lab (2016) - Type: Product & platform · Organisms: Plants, Human body - Idea: Measure urban nature from the pedestrian's eye level, not from above. - What it is: A website that measures the 'Green View Index' of city streets from Google Street View images and compares canopy cover across cities. - How it works: Computer vision segmentation of street-level imagery into vegetation pixels, mapped per street segment. - Video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iDzQ-zbThSg - Images: http://senseable.mit.edu/treepedia/assets/og.png - Project page: https://senseable.mit.edu/treepedia #### Sensor.Community (Luftdaten) — Sensor.Community (2015) - Type: Product & platform · Organisms: Human body - Idea: A cheap, well-documented kit can scale into a continental sensing network. - What it is: A volunteer network of home-built particulate matter sensors, started in Stuttgart, that now has tens of thousands of sensors in over 70 countries on a live map. - How it works: NodeMCU microcontroller with an SDS011 particle sensor in drainpipe housing, uploading to open data servers. - Video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6ul4v3iNVe0 - Project page: https://sensor.community/en/ #### Smog Free Tower — Studio Roosegaarde (2015) - Type: Artwork · Organisms: Human body - Idea: Make clean air a place you can stand in and smog a thing you can hold. - What it is: A seven-metre tower that cleans surrounding air with positive ionisation; the captured carbon particles are compressed into 'Smog Free Rings'. - How it works: Ionisation-based air purifier using about 1,170 watts, shown in Rotterdam, Beijing, Tianjin, Kraków and elsewhere. - Video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1uMeuVxywBM - Images: https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/b/b2/Smog_free_tower_in_Beijing_03.jpg/960px-Smog_free_tower_in_Beijing_03.jpg - Project page: https://www.studioroosegaarde.net/project/smog-free-tower #### Waterlicht — Studio Roosegaarde (2015) - Type: Artwork · Organisms: Ecosystems, Human body - Idea: Make an abstract flood risk into a sea level you can stand under. - What it is: Waving lines of blue LED light and lenses flood a public square after dark, showing how high the water could rise without Dutch dikes; visitors walk beneath the virtual sea level. - How it works: Software-controlled LEDs and lenses project layered light lines at a set height; toured to Westervoort, Amsterdam Museumplein, New York and elsewhere. - Paper: https://doi.org/10.1145/3284389.3284495 (MAB 2018) - Video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LWzPm_ponkI - Images: https://cdn.prod.website-files.com/6683beecb76948bee8843558/66cfb15dd70d897cb22cfd9b_Waterlicht%20Roosegaarde.png_new.webp https://cdn.prod.website-files.com/6683beecb76948bee8843558/66c2e02fe9d04908dc6d1f24_8MAIN_Waterlicht_Roosegaarde_Loevestein_%40Daniel_result_new.webp - Project page: https://artifact-archive.org/whole-archive #### Global Forest Watch — World Resources Institute (2014) - Type: Product & platform · Organisms: Plants, Ecosystems - Idea: Make forest loss visible to anyone, almost as it happens. - What it is: An open online platform that shows tree cover loss and deforestation alerts worldwide from satellite data, updated weekly. - How it works: Landsat-based tree cover change maps (University of Maryland) and GLAD alerts on a web map with subscriptions. - Video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lTG-0brb98I - Images: https://www.globalforestwatch.org/preview.jpg - Project page: https://www.globalforestwatch.org/ #### Rainforest Connection Guardian — Rainforest Connection (2014) - Type: Product & platform · Organisms: Ecosystems, Animals - Idea: Give a forest ears and a phone line so it can report harm in real time. - What it is: Recycled smartphones with solar panels are hung high in rainforest trees to listen continuously; when they hear chainsaws or trucks, rangers receive alerts, and the recordings also track wildlife. - How it works: Solar-powered Android 'Guardian' devices stream audio over mobile networks to cloud models that detect illegal logging and species calls. - Video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xPK2Ch90xWo - Images: https://framerusercontent.com/images/nqlZBCfcFokkCz6ScVVTJWeI.png - Project page: https://rfcx.org/ #### A Song of Our Warming Planet — Daniel Crawford (2013) - Type: Artwork · Organisms: Ecosystems - Idea: Hearing warming as rising pitch makes a trend felt in a few minutes. - What it is: A cello piece in which each note is a year of global temperature from 1880 on, rising in pitch as the planet warms. - How it works: NASA GISS temperature records mapped to pitch across the cello's range. - Video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Z7UCUoWmv9I - Project page: https://danielcrawford.org/ #### Smart Citizen Kit — Fab Lab Barcelona (2012) - Type: Product & platform · Organisms: Human body, Ecosystems - Idea: Environmental data about a neighbourhood can be produced by the people who live there. - What it is: An open-source sensor kit that residents install at home to measure air quality, noise, light and temperature and share on a public map. - How it works: Arduino-compatible board with gas, particle and sound sensors, Wi-Fi upload and an open data platform. - Video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pAUvh1aY-oY - Project page: https://smartcitizen.me/ #### Safecast — Safecast (2011) - Type: Product & platform · Organisms: Human body, Ecosystems - Idea: When official data fail, citizens can build their own trusted measurements. - What it is: A volunteer project that built open-source Geiger counters after the Fukushima disaster and published over 150 million radiation readings as open data, later adding air quality. - How it works: bGeigie Nano kits mounted on cars and bikes logging GPS-tagged readings to an open map. - Video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gXa4Q9plVGs - Images: https://safecast.org/wp-content/uploads/2019/12/bgphoto-l6.jpg - Project page: https://safecast.org/ #### Grassroots Balloon Mapping — Public Lab (2010) - Type: Product & platform · Organisms: Ecosystems, Human body - Idea: A cheap balloon can give communities their own view from above. - What it is: A method using cameras lifted by helium balloons and kites to make aerial maps; volunteers used it to document the Deepwater Horizon oil spill on the Gulf Coast. - How it works: Point-and-shoot camera in a soda-bottle rig, tethered balloon, and MapKnitter software to stitch images. - Video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vrCBvOAA7Ns - Project page: https://publiclab.org/ #### Particle Falls — Andrea Polli (2010) - Type: Artwork · Organisms: Human body - Idea: Show invisible pollution as a beautiful, legible public image. - What it is: A large projection on a building facade that shows a blue waterfall, with bursts of orange and white particles as a nearby sensor detects fine particulate pollution in real time. - How it works: Nephelometer measuring PM2.5 drives generative projection software; shown in San Jose, Philadelphia, Pittsburgh and other cities. - Video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=m5Vwi8VSasQ - Images: https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/b/b2/Andrea_Polli_2013_Particle_Falls_056.JPG/960px-Andrea_Polli_2013_Particle_Falls_056.JPG #### The Design of Eco-Feedback Technology — Jon E. Froehlich (2010) - Type: Paper · Organisms: Ecosystems, Human body - Idea: Showing people their environmental impact only works if the display fits how behaviour actually changes. - What it is: A CHI paper, with Leah Findlater and James Landay, that surveys eco-feedback technology and bridges HCI and environmental psychology. - How it works: Reviews 89 environmental psychology studies and HCI eco-feedback systems and derives design dimensions. - Paper: https://doi.org/10.1145/1753326.1753629 (CHI 2010) #### inAir — Eric Paulos (2010) - Type: Research prototype · Organisms: Human body - Idea: Making invisible indoor air visible changes everyday habits like cooking and cleaning. - What it is: A home device, by Sunyoung Kim and Eric Paulos, that measures indoor fine particulates, shows the level on a display and lets households share readings through a social network. - How it works: Particle counter with a visual display and social sharing, deployed in homes for four weeks. - Paper: https://doi.org/10.1145/1753326.1753605 (CHI 2010) - Images: https://figures.semanticscholar.org/134bfc9d694708e02db5cf218728b3bfeb61803d/1-Figure1-1.png #### Common Sense: Street Sweeper Air Sensing — Eric Paulos (2009) - Type: Research prototype · Organisms: Human body, Ecosystems - Idea: Put sensors on vehicles that already cover every street, and give the data to communities who need it. - What it is: A project that mounted air quality sensors on San Francisco street sweepers and worked with community activists in West Oakland to map pollution. - How it works: Vehicle-mounted CO, NOx and O3 sensors with GPS, plus fieldwork with environmental justice groups (Intel Research Berkeley). - Paper: https://doi.org/10.1145/1518701.1518762 (CHI 2009) - Images: https://figures.semanticscholar.org/4356d8905fe813da608acf865f1a02cf6a74302e/3-Figure1-1.png #### Ecosia — Ecosia (2009) - Type: Product & platform · Organisms: Plants, Ecosystems - Idea: Attach a visible ecological counter to a mundane digital habit. - What it is: A search engine that spends its advertising profit on tree-planting projects and shows each user a running count of the trees their searches have helped fund. - How it works: Ad-funded search with a per-user tree counter, monthly financial reports and planting partners in many countries. - Video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yRDA1ynrHTU - Images: https://www.ecosia.org/static/og/facebook.jpg - Project page: https://www.ecosia.org/ #### UbiGreen — Jon E. Froehlich (2009) - Type: Research prototype · Organisms: Animals, Plants, Human body - Idea: Put ambient nature imagery on the lock screen to reflect everyday environmental choices. - What it is: A mobile app that senses how people travel and shows green trips on the phone's wallpaper as a growing tree or a polar bear whose ice floe expands. - How it works: Semi-automatic activity sensing with a wearable sensor and phone, plus ambient wallpaper; three-week field study with 13 participants. - Paper: https://doi.org/10.1145/1518701.1518861 (CHI 2009) - Images: https://figures.semanticscholar.org/fc3cbcf95b137ffdf8cb236a9af1248e30e96d7c/1-Figure1-1.png https://figures.semanticscholar.org/fc3cbcf95b137ffdf8cb236a9af1248e30e96d7c/4-Figure3-1.png #### Weather Scores — Nathalie Miebach (2009) - Type: Artwork · Organisms: Ecosystems - Idea: Weather data can become both an object and a piece of music. - What it is: Woven basket-like sculptures that encode storm data such as wind, pressure and temperature, which also serve as musical scores performed by musicians. - How it works: Hand-woven reed and wood structures mapped from meteorological records, translated into scores with collaborating musicians. - Video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MbhNaj88uL4 - Project page: https://www.nathaliemiebach.com/ #### Nuage Vert — HeHe (Helen Evans & Heiko Hansen) (2008) - Type: Artwork · Organisms: Human body, Ecosystems - Idea: Draw on the emissions themselves to make consumption visible in the sky. - What it is: A green laser traced the outline of the steam cloud from the Salmisaari power plant in Helsinki; the cloud grew as local residents cut their electricity use. - How it works: Tracking laser projection with real-time consumption data from the utility, part of the Pixelache festival. - Video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yFKTG3UqKGc - Project page: http://www.hehe.org/ #### The Idea of a Tree — mischer'traxler studio (2008) - Type: Artwork · Organisms: Ecosystems - Idea: Let the sun, not the designer, decide the form, so an object carries the trace of its day like a tree ring. - What it is: A solar-powered machine that pulls thread through glue and dye and winds it around a mould; the more sun on a given day, the thicker and darker the object, so each stool or lamp records the weather of the day it was made. - How it works: Photovoltaic panels power the winding machine directly; varying sunlight changes winding speed and dye uptake, and production stops at sunset. - Video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-5t2q_hSpgc - Images: https://mischertraxler.com/wp/wp-content/uploads/2017/11/mischertraxler_tioat_travelmachine.jpg https://mischertraxler.com/wp/wp-content/uploads/2017/11/the_idea_of_a_tree_all_different_trees-848x1200.jpg - Project page: https://artifact-archive.org/whole-archive #### Tangible Earth — Shinichi Takemura (2005) - Type: Product & platform · Organisms: Ecosystems - Idea: Holding the planet in your hands makes its systems feel close. - What it is: A one-to-ten-million-scale interactive digital globe that people spin by hand to see real-time clouds, earthquakes, ocean temperatures and other planetary data. - How it works: Spherical rear-projection screen with a touch-sensitive rotation interface and live data feeds. - Video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sGDT_gkW0_0 ### Digital & Mediated Nature Nature rendered, simulated or augmented: VR forests, digital twins, generative ecosystems, technological nature. #### Large Nature Model — Refik Anadol (2024) - Type: Artwork · Organisms: Plants, Animals, Ecosystems - Idea: A foundation model of nature raises the question of who owns the digital image of the living world. - What it is: An open-source generative AI model trained only on images and sounds of nature, gathered with institutions such as the Smithsonian and the Natural History Museum London, and shown as immersive installations. - How it works: Diffusion-style model trained on a curated archive of nature data, including the studio's own rainforest recordings. - Video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4oXaOvObsxA - Project page: https://refikanadol.com/works/large-nature-model/ #### Under the Shade — Francesca Valsecchi (2024) - Type: Research prototype · Organisms: Animals - Idea: Use sound to bring an overlooked urban bird into attention. - What it is: A sound installation of loudspeakers that plays a generated soundscape of crows, letting people listen to crows and their calls away from the birds' own habitat. - How it works: Field recordings of crows are arranged into a spatial soundscape across multiple speakers. - Paper: https://doi.org/10.21606/drs.2024.752 (DRS 2024) - Project page: https://artifact-archive.org/whole-archive #### Terra Nil — Free Lives (2023) - Type: Product & platform · Organisms: Plants, Animals, Ecosystems - Idea: Invert a genre's goal from building up to restoring and leaving. - What it is: A 'reverse city builder' in which players turn wasteland into thriving biomes and then recycle all their machines and leave no trace. - How it works: Strategy game with ecological succession rules for soil, water, climate and species. - Video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=F8eYqNNxICE - Images: https://shared.fastly.steamstatic.com/store_item_assets/steam/apps/1210320/capsule_616x353.jpg - Project page: https://store.steampowered.com/app/1210320/Terra_Nil/ #### Endling: Extinction is Forever — Herobeat Studios (2022) - Type: Product & platform · Organisms: Animals, Ecosystems - Idea: Experience ecological collapse from the viewpoint of an animal trying to survive it. - What it is: A video game in which the player is the last mother fox on an Earth ravaged by humans, protecting her cubs while forests are cut and rivers polluted. - How it works: A side-scrolling survival game where the environment degrades day by day as a consequence of off-screen human activity. - Paper: https://doi.org/10.21606/drs.2024.606 (DRS 2024) - Video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kiM2_XB_HZE - Images: https://herobeatstudios.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/04/Endling-3.jpg https://herobeatstudios.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/04/Endling-Win64-Shipping-2021-12-19-11-30-22.jpg - Project page: https://artifact-archive.org/whole-archive #### Feral Map — Jaz Hee-jeong Choi, Markéta Dolejšová (2022) - Type: Research prototype · Organisms: Ecosystems, Plants, Animals - Idea: Map a forest through stories rather than timber volumes. - What it is: An online map of forest stories, creatures and impressions gathered on Open Forest walks, browsed without a fixed structure so that unexpected links between forest beings appear. - How it works: Participants walk local forests, record observations and co-write stories from forest creatures' perspectives, which are posted to a non-hierarchical web map. - Paper: https://doi.org/10.1145/3537797.3537864 (PDC 2022) - Images: https://figures.semanticscholar.org/b51fa084e4263a11776b6d17e762e205152774b2/3-Figure2-1.png - Project page: https://artifact-archive.org/whole-archive #### Moss Garden of Resonating Microcosms — teamLab (2022) - Type: Artwork · Organisms: Plants, Ecosystems - Idea: Let wind, visitors and moss share one interactive surface. - What it is: An outdoor moss garden at teamLab Planets in Tokyo filled with egg-shaped 'ovoids' that change colour and emit sound when pushed by people or wind, rippling across the garden. - How it works: Self-righting light objects with sensors, LEDs and speakers placed over living moss. - Video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uzLHCg6h_Yg - Project page: https://www.teamlab.art/ #### Smart Forests Atlas — Michelle Westerlaken, Jennifer Gabrys (2022) - Type: Product & platform · Organisms: Ecosystems, Plants - Idea: Organise forest knowledge like a garden that grows, not like a finished archive. - What it is: An open-data research platform on digital technologies in forests, built as a 'digital garden' where stories, data and impressions can be browsed without a fixed structure. - How it works: Designed with a digital tools cooperative around six design qualities meant to counter colonial and anthropocentric habits of gardening and archiving. - Paper: https://doi.org/10.1145/3537797.3537804 (PDC 2022) - Video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q4Qks4wUiF0 - Images: https://fra1.digitaloceanspaces.com/smartforests/images/SmartForests_Atlas_Home.original.png - Project page: https://artifact-archive.org/whole-archive #### Machine Hallucinations: Nature Dreams — Refik Anadol (2021) - Type: Artwork · Organisms: Plants, Ecosystems - Idea: An AI trained on nature images shows us our collective, mediated image of nature. - What it is: A series of large LED 'data paintings' in which a generative model trained on hundreds of millions of nature photographs morphs through landscapes and flowers. - How it works: StyleGAN-type models trained on publicly available nature photos, rendered as fluid pigment-like animations. - Video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yiPidm0TZ48 - Project page: https://refikanadol.com/works/machine-hallucinations-nature-dreams/ #### Alba: A Wildlife Adventure — ustwo games (2020) - Type: Product & platform · Organisms: Animals, Ecosystems - Idea: A game about noticing wildlife can also plant trees in the world. - What it is: A game in which a girl photographs and identifies the birds and animals of a Mediterranean island and campaigns to save its nature reserve; the studio pledged to plant a real tree for each player. - How it works: Open-world game with a camera-based species-ID mechanic, partnered with Ecologi for tree planting. - Video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=a-Eu9WE3grA - Images: https://www.albawildlife.com/alba-a-wildlife-adventure-ustwo.jpg - Project page: https://www.albawildlife.com/ #### Beyond Blue — E-Line Media (2020) - Type: Product & platform · Organisms: Animals, Ecosystems - Idea: Pair play with real science footage so the game points back to the actual ocean. - What it is: An ocean exploration game in which players scan sperm whales, sharks and reef life as a marine biologist, with unlockable mini-documentaries from BBC Blue Planet II. - How it works: Narrative game developed with ocean scientists and the BBC Natural History Unit. - Video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pOAWBCXpo6k - Images: https://shared.fastly.steamstatic.com/store_item_assets/steam/apps/1057090/capsule_616x353.jpg - Project page: https://www.beyondbluegame.com/ #### Can Simulated Nature Support Mental Health? — Matthew H. E. M. Browning (2020) - Type: Paper · Organisms: Plants, Ecosystems, Human body - Idea: Virtual nature helps, but it maintains mood rather than lifting it as the real place does. - What it is: An experiment comparing six minutes outdoors in nature, a 360-degree VR video recorded at the same spot, and an indoor setting: both nature conditions were restorative, but positive mood rose only outdoors. - How it works: Experiment with undergraduate students measuring skin conductance, restorativeness and mood before and after exposure. - Paper: https://doi.org/10.3389/fpsyg.2019.02667 (Frontiers in Psychology 2020) - Images: https://figures.semanticscholar.org/d64c8df172187348b953c98800e989e96e3bedc6/4-Figure2-1.png #### Salvaging Birds — Maya Livio (2019) - Type: Artwork · Organisms: Animals - Idea: Ask what is lost when birds become data, and generate the birds the data leaves out. - What it is: A film and media project that creates AI-generated female, intersex and queer birds and birdsong to fill the male bias in avian conservation datasets, woven with interviews of ornithologists. - How it works: Custom-trained generative models produce speculative bird images and songs from existing recordings of female or unsexed birds. - Paper: https://doi.org/10.1145/3491102.3501851 (CHI 2022) - Video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WK4zhtUvNIQ - Images: https://freight.cargo.site/w/1200/i/33450d8c9c40b1e702db1a65d9aa224dccf5284653e706ca2acdc3bebe2bb2cc/Salvaging-Birds-Still-3_Livio.png https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/fcdd8840acb35bccf15624e48cc17c524543cec2ccd6d47c17a1b54662ff4978/Salvaging-Birds_Still-6.png - Project page: https://artifact-archive.org/whole-archive #### Awavena — Lynette Wallworth (2018) - Type: Artwork · Organisms: Plants, Ecosystems, Human body - Idea: Digital nature can carry Indigenous ways of seeing the forest, made with the community. - What it is: A VR work made with the Yawanawá people of the Brazilian Amazon, in which the forest is shown as seen in the visions of Hushahu, the community's first female shaman. - How it works: Volumetric capture and particle-based rendering developed with the community; premiered at Sundance 2018. - Video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zIM8mOYvPec #### Eco — Strange Loop Games (2018) - Type: Product & platform · Organisms: Plants, Animals, Ecosystems - Idea: A shared, fragile ecosystem makes players negotiate laws to protect it. - What it is: A multiplayer game in which players build a civilisation on a planet with a simulated ecosystem; overhunting, pollution or deforestation can cause extinctions and collapse. - How it works: Agent-based ecosystem simulation with species populations, pollution and climate, plus in-game government and economy. - Video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ud_refZuQoA - Images: https://shared.fastly.steamstatic.com/store_item_assets/steam/apps/382310/7fbe4fbde5ef9c1ccb70a176da3c6736f6c78231/capsule_616x353.jpg - Project page: https://play.eco/ #### Digital-Nature Hybrids in a Walled Kitchen Garden — Liz Edwards, Paul Coulton (2017) - Type: Paper · Organisms: Plants, Human body - Idea: Interpretation in a garden can grow with the garden. - What it is: Digital-nature artefacts designed to engage visitors in a National Trust walled kitchen garden, iterated through research through design. - How it works: Research-through-design iterations of interpretation artefacts, reflecting on materials, values, engagement and place. - Paper: https://doi.org/10.1162/desi_a_00452 (Design Issues 2017) - Images: https://figures.semanticscholar.org/7784d144d4c4b4febd44c76e68930a6d8fc0ce39/4-Figure1-1.png https://figures.semanticscholar.org/7784d144d4c4b4febd44c76e68930a6d8fc0ce39/8-Figure3-1.png - Project page: https://doi.org/10.1162/desi_a_00452 #### Everything — David OReilly (2017) - Type: Product & platform · Organisms: Animals, Plants, Ecosystems - Idea: Play as every thing, so no one perspective is central. - What it is: A video game in which the player can become anything in the universe, from a bacterium or an animal to a planet or a galaxy, and move between scales, narrated by lectures of Alan Watts. - How it works: A procedural open world lets the player possess any object or creature and zoom between scales; the gameplay film ran as an autoplay artwork. - Paper: https://doi.org/10.21606/drs.2024.606 (DRS 2024) - Video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HdJk8ROpuEo - Project page: https://artifact-archive.org/whole-archive #### Franchise Freedom — Studio Drift (2017) - Type: Artwork · Organisms: Animals - Idea: Rebuild a natural spectacle with machines and ask what freedom the flock has. - What it is: A night performance in which hundreds of lit drones fly as a flock, following an algorithm based on research into starling murmurations. - How it works: Swarm-control software modelled on flocking rules, run on custom drones; shown at Art Basel Miami, Burning Man and Central Park. - Video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YnhoAE2T8xg - Images: https://studiodrift.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/02/1.-Studio-Drift_Franchise-Freedom_ABurning-Man-Festival_USA_2018_Rahi-Rezvani.jpg - Project page: https://studiodrift.com/work/franchise-freedom/ #### Inner Garden — Joan Sol Roo (2017) - Type: Research prototype · Organisms: Ecosystems, Human body - Idea: Map inner states to a living landscape you can see and touch. - What it is: An augmented sandbox in which people shape terrain by hand; their breathing and heart rate change the weather, sea and plant growth in the projected miniature world, supporting mindfulness. - How it works: Kinect depth sensing and projection over sand, with physiological sensors and a VR mode. - Paper: https://doi.org/10.1145/3025453.3025743 (CHI 2017) - Video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JLm5kofOIIQ #### Nature Treks VR — Greener Games (2017) - Type: Product & platform · Organisms: Plants, Animals, Ecosystems - Idea: Virtual nature as a relaxation tool, used where real nature is out of reach, such as hospitals. - What it is: A VR app of calm natural environments, from forests to underwater and space, where users can plant trees, call animals and change the weather. - How it works: Game-engine environments for consumer headsets with simple magical interactions and ambient audio. - Video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-bIWI_5ZOEk - Images: https://shared.fastly.steamstatic.com/store_item_assets/steam/apps/587580/capsule_616x353.jpg - Project page: https://store.steampowered.com/app/587580/Nature_Treks_VR/ #### Walden, a game — Tracy Fullerton (2017) - Type: Artwork · Organisms: Plants, Animals, Ecosystems - Idea: A game can reward attention and slowness instead of conquest. - What it is: A first-person game that simulates Henry David Thoreau's two years at Walden Pond; players must survive but are rewarded for noticing nature and reading, and neglecting beauty drains their inspiration. - How it works: Open-world simulation of the seasons built from Thoreau's text, developed over ten years at the USC Game Innovation Lab. - Video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eoc8OnYvZfw - Images: https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5972908bf7e0ab1a5fe04927/1504130885549-EURUQCDKA8TBUTWVBDVR/Sunset_summer_300dpi.jpg - Project page: https://www.waldengame.com/ #### Avian Attractor — Judith Doyle (2016) - Type: Artwork · Organisms: Animals, Human body - Idea: Put human and bird movement into the same frame to suggest kinship. - What it is: An interactive installation that blends recorded images and video of birds with live camera footage of visitors, producing abstract composite scenes where birds and humans share one image. - How it works: Live video of visitors is composited in real time with archival bird footage; shown in the CHI 2016 interactivity programme. - Paper: https://doi.org/10.1145/2851581.2891093 (CHI 2016 EA) - Project page: https://artifact-archive.org/whole-archive #### Graffiti Nature — teamLab (2016) - Type: Artwork · Organisms: Animals, Plants, Ecosystems - Idea: Let children draw species into an ecosystem and watch the food web act on them. - What it is: Children colour paper animals and flowers that are scanned and come alive in a projected ecosystem, where creatures eat, multiply and die depending on what else lives there. - How it works: Drawing scanner, real-time simulation of predator–prey rules and floor and wall projection. - Video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OomhbW3bffs - Images: https://teamlab-site.imagewave.pictures/b5EBo9Uo-OK6SM09ZTkEZQ/dkbiBVbLMaAZoA8VG9gJx3/width=1200,format=jpeg - Project page: https://www.teamlab.art/w/graffitinature/ #### The Woods (Being Radiotropic) — Tega Brain (2016) - Type: Artwork · Organisms: Plants, Human body - Idea: Make network infrastructure negotiate with a plant instead of serving only humans. - What it is: A wireless router controlled by a houseplant: the plant photographs itself and injects its images into the websites people load, and if it is doing badly it can kick users off its network. - How it works: A Linux router with a camera and sensors approximating the plant's condition rewrites web content and throttles access; part of the Being Radiotropic router series shown at Eyebeam. - Images: https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/f092d5ebc4b9d858a85a56d59499caa97579f601bf515052bb6df7253355b452/theWoods-small.jpg https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/8b3bdaf62ece6629c69bcbcaea53d62f8609dbcf05d678917d1e0a24e4e88073/plant-small.jpg - Project page: https://artifact-archive.org/whole-archive #### theBlu: Whale Encounter — Wevr (2016) - Type: Artwork · Organisms: Animals, Ecosystems - Idea: Scale is what VR does best: meeting an animal at its true size. - What it is: A short room-scale VR piece in which a life-size blue whale swims past the viewer standing on the deck of a shipwreck. - How it works: Real-time rendered underwater scene for HTC Vive, part of the theBlu series. - Video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hUpkVa4UkMg - Project page: https://wevr.com/theblu #### A Forest Where Gods Live — teamLab (2015) - Type: Artwork · Organisms: Plants, Ecosystems - Idea: Digital art can make people look again at an old forest instead of replacing it. - What it is: A night-time exhibition in the 50-hectare Mifuneyama Rakuen garden in Kyushu, where projections and lights on ancient trees, caves, rocks and ponds respond to visitors. - How it works: Interactive projection mapping and responsive lighting placed across the garden's natural features. - Video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EFbxQIQ8IxM - Project page: https://www.teamlab.art/ #### Atmoph Window — Atmoph (2015) - Type: Product & platform · Organisms: Ecosystems, Human body - Idea: The plasma window became a consumer product: consider what it gives and what it takes. - What it is: A wall-mounted screen framed like a window that plays thousands of long-take landscape videos with sound, including live views, to bring distant nature into rooms. - How it works: Wi-Fi display with a library of 4K landscape footage and ambient sound, controlled from a phone app. - Video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PvHZuNk6LYs - Images: https://webres-atmoph.global.ssl.fastly.net/og/og_top_yo_v3.jpg - Project page: https://atmoph.com/en #### Digital Nature — Yoichi Ochiai (2015) - Type: Book & essay · Organisms: Ecosystems, Human body - Idea: Stop treating the digital as the opposite of nature; treat it as the next layer of nature. - What it is: A concept and research programme, laid out in talks and in the 2018 book 'Digital Nature', that describes a future where computers and nature merge into one environment. - How it works: Builds the argument through the Digital Nature Group's works in acoustic levitation, holography and computational fabrication. - Video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BGwrRFjmhkU - Project page: https://digitalnature.slis.tsukuba.ac.jp/ #### Flowers and People, Cannot be Controlled but Live Together — teamLab (2015) - Type: Artwork · Organisms: Plants, Human body - Idea: A digital ecosystem can respond to human presence the way a real one does. - What it is: A room of digital flowers that grow, bloom and scatter in real time through the seasons; flowers grow faster where people stand still and wither when touched. - How it works: Real-time computer rendering (not pre-recorded) with visitor tracking across projected walls. - Video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=arafX3Es6JQ - Project page: https://www.teamlab.art/ #### CoeLux Artificial Skylight — CoeLux (2014) - Type: Product & platform · Organisms: Ecosystems, Human body - Idea: Simulate the physics of the sky, not just its picture. - What it is: An artificial skylight that reproduces the blue sky and a sharp, warm sun with realistic depth, for windowless rooms and basements. - How it works: LED source and nanostructured material that reproduces Rayleigh scattering, from Paolo Di Trapani's research at the University of Insubria. - Video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0ot649VWF8Q - Project page: https://www.coelux.com/ #### Proteus — Ed Key & David Kanaga (2013) - Type: Artwork · Organisms: Plants, Animals, Ecosystems - Idea: Exploration and listening can be the whole point of a nature game. - What it is: A game about walking around a procedurally generated island through the seasons, where every plant, creature and weather event makes music. - How it works: Procedural terrain and flora generation with a generative soundtrack by David Kanaga tied to objects in view. - Video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rpkpuoq6y9s - Images: https://shared.fastly.steamstatic.com/store_item_assets/steam/apps/219680/capsule_616x353.jpg - Project page: https://store.steampowered.com/app/219680/Proteus/ #### earth.nullschool.net — Cameron Beccario (2013) - Type: Product & platform · Organisms: Ecosystems - Idea: Let people spin the planet and watch its air and water move. - What it is: An animated globe showing global winds, ocean currents, waves, temperature and pollution as flowing particles, updated every few hours from forecast models. - How it works: Browser visualisation of GFS, OSCAR and GEOS-5 data with D3 and canvas particle rendering. - Video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vs3eqRh7BXw - Images: https://earth.nullschool.net/sample.jpg - Project page: https://earth.nullschool.net/ #### Rain Room — Random International (2012) - Type: Artwork · Organisms: Human body - Idea: Technology can make a weather phenomenon respond to you, and that changes how rain feels. - What it is: A field of falling water that stops wherever visitors walk, so people can stand inside a downpour without getting wet. - How it works: 3D cameras track bodies and switch off solenoid valves in a ceiling grid above each person. - Video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FslABAyj2OA - Images: https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/5/5d/RainRoomSharjah.jpg/960px-RainRoomSharjah.jpg - Project page: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rain_Room #### Supertree Grove — Gardens by the Bay (2012) - Type: Product & platform · Organisms: Plants, Ecosystems - Idea: An engineered tree can carry real plants and real ecological functions. - What it is: Eighteen vertical gardens 25–50 metres tall in Singapore's Gardens by the Bay, clad in living plants, that collect rainwater, vent the conservatories and host nightly light and sound shows. - How it works: Steel frames with planting panels of over 160,000 plants, photovoltaic cells and ducts linked to the biomass-powered cooling system (Grant Associates). - Video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5UhnuddcAsE - Images: https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/5/5d/Supertree_Grove%2C_Gardens_by_the_Bay%2C_Singapore_-_20120712-02.jpg/960px-Supertree_Grove%2C_Gardens_by_the_Bay%2C_Singapore_-_20120712-02.jpg - Project page: https://www.gardensbythebay.com.sg/en/things-to-do/attractions/supertree-grove.html #### Wind Map — Fernanda Viégas & Martin Wattenberg (2012) - Type: Artwork · Organisms: Ecosystems - Idea: Invisible weather becomes a living landscape when drawn as motion. - What it is: A live web map of the winds across the US drawn as flowing white strokes, updated hourly from the National Digital Forecast Database; later acquired by MoMA. - How it works: Particle advection over hourly surface wind forecasts, rendered in the browser. - Video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LUCDmWTVlGo - Project page: http://hint.fm/wind/ #### Flower — thatgamecompany (2009) - Type: Artwork · Organisms: Plants, Ecosystems - Idea: Play as a natural force rather than a character. - What it is: A game in which the player is the wind, carrying a stream of petals across fields to make flowers bloom and bring colour back to a grey city. - How it works: Motion-controlled flight using the PlayStation Sixaxis controller over dense simulated grass fields. - Video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=s1oZnf3475c - Images: https://thatgamecompany.com/wp-content/uploads/thatgamecompany-games-bg-flower.jpg - Project page: https://thatgamecompany.com/flower/ #### A Plasma Display Window? The Shifting Baseline Problem — Peter H. Kahn Jr. (2008) - Type: Paper · Organisms: Plants, Ecosystems, Human body - Idea: A screen of nature is not a window onto nature, even if it looks the same. - What it is: An experiment in which office workers had a real window, a plasma screen showing a live HDTV nature view, or a blank wall; heart rate recovered faster with the real window than with the screen. - How it works: Controlled lab study with 90 participants measuring heart rate recovery after mild stress; companion field study in inside offices. - Paper: https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jenvp.2007.10.008 (Journal of Environmental Psychology 2008) - Images: https://figures.semanticscholar.org/46c2249904dd1bd634a5bb1fcc20f5fb5010887f/3-Figure1-1.png #### Fragile Future — Studio Drift (2008) - Type: Artwork · Organisms: Plants - Idea: Combine the most fragile natural form with electronics to ask what future they share. - What it is: Light sculptures in which real dandelion seed heads are glued seed by seed onto LEDs and connected by bronze circuits that can grow like a network. - How it works: Hand-harvested dandelions preserved and attached to LEDs on modular phosphor-bronze frames. - Video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Jg8YH32s2Mo - Images: https://studiodrift.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/02/FragileFuture_StudioDrift_CidadeMatarazzo_Brazil1.jpeg - Project page: https://studiodrift.com/work/fragile-future/ #### explore.org Live Nature Cams — explore.org (2008) - Type: Product & platform · Organisms: Animals, Ecosystems - Idea: Live, unedited nature can build attachment to individual wild animals at a distance. - What it is: A network of free live cameras, including Katmai's Brooks Falls bears and the Decorah eagle nest, watched by millions who follow individual animals through a season. - How it works: Solar-powered cameras streaming to YouTube and explore.org, with chat communities and events such as Fat Bear Week. - Video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=J7ZrIDvqlic - Images: https://explore.org/ExploreShareImage.jpg - Project page: https://explore.org/livecams #### Artificial Nature — Haru Ji & Graham Wakefield (2007) - Type: Artwork · Organisms: Ecosystems - Idea: Make digital nature alive: give it its own evolution rather than a scripted loop. - What it is: A series of immersive installations and VR worlds populated by evolving artificial organisms that feed, grow and reproduce in a simulated ecosystem that visitors disturb and nourish. - How it works: Real-time artificial life simulation with fluid dynamics and generative graphics, built in the authors' own software (e.g. Max/Gen). - Video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BODIzcZUr_o - Images: https://artificialnature.net/img/wae/thumbs/wae8.jpg - Project page: https://artificialnature.net/ #### Artificial Window View of Nature — Roger S. Ulrich (2005) - Type: Paper · Organisms: Plants, Ecosystems, Human body - Idea: If a screen must replace a window, give it the parallax and depth of a real one. - What it is: A CHI paper by Adnan Radikovic, John Leggett, John Keyser and Roger Ulrich describing a large display that renders a nature view which responds to the viewer's head position like a real window. - How it works: Head-tracked rendering of a 3D nature scene on a wall display for windowless rooms. - Paper: https://doi.org/10.1145/1056808.1057075 (CHI EA 2005) - Images: https://figures.semanticscholar.org/29456af02d6238ee92da426a357d157593f09b09/2-Figure1-1.png #### Hardware Companions? AIBO Discussion Forums — Peter H. Kahn Jr. (2003) - Type: Paper · Organisms: Animals, Human body - Idea: People attribute social life to robot animals while knowing they are machines, which changes what 'pet' means. - What it is: A CHI paper, with Batya Friedman and Jennifer Hagman, analysing 6,438 posts from online AIBO forums to see whether owners treat the robot dog as an artefact or as a living companion. - How it works: Content analysis of forum postings coded for technological essences, life-like essences, mental states, social rapport and moral standing. - Paper: https://doi.org/10.1145/642611.642660 (CHI 2003) - Images: https://figures.semanticscholar.org/48a35277207f32bb46b982a5c43ead2ec09dca89/2-Figure1-1.png https://figures.semanticscholar.org/48a35277207f32bb46b982a5c43ead2ec09dca89/5-Figure2-1.png #### The Weather Project — Olafur Eliasson (2003) - Type: Artwork · Organisms: Human body, Ecosystems - Idea: An obviously artificial sun made people talk about weather and togetherness. - What it is: An artificial sun made of hundreds of mono-frequency lamps, a mirrored ceiling and fine mist filled Tate Modern's Turbine Hall; visitors lay on the floor to watch themselves under it. - How it works: Semicircle of yellow sodium lamps doubled by a mirrored ceiling, humidifiers producing mist, and exposed construction. - Video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kYAaZ53tazU - Images: https://res.cloudinary.com/olafureliasson-net/image/private/q_auto:eco,c_fit,h_640,w_640/img/the-weather-project_21881.jpg - Project page: https://olafureliasson.net/artwork/the-weather-project-2003/ #### Eden — Jon McCormack (2000) - Type: Artwork · Organisms: Ecosystems - Idea: Link an artificial ecosystem's survival to human attention and watch it adapt. - What it is: An evolving sonic ecosystem of artificial creatures that sing to find food and mates; visitors' presence, sensed by cameras, makes food grow, so the creatures evolve songs that keep people nearby. - How it works: Cellular world projected on translucent screens, with evolving agents whose behaviour and sound are learned; infrared sensing of visitors. - Video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Yrww68pnqqM - Images: https://i0.wp.com/jonmccormack.info/wp-content/uploads/2023/04/edenIsometric.jpg?fit=1962%2C1320&ssl=1 - Project page: https://jonmccormack.info/artworks/eden/ #### Biosphere 2 — Biosphere 2 (1991) - Type: Research prototype · Organisms: Plants, Animals, Ecosystems - Idea: Building a whole nature inside technology reveals how much we do not understand. - What it is: A 1.27-hectare sealed glass structure in Arizona containing rainforest, ocean, savanna, desert and farm, in which eight people lived for two years (1991–93) as an experiment in closed ecosystems. - How it works: Airtight steel-and-glass spaceframe with engineered biomes and 'lungs' for air pressure; oxygen fell and CO2 rose as soil microbes respired. - Video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oUJGR6qNVzA - Images: https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/0/05/Wiki_bio2_sunset_001.jpg/960px-Wiki_bio2_sunset_001.jpg - Project page: https://biosphere2.org/ #### Strandbeest — Theo Jansen (1990) - Type: Artwork · Organisms: Ecosystems - Idea: Treat machines as a new species that evolves generation by generation to survive a habitat. - What it is: Large walking skeletons of PVC tubing that are powered by wind on Dutch beaches, store air in bottles, and in later generations sense water and turn back from the sea. - How it works: Jansen's linkage legs, computer-evolved proportions, wind sails and pneumatic 'muscles' and 'nerves'. - Video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Pj-NqWDH2qE - Project page: https://www.strandbeest.com/ ### HNI Theory & Methods Frameworks, reviews and methods for studying and designing human–nature interaction. #### Mediating Human–Nature Relations through Technology: A Scoping Review of Post-Anthropocentric Artifacts and Their Design Strategies — Madlen Kneile, Judith Dörrenbächer, Marc Hassenzahl, Matthias Laschke (2025) - Type: Paper · Organisms: Ecosystems, Animals, Plants - Idea: Most post-anthropocentric artifacts still serve human agency; the open space is designing artifacts that let nature intrude on, and gain power over, human routines. - What it is: A PRISMA-ScR scoping review of 53 HCI and design papers that extracts 114 artifacts bringing humans and nature into contact, sorts them into seven design strategies in three focus areas, and publishes all of them in an online Artifact Archive. - How it works: Keyword search of the ACM and DRS digital libraries plus reference checks, then clustering of artifact fact sheets by design strategy (revealing and recognizing, exploring, exchanging and expressing, sharing common livelihoods, intertwining spaces, intruding, empowering), human–technology relation, artifact type and entity of nature. - Paper: https://doi.org/10.1145/3743674 (ACM TOCHI 2025) - Images: https://figures.semanticscholar.org/fa3c52a2c37947caa2fdb3af852e53ee75ee5ac9/10-Figure3-1.png https://figures.semanticscholar.org/fa3c52a2c37947caa2fdb3af852e53ee75ee5ac9/11-Figure4-1.png - Project page: https://artifact-archive.org #### Phenology Circles: A Method to Deepen Relations in More-Than-Human Design Processes — Margot Brereton (2024) - Type: Paper · Organisms: Plants, Insects, Ecosystems - Idea: A shared practice of noticing the seasons deepens designers' relations with other species around the design work. - What it is: A DIS paper by Shannon Rodgers and colleagues describing a 'phenology circle': an online, global gardening community the researchers ran for over two years to attune to the rhythms of plants, animals and one another. - How it works: Online community of practice (N = 42) sharing over 1,200 images and posts; reflection on eight core members in the backstage of participatory design research. - Paper: https://doi.org/10.1145/3643834.3660694 (DIS 2024) - Images: https://figures.semanticscholar.org/9deb8ac82c2a5298f9e9fdbe2008f234e09b2c60/7-Figure2-1.png #### Seeding a Repository of Methods-To-Be for Nature-Entangled Design Research — Oscar Tomico, Ferran Altarriba Bertran (2024) - Type: Paper · Organisms: Ecosystems, Plants, Human body - Idea: Designing with nature needs its own methods, and they should be shared and tried. - What it is: A DIS paper sharing an annotated portfolio of emerging, not-yet-polished methods for nature-entangled design, gathered and tried during a conference workshop. - How it works: Workshop-based collection, cross-pollination of methods in use, and discussion of how to articulate them further. - Paper: https://doi.org/10.1145/3643834.3660745 (DIS 2024) - Images: https://figures.semanticscholar.org/f81172c3e1be018e35a4b8466cfac9131a402cfe/4-Figure7-1.png #### HCI Outdoors: Theory, Design, Methods and Applications — Michael D. Jones, Jonna Häkkilä (2020) - Type: Book & essay · Organisms: Ecosystems, Human body - Idea: The outdoors is its own design context, with values such as solitude, risk and disconnection. - What it is: An edited book (Jones, Anderson, Häkkilä, Cheverst, Daiber) that maps interaction design for hiking, climbing, skiing, camping and wild places, following a CHI 2018 workshop. - How it works: Collects chapters on theory, methods for research in the wild and case studies of outdoor systems. - Paper: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-45289-6 (Springer Human–Computer Interaction Series 2020) - Images: https://covers.openlibrary.org/b/isbn/9783030452889-L.jpg?default=false #### HCI in the Garden — Margot Brereton (2019) - Type: Paper · Organisms: Plants, Insects, Ecosystems - Idea: Garden HCI can go beyond care tasks: sharing discoveries, serving older adults, playing and relaxing. - What it is: An OzCHI mapping review by Shannon Rodgers, Bernd Ploderer and Margot Brereton of 28 HCI papers on gardening, identifying themes and gaps. - How it works: Mapping review finding six themes: discovery, connecting, bringing the garden inside, coordinating, sustainability and learning skills. - Paper: https://doi.org/10.1145/3369457.3369498 (OzCHI 2019) #### Beyond Knowing Nature: Pathways to Nature Connection — Miles Richardson (2017) - Type: Paper · Organisms: Ecosystems, Human body - Idea: Knowing the names of species is not the same as feeling connected; design for feeling. - What it is: A study, with Ryan Lumber and David Sheffield, showing that contact, emotion, compassion, meaning and beauty build nature connection, while knowledge-based activities such as identifying species do not. - How it works: Two online surveys (n = 321) built around the nine values of the biophilia hypothesis, then a walking intervention (n = 72) that put the identified pathways into practice. - Paper: https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0177186 (PLOS ONE 2017) - Project page: https://findingnature.org.uk/ #### Citizen Science: New Research Challenges for Human–Computer Interaction — Jennifer Preece (2016) - Type: Paper · Organisms: Ecosystems, Animals, Plants - Idea: Citizen science tools succeed or fail on interaction design, not only on the science. - What it is: A paper that sets out what HCI can contribute to biodiversity citizen science: motivation, data quality, usability and long-term participation. - How it works: Reviews projects such as iNaturalist, eBird and NatureNet and draws open research questions from them. - Paper: https://doi.org/10.1080/10447318.2016.1194153 (International Journal of Human–Computer Interaction 2016) #### Extinction of Experience: The Loss of Human–Nature Interactions — Masashi Soga (2016) - Type: Paper · Organisms: Ecosystems, Human body - Idea: Less contact with nature leads to less care for it, which leads to less nature: a loop design can try to break. - What it is: A review showing that people everywhere are having fewer direct experiences of nature, and that this loss harms health and weakens support for conservation. - How it works: Synthesises ecological and psychological studies into a model of causes (opportunity, orientation) and consequences of lost human–nature interaction. - Paper: https://doi.org/10.1002/fee.1225 (Frontiers in Ecology and the Environment 2016) - Images: https://figures.semanticscholar.org/85ec779dadfabe243b477d84fdf10f0d8decfd44/3-Figure2-1.png #### From Conservation to Crowdsourcing: A Typology of Citizen Science — Andrea Wiggins (2011) - Type: Paper · Organisms: Ecosystems, Animals - Idea: Different kinds of citizen science need different technology and different roles for volunteers. - What it is: A paper, with Kevin Crowston, that sorts citizen science projects into five types: action, conservation, investigation, virtual and education. - How it works: Clusters survey data from 80 projects by goals, organisation and technology use. - Paper: https://doi.org/10.1109/hicss.2011.207 (HICSS 2011) #### Soundscape Ecology — Bryan C. Pijanowski (2011) - Type: Paper · Organisms: Ecosystems, Animals - Idea: Listening to a place is a way of measuring its health. - What it is: A special issue introduction, with Almo Farina, that defines soundscape ecology as the study of all the sounds of a landscape: animal sounds, geophysical sounds and human noise. - How it works: Frames concepts such as biophony, geophony and anthrophony and methods for long-term acoustic monitoring. - Paper: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10980-011-9655-6 (Landscape Ecology 2011) - Images: https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/9/99/Mount_Rainier_soundscape.jpg/960px-Mount_Rainier_soundscape.jpg #### Technological Nature: Adaptation and the Future of Human Life — Peter H. Kahn Jr. (2011) - Type: Book & essay · Organisms: Ecosystems, Animals, Human body - Idea: Technological nature is better than no nature, but not as good as actual nature, and people may not notice the difference. - What it is: A book that reports a decade of studies on robot dogs, nature webcams and plasma-screen 'windows', and asks what people lose when technological nature replaces real nature. - How it works: Synthesises controlled experiments, field studies and interviews from the HINTS Lab with developmental psychology and the idea of environmental generational amnesia. - Paper: https://doi.org/10.7551/mitpress/7983.001.0001 (MIT Press 2011) - Images: https://covers.openlibrary.org/b/id/9517794-L.jpg?default=false - Project page: https://mitpress.mit.edu/9780262113229/technological-nature/ #### Citizen Science: A Developing Tool for Expanding Science Knowledge and Scientific Literacy — Rick Bonney, Cornell Lab of Ornithology (2009) - Type: Paper · Organisms: Animals, Ecosystems - Idea: Treat volunteers as research partners, and design the whole pipeline around them. - What it is: A paper describing the Cornell Lab of Ornithology's model for citizen science projects, from choosing a question to analysing volunteer data. - How it works: Draws on two decades of bird projects such as Project FeederWatch and eBird. - Paper: https://doi.org/10.1525/bio.2009.59.11.9 (BioScience 2009) - Images: https://figures.semanticscholar.org/2e888654c68524163fbf7a54396488249e73a702/6-Figure1-1.png #### The Human Relation With Nature and Technological Nature — Peter H. Kahn Jr. (2009) - Type: Paper · Organisms: Ecosystems, Human body - Idea: Ask of every nature technology: is it a supplement or a substitute? - What it is: A short review that defines technological nature (technologies that mediate, augment or simulate nature) and summarises evidence that it offers some but not all benefits of real nature. - How it works: Reviews the authors' experiments with real windows, plasma displays, robotic pets and webcams and draws a research agenda from them. - Paper: https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1467-8721.2009.01602.x (Current Directions in Psychological Science 2009) - Project page: https://depts.washington.edu/hintslab/ #### Biophilic Design: The Theory, Science and Practice of Bringing Buildings to Life — Stephen R. Kellert, Edward O. Wilson (2008) - Type: Book & essay · Organisms: Plants, Ecosystems, Human body - Idea: Nature in design is more than plants: light, materials, shapes, prospect and refuge all count. - What it is: An edited volume, with Judith Heerwagen and Martin Mador, that translates biophilia into about 70 attributes for designing buildings and places. - How it works: Collects contributions from architects, psychologists and biologists and organises them into direct, indirect and spatial experiences of nature. - Images: https://covers.openlibrary.org/b/isbn/9780470163344-L.jpg?default=false - Project page: https://www.wiley.com/en-us/Biophilic+Design-p-9780470163344 #### Last Child in the Woods — Richard Louv (2005) - Type: Book & essay · Organisms: Ecosystems, Human body - Idea: Children's distance from nature is a design and policy problem, not only a personal choice. - What it is: A book that describes how children's unstructured time outdoors has shrunk and names the result 'nature-deficit disorder'. - How it works: Combines interviews with parents, teachers and researchers with a review of studies on nature and child development. - Video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WPzrHhe0xM0 - Images: https://covers.openlibrary.org/b/isbn/9781565123915-L.jpg?default=false - Project page: https://richardlouv.com/books/last-child/ #### The Connectedness to Nature Scale — F. Stephan Mayer (2004) - Type: Paper · Organisms: Ecosystems, Human body - Idea: If you design for nature connection, measure it. - What it is: A 14-item questionnaire, developed with Cynthia McPherson Frantz, that measures how much a person feels part of the natural world. - How it works: Validated across five studies linking scale scores to ecological behaviour and wellbeing. - Paper: https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jenvp.2004.10.001 (Journal of Environmental Psychology 2004) #### The Experience of Nature: A Psychological Perspective — Rachel & Stephen Kaplan (1989) - Type: Book & essay · Organisms: Ecosystems, Human body - Idea: Design restorative experiences around soft fascination, being away, extent and compatibility. - What it is: A book that sets out Attention Restoration Theory: natural settings capture 'soft fascination' and let tired directed attention recover. - How it works: Draws on two decades of landscape preference studies and wilderness programme research. - Images: https://covers.openlibrary.org/b/isbn/9780521341394-L.jpg?default=false - Project page: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Attention_restoration_theory #### Biophilia — Edward O. Wilson (1984) - Type: Book & essay · Organisms: Ecosystems, Animals, Human body - Idea: Our attraction to living things is part of human nature, so designs can build on it. - What it is: A book of essays proposing that humans have an innate tendency to focus on life and lifelike processes. - How it works: Combines evolutionary biology with the author's field experience in the tropics. - Images: https://covers.openlibrary.org/b/isbn/9780674074422-L.jpg?default=false - Project page: https://www.hup.harvard.edu/books/9780674074422 #### View Through a Window May Influence Recovery from Surgery — Roger S. Ulrich (1984) - Type: Paper · Organisms: Plants, Human body - Idea: Even a view of nature through glass is measurably good for the body. - What it is: A hospital study in which gallbladder surgery patients whose window faced trees had shorter stays and needed fewer strong painkillers than patients facing a brick wall. - How it works: Compared matched pairs of patient records from 1972–1981 in a Pennsylvania hospital, differing only in the view from the room. - Paper: https://doi.org/10.1126/science.6143402 (Science 1984) ## Organizations & resources ### Research centre & lab - **Aboriginal Territories in Cyberspace (AbTeC)** (Montreal, Canada) — An Indigenous research-creation studio that ensures Indigenous presence in games, virtual worlds and the web, and runs the Skins workshops on Indigenous futures. https://abtec.org/ - **Abundant Intelligences** (Montreal, Canada) — An international research programme led from Concordia University that designs AI from Indigenous knowledge systems, with labs in Canada, the US and Aotearoa New Zealand. https://abundant-intelligences.net/ - **Allen Discovery Center at Tufts University** (Medford, US) — Michael Levin's centre studying how bioelectric signals guide body shape, which co-created xenobots and other synthetic living forms. https://allencenter.tufts.edu/ - **Animal Law & Policy Program (Harvard Law School)** (Cambridge, US) — Harvard Law School programme that researches and teaches animal law and policy, from farmed animal regulation to wildlife and animal testing. https://animal.law.harvard.edu/ - **Animal Law and Policy Program (UCLA Law)** (Los Angeles, US) — UCLA School of Law programme that supports research, teaching and public events on the legal treatment of animals. https://law.ucla.edu/academics/centers/animal-law-policy-program - **Anthropic — Model Welfare research** (San Francisco, US) — Research programme at AI company Anthropic that investigates whether its Claude models might have experiences or preferences that matter, and introduces low-cost interventions such as letting models end abusive conversations. https://www.anthropic.com/research/exploring-model-welfare - **Antikythera** (Global (Berggruen Institute)) — A think tank and studio, incubated by the Berggruen Institute, that rethinks computation at planetary scale, including planetary sensing and the reorientation of philosophy around the Earth. https://antikythera.org/ - **Ape Initiative** (Des Moines, US) — Iowa sanctuary and research centre, home of the late bonobo Kanzi, that studies bonobo cognition and communication through lexigram keyboards and non-invasive, choice-based research. https://www.apeinitiative.org/ - **Ars Electronica Futurelab** (Linz, AT) — Ars Electronica's research and development lab, which works with artists and companies on art-driven projects in AI, robotics and life sciences. https://ars.electronica.art/futurelab/en/ - **Art Laboratory Berlin** (Berlin, DE) — A Berlin art space and research platform for art at the intersection of the life sciences and technology, with exhibitions, conferences and a DIY lab. https://artlaboratory-berlin.org/ - **Arts Catalyst** (Sheffield, UK) — A UK arts organisation that commissions art engaging with science and ecology, from space biology to environmental justice. https://artscatalyst.org/ - **Art|Sci Center (UCLA)** (Los Angeles, US) — Victoria Vesna's centre at UCLA that brings artists and scientists together through courses, exhibitions and events on biology and nanotech. https://artsci.ucla.edu/ - **aWISH (Animal Welfare Indicators at the Slaughterhouse)** (Europe) — EU-funded project that uses data and automated indicators collected at slaughterhouses to monitor and improve the welfare of farmed animals across their lives. https://www.awish-project.eu/about/ - **Berggruen Institute (Planetary programme)** (Los Angeles, US) — A think tank whose Planetary programme and Future Humans work explore how new ideas of the planet, life and intelligence should change philosophy and governance. It publishes Noema. https://www.berggruen.org/ - **BioArt Laboratories** (Eindhoven, NL) — Jalila Essaïdi's Eindhoven foundation that links art, science and industry, known for projects such as bulletproof skin and circular manure materials. https://bioartlab.com/ - **BIOTOPIA** (Munich, DE) — A new natural history and life sciences museum in Munich that runs festivals, labs and exhibitions linking art, design and biology. https://biotopia.net/ - **Braingeneers (UC Santa Cruz)** (Santa Cruz, US) — A UC Santa Cruz-led group that builds remote-controlled lab tools to grow, record and train brain organoids over the internet. https://braingeneers.ucsc.edu/ - **Brooks Institute for Animal Rights Law and Policy** (US) — Think tank that funds scholarship, fellowships and student programmes in animal law and policy, including the Brooks Animal Law student summits. https://thebrooksinstitute.org/ - **California Institute for Machine Consciousness** (Berkeley, US) — Research institute co-founded by Joscha Bach to study how consciousness could arise in machines and to build testable computational models of it. https://cimc.ai/ - **CaML (Compassion in Machine Learning)** (International) — Research group that measures and reduces speciesist bias in AI models, for example by training models on synthetic data that expresses compassion for all sentient beings. https://www.compassionml.com/ - **Center for Alternatives to Animal Testing (Johns Hopkins)** (Baltimore, US) — A Johns Hopkins centre that develops alternatives to animal testing and, under Thomas Hartung, launched the organoid intelligence research agenda. https://caat.publichealth.jhu.edu/ - **Center for Earth Jurisprudence (Barry University)** (Orlando, Florida, US) — A law-school centre that teaches and researches earth jurisprudence and rights of nature. It runs an environmental and earth law clinic, a fellowship and symposia. https://www.earthjurist.org/ - **Center for Genomic Gastronomy** (Online) — An artist-led research group that studies the biotechnologies and biodiversity of human food systems through exhibitions, meals and publications. https://genomicgastronomy.com/ - **Center for Global Soundscapes (Purdue University)** (West Lafayette, Indiana, US) — A Purdue research centre in soundscape ecology that records and analyses the sounds of ecosystems worldwide and runs public soundscape projects. https://centerforglobalsoundscapes.org/ - **Center for Mind, Brain, and Consciousness (NYU)** (New York, US) — NYU philosophy centre directed by David Chalmers and Ned Block that runs workshops and debates on consciousness science, including animal and AI consciousness, often co-hosted with CMEP. https://wp.nyu.edu/consciousness/ - **Center for Mind, Ethics, and Policy (NYU)** (New York, US) — NYU research centre on the consciousness, sentience, moral, legal and political status of nonhumans, with a focus on animals and AI systems. It publishes research, funds digital-minds work and hosts public events and an annual summit. https://nonhumanminds.org/ - **Center for Native Peoples and the Environment (SUNY-ESF)** (Syracuse, New York, US) — A centre that brings Indigenous and Western scientific knowledge together for environmental education and restoration, founded by Robin Wall Kimmerer. https://www.esf.edu/nativepeoples/ - **Center for PostNatural History** (Pittsburgh, US) — A Pittsburgh museum of organisms intentionally altered by humans, from lab mice to genetically engineered fish. https://www.postnatural.org/ - **Center for Reducing Suffering** (International) — Research organisation on how to reduce severe suffering in the long-term future, including that of wild animals and potential digital minds. https://centerforreducingsuffering.org/ - **Center for the Future of AI, Mind & Society (FAU)** (Boca Raton, US) — Florida Atlantic University centre directed by philosopher Susan Schneider that studies machine consciousness, AI ethics and the future of the mind. https://www.fau.edu/future-mind/ - **Center on Long-Term Risk** (London, UK) — Research institute focused on preventing worst-case outcomes of advanced AI, including risks of astronomical suffering (s-risks) that could affect digital minds. https://longtermrisk.org/ - **Centre for Animals and Social Justice** (UK) — UK think tank that researches how to embed animal protection in politics and government, such as through an Animal Sentience Committee. https://www.casj.org.uk/ - **Centre for Materials Science & Culture (RCA)** (London, UK) — A Royal College of Art research centre that brings designers and material scientists together, including work on bio-based and living materials. https://www.rca.ac.uk/research-innovation/research-centres/centre-materials-science-culture/ - **Centre for Wild Animal Welfare** (Cambridge, UK) — UK-based organisation working to bring wild animal welfare into policy, such as humane management of urban wildlife and pest control. https://www.wildanimalwelfare.org/ - **Chittka Lab (Queen Mary University of London)** (London, UK) — Lars Chittka's bee lab, whose experiments on learning, play and emotion-like states in bumblebees are central to the debate on insect minds. https://chittkalab.sbcs.qmul.ac.uk/ - **Citizen Sense** (London, UK) — A research group that worked with communities on DIY environmental sensing, such as air pollution monitoring with the Dustbox, and studied what citizen sensing changes. https://citizensense.net/ - **Clever Dog Lab (Vetmeduni Vienna)** (Vienna, Austria) — Dog cognition lab at the Messerli Research Institute in Vienna where pet dogs take part in studies of perception, social learning and emotion, including touchscreen experiments. https://www.vetmeduni.ac.at/cleverdoglab - **Comparative Cognition Lab, UC San Diego (MICO)** (San Diego, US) — Federico Rossano's lab studying communication in dogs, cats and great apes; it runs MICO, the Massive Interspecies Communication Observatory, a citizen-science study of pets using soundboard buttons. https://cclab.ucsd.edu/ - **Complex Materials Lab (ETH Zurich)** (Zurich, CH) — André Studart's lab at ETH Zurich that develops bio-inspired and living materials, including 3D-printed bacteria-laden and self-healing materials. https://complex.mat.ethz.ch/ - **Cornell Lab of Ornithology** (Ithaca, New York, US) — A research institute at Cornell University that studies birds and nature and runs large public science projects such as eBird, Merlin Bird ID, Project FeederWatch and the Macaulay Library. https://www.birds.cornell.edu/home/ - **CRESH (Centre for Research on Environment, Society and Health)** (Edinburgh / Glasgow, UK) — A research centre of the Universities of Edinburgh and Glasgow that studies how green space and other environments shape health and health inequalities. https://cresh.org.uk/ - **Design & Living Systems Lab (Central Saint Martins)** (London, UK) — A research lab at Central Saint Martins led by Carole Collet that explores how biology and biotechnology can shape sustainable design futures. http://www.designandlivingsystems.com/ - **Digital Naturalism Laboratories (Dinalab)** (Gamboa, Panama) — A field lab and makerspace at the edge of the Panamanian rainforest where artists, biologists and hackers build tools to study and interact with wildlife. https://www.dinalab.net/ - **Dolphin Communication Project** (US / Bahamas) — Nonprofit led by Kathleen Dudzinski that studies how wild and managed dolphins communicate through sound and touch, and runs public education on dolphin behaviour. https://www.dolphincommunicationproject.org/ - **DolphinGemma (Google × Wild Dolphin Project)** (Mountain View, US) — Open audio language model from Google, trained on decades of Wild Dolphin Project recordings, that learns the structure of dolphin vocalisations and generates dolphin-like sound sequences. https://blog.google/innovation-and-ai/products/dolphingemma/ - **Dominica Sperm Whale Project** (Dominica) — Long-term field study, started in 2005, that follows individual sperm whale families off Dominica and documents their vocal clans and culture; its data underpins Project CETI. http://www.thespermwhaleproject.org/ - **Duke Canine Cognition Center** (Durham, US) — Brian Hare's lab at Duke University that studies how dogs think and read human cues, using games that owners can also play through the Dognition platform. https://evolutionaryanthropology.duke.edu/research/dogs - **Earth BioGenome Project** (Global) — An international 'moonshot' to sequence the genomes of all known eukaryotic species on Earth, as a resource for conservation and biology. https://www.earthbiogenome.org/ - **Earth Species Project** (Berkeley, US) — Nonprofit AI lab that builds open machine-learning models, such as NatureLM-audio, to decode nonhuman animal communication and publishes benchmarks and datasets for bioacoustics. https://earthspecies.org/ - **Eleos AI Research** (US) — Nonprofit research organisation that studies whether AI systems could be conscious or have welfare, and advises AI labs on how to assess and respond to that possibility. https://eleosai.org/ - **ElephantVoices** (Kenya / Norway) — Nonprofit founded by Joyce Poole and Petter Granli that studies elephant communication and publishes the Elephant Ethogram, an open database of African savanna elephant behaviours and calls. https://www.elephantvoices.org/ - **Environmental Neuroscience Lab (University of Chicago)** (Chicago, US) — Marc Berman's lab, which studies how natural and urban environments affect attention, mood and behaviour, including work on attention restoration theory. https://voices.uchicago.edu/bermanlab/ - **European Centre for Environment and Human Health (University of Exeter)** (Truro, Cornwall, UK) — A University of Exeter research centre that studies how natural environments, including green and blue spaces, affect human health, such as the '120 minutes a week in nature' finding. https://www.ecehh.org/ - **Fab Lab Barcelona (IAAC)** (Barcelona, ES) — IAAC's digital fabrication lab, a hub of the global Fab Lab network, with research on distributed manufacturing, biomaterials and Fab City. https://fablabbcn.org/ - **Family Dog Project (ELTE)** (Budapest, Hungary) — Research group at Eötvös Loránd University, Budapest, that pioneered studies of dog–human communication, including dog brain imaging while listening to speech. https://ethology.elte.hu/Family_Dog_Project - **Faunalytics** (US) — Research nonprofit that runs studies for animal advocates and keeps a large research library; it co-developed benchmarks for measuring speciesist bias in AI models. https://faunalytics.org/ - **Forethought** (Oxford, UK) — Research nonprofit on how to navigate the transition to advanced AI, including the moral status and rights of digital minds. https://www.forethought.org/ - **Foundations of Animal Sentience (ASENT)** (London, UK) — ERC-funded LSE project (2019–2024) led by Jonathan Birch that developed methods for assessing sentience in animals such as octopuses, crabs and insects and linked them to welfare policy. https://www.lse.ac.uk/cpnss/archived-research-project-and-grants/foundations-of-animal-sentience-asent - **FUNGAR – Fungal Architectures** (Bristol, UK) — An EU-funded project that set out to grow buildings from mycelium that can also sense and compute. https://www.fungar.eu/ - **FUNGATERIA** (Online) — An EU Pathfinder project developing engineered living materials from fungi and bacteria for self-growing, self-repairing structures. https://www.fungateria.eu/ - **Future Generations Commissioner for Wales** (Cardiff, Wales, UK) — The office that guards the interests of people not yet born under the Well-being of Future Generations (Wales) Act 2015. It advises Welsh public bodies to think long-term. https://www.futuregenerations.wales/ - **Global Priorities Institute (Oxford)** (Oxford, UK) — Oxford research institute (2018–2025) that produced philosophy and economics research on global priorities, including moral weights of animals and cluelessness about the long-term future. https://www.globalprioritiesinstitute.org/ - **Human Interaction with Nature and Technological Systems Lab (HINTS, University of Washington)** (Seattle, US) — Peter Kahn's lab at the University of Washington, which studies how people interact with nature and with technological nature such as robots and nature displays, and the idea of 'environmental generational amnesia'. https://depts.washington.edu/hints/ - **Humane League Labs** (US) — Research arm of The Humane League that tests which messages and campaign tactics most effectively reduce farmed animal suffering. https://thehumaneleague.org/article/humane-league-labs - **ICARUS (International Cooperation for Animal Research Using Space)** (Radolfzell, Germany) — A Max Planck project that tracks small animals worldwide with tiny tags read by satellites, to build an 'internet of animals' that follows migrations and animal behaviour. https://www.icarus.mpg.de/ - **Indigenous Protocol and AI Working Group** (Global) — A group of Indigenous scholars and technologists who asked how AI could be built from Indigenous perspectives, including relationships with nonhuman kin. Its 2020 position paper is widely cited. https://www.indigenous-ai.net/ - **Institute for Computational Design and Construction (University of Stuttgart)** (Stuttgart, DE) — Achim Menges' institute that develops biomimetic, computationally designed architecture, including fibre pavilions modelled on beetle shells and spider webs. https://www.icd.uni-stuttgart.de/ - **Institute for Computer Designed Organisms** (Burlington, US) — A research institute by the University of Vermont and Tufts teams behind xenobots that uses AI to design new living machines. https://cdorgs.github.io/ - **Institute for the Future (IFTF)** (Palo Alto, California, US) — A nonprofit futures research organisation that makes long-range forecasts, games and scenarios, including work on climate futures and relationships with the natural world. https://www.iftf.org/ - **IPBES (Intergovernmental Science-Policy Platform on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services)** (Bonn, Germany) — The intergovernmental body that assesses the state of biodiversity for policymakers. Its 2022 Values Assessment brought relational and Indigenous values of nature into the science-policy debate. https://www.ipbes.net/ - **Jeremy Coller Centre for Animal Sentience (LSE)** (London, UK) — LSE research centre led by Jonathan Birch that studies the evidence for sentience across animals (and AI) and turns it into policy, building on the review that led to the UK's Animal Welfare (Sentience) Act. https://www.lse.ac.uk/sentience - **K. Lisa Yang Center for Conservation Bioacoustics** (Ithaca, New York, US) — A Cornell Lab centre that develops acoustic recorders, AI tools such as BirdNET, and sound analysis software (Raven) to monitor elephants, whales, birds and forests by listening. https://www.birds.cornell.edu/ccb/ - **Kapelica Gallery** (Ljubljana, SI) — A Ljubljana gallery for contemporary investigative art, among the first to show bio art, robotics and body-based work. https://kapelica.org/ - **Kinds of Intelligence programme (Leverhulme CFI)** (Cambridge, UK) — Cambridge research programme comparing animal, human and artificial intelligence; it created the Animal-AI Testbed, which tests AI agents on tasks from animal cognition studies. https://www.lcfi.ac.uk/research/programme/kinds-of-intelligence - **KONTEJNER** (Zagreb, HR) — A Zagreb bureau for contemporary art practice that curates the Touch Me festival and exhibitions on the body, science and technology, including bio art. https://www.kontejner.org/ - **Limelight Rainforest** (Global) — The team that won the XPRIZE Rainforest grand prize in 2024, combining canopy rafts, drones, sound recorders and AI to inventory rainforest species. https://limelightrainforest.org/ - **Living Architecture (EU project)** (Newcastle, UK) — An EU-funded project that built microbial fuel cell bioreactor walls able to clean water, make electricity and respond to occupants. https://livingarchitecture-h2020.eu/ - **Mediamatic** (Amsterdam, NL) — An Amsterdam art centre with a biotech lab, fermentation kitchen and aquaponics greenhouse, running workshops on mycelium and bio art. https://www.mediamatic.net/ - **Mediated Matter (MIT Media Lab)** (Cambridge MA, US) — Neri Oxman's former MIT Media Lab group, which designed with silkworms, bacteria and biopolymers and coined 'material ecology'; its archive stays online. https://www.media.mit.edu/groups/mediated-matter/overview/ - **Messerli Research Institute** (Vienna, Austria) — Interdisciplinary institute in Vienna that studies human–animal relationships through comparative cognition, animal ethics and comparative medicine. https://www.vetmeduni.ac.at/en/messerli - **Microsoft AI for Good Lab** (Redmond, Washington, US) — Microsoft's applied research lab for social and environmental problems. Its biodiversity work includes PyTorch-Wildlife, MegaDetector for camera-trap images and species monitoring with partners. https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/research/group/ai-for-good-research-lab/ - **Minimal Intelligence Lab (MINT Lab, University of Murcia)** (Murcia, Spain) — Paco Calvo's lab studying plant intelligence and behaviour, such as whether climbing beans plan their movements, and the philosophy of minimal minds. https://www.um.es/mintlab/ - **Molecular Information Systems Lab (University of Washington)** (Seattle, US) — A University of Washington and Microsoft lab that builds systems to store and compute data in DNA. https://misl.cs.washington.edu/ - **Molecular Programming Project** (Pasadena, US) — A multi-university research effort that develops the theory and tools to program molecules such as DNA to compute and build. http://molecular-programming.org/ - **More-Than-Human Life (MOTH) Program, NYU Law** (New York, US) — A programme at NYU School of Law that works on the rights of nature and nonhuman animals through legal research, strategic litigation support and storytelling. https://www.mothlife.org/ - **MU Hybrid Art House** (Eindhoven, NL) — An Eindhoven art house that shows work at the edge of art, design and technology, with many exhibitions on biotech and nature, and co-runs the Bio Art & Design Award. https://mu.nl/ - **Natural Capital Alliance (formerly Natural Capital Project, Stanford)** (Stanford, California, US) — A Stanford-led partnership that builds free tools such as InVEST to map the benefits nature gives people, including mental health benefits of nature experience. https://naturalcapitalalliance.stanford.edu/ - **Naturalis Biodiversity Center** (Leiden, Netherlands) — The Dutch national natural history museum and research centre, which also builds AI species recognition and automated biodiversity monitoring (ARISE). https://www.naturalis.nl/ - **Nature Connectedness Research Group (University of Derby)** (Derby, UK) — A research group that studies people's sense of connection with nature and its effects on wellbeing and pro-nature behaviour, and developed the 'pathways to nature connectedness'. https://www.derby.ac.uk/research/themes/zero-carbon/zero-carbon-nbs-research-centre/nature-connectedness-research-group/ - **NC3Rs** (London, UK) — UK national centre that funds and promotes the replacement, reduction and refinement of animals in research, including AI and computational alternatives. https://nc3rs.org.uk/ - **Nieuwe Instituut** (Rotterdam, NL) — The Dutch national institute for architecture, design and digital culture, whose research and exhibitions have covered biobased design and more-than-human perspectives. https://nieuweinstituut.nl/en - **Ocean Alliance** (Gloucester, US) — Whale research nonprofit founded by Roger Payne, whose humpback song recordings sparked 'Save the Whales'; it is digitising more than 1,200 original tapes and develops drone-based whale research. https://whale.org/ - **Open BioLab Brussels** (Brussels, BE) — An open biology lab at Erasmus University College Brussels for students, citizens and makers to experiment with biotech. https://www.erasmushogeschool.be/nl/labs/openbiolab - **Open Wetlab (Waag)** (Amsterdam, NL) — Waag's public biology lab where artists, designers and citizens work hands-on with biotechnology and discuss its social questions. https://waag.org/en/lab/open-wetlab/ - **Oxford Centre for Animal Ethics** (Oxford, UK) — Independent academic centre founded by Andrew Linzey that publishes the Journal of Animal Ethics and book series and runs an annual summer school on animal ethics. https://www.oxfordanimalethics.com/ - **Planetary Personhood** (Stockholm, Sweden) — A project by the studio Nonhuman Nonsense that imagines granting legal personhood to the planet and to nonhuman beings, through speculative design, legal drafts and public events. https://planetarypersonhood.com/ - **Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research (PIK)** (Potsdam, Germany) — A German research institute on climate and Earth-system science that leads the Planetary Boundaries Science Lab and its yearly Planetary Health Check. https://www.pik-potsdam.de/ - **Project CETI (Cetacean Translation Initiative)** (Dominica / New York, US) — Interdisciplinary initiative of marine biologists, roboticists, linguists and machine-learning researchers working to understand sperm whale communication off Dominica, including the structure of their click codas. https://www.projectceti.org/ - **Qian Lab (Caltech)** (Pasadena, US) — Lulu Qian's Caltech lab that builds DNA circuits and molecular neural networks that recognise patterns. http://qianlab.caltech.edu/ - **Qualia Research Institute** (San Francisco, US) — Independent research group that tries to build a mathematical theory of conscious experience and valence, from phenomenology studies to neuroscience models. https://qri.org/ - **Reciprocal Research** (US) — Research nonprofit led by Cameron Berg that runs empirical experiments on self-reports, introspection and possible consciousness in large language models. https://reciprocalresearch.org/ - **Rethink Priorities** (Remote / US) — Research think tank with large animal welfare and worldview teams; known for its Moral Weight Project comparing welfare capacities across species and its Digital Consciousness Model. https://rethinkpriorities.org/ - **Sculpting Evolution (MIT Media Lab)** (Cambridge MA, US) — Kevin Esvelt's MIT Media Lab group, which develops gene-drive and ecological engineering tools and argues for community-led, open decisions about them. https://www.media.mit.edu/groups/sculpting-evolution/overview/ - **Sentience Institute** (US) — Think tank researching moral circle expansion — how societies come to care about animals and possibly sentient AI — including its AI, Morality, and Sentience (AIMS) survey. https://www.sentienceinstitute.org/ - **Smart Forests** (Cambridge, UK) — A research project at the University of Cambridge that studies how forests become digital environments through sensors, drones and data, and what that means for politics and ecology. https://smartforests.net/ - **Stockholm Resilience Centre** (Stockholm, Sweden) — A research centre at Stockholm University on social-ecological systems and resilience, known for the planetary boundaries framework. https://www.stockholmresilience.org/ - **Sussex Centre for Consciousness Science** (Brighton, UK) — University of Sussex centre co-directed by Anil Seth that studies the brain basis of conscious experience and the prospects for consciousness in AI. https://www.sussex.ac.uk/research/centres/sussex-centre-for-consciousness-science - **SymbioticA (University of Western Australia)** (Perth, AU) — The first research lab where artists work hands-on in a biology department, known for the Tissue Culture & Art Project and its artist residencies; its website is now archived. https://static.weboffice.uwa.edu.au/archive/www.symbiotica.uwa.edu.au/ - **TextileLab Amsterdam (Waag)** (Amsterdam, NL) — Waag's open lab for textiles, where designers experiment with natural dyes, bacterial colour and grown materials. https://waag.org/en/lab/textilelab/ - **The Alex Foundation** (US) — Nonprofit supporting Irene Pepperberg's research on grey parrot cognition and communication, begun with the parrot Alex and continued with Griffin. https://alexfoundation.org/ - **The Bat Lab (Yossi Yovel, Tel Aviv University)** (Tel Aviv, Israel) — Tel Aviv University lab that tracks bats in the wild and uses machine learning to classify their social calls; Yossi Yovel also chairs the Coller Dolittle Prize. https://www.yovelbatlab.com/ - **The Gorilla Foundation** (Woodside, US) — Organisation behind Project Koko, in which Francine Patterson taught the gorilla Koko a modified sign language from the 1970s; it now works on great ape sanctuary and conservation. https://www.koko.org/ - **The Nature Lab (RISD)** (Providence, US) — Rhode Island School of Design's natural-history collection and biology lab, where art and design students study specimens and work with living systems. https://naturelab.risd.edu/ - **The Parliament of Things** (Amsterdam, Netherlands) — A research and events platform, inspired by Bruno Latour, that asks how animals, plants, rivers and things could gain a voice in politics. It has held sessions on the rights of the North Sea, soil and the Rhine. https://theparliamentofthings.org/ - **Transnatural** (Amsterdam, NL) — An Amsterdam gallery and cultural hub for art and design that merges nature and technology, from biomaterials to living installations. https://transnatural.org/ - **Uehiro Oxford Institute (formerly Oxford Uehiro Centre for Practical Ethics)** (Oxford, UK) — Oxford ethics centre whose researchers work on moral status, animal ethics, AI ethics and the moral circle. https://www.practicalethics.ox.ac.uk/ - **Unconventional Computing Laboratory (UWE Bristol)** (Bristol, UK) — Andrew Adamatzky's lab that computes with slime moulds, fungi, chemical reactions and other unconventional substrates. https://uncomp.uwe.ac.uk/ - **Valldaura Labs (IAAC)** (Barcelona, ES) — IAAC's self-sufficient research campus in the Collserola forest, where students test bio-based construction, food and energy systems on site. https://valldaura.net/ - **Waag Futurelab** (Amsterdam, NL) — An Amsterdam research institute for technology and society that runs open labs (Open Wetlab, TextileLab, FabLab) and public programmes on biotech and ecology. https://waag.org/en/ - **Welfare Footprint Institute (formerly Welfare Footprint Project)** (US / Brazil) — Research institute that measures animal suffering as time spent in pain of different intensities, giving comparable numbers for practices such as cage-free housing or fish slaughter methods. https://welfarefootprint.org/ - **Wellcome Collection** (London, UK) — A free London museum and library about health and life, whose exhibitions often commission artists working with biology and medicine. https://wellcomecollection.org/ - **Wild Animal Initiative** (US) — Nonprofit that builds the scientific field of wild animal welfare by funding and publishing research on the lives of wild animals and keeping an open research library. https://www.wildanimalinitiative.org/ - **Wild Animal Welfare Program (NYU)** (New York, US) — NYU programme in the Department of Environmental Studies that studies the welfare of wild animals and how humans can responsibly improve it, linking animal welfare science, ecology and ethics. https://sites.google.com/nyu.edu/wildanimalwelfare/home - **Wild Dolphin Project** (Florida, US / Bahamas) — Nonprofit that has studied a community of wild Atlantic spotted dolphins in the Bahamas since 1985, recording their sounds and behaviour and testing two-way underwater interfaces such as CHAT. https://www.wilddolphinproject.org/ - **Wild Minds Lab (University of St Andrews)** (St Andrews, UK) — Catherine Hobaiter's lab studying communication and cognition in wild apes, including the Great Ape Dictionary project that invites the public to help decode chimpanzee and bonobo gestures. https://www.wildminds.ac.uk/ - **Wyss Institute for Biologically Inspired Engineering (Harvard)** (Boston, US) — Harvard's institute that turns biological principles into technologies, from organs-on-chips and DNA nanotech to engineered living materials. https://wyss.harvard.edu/ - **YCAM (Yamaguchi Center for Arts and Media)** (Yamaguchi, JP) — A Japanese art centre whose YCAM Bio Research programme runs a biolab, food and DNA workshops and art commissions with living systems. https://www.ycam.jp/en/ ### Nonprofit & advocacy - **Amazon Conservation Team** (Arlington, Virginia, US / Colombia / Suriname) — An organisation that partners with Indigenous peoples in Colombia and Suriname to map and protect their forests, combining ancestral knowledge with GPS and satellite monitoring. https://www.amazonteam.org/ - **Amplify for Animals** (Online) — Programme of Vegan Hacktivists that trains and supports animal protection groups in using AI and digital tools effectively. https://veganhacktivists.org/amplify - **Anima Mundi Law Initiative** (UK) — A legal initiative that develops creative and practical legal strategies for the climate and ecological crises at the intersection of law, ecology and culture. https://www.animamundilaw.org/ - **Animal Charity Evaluators** (US) — Charity evaluator that researches animal charities and recommends those that can do the most good per dollar; it also studies AI's impact on animals. https://animalcharityevaluators.org/ - **Animal Ethics** (International) — Nonprofit that promotes consideration for all sentient animals, with a large resource library on wild animal suffering and the 2026 documentary 'AI & Animals'. https://www.animal-ethics.org/ - **Animal Legal Defense Fund** (Cotati, US) — US legal advocacy organisation that brings lawsuits to protect animals, supports animal law programmes and publishes annual rankings of state animal protection laws. https://aldf.org/ - **Arribada Initiative** (UK) — An open-source conservation technology programme that designs low-cost animal tags, cameras and sensors, starting with sea turtle trackers. https://arribada.org/ - **Asociación ANDES (Potato Park)** (Cusco, Peru) — A Peruvian Indigenous organisation that co-founded the Potato Park, where Quechua communities conserve hundreds of native potato varieties as a biocultural heritage territory. https://andes.org.pe/ - **Awana Digital (Mapeo)** (Global) — A nonprofit (formerly Digital Democracy) that builds Mapeo and other offline, open-source tools with Indigenous communities to map and monitor their territories. https://www.awana.digital/ - **Baltimore Underground Science Space (BUGSS)** (Baltimore, US) — A Baltimore community lab offering biology classes, an iGEM team and art-science events for the public. https://bugssonline.org/ - **Bat Conservation Trust** (London, UK) — A UK charity for bats that runs the National Bat Monitoring Programme, in which volunteers survey bats with detectors every year. https://www.bats.org.uk/ - **Bio Art Ethics (BEAK)** (Online) — An initiative that offers ethical review and consulting for bio art projects, filling a gap left by institutional review boards. https://bioartethics.xyz/ - **BioBricks Foundation** (San Francisco, US) — A nonprofit that promoted open, standardised genetic parts and legal tools such as the Open Material Transfer Agreement; its old site is no longer active. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BioBricks_Foundation - **BioCurious** (San Jose, US) — A Bay Area community biology lab where members run open projects, classes and meetups. https://biocurious.org/ - **Biologigaragen** (Copenhagen, DK) — A Copenhagen community biology lab for citizen science and open biotech projects. http://biologigaragen.org/ - **Biomimicry Institute** (Missoula MT, US) — A nonprofit that teaches designers to learn from nature's strategies, runs the Ray of Hope Prize and publishes AskNature. https://biomimicry.org/ - **Bionyfiken** (Stockholm, SE) — The Swedish biohacking association, which runs community lab activities, workshops and events. https://bionyfiken.se/ - **BIOOK** (Bilbao, ES) — A Basque social enterprise and nonprofit that brings DIY biology to citizens through workshops, kits and a podcast. https://biook.org/ - **BosLab** (Boston, US) — A Boston-area community biology lab run by volunteers, with classes and member projects. https://www.boslab.org/ - **Carboncopies Foundation** (San Francisco, US) — Nonprofit that supports research on whole-brain emulation and substrate-independent minds through workshops, a research roadmap and public education. https://carboncopies.org/ - **Center for Democratic and Environmental Rights (CDER)** (US) — A legal centre that supports governments, tribes and communities in writing rights-of-nature laws. It runs projects such as 'Land That Owns Itself', rights-of-pollinators work and a rights-of-nature law library. https://www.centerforenvironmentalrights.org/ - **Center for Humans and Nature** (Chicago, US) — A nonprofit that brings together philosophers, scientists, artists and Indigenous thinkers to explore human responsibilities to each other and the more-than-human world, through essays, books and the Minding Nature journal. https://humansandnature.org/ - **Community Environmental Legal Defense Fund (CELDF)** (Pennsylvania, US) — A US legal nonprofit that helps communities pass local laws recognising the rights of nature. It helped write the first US rights-of-nature ordinance (Tamaqua, 2006) and advised on Ecuador's 2008 constitution. https://celdf.org/ - **Compassion in World Farming** (Godalming, UK) — International farm animal welfare organisation that campaigns against factory farming, runs animal sentience conferences and engages with EU and UK policy on precision livestock farming. https://www.ciwf.org/ - **Counter Culture Labs** (Oakland, US) — An Oakland community lab for citizen science and biohacking, home of the Real Vegan Cheese and Open Insulin projects. https://www.counterculturelabs.org/ - **Crop Trust (Svalbard Global Seed Vault)** (Bonn, Germany) — An international organisation that funds crop diversity conservation in genebanks and supports the Svalbard Global Seed Vault, which stores seed back-ups for centuries. https://www.croptrust.org/ - **Crustacean Compassion** (UK) — UK charity that campaigned for crabs and lobsters to be recognised as sentient in law and now pushes for humane handling and slaughter rules. https://www.crustaceancompassion.org/ - **Cultural Survival** (Cambridge, Massachusetts, US) — An Indigenous-led nonprofit that supports Indigenous peoples' rights to land, language and culture, with community radio and grants for Indigenous environmental defenders. https://www.culturalsurvival.org/ - **DIYBCN Biohackers** (Barcelona, ES) — A Barcelona biohacker community that runs open workshops and projects in DIY biology. https://diybcn.org/ - **Earth Law Center** (US) — A nonprofit that drafts and defends laws giving rivers, oceans and ecosystems legal rights, including the Universal Declaration of the Rights of Rivers. It also trains lawyers and students in earth law. https://www.earthlawcenter.org/ - **Earthwatch Institute** (Boston, US / Oxford, UK) — A nonprofit that sends volunteers on field research expeditions with scientists and runs programmes such as FreshWater Watch and Tiny Forests. https://earthwatch.org/ - **Embassy of the North Sea** (The Hague, Netherlands) — An embassy that listens to, speaks with and negotiates on behalf of the plants, animals and people of the North Sea. It works through art, research and law toward the sea's self-representation. https://www.embassyofthenorthsea.com/ - **End Ecocide on Earth** (France) — A citizens' movement that grew out of a 2013 European Citizens' Initiative and campaigns for ecocide to be recognised as a crime and for the rights of ecosystems. https://www.endecocide.org/en/ - **Fish Welfare Initiative** (India / International) — Nonprofit that improves conditions for farmed fish in India and Southeast Asia by working with farmers on water quality and stocking density. https://www.fishwelfareinitiative.org/ - **Genspace** (New York, US) — A Brooklyn community biology lab, one of the first, offering classes, open lab access and art-science programmes to the public. https://www.genspace.org/ - **Global Fishing Watch** (Washington, DC, US) — A nonprofit that publishes a free public map of fishing and vessel activity worldwide, built from satellite and ship-tracking data, to support ocean transparency. https://globalfishingwatch.org/ - **Greenspace Scotland** (Stirling, Scotland, UK) — A Scottish charity that works on the quality of parks and green spaces and their links to health, including green health partnerships and nature prescribing. https://www.greenspacescotland.org.uk/ - **Hackuarium** (Renens, CH) — A Swiss community lab near Lausanne for DIY biology, open hardware and citizen science projects. https://wiki.hackuarium.ch/w/Main_Page - **Indigenous Climate Action** (Canada) — An Indigenous-led organisation in Canada that centres Indigenous knowledge and rights in climate action, and trains community climate leaders. https://www.indigenousclimateaction.com/ - **Indigenous Leadership Initiative** (Canada) — A First Nations organisation that supports Indigenous Guardians programmes and Indigenous Protected and Conserved Areas in Canada. https://www.ilinationhood.ca/ - **Innovate Animal Ag** (US) — Nonprofit that helps farmers adopt technologies that improve animal welfare, such as in-ovo sexing of eggs and welfare-monitoring sensors. https://innovateanimalag.org/ - **International Living Future Institute** (Seattle, US) — A nonprofit that runs the Living Building Challenge, a building standard that requires regenerative, nature-connected design, including a biophilic design requirement. https://living-future.org/ - **International Rivers** (Global) — An organisation that defends rivers and river communities against destructive dams, and campaigns for the rights of rivers. It co-organises the International Day of Action for Rivers. https://www.internationalrivers.org/ - **Lawyers for Nature** (UK) — A UK group of lawyers who give nature a voice in decision-making, advising on rights of nature, river rights and 'Nature on the Board' models for companies. https://www.lawyersfornature.com/ - **London Biohackspace** (London, UK) — A volunteer-run community biology lab in London where members do open projects and host workshops. https://biohackspace.org/ - **Material Innovation Initiative** (San Francisco, US) — A nonprofit think tank that publishes research and market reports on next-generation, animal-free materials such as mycelium and microbial leathers. https://materialinnovation.org/ - **Native Seeds/SEARCH** (Tucson, Arizona, US) — A seed bank that conserves arid-adapted crop varieties of the US Southwest and returns seeds to Native American communities through its Native American Seed Share. https://www.nativeseeds.org/ - **Nature's Rights** (Europe) — A European movement for the legal recognition of nature's rights, which drafted a proposal for an EU directive on the rights of nature. https://www.natures-rights.org/ - **NDN Collective** (Rapid City, South Dakota, US) — An Indigenous-led organisation that funds and organises Indigenous communities, including the LANDBACK campaign to return land to Indigenous stewardship. https://ndncollective.org/ - **New Harvest** (Online) — A nonprofit research institute that funds open, public research in cellular agriculture, growing animal products from cell cultures. https://www.new-harvest.org/ - **Ngā Tāngata Tiaki o Whanganui (Te Awa Tupua)** (Whanganui, Aotearoa New Zealand) — The iwi trust for the Whanganui River settlement. The 2017 Te Awa Tupua Act made the Whanganui River a legal person, with human guardians who speak for it. https://www.ngatangatatiaki.co.nz/ - **Nonhuman Rights Project** (US) — A civil-rights organisation that brings habeas corpus cases to win legal personhood and liberty for cognitively complex animals such as elephants and chimpanzees. https://www.nonhumanrights.org/ - **Open Insulin Foundation** (Oakland, US) — A community biotech project that develops open protocols to produce affordable insulin at small scale. https://openinsulin.org/ - **Open Paws** (International) — Nonprofit building AI tools and open datasets for animal advocacy, including models trained to take animals' interests into account. https://www.openpaws.ai/ - **Open Science Network Society** (Vancouver, CA) — A Vancouver nonprofit with a community science lab, outreach and mentoring to bring hands-on science to the public. https://www.opensciencenet.org/ - **Pachamama Alliance** (San Francisco, US / Ecuador) — An organisation formed at the invitation of Achuar leaders to protect the Amazon rainforest and to help people in the Global North rethink their relationship with the Earth. https://pachamama.org/ - **Park Rx America** (US) — A nonprofit that helps doctors prescribe time in parks and nature to patients, and tracks those nature prescriptions. https://www.parkrx.org/ - **Policy for Animals** (US) — Organisation that works on animal-inclusive public policy and has published analysis of how AI regulation can account for animals. https://www.policyforanimals.org/ - **Quiet Parks International** (Global) — A nonprofit that certifies wilderness, urban and marine places free of human noise pollution, so natural soundscapes can be protected. https://www.quietparks.org/ - **Rainforest Connection (RFCx)** (San Francisco, US) — A nonprofit that places recycled smartphones as solar-powered 'Guardian' listening devices in forests to detect chainsaws and gunshots in real time and to monitor biodiversity by sound. https://rfcx.org/ - **Rainforest Foundation US** (New York, US) — A nonprofit that supports Indigenous peoples in Central and South America to secure land rights, and trains community forest monitors to use drones, smartphones and satellite alerts. https://www.rainforestfoundation.org/ - **Rechtsperson Reuss** (Switzerland) — A Swiss association campaigning to make the Reuss river a legal person, one of the first river-rights campaigns in Switzerland. https://r-reuss.ch/ - **REEF (Reef Environmental Education Foundation)** (Key Largo, Florida, US) — A marine conservation nonprofit whose Volunteer Fish Survey Project has collected hundreds of thousands of fish surveys from divers and snorkelers. https://www.reef.org/ - **Revive & Restore** (Sausalito, California, US) — A nonprofit that applies biotechnology to conservation, such as cloning the black-footed ferret and Przewalski's horse and genetic rescue of endangered species. https://reviverestore.org/ - **Saami Council** (Sápmi (Norway, Sweden, Finland, Russia)) — A council of Sámi organisations across four countries that works on Sámi rights, land use, reindeer herding and Arctic environmental policy. https://www.saamicouncil.net/ - **Screwworm Free Future** (International) — Initiative working to eradicate the New World screwworm, a parasite that eats living animals, using gene-drive and sterile-insect techniques to reduce wild animal suffering. https://www.screwworm.org/ - **Sensing Clues** (Netherlands) — A Dutch nonprofit that builds open tools for wildlife crime prevention and nature monitoring, turning field observations and sensor data into shared situational maps. https://sensingclues.org/ - **Shan Shui Conservation Center (山水自然保护中心)** (Beijing, China) — A Chinese conservation NGO that works with local communities in western China on snow leopard and giant panda protection, and runs the Nature Watch Festival. http://www.shanshui.org/ - **Shrimp Welfare Project** (International) — Nonprofit that works with farmers and buyers to reduce the suffering of farmed shrimp, for example through electrical stunning before slaughter, and funds shrimp sentience research. https://www.shrimpwelfareproject.org/ - **SoundBio Lab** (Seattle, US) — A Seattle community biology lab offering workshops, open lab nights and a community iGEM team. https://www.sound.bio/ - **Stichting Rechten van de Natuur** (Netherlands) — A Dutch foundation that works for legal rights of nature in the Netherlands, including campaigns for the Wadden Sea and other ecosystems. https://rechtenvandenatuur.org/ - **Stop Ecocide International** (Netherlands / UK) — A campaign to make ecocide, severe and widespread damage to nature, an international crime. It convened the 2021 expert panel that drafted a legal definition of ecocide. https://www.stopecocide.earth/ - **Te Hiku Media** (Kaitāia, Aotearoa New Zealand) — A Māori media organisation that built its own te reo Māori speech AI and a licence that keeps Indigenous data under community control. https://tehiku.nz/ - **Te Uru Taumatua (Ngāi Tūhoe)** (Te Urewera, Aotearoa New Zealand) — The tribal authority of Ngāi Tūhoe. Under the Te Urewera Act 2014, the former national park Te Urewera became a legal entity, co-governed by Tūhoe according to its own values. https://www.ngaituhoe.iwi.nz/ - **Terreform ONE** (New York, US) — A nonprofit architecture and ecological design lab in New York that builds prototypes with mycelium, living plants and animal habitats. https://www.terreform.org/ - **The Far Out Initiative** (UK) — Project that studies people with a genetic variant that makes them nearly pain-free, with the long-term aim of using gene editing to reduce suffering in wild and farmed animals. https://farout.bio/ - **The Frozen Ark** (Nottingham, UK) — A consortium of zoos, museums and labs that stores DNA and living cells of endangered animals so their genetic information is not lost. https://www.frozenark.org/ - **The Gaia Foundation** (London, UK) — A foundation that works with Indigenous and local communities in Africa, South America and Europe to protect seeds, sacred natural sites and water, and to promote earth jurisprudence. https://www.gaiafoundation.org/ - **The Long Now Foundation** (San Francisco, US) — A foundation that encourages long-term thinking over the next 10,000 years, through projects such as the 10,000-year Clock, the Rosetta Project and its seminar series. https://longnow.org/ - **The Safina Center** (Long Island, US) — Nonprofit founded by ecologist and author Carl Safina that combines science, writing and art to communicate the inner lives of animals and the case for protecting them. https://www.safinacenter.org/ - **Tierra Digna** (Bogotá, Colombia) — A Colombian social-justice centre that brought the case in which the Constitutional Court declared the Atrato River a subject of rights in 2016. It supports Afro-Colombian and Indigenous communities defending their territories. https://tierradigna.org/ - **Universities Federation for Animal Welfare (UFAW)** (Wheathampstead, UK) — UK scientific charity that funds animal welfare science, publishes the journal Animal Welfare and runs conferences on improving the lives of kept and wild animals. https://scienceforanimalwelfare.org/ - **Vegan Hacktivists** (International) — Volunteer tech collective that builds websites, apps and data tools for animal protection organisations for free; its design studio is Violet Studios. https://veganhacktivists.org/ - **Wild Law Institute** (Cape Town, South Africa) — An institute that develops laws and practices based on earth jurisprudence, so that people take responsibility for the health of the Earth. It grew from Cormac Cullinan's work on 'Wild Law'. https://www.wildlaw.net/ - **Wild Me (Wildbook)** (Portland, Oregon, US) — The team behind Wildbook, open-source software that identifies individual animals such as whale sharks, zebras and giraffes from photos taken by researchers and the public. https://www.wildme.org/ - **Wildlife Protection Solutions** (Global) — A nonprofit that deploys remote cameras and AI (wpsWatch) to detect poachers and monitor wildlife in protected areas. https://wildlifeprotectionsolutions.org/ - **Xerces Society for Invertebrate Conservation** (Portland, Oregon, US) — A nonprofit that protects insects and other invertebrates, running community science projects such as Bumble Bee Watch and the Western Monarch Count. https://xerces.org/ ### Network & community - **#NatureForAll (IUCN)** (Global) — A global movement launched by IUCN to inspire love of nature, sharing tools and stories on how to connect people, especially young people, with nature. https://natureforall.global/ - **ARCANI (Accelerating Research Collaboration on Artificial and Natural Intelligences)** (US) — NSF-funded research coordination network that links communities studying biological and artificial intelligence, with partners such as Diverse Intelligences, Santa Fe Institute, Earth Species Project and Interspecies Internet. https://www.arcanigroup.org/ - **Association for Advancing Participatory Sciences (formerly Citizen Science Association)** (US) — A professional association for people who run or study participatory and community science projects, which publishes the journal Citizen Science: Theory and Practice. https://participatorysciences.org/ - **Association for Mathematical Consciousness Science** (International) — Scholarly association that promotes formal and mathematical approaches to consciousness science and has published open letters on the responsible study of AI consciousness. https://amcs-community.org/ - **Association for the Scientific Study of Consciousness (ASSC)** (International) — Main scholarly society for consciousness science; its annual conference brings together neuroscientists, psychologists and philosophers working on human, animal and machine consciousness. https://theassc.org/ - **Australian Citizen Science Association** (Australia) — A national network that supports citizen science in Australia through a project finder, working groups and conferences. https://citizenscience.org.au/ - **Australian Earth Laws Alliance (AELA)** (Australia) — A national network that promotes earth jurisprudence and rights of nature in Australia, working with First Nations knowledge holders. It has run citizens' tribunals for ecosystems such as the Great Barrier Reef. https://www.earthlaws.org.au/ - **Bioart Society (SOLU)** (Helsinki, FI) — A Helsinki association that supports art about life sciences and ecology, runs the SOLU space and the Ars Bioarctica residency at the Kilpisjärvi field station. https://bioartsociety.fi/ - **BioClub Tokyo** (Tokyo, JP) — A Tokyo community lab and meetup for biology, art and design, founded with Loftwork and FabCafe. https://bioclub.tokyo/ - **Biofriction** (Barcelona, ES) — A European project by Hangar, Kapelica Gallery, Bioart Society and Cultivamos Cultura that ran residencies and events on bio art and citizen biotech; the site is archived. https://biofriction.org/ - **Biomaker** (Cambridge, UK) — A Cambridge-based open-source bioinstrumentation initiative that funds and documents low-cost hardware projects for biology. https://biomaker.org/ - **Biophilic Cities Network** (Charlottesville, Virginia, US) — A network of cities and researchers, based at the University of Virginia, that works to make daily contact with nature a core part of urban planning. https://www.biophiliccities.org/ - **Biotehna** (Ljubljana, SI) — An open platform run with Kapelica Gallery for artistic research into living systems, with a shared lab, workshops and residencies. https://biotehna.org/ - **BlueCity** (Rotterdam, NL) — A circular-economy hub in a former Rotterdam swimming pool that hosts biomaterial startups and the BlueCity Lab for material experiments. https://www.bluecity.nl/en - **Budburst** (Chicago Botanic Garden, US) — A Chicago Botanic Garden project in which the public records when plants leaf, flower and fruit, and how pollinators visit them, to study climate effects. https://budburst.org/ - **Build-a-Cell** (Online) — An open international community of researchers working to build synthetic living cells from non-living parts. https://www.buildacell.org/ - **Children & Nature Network** (Minneapolis, US) — A network co-founded by Richard Louv, author of Last Child in the Woods, that works to give every child daily access to nature, and keeps a research library on nature and child health. https://www.childrenandnature.org/ - **Community Biotechnology Initiative (MIT Media Lab)** (Cambridge MA, US) — An MIT Media Lab initiative that supports community biology labs worldwide and convenes the Global Community Bio Summit. https://www.media.mit.edu/groups/community-bio/overview/ - **Comparative Cognition Society** (US) — Scholarly society for the study of cognition across species; it runs the annual International Conference on Comparative Cognition (CO3) and the journal Comparative Cognition & Behavior Reviews. https://comparativecognition.org/ - **ConservationDrones.org** (Global) — A community that shares knowledge on building and using low-cost drones for wildlife surveys, forest mapping and conservation. https://conservationdrones.org/ - **Country Needs People** (Australia) — An alliance of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander organisations that campaigns for Indigenous ranger programmes and Indigenous Protected Areas in Australia. https://www.countryneedspeople.org.au/ - **Dark Mountain Project** (UK) — A network of writers and artists that began with the 2009 'Uncivilisation' manifesto, publishing books that look for new stories in a time of ecological collapse. https://dark-mountain.net/ - **DNA Data Storage Alliance (SNIA)** (Online) — An industry alliance, now part of SNIA, that writes standards and roadmaps for storing digital data in DNA. https://www.snia.org/groups/snia-dna-technology-affiliate - **Earth Charter International** (San José, Costa Rica) — The body that promotes the Earth Charter, a 2000 declaration of ethical principles for a just, sustainable and peaceful global society that respects the community of life. https://earthcharter.org/ - **Earth System Governance Project** (Global) — A global research network on how societies can govern the relationship between people and the Earth system, including work on rights of nature and planetary justice. https://www.earthsystemgovernance.org/ - **Engineering Biology Research Consortium (EBRC)** (Emeryville, US) — A US consortium of researchers and companies that writes roadmaps and policy guidance for engineering biology. https://ebrc.org/ - **European Citizen Science Association (ECSA)** (Berlin, Germany) — A membership association that connects citizen science practitioners in Europe, publishes the Ten Principles of Citizen Science and runs a biennial conference. https://www.ecsa.ngo/ - **FAST (Farmed Animal Strategic Team)** (Online) — Long-running email list and resource hub that connects people working professionally for farmed animals, with jobs, funding and tools listings. https://fastcommunity.org/ - **Firesticks Alliance** (Australia) — An Indigenous-led network that revives cultural burning, the practice of caring for Country with fire, across Australia. https://www.firesticks.org.au/ - **Forest School Association** (UK) — The UK professional body for Forest School, a long-term outdoor learning approach in which children learn through regular sessions in woodland. https://forestschoolassociation.org/ - **Forest Therapy Society (森林セラピーソサエティ)** (Tokyo, Japan) — A Japanese organisation that certifies Forest Therapy Bases and Roads, forests where the relaxing effects of walking have been measured, and trains forest therapy guides. https://www.fo-society.jp/ - **FrogID (Australian Museum)** (Sydney, Australia) — An Australian Museum app in which the public records frog calls, which experts identify to map frog species and track declines. https://www.frogid.net.au/ - **Future Earth** (Global) — A global network of sustainability researchers that coordinates research on Earth systems and hosts the Earth Commission, which defines safe and just Earth-system boundaries. https://futureearth.org/ - **Gathering for Open Science Hardware (GOSH)** (Online) — A global community that promotes open-source scientific hardware, including low-cost lab tools used by community biology labs. https://openhardware.science/ - **Genomic Pub** (Seoul, KR) — A Korean knowledge-sharing community for biology beginners and experts, running talks and DIY bio activities. https://genomicpubus.imweb.me/ - **Global Alliance for the Rights of Nature (GARN)** (Global) — A worldwide network of organisations and individuals working to have the rights of nature recognised in law. It runs the International Rights of Nature Tribunal and connects hundreds of member groups. https://www.garn.org/ - **Global Biofoundry Alliance** (Online) — An alliance of public biofoundries worldwide that share automated methods and standards for engineering biology. https://www.biofoundries.org/ - **Global Indigenous Data Alliance (GIDA)** (Global) — A network of Indigenous data sovereignty groups that published the CARE Principles for Indigenous Data Governance, used alongside FAIR principles in biodiversity and research data. https://www.gida-global.org/ - **Globe at Night** (Tucson, Arizona, US (NOIRLab)) — A NOIRLab campaign in which people count visible stars to measure light pollution, a threat to nocturnal animals, insects and people alike. https://globeatnight.org/ - **GLOBE Program (GLOBE Observer)** (Global (NASA-supported)) — An international science and education programme in which students and the public collect data on clouds, land cover, trees and mosquitoes that is used by NASA scientists. https://www.globe.gov/ - **Hackteria** (Zurich, CH) — A global network for open-source biological art, sharing DIY lab tools, wiki tutorials and nomadic workshops across Europe and Asia. https://www.hackteria.org/ - **Harmony with Nature (United Nations)** (New York, US) — A UN programme that tracks rights-of-nature law worldwide and convenes a Knowledge Network of experts in earth jurisprudence. It reports yearly to the UN General Assembly on living in harmony with nature. http://www.harmonywithnatureun.org/ - **Hive** (Online) — Community platform for farmed animal advocates with a Slack workspace, newsletter, courses and events for building skills and connections. https://www.joinhive.org/ - **HONF Foundation (House of Natural Fiber)** (Yogyakarta, ID) — A Yogyakarta new-media art lab known for its Micronation/Macronation biotech projects and DIY science with local communities. https://honf.org/ - **ICCA Consortium** (Global) — A global association supporting territories and areas conserved by Indigenous peoples and local communities (ICCAs), known as 'territories of life'. https://www.iccaconsortium.org/ - **iNaturalist** (Oakland, California, US) — A global community and app where people share photos of plants, animals and fungi, and other users and computer vision help identify them. Its observations feed research through GBIF. https://www.inaturalist.org/ - **Indigenous Environmental Network** (Bemidji, Minnesota, US) — An alliance of Indigenous grassroots groups working on environmental and economic justice, protection of sacred sites and the rights of Mother Earth. https://www.ienearth.org/ - **Insect Welfare Research Society** (US) — Scientific society that funds and promotes research on insect sentience and welfare, especially for the billions of insects raised on farms for food and feed. https://www.insectwelfare.com/ - **International Barcode of Life (iBOL)** (Guelph, Canada) — A research alliance that builds a DNA barcode library of all multicellular life so species can be identified from small tissue or environmental samples. https://ibol.org/ - **International Bioacoustics Society (IBAC)** (International) — Scientific society, active since 1969, for researchers studying animal sound production, perception and communication; it holds regular bioacoustics meetings. https://ibac.info/ - **International Society for Applied Ethology** (International) — Scientific society for the study of the behaviour of domestic, captive and wild animals as it relates to their welfare and management. https://www.applied-ethology.org/ - **International Society for Artificial Life (ISAL)** (Online) — The society behind the ALIFE conference and Artificial Life journal, studying life-like behaviour in software, hardware and wetware. https://alife.org/ - **International Society of Nature and Forest Medicine (INFOM)** (Tokyo, Japan) — A scientific society that studies the health effects of forests and nature, such as effects of forest bathing on stress hormones and immune cells. https://www.infom.org/ - **Interspecies Internet** (Delaware, US / UK) — Nonprofit network (11,500+ members) for the emerging field of interspecies communication. It runs the monthly Interspecies Conversations lectures, workshops, the Animals in Translation report and shared ethics and data standards projects. https://www.interspecies.io/ - **iSpot** (Milton Keynes, UK (The Open University)) — An Open University community for identifying wildlife from photos, designed to help beginners learn identification from experts. https://www.ispotnature.org/ - **Journey North** (University of Wisconsin–Madison, US) — A citizen science programme that maps the seasonal migrations of monarch butterflies, hummingbirds and other species from public sightings. https://journeynorth.org/ - **Just One Giant Lab (JOGL)** (Paris, FR) — An open research platform, co-founded by a La Paillasse founder, that connects distributed volunteers to solve science problems together. https://www.jogl.network/ - **Lifepatch** (Yogyakarta, ID) — A citizen initiative in art, science and technology in Yogyakarta that runs DIY biology, water monitoring and fermentation projects with local communities. https://lifepatch.id/ - **ManyBirds** (International) — Big-team science project that coordinates behaviour and cognition studies across many bird species and labs to build a comparative picture of avian minds. https://themanybirds.com/ - **ManyDogs Project** (International) — International consortium of dog-cognition labs that runs joint studies, such as how dogs understand human pointing, across many sites and breeds. https://manydogs.org/ - **ManyPrimates** (International) — Open, collaborative research network that runs the same cognition experiments across many primate species and sites to get larger, reproducible samples. https://manyprimates.github.io/ - **Monarch Watch** (University of Kansas, US) — A programme at the University of Kansas where volunteers tag monarch butterflies and plant milkweed 'Monarch Waystations' to support their migration. https://monarchwatch.org/ - **Mosquito Alert** (Barcelona, Spain) — A citizen science app and research project in which people photograph mosquitoes and breeding sites, helping experts and AI track invasive and disease-carrying species. https://www.mosquitoalert.com/ - **NaturaLista (CONABIO)** (Mexico City, Mexico) — Mexico's national node of iNaturalist, run by the biodiversity commission CONABIO, with one of the largest observer communities in Latin America. https://www.naturalista.mx/ - **Nature's Calendar (Woodland Trust)** (UK) — A Woodland Trust phenology project in which volunteers record signs of the seasons, such as first leaves and first swallows, to track climate change. https://naturescalendar.woodlandtrust.org.uk/ - **Netzwerk Rechte der Natur** (Germany) — A German-speaking network that campaigns for rights of nature in Germany, Austria and Switzerland, and collects legal texts and news on the topic. https://www.rechte-der-natur.de/ - **Next Nature** (Amsterdam, NL) — An Amsterdam organisation that explores how technology becomes a 'next nature' through exhibitions, speculative projects and public debate. https://nextnature.org/en - **Nordic Alliance for the Rights of Nature (Nature & Democracy)** (Nordic countries) — A Nordic platform that works to change the legal and cultural understanding of nature, pushing for rights of nature in Sweden, Norway, Finland, Denmark and Iceland. https://natureanddemocracy.org/ - **Open Fung** (Online) — An art and science network around fungi that publishes, organises events and partnered with Biodesign Challenge on a fungi track. https://www.openfung.org/ - **Orcasound** (Salish Sea, US / Canada) — A hydrophone network in the Salish Sea that streams live underwater sound so the public can listen for endangered Southern Resident orcas and help label their calls. https://www.orcasound.net/ - **Organoid Intelligence (OI) Community** (Baltimore, US) — The community site for organoid intelligence research, which lists founding researchers and resources and runs the International Conference on Organoid Intelligence. https://organoidintelligence.org/ - **Pl@ntNet** (Montpellier, France) — A French research consortium and app that identifies plants from photos with AI, while collecting observations that help botanists map plant biodiversity. https://plantnet.org/ - **Planetary Health Alliance** (Baltimore, US (Johns Hopkins)) — A consortium of hundreds of universities and organisations that studies how human health depends on the health of Earth's natural systems. https://www.planetaryhealthalliance.org/ - **PRISM (Partnership for Research Into Sentient Machines)** (London, UK) — Non-profit partnership that convenes researchers, companies and policymakers around the possibility of conscious AI, and runs events and a podcast on the topic. https://www.prism-global.com/ - **Project FeederWatch** (Ithaca, US / Canada) — A winter survey run by the Cornell Lab and Birds Canada in which people count the birds at their backyard feeders. https://feederwatch.org/ - **Public Lab** (US (archived)) — A community that developed DIY tools such as balloon and kite mapping and low-cost spectrometers for environmental investigation, started after the 2010 Gulf oil spill. Its site is now an archive. https://publiclab.org/ - **Reef Check** (Marina del Rey, California, US) — An international programme that trains volunteer divers to survey the health of coral reefs and kelp forests with a standard method. https://www.reefcheck.org/ - **Rights of Nature Philippines** (Philippines) — A coalition campaigning for a Rights of Nature Act in the Philippines and for local ordinances that recognise the rights of ecosystems. https://rightsofnature.org.ph/ - **River Rights Network (UK)** (UK) — A UK network of river groups, campaigners and cooperatives working to make the rights of rivers real in British law. It runs 'A Meeting of Rivers' workshops supported by an AHRC grant. https://www.riverrights.org/ - **S+T+ARTS** (Brussels, BE) — The European Commission's Science, Technology and the Arts initiative, which funds residencies, prizes and regional centres pairing artists with researchers. https://starts.eu/ - **SciArt Initiative** (New York, US) — A nonprofit that connects scientists and artists through residencies, open calls, exhibitions and an online community. https://www.sciartinitiative.org/ - **Science Gallery Network** (Dublin, IE) — A network of university-linked galleries (Atlanta, Bengaluru, London, Melbourne, Monterrey and others) that show art-science exhibitions for young adults. https://sciencegallery.org/ - **Scottish Primate Research Group** (Scotland, UK) — Research network of Scottish universities studying primate behaviour, cognition and communication, including the Living Links research centre at Edinburgh Zoo; a member of ARCANI. https://sprg.org.uk/ - **Sentient Futures** (San Francisco, US) — Field-building nonprofit for the intersection of AI, animals and possibly sentient digital minds. It runs the AI×Animals course, a project incubator, a residency, a 1,700-member Slack community and the Sentient Futures Summit. https://sentientfutures.ai/ - **Sentientism** (Online) — Network, podcast and online community for a worldview that combines evidence and reason with moral concern for all sentient beings. https://sentientism.info/ - **SMART Conservation Tools** (Global) — A partnership of conservation organisations that maintains SMART, free software used in over a thousand protected areas to plan ranger patrols and record wildlife and threats. https://smartconservationtools.org/ - **SynBio Africa** (Kampala, UG) — An organisation that builds synthetic biology capacity in Africa through training, research and policy dialogue. https://synbioafrica.com/ - **Te Mana Raraunga (Māori Data Sovereignty Network)** (Aotearoa New Zealand) — A network of Māori researchers and practitioners that sets out principles for Māori control over data about Māori people, lands and taonga, including environmental data. https://www.temanararaunga.maori.nz/ - **Tela Botanica** (Montpellier, France) — A French-speaking botanical network of tens of thousands of members who share plant observations, online courses and a collaborative flora. https://www.tela-botanica.org/ - **The Buffalo Treaty** (Blackfoot Confederacy, US / Canada) — A treaty signed by Indigenous nations across the US and Canada to bring the buffalo back to the prairies, treating the buffalo as a relative and a partner. https://www.buffalotreaty.com/ - **The Club of Rome** (Winterthur, Switzerland) — A group of thinkers known for the 1972 report The Limits to Growth, which still works on planetary emergencies and long-term economic change. https://www.clubofrome.org/ - **USA National Phenology Network (Nature's Notebook)** (Tucson, Arizona, US) — A network that collects phenology data on plants and animals through its Nature's Notebook programme and publishes forecasts such as the spring leaf-out map. https://www.usanpn.org/ - **Vigie-Nature (MNHN)** (Paris, France) — The French National Museum of Natural History's citizen science programme, with protocols for monitoring birds, butterflies, pollinators (Spipoll), bats and plants. https://www.vigienature.fr/ - **WILDLABS** (Global (hosted by WWF-UK)) — The main online community for conservation technology, where field conservationists, engineers and researchers share tools, run working groups on topics such as acoustic monitoring and camera traps, and publish the yearly State of Conservation Technology report. https://wildlabs.net/ - **Work That Reconnects Network** (Global) — A network of facilitators practising Joanna Macy's Work That Reconnects, group exercises such as the Council of All Beings that help people feel part of the living Earth. https://workthatreconnects.org/ - **World Forum for Acoustic Ecology (WFAE)** (Global) — An international network of people who study and care for soundscapes, the sonic environment of humans and other species, building on R. Murray Schafer's World Soundscape Project. https://www.wfae.net/ - **Zooniverse** (Oxford, UK / Chicago, US) — The largest platform for people-powered research, where volunteers classify camera-trap images, animal sounds, galaxies and archives for hundreds of projects. https://www.zooniverse.org/ - **Zoöp (Zoönomic Foundation)** (Rotterdam, Netherlands) — An organisational model developed at Het Nieuwe Instituut in which nonhuman life has a representative in an organisation's governance. Zoöps report on how their work affects the ecologies they depend on. https://zoop.hetnieuweinstituut.nl/ ### Funding & prize - **Accelerating Research on Consciousness (Templeton World Charity Foundation)** (Nassau, Bahamas) — Funding programme that sets up 'adversarial collaborations' in which rival theories of consciousness are tested against each other in pre-registered experiments. https://www.templetonworldcharity.org/our-initiatives/accelerating-research-consciousness - **Animal Welfare Fund (EA Funds)** (Online) — Grant fund that makes small and medium grants to animal welfare projects, including neglected species and AI-related work for animals. https://funds.effectivealtruism.org/funds/animal-welfare - **Bio Art & Design Award (BAD Award)** (Eindhoven, NL) — A Dutch award that pairs young artists and designers with Dutch life-science labs, funding new works shown at MU Hybrid Art House. https://badaward.nl/ - **Coefficient Giving (formerly Open Philanthropy) — Farm Animal Welfare** (San Francisco, US) — Largest funder of farm animal welfare work worldwide (formerly Open Philanthropy); it also funds AI safety and research on digital minds. https://coefficientgiving.org/ - **Coller Dolittle Prize for Two-way Interspecies Communication** (Tel Aviv, Israel / London, UK) — Prize by the Jeremy Coller Foundation and Tel Aviv University: a US$100,000 annual award for research on decoding animal communication and a major prize for the first team to achieve two-way communication with another species. https://coller-dolittle-24.sites.tau.ac.il/ - **Digital Minds Fund (Longview Philanthropy)** (London, UK) — Grant programme run by Longview Philanthropy that funds research and applied work on the possible consciousness, welfare and moral status of AI systems. https://www.longview.org/fund/digital-minds-fund/ - **Diverse Intelligences (Templeton World Charity Foundation)** (Nassau, Bahamas) — Funding initiative that supports research on the many forms of intelligence in animals, plants, microbes and machines, and runs a summer institute for early-career scholars. https://www.templetonworldcharity.org/our-initiatives/diverse-intelligences - **Jeremy Coller Foundation** (London, UK) — Philanthropic foundation of investor Jeremy Coller that funds work against factory farming, the LSE centre for animal sentience, the Coller Dolittle Prize and early Interspecies Internet workshops. https://www.jeremycollerfoundation.org/ - **Macroscopic Ventures** (Switzerland) — Philanthropic fund (formerly Polaris Ventures) that funds work on reducing large-scale suffering from advanced AI, including research on digital sentience. https://macroscopic.org/ - **Prix Ars Electronica** (Linz, AT) — A long-running media-art competition whose Hybrid Art and Artificial Life & Intelligence categories have recognised many key bio art works. https://ars.electronica.art/prix/en/ - **S+T+ARTS Prize** (Linz, AT) — A European Commission prize run by Ars Electronica for collaborations between science, technology and the arts, often won by bio-based projects. https://starts-prize.aec.at/en/ - **Schering Stiftung** (Berlin, DE) — A Berlin foundation that supports art and science, including exhibitions and awards for artists working with the life sciences. https://scheringstiftung.de/de/ - **Stray Dog Institute** (US) — Foundation that funds and researches efforts to end factory farming and build more just food systems, with interest in technology's effects on animals. https://straydoginstitute.org/ - **The Earthshot Prize** (London, UK) — An annual prize that awards £1 million each to five solutions for restoring nature, cleaning the air, reviving the oceans, reducing waste and fixing the climate. https://earthshotprize.org/ - **The Navigation Fund** (US) — Foundation of Jed McCaleb that funds farmed animal welfare, AI safety and other neglected areas; a supporter of Sentient Futures. https://www.navigation.org/ - **XPRIZE Rainforest** (Global) — A US$10 million competition in which teams used drones, eDNA, sound and AI to survey rainforest biodiversity quickly. The finals were held in the Amazon in 2024. https://www.xprize.org/prizes/rainforest ### Programme & residency - **AI×Animals course (Sentient Futures)** (Online) — Free 8-week online fellowship with an open syllabus covering precision livestock farming, AI-assisted interspecies communication, genetic welfare, alternative proteins and animal advocacy in the age of transformative AI. https://sentient-futures.notion.site/aixa - **Ambitious Impact (Charity Entrepreneurship)** (London, UK) — Incubator that trains founders to start new high-impact charities, including several animal welfare groups such as Shrimp Welfare Project and Fish Welfare Initiative. https://www.ambitiousimpact.com/ - **Animal Advocacy Careers** (Online) — Organisation that runs a job board, skills courses and career advising to help people find high-impact work for animals. https://animaladvocacycareers.org/ - **Anthropocene Curriculum (HKW / Max Planck Institute for the History of Science)** (Berlin, Germany) — A long-term collaborative project of Haus der Kulturen der Welt and the Max Planck Institute for the History of Science that develops experimental education on the Anthropocene through campuses, field work and an online archive. https://www.anthropocene-curriculum.org/ - **Association of Nature and Forest Therapy Guides and Programs (ANFT)** (US) — An organisation that trains and certifies forest therapy guides, adapting Japanese shinrin-yoku (forest bathing) into guided sensory walks. https://anft.earth/ - **BioBuilder Educational Foundation** (Cambridge MA, US) — A nonprofit that brings synthetic biology into high schools through teacher training, a textbook and lab activities. https://biobuilder.org/ - **Biodesign Challenge** (New York, US) — An international programme in which art, design and science students spend a semester designing projects with biotechnology, culminating in an annual summit and prizes. https://www.biodesignchallenge.org/ - **BioHack Academy (Waag)** (Amsterdam, NL) — A Waag course in which participants build their own open-source biolab equipment and learn to grow and engineer organisms. https://waag.org/en/project/biohack-academy/ - **Center for Animal Law Studies (Lewis & Clark Law School)** (Portland, US) — Law school centre offering the first animal law LL.M. and clinics, and publishing the Animal Law Review. https://law.lclark.edu/centers/animal_law_studies/ - **CHEMARTS (Aalto University)** (Espoo, FI) — An Aalto University collaboration between chemistry and design students that develops new uses for wood-based and other biomaterials. https://chemarts.aalto.fi/ - **Cultivamos Cultura** (São Luís, PT) — Marta de Menezes' rural art-science centre in Portugal that hosts residencies, a biolab and workshops on bio art. https://cultivamoscultura.com/ - **Fabricademy** (Barcelona, ES) — A distributed textile and technology course across the Fab Lab network, covering biofabricated materials, bio-dyes and wearables. https://textile-academy.org/ - **How To Grow (Almost) Anything** (Cambridge MA, US) — An MIT course on synthetic biology, open to remote nodes worldwide, that teaches students to design and build with living organisms. https://htgaa.org/ - **iGEM Foundation** (Paris, FR) — The international Genetically Engineered Machine competition, where student teams design synthetic biology projects each year. https://igem.org/ - **IndieBio** (San Francisco, US) — A biotech startup accelerator run by SOSV that has funded many biomaterials, food and synthetic biology companies. https://indiebio.co/ - **Institute for Postnatural Studies** (Madrid, ES) — A Madrid centre for artistic research that runs courses, residencies and publications questioning the idea of nature in the post-natural era. https://instituteforpostnaturalstudies.org/ - **MA Art and Science (Central Saint Martins)** (London, UK) — A master's course at Central Saint Martins for artists who work across art and scientific research, including biology and ecology. https://www.arts.ac.uk/subjects/fine-art/postgraduate/ma-art-and-science-csm - **MA Biodesign (Central Saint Martins)** (London, UK) — A master's course at Central Saint Martins where students work with living systems, wet labs and scientists to design regenerative products and materials. https://www.arts.ac.uk/subjects/textiles-and-materials/postgraduate/ma-biodesign-csm - **Materiability Research Network** (Online) — Manuel Kretzer's educational platform and network on smart and biological materials, with open tutorials and student projects. https://materiability.com/ - **Schumacher College** (Dartington, Devon, UK) — A college on the Dartington estate that teaches ecology, regenerative design and ecological economics through holistic, land-based learning. https://www.schumachercollege.org.uk/ - **Serpentine Ecologies / Back to Earth** (London, UK) — The Serpentine Galleries' long-term ecology programme, in which artists, architects and thinkers make proposals and campaigns responding to the climate and ecological emergency. https://www.serpentinegalleries.org/art-and-ideas/back-to-earth-can-i-get-back-to-you/ - **SVA Bio Art Lab** (New York, US) — A biology lab inside the School of Visual Arts where art students work with living matter, founded by bio art pioneer Suzanne Anker. https://bioart.sva.edu/ - **Wild & Legal** (France) — A French programme in which students draft citizen law proposals granting rights to specific ecosystems, such as rivers and forests. https://wildlegal.eu/ ### Conference & event series - **ACI — International Conference on Animal-Computer Interaction** (International) — Annual conference of the animal–computer interaction community, on designing technology with and for animals and on the ethics of involving them in research. https://www.aciconf.org/ - **AI for Non-Human Animal Communication (NeurIPS workshop)** (Online / NeurIPS) — Machine-learning conference workshop that gathers researchers applying AI to the study of animal vocalisations, gestures and other signals, and discusses the ethics of decoding them. https://aiforanimalcomms.org/ - **Ars Electronica** (Linz, AT) — A Linz festival, museum and lab for art, technology and society whose yearly festival regularly features bio art, synthetic biology and living-machine work. https://ars.electronica.art/news/en/ - **Audubon Christmas Bird Count** (Americas) — The longest-running citizen science survey, held every winter since 1900, in which volunteers count birds in set circles across the Americas. https://www.audubon.org/conservation/science/christmas-bird-count - **Big Butterfly Count** (UK) — A summer survey by Butterfly Conservation in which the public counts butterflies and day-flying moths for 15 minutes. https://bigbutterflycount.butterfly-conservation.org/ - **BIO – Biennial of Design Ljubljana** (Ljubljana, SI) — One of Europe's oldest design biennials, run by the Museum of Architecture and Design, whose recent editions focus on ecology, food and living materials. https://www.bio.si/ - **Biofabricate** (New York, US) — Founded by Suzanne Lee, Biofabricate runs an annual summit and industry network for materials grown by living organisms, plus a biomaterials learning site. https://www.biofabricate.co/ - **Biohacking Village** (Las Vegas, US) — A nonprofit community and event at DEF CON on biohacking, medical device security and open biology. https://www.villageb.io/ - **CARE — Conference on Animal Rights in Europe** (Europe) — Large European conference organised by Anima International for animal advocates, researchers and organisations to share strategy and research. https://www.careconf.eu/ - **City Nature Challenge** (Global) — A yearly bioblitz in which cities around the world compete to record the most urban wildlife on iNaturalist over four days. https://www.citynaturechallenge.org/ - **Decoding Communication in Nonhuman Species (Simons Institute workshops)** (Berkeley, US) — Workshop series at UC Berkeley's Simons Institute for the Theory of Computing, co-hosted with Project CETI (2020, 2023, 2024, 2025), where computer scientists, linguists and biologists present work on decoding animal communication. https://simons.berkeley.edu/workshops/decoding-communication-nonhuman-species-iv-co-hosted-project-ceti - **Global Community Bio Summit** (Cambridge MA, US) — A yearly summit, first hosted at the MIT Media Lab, that gathers community biology labs, biohackers and bioartists from around the world. https://www.biosummit.org/ - **International Rights of Nature Tribunal** (Global) — A people's tribunal convened by GARN that hears cases about harm to ecosystems, such as the Amazon and the Great Barrier Reef, using the Universal Declaration of the Rights of Mother Earth. https://www.rightsofnaturetribunal.org/ - **Interspecies Conversations (lecture series)** (Online) — Free monthly online lecture series by Interspecies Internet with researchers on animal communication and cognition, from parrot and bat vocalisations to sperm whale acoustics and animal–computer interaction. https://www.interspecies.io/interspecies-conversations - **ISNSCE and the DNA Computing Conference** (Online) — The society that runs the yearly International Conference on DNA Computing and Molecular Programming. https://isnsce.org/ - **Living Machines Conference** (Online) — A yearly international conference on biomimetic and biohybrid systems, from bio-inspired robots to living-artificial hybrids. https://livingmachinesconference.eu/2025/ - **Minding Animals International** (International) — International network whose conference, held roughly every three years, gathers scholars, artists and advocates in animal studies and animal ethics. https://www.mindinganimals.com/ - **NYU Mind, Ethics, and Policy Summit** (New York, US) — Annual two-day summit at NYU where researchers, practitioners and policymakers discuss which nonhumans matter, how much, and what follows for law, policy and AI governance. https://nonhumanminds.org/opportunities/ - **RSPB Big Garden Birdwatch** (UK) — An annual UK survey in which hundreds of thousands of people spend one hour counting the birds in their garden or local park. https://www.rspb.org.uk/whats-happening/big-garden-birdwatch - **Sentient Futures Summit** (San Francisco, US) — Twice-yearly conference (formerly AI, Animals & Digital Minds) that brings AI researchers, welfare scientists, philosophers and animal advocates together to discuss how transformative AI will affect animals and artificial minds. https://sentientfutures.ai/summit - **SynBioBeta** (San Francisco, US) — The main industry conference and community for synthetic biology startups and investors. https://www.synbiobeta.com/ - **The Science of Consciousness (conference)** (Tucson, US) — Long-running interdisciplinary conference series started at the University of Arizona in 1994, covering theories of consciousness, animal minds and machine consciousness. https://consciousness.arizona.edu/ ### Journal, podcast & report - **AI & Animals: A Documentary** (Online) — 36-minute documentary by Animal Ethics on how AI may scale up factory farming, carry speciesist bias in language models, and also help advocacy, wild animal welfare and alternatives to animal use. https://www.aiandanimals.org/ - **Animal Cognition (journal)** (Online) — Springer journal publishing research on thinking, learning, memory and communication across animal species, from insects to great apes. https://link.springer.com/journal/10071 - **Animal Sentience (journal)** (Online) — Open-access interdisciplinary journal founded by Stevan Harnad that publishes target articles on animal feeling with open peer commentary from scientists and philosophers. https://www.wellbeingintlstudiesrepository.org/animsent/ - **Animals in Translation (Interspecies Internet report)** (Online) — Multimedia publication from the 2024 Interspecies Internet workshop co-hosted with the Santa Fe Institute, proposing criteria and frameworks for judging whether animal communication has been decoded. https://www.interspecies.io/publication - **Atmos** (New York, US) — A climate and culture magazine that publishes stories on ecology, Indigenous knowledge and more-than-human relations with a strong visual style. https://atmos.earth/ - **BioDesigned** (Online) — An online magazine from the Biodesign Challenge community with essays, interviews and news on biology in design, art and industry. https://biodesigned.org/ - **Biotechnology Design (Cambridge University Press)** (Cambridge, UK) — An open-access journal, formerly Research Directions: Biotechnology Design, that publishes research at the meeting point of design and biotechnology. https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/biotechnology-design - **Cambridge Declaration on Consciousness** (Cambridge, UK) — 2012 declaration by a group of neuroscientists stating that many nonhuman animals, including all mammals, birds and octopuses, possess the neurological substrates that generate consciousness. https://philiplow.foundation/consciousness/ - **Consciousness in Artificial Intelligence (Butlin, Long et al. report)** (Online) — 2023 report by 19 scientists and philosophers that derives indicator properties from neuroscientific theories of consciousness and assesses current AI systems against them. https://arxiv.org/abs/2308.08708 - **Emergence Magazine** (Online) — An online and print magazine of essays, films and audio stories on ecology, culture and spirituality, often centring Indigenous and relational views of the living world. https://emergencemagazine.org/ - **Experience Machines (newsletter)** (Online) — Substack newsletter by Eleos AI's Robert Long on AI consciousness, AI welfare and the philosophy of mind. https://experiencemachines.substack.com/ - **For The Wild** (US) — A podcast and media project with conversations on land, rewilding, Indigenous resistance and the more-than-human world. https://forthewild.world/ - **Future Ecologies** (Vancouver, Canada) — A documentary podcast that explores the relationships between people and the rest of nature, through stories about ecology, land and design. https://www.futureecologies.net/ - **Future Perfect (Vox)** (Online) — Vox section on effective ways to do good, with regular reporting on farmed animal welfare, animal sentience and AI welfare. https://www.vox.com/future-perfect - **GROW by Ginkgo** (Boston, US) — Ginkgo Bioworks' magazine of essays, fiction and art on biotechnology and its futures, commissioned from writers and artists. https://www.growbyginkgo.com/ - **How I Learned to Love Shrimp (podcast)** (Online) — Podcast by Amanda Hungerford and James Ozden with interviews about neglected animals, animal sentience and strategy for helping them. https://www.howilearnedtoloveshrimp.com/ - **International Journal of Unconventional Computing** (Philadelphia, US) — A journal for computing with physical, chemical and biological systems, edited by Andrew Adamatzky. https://www.oldcitypublishing.com/journals/ijuc-home/ - **Interspecies Future: A Primer (LAS Art Foundation)** (Berlin, Germany) — Book published by LAS Art Foundation with more than 60 contributions from artists, scientists and technologists on interspecies communication, nonhuman intelligence and Indigenous knowledge. https://www.las-art.foundation/explore/publication-interspecies-future-a-primer - **Journal of Animal Ethics** (Online) — Peer-reviewed journal of the Oxford Centre for Animal Ethics, published by University of Illinois Press, on the moral status and treatment of animals. https://www.jstor.org/journal/janimalethics - **Knowing Animals (podcast)** (Online) — Academic podcast hosted by philosopher Josh Milburn in which researchers in animal studies and animal ethics discuss their work. https://knowinganimals.libsyn.com/ - **Leonardo / ISAST** (San Francisco, US) — A nonprofit that publishes the journal Leonardo (MIT Press) and runs LASER talks, a key forum for art-science including bio art since 1968. https://leonardo.info/ - **Makery** (Paris, FR) — A bilingual online media outlet on labs, makers, DIY biology and art-science, covering hackerspaces and community labs worldwide. https://www.makery.info/en/ - **Mongabay** (Global) — A nonprofit environmental news outlet that reports on forests, oceans, wildlife and Indigenous land in several languages, with a regular series on conservation technology. https://www.mongabay.com/ - **Montreal Declaration for a Responsible Development of AI** (Montreal, Canada) — 2018 declaration of ethical principles for AI, drafted through public consultation in Montreal, whose first principle says AI must permit the growth of the well-being of all sentient beings. https://montrealdeclaration-responsibleai.com/ - **Natural Computing (Springer)** (Online) — A Springer journal on computation inspired by or performed with nature, including DNA, molecular and cellular computing. https://link.springer.com/journal/11047 - **New York Declaration on Animal Consciousness** (New York, US) — 2024 statement signed by hundreds of scientists and philosophers saying there is strong support for conscious experience in mammals and birds and at least a realistic possibility in all vertebrates and many invertebrates. https://sites.google.com/nyu.edu/nydeclaration/declaration - **Noema Magazine** (Los Angeles, US) — A magazine of the Berggruen Institute on philosophy, governance, technology and the planet, publishing essays on nonhuman intelligence, planetary thinking and ecology. https://www.noemamag.com/ - **Orion Magazine** (Northampton, Massachusetts, US) — An ad-free magazine of nature, culture and place, publishing writers such as Robin Wall Kimmerer and Barry Lopez on how people relate to the natural world. https://orionmagazine.org/ - **Politics and Animals (journal)** (Lund, Sweden) — Open-access peer-reviewed journal on the political and legal status of animals, from animal citizenship to democratic representation. https://journals.lub.lu.se/pa/ - **Review of the Evidence of Sentience in Cephalopod Molluscs and Decapod Crustaceans (LSE report)** (London, UK) — 2021 report for the UK government by Jonathan Birch and colleagues that found strong evidence of sentience in octopuses, squid, crabs and lobsters; it led to their inclusion in the Animal Welfare (Sentience) Act 2022. https://www.lse.ac.uk/business/consulting/reports/review-of-the-evidence-of-sentiences-in-cephalopod-molluscs-and-decapod-crustaceans - **SciArt Magazine** (Online) — An online magazine that covers artists working with science, publishing interviews and themed monthly issues. https://www.sciartmagazine.com/ - **Sentient (formerly Sentient Media)** (US) — Nonprofit newsroom that reports on animal agriculture, animal welfare and the treatment of animals, and trains journalists to cover them. https://sentientmedia.org/ - **Taking AI Welfare Seriously (report)** (Online) — 2024 report by Robert Long, Jeff Sebo and co-authors arguing that some AI systems may soon be conscious or robustly agentic, and that AI companies should start preparing policies for AI welfare. https://arxiv.org/abs/2411.00986 - **The Sentience Institute Podcast** (Online) — Interview podcast from Sentience Institute on moral circle expansion, digital minds and effective animal advocacy. https://www.sentienceinstitute.org/podcast - **Toulon Declaration** (Toulon, France) — 2019 declaration by legal scholars at the University of Toulon calling for animals to be recognised as legal persons rather than things. https://www.univ-tln.fr/declaration-de-toulon/ ### Directory, archive & dataset - **AI Welfare Guide** (Online) — Onboarding website for people entering AI welfare research that summarises the main theories of consciousness, key organisations and open questions; built in the Sentient Futures incubator. https://aiwelfare.guide/ - **Allen Coral Atlas** (Online) — A global map of shallow coral reefs made from satellite imagery, with monitoring of coral bleaching, used by reef managers and scientists. https://allencoralatlas.org/ - **Animal Protection Index (World Animal Protection)** (London, UK) — Index that ranks 50 countries on their animal welfare legislation and policy, including recognition of animal sentience. https://api.worldanimalprotection.org/ - **Animal Rights Map** (Online) — Interactive world map of animal protection organisations, groups and sanctuaries, made to help advocates find each other. https://animalrightsmap.org/ - **Animal-AI Testbed** (Cambridge, UK) — Open-source 3D environment and task set (behind the 2019 Animal-AI Olympics) that evaluates AI agents with experiments adapted from comparative animal cognition. https://github.com/Kinds-of-Intelligence-CFI/animal-ai - **AnimalHarmBench** (Online) — Open benchmark that tests how large language models reason about harm to animals, using a framework of AI harms to animals by Coghlan and Parker. https://github.com/AI-for-Animals/ahb - **Arbimon** (Online (Rainforest Connection)) — A free cloud platform from Rainforest Connection for storing, analysing and sharing ecoacoustic recordings, with tools for species detection and soundscape analysis. https://arbimon.org/ - **AskNature** (Online) — The Biomimicry Institute's free online library of biological strategies and bio-inspired designs, searchable by function. https://asknature.org/ - **Atlas of Living Australia** (Canberra, Australia) — Australia's national biodiversity database, combining museum, herbarium and citizen science records for more than 100,000 species. https://www.ala.org.au/ - **BirdNET** (Ithaca, US / Chemnitz, Germany) — A free AI tool from the Cornell Lab and TU Chemnitz that identifies thousands of bird species by sound, used both in apps and in large acoustic monitoring projects. https://birdnet.cornell.edu/ - **China Bird Report (中国观鸟记录中心)** (China) — China's main online bird records database, where birdwatchers submit checklists that are used for bird distribution and conservation research. http://www.birdreport.cn/ - **CitSci.org** (Colorado State University, US) — A free platform from Colorado State University that lets anyone design and run a citizen science project, from data sheets to analysis. https://citsci.org/ - **Conservation Evidence** (Cambridge, UK) — A free database from the University of Cambridge that summarises scientific evidence on what works, and what does not, in conservation actions. https://www.conservationevidence.com/ - **Digital Consciousness Model (Rethink Priorities)** (Online) — Probabilistic model from Rethink Priorities' AI Cognition Initiative that combines many theories of consciousness to estimate how likely different AI systems (and animals) are to be conscious. https://rethinkpriorities.org/digital-consciousness/ - **DIYbio.org** (Online) — The founding network of the do-it-yourself biology movement, with a mailing list, safety discussions and a world directory of local groups. https://diybio.org/local/ - **EarthRanger (Ai2)** (Seattle, US) — Free software from the Allen Institute for AI that gives protected-area managers one live map of rangers, collared animals, sensors and incidents. https://www.earthranger.com/ - **eBird** (Ithaca, New York, US) — A Cornell Lab platform where birders submit checklists of the birds they see, building one of the largest biodiversity datasets in the world. https://ebird.org/home - **Eco Jurisprudence Monitor** (Online) — A searchable global map and database of rights-of-nature laws, court rulings, policies and initiatives, maintained with GARN and academic partners. https://ecojurisprudence.org/ - **FathomNet** (Moss Landing, California, US) — An open image database of labelled ocean life, led by MBARI, used to train AI that can recognise deep-sea animals in underwater video. https://www.fathomnet.org/ - **Future Materials Bank** (Maastricht, NL) — An open online database of sustainable and experimental materials made by artists and designers, initiated by the Jan van Eyck Academie in Maastricht. https://www.futurematerialsbank.com/ - **GBIF (Global Biodiversity Information Facility)** (Copenhagen, Denmark) — An international network and open data infrastructure that gives free access to billions of species occurrence records from museums, surveys and citizen science. https://www.gbif.org/ - **Global Animal Law (GAL) Association** (Zurich, Switzerland) — Association that maintains an open database of animal protection laws and constitutional provisions around the world. https://www.globalanimallaw.org/ - **Global Forest Watch** (Washington, DC, US (WRI)) — An open platform from the World Resources Institute that shows near-real-time forest loss alerts from satellites so anyone can monitor forests. https://www.globalforestwatch.org/ - **Happywhale** (Santa Cruz, California, US) — A platform where whale watchers upload tail-fluke photos that AI matches to individual humpbacks and other whales, tracking their journeys across oceans. https://happywhale.com/ - **iGEM Registry of Standard Biological Parts** (Online) — An open collection of standardised genetic parts (BioBricks) contributed and used by iGEM teams. https://parts.igem.org/Main_Page - **Interspecies communication archive (Internet Archive)** (Online) — Open collection of books, papers, video and audio on interspecies communication curated by Earth Species Project and Interspecies Internet on the Internet Archive. https://archive.org/details/interspecies.io-books-and-papers - **iRecord** (UK (UKCEH Biological Records Centre)) — A UK website and app for sharing wildlife sightings, which are checked by expert verifiers and used for national species atlases. https://irecord.org.uk/ - **IUCN Red List of Threatened Species** (Global) — The world's main source on the extinction risk of animals, fungi and plants, assessing more than 160,000 species. https://www.iucnredlist.org/ - **Local Contexts** (Global) — An initiative that provides Traditional Knowledge and Biocultural Labels, digital tags Indigenous communities attach to data, samples and collections to assert their rights and provenance. https://localcontexts.org/ - **Macaulay Library** (Ithaca, New York, US) — The Cornell Lab's archive of wildlife sounds, photos and videos, with tens of millions of media files contributed largely by birders through eBird. https://www.macaulaylibrary.org/ - **Map of Life** (Yale University, US) — A Yale-led platform that maps where more than 450,000 species live and tracks biodiversity indicators for countries and protected areas. https://mol.org/ - **MaterialDistrict** — An online platform and yearly fair in Rotterdam that catalogues innovative materials, including a large section on bio-based and grown materials. https://materialdistrict.com/ - **Materiom** (London, UK) — An open-data platform that publishes recipes and property data for biomaterials made from locally abundant biomass, so communities can make and test them. https://www.materiom.org/ - **MICO (Massive Interspecies Communication Observatory)** (San Diego, US) — Nonprofit–university–industry partnership, fiscally sponsored by Interspecies Internet, that collects data from pets using soundboard buttons so researchers can run blind, controlled studies of animal communication at scale. https://micoproject.org/ - **Movebank** (Konstanz, Germany) — A free online database of animal tracking data hosted by the Max Planck Institute of Animal Behavior, holding billions of GPS locations from thousands of species. https://www.movebank.org/ - **Native Land Digital** (Canada) — An Indigenous-led nonprofit that maps Indigenous territories, languages and treaties worldwide so people can learn whose land they live on. https://native-land.ca/ - **NatureServe** (Arlington, Virginia, US) — A network of biodiversity data centres in the Americas that tracks the status of species and ecosystems for conservation planning. https://www.natureserve.org/ - **OBIS (Ocean Biodiversity Information System)** (Ostend, Belgium (UNESCO-IOC)) — A UNESCO global open-access database of marine species occurrences, gathered from thousands of datasets. https://obis.org/ - **Observation.org (Waarneming.nl)** (Netherlands) — A Dutch-born nature recording platform, with the ObsIdentify app, where people log sightings of all species. It is widely used across Europe. https://observation.org/ - **OpenWetWare** (Online) — A wiki where biologists and community labs share protocols, lab notebooks and course material openly. https://openwetware.org/wiki/Main_Page - **Protected Planet (UNEP-WCMC)** (Cambridge, UK) — The official global database of protected areas and other effective area-based conservation measures, maintained by UNEP-WCMC with IUCN. https://www.protectedplanet.net/ - **Restor** (Zurich, Switzerland) — An open platform, spun out of ETH Zurich's Crowther Lab, where restoration projects map their sites and share ecological data on biodiversity, soil and carbon. https://restor.eco/ - **SciStarter** (US) — A searchable directory of thousands of citizen science projects, with tools that help people join, track and get credit for their contributions. https://scistarter.org/ - **Skylight (Ai2)** (Seattle, US) — A free maritime monitoring platform from the Allen Institute for AI that uses satellite data and AI to detect illegal fishing and protect marine areas. https://www.skylight.global/ - **Wildlife Insights** (Online) — A platform built by Conservation International, Google and partners that uses AI to identify animals in camera-trap photos and shares the data for conservation. https://www.wildlifeinsights.org/ - **xeno-canto** (Online (Naturalis, Netherlands)) — A community-built open archive of bird, frog, bat and insect sound recordings from around the world, widely used to train bioacoustic AI. https://xeno-canto.org/ ### Company & studio - **3Brain** — A company that makes high-density CMOS microelectrode arrays for recording neural cultures, organoids and retinas. https://www.3brain.com/ - **Amino Labs** (Montreal, CA) — A company that makes beginner-friendly genetic engineering kits and mini-labs for schools and the public. https://amino.bio/ - **AMSilk** (Planegg, DE) — A German biotech company that produces spider-silk proteins by fermentation for textiles, cosmetics and medical coatings. https://www.amsilk.com/ - **Bento Lab** (London, UK) — A London company that makes a portable DNA lab combining PCR, centrifuge and gel electrophoresis for education and fieldwork. https://bento.bio/ - **Biobased Creations** (Amsterdam, NL) — A Dutch design agency that makes exhibitions and pavilions (such as the Embassy of Circular & Biobased Building) to show bio-based materials to the public. https://biobasedcreations.com/ - **Biofaction** (Vienna, AT) — A Vienna research and science-communication company that runs projects on synthetic biology, xenobiology and art, including the Bio:Fiction film festival. https://www.biofaction.com/ - **Biohm** (London, UK) — A research-led company that grows mycelium insulation and makes building panels from food waste for a circular construction industry. https://www.biohm.co.uk/ - **Biomason** (Durham NC, US) — A company that grows cement tiles and building products with bacteria at ambient temperature instead of kiln-fired cement. https://biomason.com/ - **Biome (いきものコレクション)** (Kyoto, Japan) — A Japanese company whose Biome app turns species observation into a collection game with AI identification, generating biodiversity data for companies and local governments. https://biome.co.jp/ - **Biome Makers** (California, US / Spain) — A company that sequences soil microbiomes to give farmers a picture of soil life and health through its BeCrop test. https://biomemakers.com/ - **Biomemory** (Paris, FR) — A French company developing DNA data storage appliances for data centres, using biological production of DNA. https://www.biomemory.com/ - **Blast Studio** (London, UK) — A London design studio that 3D-prints objects and columns from mycelium grown on waste such as used coffee cups. https://www.blast-studio.com/ - **Bolt Threads** (Emeryville CA, US) — A materials company known for bioengineered spider silk protein and the mycelium leather Mylo, now focused on bio-based beauty ingredients. https://boltthreads.com/ - **Colorifix** (Norwich, UK) — A company that uses engineered microbes to produce and fix dyes on textiles, cutting the water and chemicals used in dyeing. https://www.colorifix.com/ - **Conscium** (London, UK) — London AI company working on machine consciousness research and verification of AI agents; it published principles for responsible research on AI consciousness. https://conscium.com/ - **Conservation X Labs** (US) — A conservation innovation company that builds tools such as the Sentinel AI camera-trap device and runs open innovation prizes. Wild Me and its Wildbook platform joined it in 2024. https://conservationxlabs.com/ - **Cortical Labs** (Melbourne, AU) — A Melbourne company that grows human neurons on chips; its DishBrain culture learned to play Pong and it sells the CL1 biological computer. https://corticallabs.com/ - **ecoLogicStudio** (London, UK) — An architecture and urban design studio that builds photobioreactors and algae-based structures that capture carbon in cities. https://www.ecologicstudio.com/ - **Ecovative** (Green Island NY, US) — A pioneer of mycelium materials that grows packaging, foams and alternative meats from fungal mycelium and licenses the process. https://ecovative.com/ - **Eon Systems** (San Francisco, US) — Company working on whole-brain emulation, starting from complete connectome models of the fruit fly, which raises questions about the moral status of emulated minds. https://eon.systems/ - **Faber Futures** (London, UK) — Natsai Audrey Chieza's biodesign studio, known for dyeing textiles with Streptomyces bacteria and for strategy work on biotech and design. https://faberfutures.com/ - **FinalSpark** (Vevey, CH) — A Swiss company that runs brain organoids on electrode arrays and offers remote access to them through its Neuroplatform. https://finalspark.com/ - **FluentPet** (US) — Company making recordable soundboard buttons that dogs and cats press to 'say' words; it provides the technology for the MICO research study with UC San Diego. https://fluent.pet/ - **Glowee** (Paris, FR) — A French company that makes light from bioluminescent marine bacteria for public lighting and installations. https://glowee.com/ - **Grown.bio** (Oosterhout, NL) — A Dutch company that grows mycelium packaging and materials and licenses its process to local producers. https://www.grown.bio/ - **Hack the Planet** (Netherlands) — A Dutch tech studio that builds rugged AI camera traps and sensors that warn communities in real time about elephants, bears and poachers. https://www.hack-the-planet.io/ - **Huue** (Berkeley CA, US) — A startup that uses engineered microbes to make indigo and other textile dyes without petrochemicals or toxic reducing agents. https://huue.bio/ - **Internet of Elephants** (Nairobi, Kenya) — A Kenyan social enterprise that turns real wildlife tracking and research data into games, stories and digital experiences that connect people to individual animals. https://internetofelephants.com/ - **Keel Labs** (Durham NC, US) — A company, formerly AlgiKnit, that spins yarns from kelp-based alginate for knitwear and textiles. https://www.keellabs.com/ - **Koniku** — A company that builds sensing devices combining living cells and silicon, aimed at smelling explosives and diseases. https://koniku.com/ - **Light Bio** (Ketchum ID, US) — A company that sells genetically engineered glowing plants, starting with the Firefly Petunia, using a fungal bioluminescence pathway. https://light.bio/ - **Living Ink Technologies** (Aurora CO, US) — A company that makes printing inks and pigments from algae, starting with a carbon-negative black ink. https://www.livingink.co/ - **Made of Air** (Berlin, DE) — A Berlin company that turns biomass into biochar-based thermoplastics that lock carbon into facades, furniture and cars. https://www.madeofair.com/ - **MaterialDriven** (London, UK) — A London material consultancy, gallery and online library that promotes new, often bio-based and waste-derived materials to designers and brands. https://www.materialdriven.com/ - **MaxWell Biosystems** (Zurich, CH) — A Swiss maker of high-density microelectrode arrays used to record and stimulate neurons and organoids, including in biocomputing research. https://www.mxwbio.com/ - **Modern Meadow** (Nutley NJ, US) — A biotech company that designs protein-based materials for fashion and beauty, first known for lab-grown leather. https://www.modernmeadow.com/ - **Modern Synthesis** (London, UK) — A London company that grows textile materials with bacteria that weave nanocellulose onto yarn frameworks. https://www.modernsynthesis.com/ - **Mogu** (Inarzo, IT) — An Italian company that grows acoustic panels and flooring from fungal mycelium and agricultural residues. https://mogu.bio/ - **MYCL (Mycotech Lab)** (Bandung, ID) — An Indonesian company that grows Mylea mycelium leather and binderless boards from agricultural waste. https://mycl.bio/ - **NatureMetrics** (London, UK) — A company that measures biodiversity from environmental DNA in water and soil samples, used by companies, governments and conservation groups. https://www.naturemetrics.com/ - **Nonhuman Nonsense** (Stockholm, Sweden) — A research-driven design and art studio that makes near-future fabulations about nonhuman rights and planetary personhood, such as 'Planetary Personhood'. https://nonhuman-nonsense.com/ - **Notpla** (London, UK) — A London company that makes packaging from seaweed and plants, including edible drink pods and coatings for takeaway boxes. https://www.notpla.com/ - **Officina Corpuscoli** (Amsterdam, NL) — Maurizio Montalti's design and research studio that works with fungi and other living systems to rethink materials and production. https://www.corpuscoli.com/ - **Open Acoustic Devices (AudioMoth)** (Southampton, UK) — Makers of AudioMoth, a low-cost open-source acoustic logger used by researchers and citizen scientists to record birds, bats, insects and whole soundscapes. https://www.openacousticdevices.info/ - **OXMAN** (New York, US) — Neri Oxman's New York design company that builds products, architecture and systems with and for nature, continuing her material ecology work. https://www.oxman.com/ - **Pili** (Toulouse, FR) — A French company, born from La Paillasse, that combines fermentation and chemistry to make bio-based dyes and pigments. https://www.pili.bio/ - **Post Carbon Lab** (London, UK) — A London textile research lab that develops photosynthetic coatings and microbial dyes for garments. https://www.postcarbonlab.com/ - **Prometheus Materials** (Longmont CO, US) — A spin-out from the University of Colorado that makes low-carbon concrete blocks using microalgae-grown biocement. https://prometheusmaterials.com/ - **Smart Parks** (Netherlands) — A Dutch social enterprise that builds LoRaWAN sensor networks and open-source animal collars to protect wildlife and parks. https://www.smartparks.org/ - **Spiber** (Tsuruoka, JP) — A Japanese company that ferments structural proteins inspired by spider silk and turns them into fibres for textiles and other products. https://spiber.inc/en - **Superflux** (London, UK) — A speculative design and futures studio whose installations, such as 'Refuge for Resurgence' and 'Mitigation of Shock', imagine more-than-human futures. https://superflux.in/ - **Tehanu** (Rwanda / Europe) — Project started by writer Jonathan Ledgard that gives other species an AI-based digital identity and wallet so they can pay humans for pro-nature actions; its first case, in 2024, involved Rwandan mountain gorillas. https://www.tehanu.io/ - **Terrapin Bright Green** (New York, US) — An environmental consultancy known for the report '14 Patterns of Biophilic Design', which translated research on nature and wellbeing into design guidance. https://www.terrapinbrightgreen.com/ - **The ODIN** (Oakland, US) — Josiah Zayner's company selling DIY CRISPR and genetic engineering kits, a flashpoint in debates about home biohacking. https://www.the-odin.com/ - **Wildlife Acoustics** (Maynard, Massachusetts, US) — A company that makes Song Meter recorders, Echo Meter bat detectors and Kaleidoscope analysis software for bioacoustic monitoring. https://www.wildlifeacoustics.com/ - **Zoolingua** (Flagstaff, US) — Company founded by prairie-dog language researcher Con Slobodchikoff that aims to use AI to translate dogs' vocalisations, facial expressions and body language for their owners. https://zoolingua.com/ ## Creators - **Earth Species Project** (24) — Nonprofit AI research lab co-founded by Aza Raskin and Britt Selvitelle. Earth Species Project develops machine-learning models and benchmarks to decode animal communication. https://www.earthspecies.org - **Ilyena Hirskyj-Douglas** (24) — Academic at the School of Computing Science, University of Glasgow; leads its Animal-Computer Interaction group. ACI researcher who builds systems that animals control themselves, from a dog-to-human video phone to music players for monkeys and parrots. - **Clara Mancini** (21) — Professor of Animal-Computer Interaction, The Open University; founder of the ACI Lab. Founder of Animal-Computer Interaction as a field; designs interfaces with working dogs and writes on animal-centred ethics. https://www.open.ac.uk/blogs/ACI/ - **Jiabao Li** (21) — Artist and designer; Associate Professor, Northeastern University (previously UT Austin, Stanford; Apple designer). Artist, inventor and professor (Harvard GSD alum) whose installations, XR works, bio-art and performances deal with glaciers, bats, mice, squid, elephants and plankton. She co-founded Endless Health and ran the Ecocentric Future Lab at UT Austin. https://www.jiabaoli.org - **Ron Wakkary** (19) — Professor, School of Interactive Arts and Technology, Simon Fraser University; founder of the Everyday Design Studio. Design researcher who builds counterfactual things such as the Morse Things and the Tilting Bowl and lives with them to study how things and people coexist. http://eds.siat.sfu.ca/ - **Ani Liu** (15) — Artist; Carrafiell Assistant Professor (Emerging Design), Weitzman School of Design, University of Pennsylvania. Research-based artist working with biology, technology and gender; MIT Media Lab alum and former Princeton Arts Fellow. Her sculptures and installations use microbes, plants, breast milk, sperm and scent to examine reproduction, labor and care. https://ani-liu.com - **Neri Oxman** (14) — Designer and architect; founder of OXMAN; former professor at the MIT Media Lab. Neri Oxman led the Mediated Matter group at the MIT Media Lab (2010–2020) and coined the term Material Ecology for design that merges computation, fabrication and biology. https://www.oxman.com - **Project CETI** (13) — Cetacean Translation Initiative, led by David Gruber. Project CETI is an interdisciplinary nonprofit that combines bioacoustics, robotics and machine learning to understand sperm whale communication off Dominica. https://www.projectceti.org - **Alexandra Daisy Ginsberg** (12) — Artist; works with synthetic biology, conservation and AI. Alexandra Daisy Ginsberg is a London-based artist whose work examines how humans value nature, from synthetic biology speculation to living artworks for pollinators. https://www.daisyginsberg.com - **Andrew Adamatzky** (12) — Professor of Unconventional Computing, UWE Bristol; director of the Unconventional Computing Laboratory. Computer scientist who builds computers from slime mould, fungi, proteinoids, kombucha and chemical reactions, and edits the International Journal of Unconventional Computing. https://uncomp.uwe.ac.uk/ - **Melody Moore Jackson** (12) — Professor, School of Interactive Computing, Georgia Institute of Technology; directs the Animal-Computer Interaction Lab. Researcher and dog trainer who designs wearable and touchscreen interfaces that service dogs operate. - **Mirela Alistar** (12) — Assistant Professor, ATLAS Institute and Computer Science, University of Colorado Boulder; director of the Living Matter Lab. Mirela Alistar started in biochip design automation and now leads a lab on interaction design with living matter: algae, kombucha, microbiomes and biomaterials. https://www.colorado.edu/atlas/living-matter-lab - **Oron Catts** (12) — Artist; co-founder of The Tissue Culture & Art Project and director of SymbioticA. Oron Catts is an artist and researcher who grows semi-living sculptures from tissue cultures. https://tcaproject.net - **Rébecca Kleinberger** (12) — Assistant Professor, Northeastern University (Khoury College and Art + Design); leads the INTERACT Animal Lab. Researcher on voice, sound and interspecies interaction; PhD from the MIT Media Lab. - **Bahareh Barati** (11) — Assistant Professor, Industrial Design, Eindhoven University of Technology. Bahareh Barati researches living and computational materials in design, including bioluminescent living light interfaces, algae-based slow computers and digital twins for mycelium growing. - **David Bowen** (11) — Studio artist and educator. American artist who builds robotic and data-driven sculptures, many of them steered by houseflies or by the electrical signals of living plants. https://www.dwbowen.com/ - **Cortical Labs** (10) — Biotech company building biological computers from human neurons on silicon chips. Founded in 2019 by Hon Weng Chong, Cortical Labs grows human and mouse neurons on high-density multi-electrode arrays. It made DishBrain, which learned to play Pong, and sells the CL1 biological computer and cloud access to it. https://corticallabs.com - **Doenja Oogjes** (10) — Design researcher; PhD from the Everyday Design Studio, Simon Fraser University. Designer and researcher who co-created the Morse Things and the Tilting Bowl and develops posthuman methods from craft practices such as weaving. - **Eduardo Kac** (10) — Artist; coined the term transgenic art. Eduardo Kac is a Brazilian-American artist known for works that use genetic engineering to create new living beings and texts. https://www.ekac.org - **Elisa Giaccardi** (10) — Professor of Interaction Design, Politecnico di Milano; formerly Chair of Post-Industrial Design, TU Delft. Interaction design researcher who put cameras on everyday objects to see the world from their side and developed thing-centred design. - **Fiona Bell** (10) — HCI researcher and designer; PhD, Living Matter Lab, CU Boulder. Fiona Bell designs with biomaterials and living microbes: SCOBY wearables, skin-microbiome interfaces and photobioreactor sculptures. - **Guy Ben-Ary** (10) — Artist and researcher, SymbioticA, The University of Western Australia. Bio-artist who has worked with living neurons since 2000: robotic drawing (MEART), neural synthesizers (cellF) and organoids grown from the composer Alvin Lucier's blood (Revivification). https://guybenary.com - **Harpreet Sareen** (10) — Designer and researcher of plant–machine hybrids; faculty at Parsons School of Design; formerly MIT Media Lab. Harpreet Sareen coined 'Cyborg Botany': plants with wires grown inside them, plants that drive robots, and plants that sense water or talk through sound. https://harpreetsareen.com/ - **Ionat Zurr** (10) — Artist and researcher; co-founder of The Tissue Culture & Art Project. Ionat Zurr is an artist and academic at the University of Western Australia who co-developed the idea of the semi-living. https://tcaproject.net - **Sarah Webber** (10) — Researcher, School of Computing and Information Systems, University of Melbourne. HCI researcher who studies digital enrichment for zoo animals and how visitors respond to it. - **Špela Petrič** (10) — Artist with a background in biology. Špela Petrič is a Slovenian artist and biologist whose performances explore relationships between humans and plants. https://www.spelapetric.org - **Elvin Karana** (9) — Professor of Materials Innovation and Design, TU Delft; leads research on living artefacts. Elvin Karana developed the Material Driven Design method and now studies 'living artefacts' made with bacteria, algae and fungi. https://www.tudelft.nl/en/ide/about-ide/people/karana-e - **Ingmar Riedel-Kruse** (9) — Professor of Molecular and Cellular Biology, University of Arizona; formerly Stanford Bioengineering. Ingmar Riedel-Kruse invented 'biotic games' and interactive biotechnology: touchscreens, joysticks and cloud labs that let people steer living Euglena cells with light. - **Marcus Foth** (9) — Professor of Urban Informatics, QUT Design Lab, Queensland University of Technology. Urban informatics researcher working on smart cities, media architecture and more-than-human urbanism. - **Raphael Kim** (9) — Designer and researcher of human–microbe interaction; PhD Queen Mary University of London; postdoc TU Delft. Raphael Kim designs 'biotic games' driven by living moulds and bacteria and helped found the Microbe-HCI community. - **Superflux** (9) — Speculative design and futures studio founded by Anab Jain and Jon Ardern. Superflux builds immersive installations, films and policy prototypes that make possible futures tangible, with a long strand of work on more-than-human politics and ecological AI. https://superflux.in - **The Tissue Culture & Art Project** (9) — Artistic research project by Oron Catts and Ionat Zurr (since 1996). TC&A grows living tissue into sculptures, garments and food to question how biotechnology treats life. https://tcaproject.net - **Interspecifics** (8) — Independent artistic research collective (Leslie García, Paloma López and others). Interspecifics is a Mexico City collective that turns bioelectric and behavioural signals of microorganisms, plants and slime moulds into sound, light and machine-learning systems. - **Ivan Henriques** (8) — Artist and researcher making bio-machines; based in the Netherlands. Ivan Henriques builds hybrid machines powered or controlled by living organisms: algae-eating floating robots, microbial-fuel-cell rafts and bacteria-driven tensegrity structures. - **Margot Brereton** (8) — Professor of Interaction Design, Queensland University of Technology (QUT). Interaction design researcher whose QUT group builds bird-listening devices, ecoacoustic citizen science tools and garden technologies with communities. https://research.qut.edu.au/ - **Mediated Matter Group (MIT Media Lab)** (8) — Research group at the MIT Media Lab directed by Neri Oxman (2010–2020). Mediated Matter worked at the intersection of computational design, digital fabrication, materials science and synthetic biology. https://www.media.mit.edu/groups/mediated-matter/overview/ - **Robertina Šebjanič** (8) — Artist working on aquatic environments, interspecies relations and underwater sound. Robertina Šebjanič makes installations and performances about marine life, underwater noise and pollution, working with jellyfish, sea urchins, olms and hydrophone recordings. https://robertina.net - **Saša Spačal** (8) — Artist. Saša Spačal is a Slovenian artist who builds installations connecting human and fungal bodies. https://www.agapea.si - **Steve Benford** (8) — Professor of Collaborative Computing, Mixed Reality Lab, University of Nottingham. Co-founder of the Mixed Reality Lab, known for performance-led research in the wild with artists such as Blast Theory, and for the trajectories framework. Recent work studies robots, AI and animals through the artwork Cat Royale. https://www.nottingham.ac.uk/research/groups/mixedrealitylab/people/steve.benford - **Theresa Schubert** (8) — Artist between media art and bioart; PhD, Bauhaus-University Weimar. Berlin-based artist who builds installations with slime mould, fungi, algae and microbes, often coupled to sensors, simulations and generative sound. https://www.theresaschubert.com/ - **Anna Dumitriu** (7) — Artist working with bacteria, infectious disease and biotechnology. Anna Dumitriu is a British artist who combines textiles and craft with microbiology in long collaborations with scientists. https://annadumitriu.co.uk - **Anna Zamansky** (7) — Associate Professor, Department of Information Systems, University of Haifa; heads the Tech4Animals lab. Researcher on technology for animals, from dog activity trackers to AI for animal behaviour and welfare. - **C-Lab (Laura Cinti & Howard Boland)** (7) — Art-science studio. London studio of Laura Cinti and Howard Boland that makes living installations with bacteria, plants and biotechnology. https://www.c-lab.co.uk - **Fiona French** (7) — Associate Professor, School of Computing and Digital Media, London Metropolitan University. ACI researcher who designs interactive toys and sound instruments for captive elephants. - **Heidi R. Biggs** (7) — Design researcher working on posthuman and ecological design. Designer-researcher who makes embodied speculations about climate change and reflects on birdwatching as a posthuman method. https://www.heidibiggsdesign.com/ - **Iohanna Nicenboim** (7) — Designer and researcher, TU Delft; works on more-than-human design and AI. Designer-researcher who treats voice assistants and AI as more-than-human agents and designs situated conversations with them. https://iohanna.com/ - **Larissa Pschetz** (7) — Reader in Interaction Design, University of Edinburgh; leads research on temporal design and biodesign. Larissa Pschetz studies how design shapes time and how designers can account for the times of other species, from microbes in labs to crops in fields. - **Marcus Carter** (7) — Human-Computer Interaction researcher, University of Sydney. Game and HCI researcher who builds digital enrichment for zoo animals, including orangutans at Melbourne Zoo. - **Michael Levin** (7) — Distinguished Professor of Biology, Tufts University; director of the Allen Discovery Center. Developmental biologist studying bioelectric signalling and how cells collectively decide what shape to build. https://drmichaellevin.org/ - **Patricia Pons** (7) — Researcher, Universitat Politècnica de València. Researcher who builds intelligent playful environments for cats and other animals using depth cameras. - **Paul Vanouse** (7) — Artist; professor at the University at Buffalo. Paul Vanouse is an American artist who uses molecular biology techniques in performances. https://www.paulvanouse.com - **Shaowen Bardzell** (7) — Professor, School of Interactive Computing, Georgia Institute of Technology. HCI scholar known for feminist HCI and humanistic approaches; advised several key more-than-human HCI projects. - **Studio Ossidiana** (7) — Architecture and design studio founded by Alessandra Covini and Giovanni Bellotti. Studio Ossidiana designs installations, furniture and landscapes for encounters between people and birds, from floating gardens to dovecote towers. https://www.studio-ossidiana.com - **Tega Brain** (7) — Artist and environmental engineer; Associate Professor of Integrated Digital Media, New York University. Australian-born artist whose works on ecological time, phenology and 'eccentric engineering' use sensors, data and clocks to rethink environmental systems. https://tegabrain.com - **Yasuaki Kakehi** (7) — Professor, Interfaculty Initiative in Information Studies, University of Tokyo; Kakehi Lab. Yasuaki Kakehi is a media artist and interaction researcher who works with materials, water, light and living matter. https://www.xlab.iii.u-tokyo.ac.jp/ - **ecoLogicStudio** (7) — Architecture and urban design studio founded by Claudia Pasquero and Marco Poletto. ecoLogicStudio designs architecture with microalgae photobioreactors, combining biology with digital design. https://www.ecologicstudio.com - **Achim Menges** (6) — Architect; director of the Institute for Computational Design and Construction (ICD), University of Stuttgart. Achim Menges researches biomimetic, computational and robotic architecture, often with wood and natural fibres. https://www.achimmenges.net/ - **Andrés Jaque** (6) — Architect; founder of Office for Political Innovation; Dean of Columbia GSAPP. Andrés Jaque is an architect and scholar whose Office for Political Innovation designs architecture as a set of relations between people, technologies, microbes and waters. https://andresjaque.net - **Brett J. Kagan** (6) — Chief Scientific Officer, Cortical Labs. Neuroscientist who led the DishBrain study and coined the term Synthetic Biological Intelligence for trained in vitro neural systems. He also writes on the ethics of embodied neural cultures. - **Cornell Lab of Ornithology** (6) — Research institute at Cornell University. The Cornell Lab of Ornithology studies birds and runs large citizen-science platforms such as eBird and Merlin. https://www.birds.cornell.edu - **Gilberto Esparza** (6) — Artist working with robotics, biotechnology and ecology. Gilberto Esparza builds autonomous bio-machines and instruments powered by bacteria in polluted water, such as Plantas Autofotosintéticas and BioSoNot. - **Joe Davis** (6) — Artist; research affiliate at MIT and Harvard Medical School. Joe Davis is an American artist who has worked in molecular biology labs since the 1980s. - **Joyce Hwang** (6) — Professor of Architecture, University at Buffalo; director of Ants of the Prairie. Joyce Hwang designs architectural installations that house bats, birds, pollinators and other urban wildlife alongside people. https://www.antsoftheprairie.com - **Lining Yao** (6) — Associate Professor, UC Berkeley; director of the Morphing Matter Lab. Lining Yao designs shape-changing materials, including bioLogic, which used living natto bacteria as humidity-driven actuators. - **Nadia Campo Woytuk** (6) — Interaction design researcher, KTH Royal Institute of Technology. Nadia Campo Woytuk works on feminist HCI for intimate health, including menstruation and the vaginal microbiome. - **Nancy Smith** (6) — HCI researcher; PhD, Indiana University. Researcher who studied hybrid human–nature arrangements such as urban homesteads and their design implications. - **Orkan Telhan** (6) — Artist and designer; Chief Information and Data Officer at Ecovative; formerly Associate Professor, University of Pennsylvania. Orkan Telhan makes speculative and functional biodesign, from the Microbial Design Studio hardware to installations about engineered bodies, food and urban microbiomes. https://www.orkantelhan.com/ - **Paul Coulton** (6) — Chair of Speculative and Game Design, ImaginationLancaster, Lancaster University. Design researcher who uses design fiction and object-oriented ontology to explore the Internet of Things and AI. https://designresearch.works/ - **Pierre Huyghe** (6) — Artist. French artist who builds living, self-changing situations with animals, plants, microbes and machine learning systems that continue without the audience. https://www.estherschipper.com/artists/41-pierre-huyghe/ - **Rachel Armstrong** (6) — Professor of Regenerative Architecture, KU Leuven; formerly Newcastle University. Rachel Armstrong is a British architect and former medical doctor who works with protocells and microbial systems in architecture. - **Sara Heitlinger** (6) — Senior Lecturer, Centre for Human-Computer Interaction Design, City St George's, University of London. Participatory design researcher who works with urban food growers on seeds, sensors and blockchain futures. https://www.connectedseeds.org/ - **Stanislav Roudavski** (6) — Senior Lecturer in Digital Architectural Design, University of Melbourne; leads the Deep Design Lab. Stanislav Roudavski designs habitat structures for birds, bats and other animals with ecologists, using computational design, scanning of old trees and robotic fabrication. - **Tau Ulv Lenskjold** (6) — Design researcher, Denmark. Participatory design researcher who experiments with speculative prototypes and relations beyond the human. - **Thad Starner** (6) — Professor, School of Interactive Computing, Georgia Institute of Technology. Wearable computing pioneer who co-developed wearables for working dogs and for two-way communication with dolphins. - **Alinta Krauth** (5) — Artist and researcher in interspecies art and digital media. Alinta Krauth makes interactive and digital art with and for animals, including enrichment works for wild flying-foxes in care and AI works built on bird song. https://www.alintakrauth.com - **Ann Light** (5) — Professor of Design and Creative Technology, University of Sussex; Professor of Interaction Design, Malmö University. Ann Light researches participatory design, care and social change, and has argued for design that responds to ecological and existential crisis. - **Donna Haraway** (5) — Distinguished Professor Emerita, History of Consciousness Department, UC Santa Cruz. Feminist scholar of science and technology, author of the Cyborg Manifesto, When Species Meet and Staying with the Trouble. - **Eduardo Reck Miranda** (5) — Professor of Computer Music, University of Plymouth; head of ICCMR. Composer and researcher in unconventional computing and music, from biocomputers to quantum computers. - **Ferran Altarriba Bertran** (5) — Researcher, Escola Universitària ERAM (University of Girona); formerly Tampere University Gamification Group. Play designer who co-designs technology 'from the wild', with forests, rivers and the people who use them. - **FinalSpark** (5) — Swiss startup running a remote-access biocomputing platform built on human brain organoids. Founded by Fred Jordan and Martin Kutter, FinalSpark keeps human forebrain organoids on multi-electrode arrays around the clock and lets researchers program them over the internet through its Neuroplatform. https://finalspark.com - **Heather Barnett** (5) — Artist and educator; Pathway Leader, MA Art and Science, Central Saint Martins (UAL). British artist who has worked with the slime mould Physarum polycephalum since 2008 through films, experiments and participatory games about collective intelligence. https://heatherbarnett.co.uk/ - **Heather Dewey-Hagborg** (5) — Artist and biohacker. Heather Dewey-Hagborg is an American artist whose work deals with genetic surveillance and DNA phenotyping. https://deweyhagborg.com - **ICD/ITKE University of Stuttgart** (5) — Institute for Computational Design and Construction and Institute of Building Structures and Structural Design. ICD and ITKE build an annual series of research pavilions that translate biological structures into robotic fabrication. https://www.icd.uni-stuttgart.de - **Jenna Sutela** (5) — Artist. Finnish artist who works with microbes, slime moulds and machine learning to explore language and cognition beyond the human. https://jennasutela.com/ - **Jennifer A. Lewis** (5) — Hansjörg Wyss Professor of Biologically Inspired Engineering, Harvard University. Jennifer Lewis develops printable inks for soft matter at Harvard's Wyss Institute, from vascularised tissue and organ building blocks to hydrogel composites that fold as they swell. https://lewisgroup.seas.harvard.edu/ - **Jennifer Gabrys** (5) — Chair in Media, Culture and Environment, University of Cambridge; lead of Citizen Sense, Smart Forests and Planetary Praxis. Sociologist who studies environmental sensing, from citizen air-quality monitors to sensor networks in forests. https://www.jennifergabrys.net/ - **Julia Lohmann** (5) — Designer; Professor of Contemporary Design, Aalto University; founder of the Department of Seaweed. Julia Lohmann founded the Department of Seaweed in 2013 as designer-in-residence at the V&A and works with kelp as a leather-like material. https://www.julialohmann.co.uk/ - **Katia Vega** (5) — Associate Professor of Design, UC Davis; director of the Interactive Organisms Lab. Katia Vega creates beauty technology and interactive wearables, including biosensing tattoos and biomaterial accessories. https://www.katiavega.com/ - **Ken Rinaldo** (5) — Artist; professor emeritus of art and technology, The Ohio State University. American artist who has built interspecies robotic installations since the late 1980s, in which fish, insects and bacteria steer or switch machines. https://www.kenrinaldo.com/ - **Lena Smirnova** (5) — Assistant Professor, Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health. Neurobiologist who develops human brain organoid models and leads Johns Hopkins work testing whether organoids show the basic mechanisms of learning and memory. - **Michelle Westerlaken** (5) — Design researcher; PhD, Malmö University. Designer-researcher who worked with dogs and other animals as design participants and wrote a thesis as a multispecies bestiary. https://michellewesterlaken.com/ - **Natalie Jeremijenko** (5) — Artist and engineer; Associate Professor at NYU; director of the Environmental Health Clinic. Natalie Jeremijenko is an Australian artist-engineer whose projects invite people to act together with fish, trees, birds and robots to improve shared environments. - **Netta Ofer** (5) — PhD researcher, Living Matter Lab, ATLAS Institute, CU Boulder. Netta Ofer designs interactions with bioluminescent algae, kombucha and slime mould through organism-centred and first-person methods. - **Shane Gero** (5) — Founder of the Dominica Sperm Whale Project; Biology Lead of Project CETI. Shane Gero is a whale biologist who has followed the same sperm whale families off Dominica since 2005, building the long-term dataset that Project CETI's AI work relies on. https://www.thespermwhaleproject.org - **Shoji Takeuchi** (5) — Professor, Institute of Industrial Science and Graduate School of Information Science and Technology, University of Tokyo; Biohybrid Systems Lab. Engineer who grows muscle tissue and skin on robot skeletons, from muscle-driven fingers and walkers to a living-skin robot face. https://www.hybrid.iis.u-tokyo.ac.jp/en/ - **Steve M. Potter** (5) — Former Associate Professor of Biomedical Engineering, Georgia Institute of Technology. Neuroengineer who embodied cultured rat neurons in simulated animals ('animats') and robots ('hybrots'), and co-created the MEART and Silent Barrage artworks with SymbioticA. https://potterlab.gatech.edu - **Ursula Damm** (5) — Artist; professor of Media Environments, Bauhaus-Universität Weimar. Media artist who works with swarming midges, fruit flies and generative video to build feedback systems between insects, humans and machines. https://ursuladamm.de - **Yuta Ikeya** (5) — Designer and researcher, Industrial Design, Eindhoven University of Technology. Yuta Ikeya designs speculative computing artefacts with living organisms, such as the Algal Relay Computer that calculates through algae growth. - **AKI INOMATA** (4) — Artist. Japanese artist who collaborates with animals such as hermit crabs, bagworms, beavers and octopuses, letting their behaviour shape the finished work. https://www.aki-inomata.com/ - **Adam W. Brown** (4) — Artist; Professor, Michigan State University. American artist whose 're-enactments' use microbiology and chemistry, from gold-making bacteria to bleeding hosts, to question human exceptionalism. He has received four Prix Ars Electronica awards. https://adamwbrown.net - **Anna Lowenhaupt Tsing** (4) — Anthropologist; Professor at UC Santa Cruz. Anna Tsing is an anthropologist of multispecies worlds, author of The Mushroom at the End of the World. https://feralatlas.org - **Anthony Atala** (4) — Director, Wake Forest Institute for Regenerative Medicine. Surgeon and researcher who leads the Wake Forest Institute for Regenerative Medicine, where the Integrated Tissue and Organ Printing system was built to print human-scale bone, cartilage and muscle. https://school.wakehealth.edu/research/institutes-and-centers/wake-forest-institute-for-regenerative-medicine - **Bruno Latour** (4) — Philosopher, sociologist and curator (1947–2022). Bruno Latour was a French philosopher of science whose actor-network theory and writings on Gaia shaped how design and art think about nonhuman agency. http://www.bruno-latour.fr - **Ceara Byrne** (4) — Researcher in Animal–Computer Interaction; PhD, Georgia Institute of Technology. Researcher who built instrumented dog toys, home touchscreens for assistance dogs and a dog-driven robot. - **Charlotte Jarvis** (4) — Artist. British artist who works with living cells, DNA and scientists to make portraits and performances. https://www.charlottejarvis.com - **Charlotte L. Robinson** (4) — Animal-Computer Interaction researcher, The Open University. Researcher who designed interfaces that assistance and diabetes alert dogs can operate. - **Douglas Blackiston** (4) — Senior Scientist, Allen Discovery Center at Tufts University and Wyss Institute. Biologist who builds Xenobots by hand and grows them from frog stem cells. - **Hill Hiroki Kobayashi** (4) — Associate Professor, Information Technology Center, The University of Tokyo. Researcher who builds remote sensing, live-sound and animal-worn systems for wildlife, from forest deer to the Fukushima exclusion zone. - **Hirotaka Sato** (4) — Provost's Chair Professor, School of Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering, Nanyang Technological University. Engineer who steers living beetles and cockroaches with small electronic backpacks that stimulate their muscles or antennae. - **Jakob Kudsk Steensen** (4) — Artist working with game engines, field recording and ecology. Danish artist who reconstructs real ecosystems from fieldwork, scans and sound recordings as immersive installations, VR and AR. https://jakobsteensen.com/ - **Jennifer Cunha** (4) — Founder, Parrot Kindergarten; researcher at Northeastern University. Parrot trainer and researcher who taught a Goffin's cockatoo, Ellie, to use a tablet speech board and studies parrot video calls. - **Johan Redström** (4) — Professor, Umeå Institute of Design, Umeå University. Design theorist who writes on how design defines things and on the changing nature of objects in a digital world. - **Joseph Lindley** (4) — Design researcher, ImaginationLancaster, Lancaster University. Researcher in design fiction, AI and object-oriented ontology who runs the designresearch.works studio. https://designresearch.works/ - **Kasia Molga** (4) — Artist and designer; Studio Molga. Polish-born artist who works with environmental and biological data, AI and living organisms; co-founded World Wilder Lab in 2013 with Erik Overmeire and Ivan Henriques. https://www.studiomolga.com/ - **Kuai Shen** (4) — Artist. Kuai Shen (Kuai Shen Auson) is an Ecuadorian artist who creates installations with ant colonies. - **Laura Beloff** (4) — Artist and researcher; professor, Aalto University. Finnish artist-researcher working on wearables, hybrid ecologies and art with living organisms, from plants to ticks and protocells. - **Laura Forlano** (4) — Professor, College of Arts, Media and Design, Northeastern University. Writer, social scientist and design researcher working at the intersection of design, science and technology studies and cities. - **Li Jönsson** (4) — Design researcher, Denmark. Design researcher who works with speculative prototypes to bring people into contact with urban animals. - **Marshmallow Laser Feast** (4) — Experiential art collective. London collective (Barney Steel, Robin McNicholas and others) that makes multisensory VR and installations about perception and the natural world. https://marshmallowlaserfeast.com/ - **Maurizio Montalti** (4) — Designer; founder of Officina Corpuscoli and co-founder of Mogu. Maurizio Montalti founded the studio Officina Corpuscoli in 2010 and has worked with fungal mycelium and mycologists at Utrecht University for more than a decade. https://www.corpuscoli.com/ - **Michael Sedbon** (4) — Artist. French artist building artificial ecosystems in which algorithms govern living cultures such as cyanobacteria. - **Next Nature Network** (4) — Design and research organisation founded by Koert van Mensvoort. Dutch network that uses design fiction, exhibitions and campaigns to discuss technology that becomes as complex and autonomous as nature. https://nextnature.net/ - **Pat Pataranutaporn** (4) — Researcher, MIT Media Lab (Fluid Interfaces group). Pat Pataranutaporn is a technologist working across synthetic biology, wearables and human–AI interaction; his bio work includes the Living Bits framework and wearable bio-digital organs. https://www.media.mit.edu/people/patpat/overview/ - **Peter H. Kahn Jr.** (4) — Professor of Psychology and of Environmental and Forest Sciences, University of Washington; director of the Human Interaction with Nature and Technological Systems (HINTS) Lab. Psychologist who studies how people relate to nature and to 'technological nature' such as robot pets, nature webcams and plasma-screen windows. https://depts.washington.edu/hintslab/ - **Rashid Bashir** (4) — Dean of the Grainger College of Engineering and Professor of Bioengineering, University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign. Bioengineer whose group makes 'bio-bots': 3D-printed hydrogel skeletons that walk using heart or skeletal muscle cells. - **Reef Design Lab** (4) — Design studio for artificial reefs and marine infrastructure, founded by Alex Goad. Reef Design Lab designs and casts modular reef structures from 3D-printed moulds, including MARS, an interlocking ceramic and concrete system installed in the Maldives and Australia. https://reefdesignlab.com/ - **Scenocosme** (4) — Artist duo Grégory Lasserre and Anaïs met den Ancxt. Scenocosme make interactive installations with plants, wood and bodies that react to touch and human bioelectricity. https://www.scenocosme.com/ - **Seung Ah Lee** (4) — Associate Professor of Electrical and Electronic Engineering, Yonsei University. Seung Ah Lee builds optical and microscopy systems, including interactive light-projection microscopes that let people play with phototactic microorganisms. - **Shuyi Sun** (4) — Researcher, Interactive Organisms Lab, University of California, Davis. Designer-researcher who builds biosensing litter boxes, toys and wearables for pet health monitoring. - **Teresa van Dongen** (4) — Designer working with living systems and light. Teresa van Dongen studied at Design Academy Eindhoven and makes lamps and installations powered by bioluminescent and electroactive bacteria. https://www.teresavandongen.com/ - **Terreform ONE** (4) — Nonprofit architecture and ecological design group co-founded by Mitchell Joachim. Terreform ONE designs ecological architecture and urban proposals with living systems, from tree houses to insect farms. https://www.terreform.org - **The Living** (4) — Architecture and design studio founded by David Benjamin. The Living is a New York studio that works with biology, computation and new materials; David Benjamin teaches at Columbia GSAPP. - **Thijs Biersteker** (4) — Artist; founder of Woven Studio. Dutch 'eco-artist' who turns scientific data on climate, pollution and plants into real-time installations. https://thijsbiersteker.com - **Thomas Hartung** (4) — Professor, Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health; director of CAAT. Toxicologist who led the 2023 proposal to name and fund Organoid Intelligence as a field, and convened the Baltimore Declaration on its ethics. - **Tomás Saraceno** (4) — Artist; founder of Studio Tomás Saraceno, the Aerocene community and Arachnophilia. Argentine artist trained in architecture who works with spiders, air, and floating solar sculptures, often with scientists and communities. https://studiotomassaraceno.org/ - **Universidad de los Andes Biodesign Challenge team** (4) — Student team, Universidad de los Andes; Biodesign Challenge 2018–2025. Students at Universidad de los Andes who took part in the Biodesign Challenge, the international competition that pairs art and design students with biologists. Instructors include Giovanna Danies and Carolina Obregón. https://www.biodesignchallenge.org/ - **teamLab** (4) — Art collective. Japanese art collective of artists, programmers and engineers making immersive digital installations. https://www.teamlab.art/ - **Adrian David Cheok** (3) — Founder and director, Mixed Reality Lab. Researcher in mixed reality and multisensory internet who built early remote-touch and play systems for pets. https://mixedrealitylab.org/ - **Agnes Meyer-Brandis** (3) — Artist. German artist whose 'poetic-scientific' projects mix fieldwork, lab work and fiction, from raising moon geese to making a perfume from a tree's volatile compounds. http://www.blubblubb.net - **Amy Congdon** (3) — Designer and design researcher; Head of Design at Modern Synthesis. Amy Congdon's Biological Atelier and Tissue Engineered Textiles seeded cells onto embroidered scaffolds, developing a craft practice for growing rather than cutting material. https://www.amycongdon.com/ - **Andrea Shin Ling** (3) — Architect and biodesigner; lead of Living Room Collective, Canada Pavilion, Venice 2025. Andrea Shin Ling works between architecture and biofabrication, from Design by Decay (fabricating with fungal and bacterial decomposition) to Picoplanktonics, a pavilion of printed cyanobacteria structures that must be watered and fed. https://www.andrealing.com/ - **André R. Studart** (3) — Professor of Complex Materials, ETH Zurich. André Studart designs bioinspired and living materials, including 3D-printed materials that contain bacteria or fungi. https://complex.mat.ethz.ch/ - **Andy Gracie** (3) — Artist (hostprods), co-founder of Hackteria. British artist whose installations connect robots, AI and living organisms such as fish, crickets, cyanobacteria and fruit flies, often framed as astrobiology experiments. https://www.hostprods.net - **Anne Marie Maes** (3) — Artist. Belgian artist who has run the Bee Laboratory on Brussels rooftops since 2009, building instrumented beehives and bacterial biofilms that monitor urban ecosystems. https://annemariemaes.net - **Anton Poikolainen Rosén** (3) — Design researcher, Södertörn University and KTH Royal Institute of Technology. Anton Poikolainen Rosén researches more-than-human design through sound, self-tracking and urban farming, often using his own body and experience as material. - **Aykut Coşkun** (3) — Associate Professor, Media and Visual Arts, Koç University. Interaction design researcher working on sustainable behaviour, the Internet of Things and more-than-human design. - **Aza Raskin** (3) — Co-founder and President of Earth Species Project; co-founder of the Center for Humane Technology. Aza Raskin is a designer and technologist who co-founded Earth Species Project in 2017 to use machine learning to decode nonhuman communication. https://www.earthspecies.org - **BCL (Georg Tremmel & Shiho Fukuhara)** (3) — Artistic research framework on biotechnology and society, founded 2004. Georg Tremmel and Shiho Fukuhara work on the legal and cultural edges of genetic modification, from storing human DNA in tree genomes to reverse-engineering a commercial blue rose and releasing it as a common. https://bcl.io/ - **Blast Studio** (3) — Design studio 3D printing with living mycelium. Blast Studio, co-founded by Paola Garnousset and Arthur Lee, prints objects and structures from waste streams such as paper cups and lets mycelium grow through them. https://www.blast-studio.com/ - **Blast Theory** (3) — Artist group led by Matt Adams, Ju Row Farr and Nick Tandavanitj. Brighton-based artist group making interactive and mixed-reality works since 1991, long-term collaborators of Nottingham's Mixed Reality Lab. https://www.blasttheory.co.uk - **California College of the Arts, Architecture Biodesign Challenge team** (3) — Student team, California College of the Arts, Architecture; Biodesign Challenge 2023–2025. Students at California College of the Arts, Architecture who took part in the Biodesign Challenge, the international competition that pairs art and design students with biologists. https://www.biodesignchallenge.org/ - **Carl DiSalvo** (3) — Professor, School of Interactive Computing, Georgia Institute of Technology. Design researcher working on participatory design, public participation and adversarial design. - **Carlos Castellanos** (3) — Artist and researcher; faculty, School of Interactive Games and Media, Rochester Institute of Technology; co-founder of Phylum. Carlos Castellanos makes hybrid biological-electronic artworks, from microbial fuel cell synthesizers to AI agents that shape bacterial growth. - **Charles Ramey** (3) — Researcher in wearable and embedded sensing, Georgia Institute of Technology. Engineer who builds sensor systems for sled dogs, otters, elephants and dolphins with Thad Starner and Melody Jackson. - **Chris Watson** (3) — Sound recordist and composer; founding member of Cabaret Voltaire. Chris Watson records animals, habitats and weather around the world for albums, installations and BBC natural history films. https://chriswatson.net - **Christina Agapakis** (3) — Synthetic biologist and writer; former creative director at Ginkgo Bioworks. Christina Agapakis is a synthetic biologist who works with artists and designers on the culture of biotechnology. https://agapakis.com - **Christopher Flynn Martin** (3) — Director of Research, Indianapolis Zoo. Primatologist who builds touchscreen systems for chimpanzees and orangutans, from the Arena shared touch-panel to the portable ApeTouch. - **Christopher Frauenberger** (3) — Professor of Human-Computer Interaction, University of Salzburg. HCI researcher working on participatory design, ethics and relational theories of technology. https://frauenberger.name/ - **Cyrus Clarke** (3) — Co-founder and strategy lead, Grow Your Own Cloud. Designer and researcher who co-founded Grow Your Own Cloud in 2018 to store digital data in the DNA of living plants. https://growyourown.cloud - **Denise Herzing** (3) — Founder and Research Director, Wild Dolphin Project. Marine biologist who has studied a community of wild Atlantic spotted dolphins in the Bahamas since 1985. https://www.wilddolphinproject.org/ - **Ecovative** (3) — Mycelium materials company founded by Eben Bayer and Gavin McIntyre. Founded in 2007 by Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute graduates Eben Bayer and Gavin McIntyre, Ecovative grows packaging, building materials and food from mycelium and farm waste. https://ecovative.com/ - **Feifei Zhou** (3) — Artist and architectural designer; co-editor and visual designer of Feral Atlas. Feifei Zhou draws and maps multispecies landscapes; this work was shown in the Design Museum's More than Human exhibition in 2025. - **Ferne Edwards** (3) — Researcher, Norwegian University of Science and Technology (NTNU). Urban researcher who, with NTNU design colleagues, studied student design projects for cohabiting with birds, bees and bats in the city. - **Foad Hamidi** (3) — Faculty, Department of Information Systems, University of Maryland, Baltimore County. Foad Hamidi designs participatory and assistive technologies, including living media interfaces that use mushrooms and plants. https://www.foadhamidi.info/ - **Francesca Valsecchi** (3) — Associate Professor, College of Design and Innovation, Tongji University. Design researcher working on ecological soundscapes, oceans and more-than-human design. - **Geertje Slingerland** (3) — Researcher, Centre of Expertise Global & Inclusive Learning, The Hague University of Applied Sciences. Works on participatory design, city commons and biodiversity urban living labs with citizens. - **Helene Steiner** (3) — Designer and researcher; co-founder of Bento Lab; former artist-in-residence at Microsoft Research Cambridge. Helene Steiner works between design and biology: portable DNA labs, biological garments and plant–human communication. https://www.helenesteiner.com/ - **Heli Väätäjä** (3) — Principal lecturer, Lapland University of Applied Sciences; formerly Tampere University of Technology. HCI researcher who has worked on dog activity tracking, dog–human bonding technology and research ethics for studies with animals. - **Hideo Iwasaki** (3) — Professor, Waseda University; founder of the metaPhorest bioaesthetics platform. Cyanobacteria and circadian-clock biologist and paper-cut artist who founded metaPhorest in 2007 as a lab-based platform for biomedia art. https://hideo-iwasaki.com - **Ioannis Ieropoulos** (3) — Microbial fuel cell researcher; founder of the Bristol BioEnergy Centre at the Bristol Robotics Laboratory. Engineer who builds robots and toilets powered by microbial fuel cells, from the EcoBot series to Pee Power. - **Jia Liu** (3) — Associate Professor of Bioengineering, Harvard John A. Paulson School of Engineering and Applied Sciences. Bioengineer who embeds soft, stretchable mesh electronics into organoids as they grow, so the electrodes become part of the tissue. https://liulab.seas.harvard.edu - **John Dabiri** (3) — Centennial Professor of Aeronautics and Mechanical Engineering, Caltech. Fluid dynamicist who studies jellyfish swimming and turns live jellyfish into ocean-sensing biohybrids. https://dabirilab.com/ - **Josh Bongard** (3) — Professor of Computer Science, University of Vermont; Morphology, Evolution & Cognition Lab. Roboticist working on evolutionary robotics and the co-design of bodies and brains. https://www.meclab.org/ - **Kit Parker** (3) — Tarr Family Professor of Bioengineering and Applied Physics, Harvard SEAS; Disease Biophysics Group. Bioengineer who builds swimming biohybrid animals (jellyfish, ray, fish) from heart muscle cells to study the heart. https://diseasebiophysics.seas.harvard.edu/ - **Leah Barclay** (3) — Sound artist and researcher; Discipline Lead of Design, University of the Sunshine Coast. Leah Barclay records terrestrial and underwater soundscapes and builds acoustic ecology projects that connect communities with rivers, reefs and forests. https://leahbarclay.com - **Lone Koefoed Hansen** (3) — Associate Professor, Department of Digital Design and Information Studies, Aarhus University. Interaction design researcher who makes plant–electronics experiments to shift how people notice plants. - **Lulu Qian** (3) — Professor of Bioengineering, Caltech. Bioengineer who builds neural networks and circuits out of DNA strands that react in a test tube. http://qianlab.caltech.edu/ - **Marcus Maeder** (3) — Sound artist and researcher, Institute for Computer Music and Sound Technology, Zurich University of the Arts. Sound artist and acoustic ecologist who records trees, soils and ecosystems. https://marcusmaeder.ch/ - **Marta Galvão Ferreira** (3) — Researcher, Interactive Technologies Institute (ITI/LARSyS), Madeira. Researcher in learning sciences and design who uses drawing and walking to help people make sense of nature. - **Marta de Menezes** (3) — Artist; director of Cultivamos Cultura. Marta de Menezes is a Portuguese artist who has made art in biology labs since 1999. https://martademenezes.com - **Martín Tironi** (3) — Associate Professor, School of Design, Pontificia Universidad Católica de Chile. Design and STS researcher working on smart cities, algorithms and post-anthropocentric design. - **Maryland Institute College of Art Biodesign Challenge team** (3) — Student team, Maryland Institute College of Art; Biodesign Challenge 2016–2025. Students at Maryland Institute College of Art who took part in the Biodesign Challenge, the international competition that pairs art and design students with biologists. Instructors include Ryan Hoover. https://www.biodesignchallenge.org/ - **Mathieu Lehanneur** (3) — Designer; founder of Studio Mathieu Lehanneur. French designer who works across objects, interiors and science collaborations; early projects paired domestic products with plants, algae and fish. https://www.mathieulehanneur.fr/ - **Miya Masaoka** (3) — Composer, koto player and sound artist; Professor at Columbia University. American composer who has made works with plants, insects and biofeedback since the 1990s. https://miyamasaoka.com - **Monika Seyfried** (3) — Co-founder and operations lead, Grow Your Own Cloud. Designer and co-founder of Grow Your Own Cloud, which develops plant-based DNA data storage with scientific advisor Jeff Nivala. https://growyourown.cloud - **MycoWorks** (3) — Biotechnology company making Fine Mycelium leather-like materials. Founded in 2013 by Phil Ross, Sophia Wang and Eddie Pavlu, MycoWorks grows sheets of Fine Mycelium that are tanned and finished like leather. https://www.mycoworks.com/ - **National Audubon Society** (3) — Bird conservation nonprofit. US conservation organisation founded in 1905. - **Natsai Audrey Chieza** (3) — Designer; founder of Faber Futures. Natsai Audrey Chieza founded the biodesign studio Faber Futures and was the first designer in residence at Ginkgo Bioworks. https://faberfutures.com/ - **Nazli Cila** (3) — Assistant Professor, Faculty of Industrial Design Engineering, TU Delft. Designer-researcher who studies connected products and AI as agents that act alongside people. https://nazlicila.com/ - **Nienke Hoogvliet** (3) — Designer; founder of Studio Nienke Hoogvliet. Nienke Hoogvliet makes textiles, dyes and leather from seaweed, fish skin and waste streams from water treatment. https://www.nienkehoogvliet.nl/ - **Nonhuman Nonsense** (3) — Research-driven design and art studio. Studio founded by Leo Fidjeland and Linnea Våglund that makes speculative projects about ecology, rights of nature and more-than-human politics. - **OXMAN** (3) — Design and research company founded by Neri Oxman. OXMAN continues the Mediated Matter agenda as a company, developing biologically grown products and ecological architecture. https://www.oxman.com - **Oscar Tomico** (3) — Head of the Design Engineering Master, Elisava Barcelona; Associate Professor, Eindhoven University of Technology. Design researcher working on soft wearables, first-person methods and nature-entangled design. - **Oskar Juhlin** (3) — Professor of Interaction Design, Department of Computer and Systems Sciences, Stockholm University. Interaction design researcher who studied GPS-tracked hunting dogs, dog owners' technology and multispecies computer interaction. - **Paolo Bombelli** (3) — Biochemist, Department of Biochemistry, University of Cambridge; biophotovoltaics researcher. Paolo Bombelli develops biophotovoltaic systems that harvest electricity from photosynthetic organisms such as moss and algae. - **Phil Ross** (3) — Artist and mycologist; co-founder and CTO of MycoWorks. Phil Ross has grown sculptures and buildings from Ganoderma (reishi) mycelium since the 1990s and coined the term Mycotecture. https://www.mycoworks.com/ - **Rachel Clarke** (3) — Senior Lecturer, Open Lab, Newcastle University. Participatory design researcher working on cities, sustainability and more-than-human participation. - **Reinhard Gupfinger** (3) — Artist and researcher, Tangible Music Lab, University of Art and Design Linz. Media artist who designs musical instruments and sonic interfaces for grey parrots living in captivity. - **Revital Cohen & Tuur Van Balen** (3) — Artist duo. Revital Cohen and Tuur Van Balen are a London-based duo whose work examines biology, production and the natural. https://www.cohenvanbalen.com - **Sam Kriegman** (3) — Assistant Professor of Computer Science, Mechanical Engineering and Chemical & Biological Engineering, Northwestern University. Computer scientist who uses evolutionary algorithms to design robot bodies, including the first computer-designed organisms (Xenobots). https://www.xenobot.group/ - **Sascha Pohflepp** (3) — Designer and artist (1978–2019). Sascha Pohflepp was a German designer whose speculative work dealt with technology, energy and synthetic biology. - **Sergiu P. Pașca** (3) — Professor of Psychiatry and Behavioral Sciences, Stanford University. Neuroscientist who developed human cortical organoids and assembloids, and transplanted human organoids into the rat brain where they joined its circuits. - **Shaun Lawson** (3) — Professor of Social Computing, Northumbria University; formerly University of Lincoln. HCI researcher who used speculative design to question quantified-pet and 'dog internet' products. - **Stacey Kuznetsov** (3) — HCI researcher; led the Social and Digital Systems (SANDS) group at Arizona State University. Stacey Kuznetsov researches DIY biology, citizen science and biofabrication in human-computer interaction. https://sandsystems.org/ - **Studio Klarenbeek & Dros** (3) — Design studio of Eric Klarenbeek and Maartje Dros. Eric Klarenbeek and Maartje Dros develop grown and biobased materials, from 3D-printed mycelium to algae bioplastics, and local production networks for them. https://www.ericklarenbeek.com/ - **Studio Roosegaarde** (3) — Social design lab founded by artist Daan Roosegaarde. Makes large public light installations about water, air, energy and living light, such as Waterlicht and Glowing Nature. https://studioroosegaarde.net - **Sylvia Janicki** (3) — PhD researcher, Digital Media, Georgia Institute of Technology. Sylvia Janicki makes interactive installations with plants and biosensors about landscape, colonial history and more-than-human relations. - **Szu-Yu (Cyn) Liu** (3) — HCI and design researcher; PhD, Indiana University. Researcher who studies alternative farming, decomposition and photography as ways to design with naturecultures. - **Taher Saif** (3) — Professor of Mechanical Science and Engineering, University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign. Mechanical engineer who builds micro-scale swimmers powered by heart cells and by motor neurons driving muscle. - **Thomas Feuerstein** (3) — Artist; lecturer at art universities in Austria and Switzerland. Austrian artist whose 'processual sculptures' run on bacteria, algae and human cell cultures grown with scientists at the University of Innsbruck. https://thomasfeuerstein.net - **Tjeerd Veenhoven** (3) — Designer; Studio Tjeerd Veenhoven. Tjeerd Veenhoven is a Dutch designer who develops materials from plants and algae, from palm-leaf leather to seaweed yarn. https://www.tjeerdveenhoven.com/ - **Tosca Terán** (3) — Interdisciplinary artist and performer (Nanotopia). Canadian-Mexican artist who performs and installs sound and XR works driven by the bio-electrical activity of mycelium, slime mould and plant roots. https://www.toscateran.com/ - **Toshiyuki Nakagaki** (3) — Professor, Research Institute for Electronic Science, Hokkaido University. Biophysicist who showed that the slime mould Physarum polycephalum finds shortest paths through mazes and builds efficient transport networks; two-time Ig Nobel laureate. https://www.es.hokudai.ac.jp/labo/nakagaki/ - **Ursula Biemann** (3) — Artist, writer and video essayist. Swiss artist whose research-based video essays follow oceans, forests and Indigenous knowledge in the climate crisis. https://geobodies.org/ - **Vilma Kankaanpää** (3) — PhD researcher, School of Computing Science, University of Glasgow. Researcher who prototypes buttons and audio devices for monkeys, lemurs and giraffes in zoos. - **Wild Dolphin Project** (3) — Nonprofit research organisation founded by Denise Herzing in 1985. The Wild Dolphin Project has studied one community of wild Atlantic spotted dolphins in the Bahamas every summer since 1985, recording their sounds together with individual identities and behaviour. https://www.wilddolphinproject.org - **Yoichi Ochiai** (3) — Associate Professor, University of Tsukuba; head of Digital Nature Group. Yoichi Ochiai is a media artist and researcher whose lab works on computational fabrication, holography and insect-based interfaces. https://digitalnature.slis.tsukuba.ac.jp/ - **Yuning Chen** (3) — Design researcher, University of Edinburgh. Yuning Chen works on biodesign ethics, using provocative methods and speculative dining to question how microbes are treated in design labs. - **Zoran Srdić Janežič** (3) — Sculptor and intermedia artist; PhD researcher at AGRFT, University of Ljubljana. Slovenian sculptor who works with animatronics, 3D design and living tissue; since 2019 he has led the Biobot series with Kapelica Gallery and BioTehna Lab. - **iNaturalist** (3) — Nonprofit nature observation network (formerly a joint initiative of the California Academy of Sciences and National Geographic Society). Online community and app where people share observations of organisms and help identify them. https://www.inaturalist.org/ - **Adam Feinberg** (2) — Professor of Biomedical Engineering and Materials Science, Carnegie Mellon University. Adam Feinberg's lab invented FRESH printing, which builds soft collagen and cell structures inside a gelatin support bath, and used it to print heart valves, ventricles and a full-size heart scaffold. https://www.cmu.edu/bme/Feinberg-Lab/ - **Agi Haines** (2) — Artist and designer; researcher at Design Informatics, University of Edinburgh. Agi Haines designs speculative modifications to the human body — reshaped infant skulls, printed organs made of repurposed tissue — and builds hyper-real silicone models of them. https://www.agihaines.com/ - **Ai Hasegawa** (2) — Artist and designer. Ai Hasegawa is a Japanese artist whose speculative designs deal with reproduction, biotechnology and the body. - **Alessandro Bozzon** (2) — Professor of Human-Centered Artificial Intelligence, Delft University of Technology. Alessandro Bozzon works on human-centred AI and knowledge and intelligence design at TU Delft's Faculty of Industrial Design Engineering. - **Alexandra Teixeira Riggs** (2) — PhD researcher, Digital Media, Georgia Institute of Technology. Alexandra Teixeira Riggs makes more-than-human and queer design work with biomaterials, sound and tangible media. - **Allison Kudla** (2) — Artist working with living systems, biology and technology. Allison Kudla makes installations in which machines read, print and tend living organisms such as cyanobacteria and plant cells. - **Alper Bozkurt** (2) — Professor of Electrical and Computer Engineering, North Carolina State University. Engineer who builds wearable and implantable sensor systems for animals, including smart harnesses for guide dogs in training. - **Alysson R. Muotri** (2) — Professor of Pediatrics and Cellular & Molecular Medicine, UC San Diego. Stem-cell biologist whose cortical organoids produced EEG-like brain waves; he has linked organoids to robots and sent them to space. https://muotri.ucsd.edu - **Amy Karle** (2) — Artist working with bioart and emerging technology. Amy Karle is an American artist who works with tissue engineering, 3D printing and AI. https://www.amykarle.com - **Andrew Pelling** (2) — Professor of Physics and Biology, University of Ottawa; founder of pHacktory. Andrew Pelling's lab grows mammalian cells on scaffolds cut from apples, asparagus and other plants, and publishes the recipes as open hardware and protocols. https://www.pellinglab.net/ - **Andrew Quitmeyer** (2) — Founder of Digital Naturalism Laboratories (Dinalab); former Assistant Professor, National University of Singapore. Designer who builds field-hacked electronics with biologists in the jungle. https://www.digitalnaturalism.org/ - **Ann Morrison** (2) — Interaction design researcher; formerly Aalborg University, now University of Southern Queensland. Researcher who designed a vibrotactile vest for hunting dogs and a self-activated wave machine for a zoo platypus. - **Anne Galloway** (2) — Associate Professor, Victoria University of Wellington; founder of the More-Than-Human Lab. Researcher in design ethnography and speculative design who studies relations among people, animals and technologies, including sheep farming. - **ArtScienceBangalore** (2) — Art-science lab at the Srishti School of Art, Design and Technology, led by Yashas Shetty. Art-science collective and DIY biolab founded at Srishti with the National Centre for Biological Sciences, known for iGEM-related bioart and mobile public labs. http://artscienceblr.org - **Audrey Dussutour** (2) — CNRS Research Director, Research Centre on Animal Cognition, Toulouse. Biologist who studies learning and decision-making in the slime mould Physarum polycephalum, known in France as 'le blob'. - **Bartaku** (2) — Artist-researcher. Belgian artist-researcher who has worked since 2007 on 'PhoEf', a long inquiry into the photovoltaic effect, making dye-sensitised solar cells from Aronia berries (Baroa belaobara) with scientists at Aalto University. https://bartaku.net - **Bolt Threads** (2) — Materials company behind Microsilk and Mylo. Bolt Threads develops biobased fibres and materials, including yeast-fermented spider-silk protein (Microsilk) and the mycelium leather Mylo, often with Stella McCartney. https://boltthreads.com/ - **Braingeneers** (2) — Research group at UC Santa Cruz Genomics Institute (David Haussler, Mircea Teodorescu, Mohammed Mostajo-Radji). An interdisciplinary UC Santa Cruz group that runs organoid experiments through an internet-connected 'cloud lab' and trains cortical organoids in closed-loop tasks. https://braingeneers.ucsc.edu - **CMU CREATE Lab** (2) — Community Robotics, Education and Technology Empowerment Lab, Carnegie Mellon University (Illah Nourbakhsh, Yen-Chia Hsu). Lab that builds tools for communities to document air pollution. - **Carman Neustaedter** (2) — Professor, School of Interactive Arts and Technology, Simon Fraser University. HCI researcher on video communication and families who studied pet video chat and guide dog teams. - **Carole Collet** (2) — Professor in Design for Sustainable Futures; director of the Design & Living Systems Lab, Central Saint Martins. Carole Collet researches textile design, biomimicry and synthetic biology at Central Saint Martins, University of the Arts London. https://www.carolecollet.com/ - **Cesar & Lois** (2) — Art collective of Lucy HG Solomon and Cesar Baio. Art collective working across the US and Brazil that builds installations linking living systems such as mycelium, plants and bacteria with artificial intelligence and networks. https://cesarandlois.org - **Charlotte Nordmoen** (2) — PhD researcher, Augmented Instruments Lab, Queen Mary University of London. Designer-researcher who builds interactive systems from wood and sensors and studies making through posthuman theory. - **Chidi Usanga** (2) — Researcher, University of Limerick. Participatory design researcher working on rivers and nonhuman stakeholders in sustainable development. - **Christopher Voigt** (2) — Professor of Biological Engineering, MIT. Christopher Voigt designs genetic circuits and programmable bacteria, from light-sensing E. coli to 'living circuit boards'. - **Claudia Núñez-Pacheco** (2) — Design researcher, Malmö University (previously Umeå University). Interaction design researcher working with somaesthetics, micro-phenomenology and first-person methods. - **Clint Zeagler** (2) — Research scientist in wearable technology, Georgia Institute of Technology. Wearable-computing designer who co-developed touchscreens, vests and interfaces that working dogs can operate. - **Cody Lukas** (2) — Artist working with living systems and scientific collaborators. Artist whose installations question where people draw the line of 'life', made with labs such as the University of Southern Denmark and the OvaCure organoid biobank. https://www.codylukas.com - **College for Creative Studies Biodesign Challenge team** (2) — Student team, College for Creative Studies; Biodesign Challenge 2020–2024. Students at College for Creative Studies who took part in the Biodesign Challenge, the international competition that pairs art and design students with biologists. https://www.biodesignchallenge.org/ - **Con Slobodchikoff** (2) — Professor Emeritus of Biology, Northern Arizona University; founder of Zoolingua. Con Slobodchikoff studied Gunnison's prairie dog alarm calls for decades and found that they encode the type, size and colour of predators. https://zoolingua.com - **Data Garden** (2) — Music label and maker of MIDI Sprout and PlantWave. Founded by Joe Patitucci and Alex Tyson as a label for ambient music, it began making plant-driven music in 2012 and later sold devices that let anyone hear their plants. https://www.plantwave.com/ - **David Rothenberg** (2) — Musician, philosopher and author; professor at New Jersey Institute of Technology. Clarinettist and writer who plays live with birds, humpback whales, insects and nightingales, and writes about why animals make music (Why Birds Sing, Thousand Mile Song, Nightingales in Berlin). http://www.davidrothenberg.net/ - **Diana Reiss** (2) — Professor of Psychology, Hunter College, City University of New York. Cognitive psychologist who built an underwater keyboard for dolphins in the 1980s and later co-founded the Interspecies Internet. - **Dirk van der Linden** (2) — Associate Professor, Department of Computer and Information Sciences, Northumbria University. Researcher on privacy and values in technology who writes critically on pet wearables and on what 'animal-centred' should mean. - **Dmitry Morozov (::vtol::)** (2) — Media artist and instrument builder. Russian artist working as ::vtol::, known for robotic sound objects, circuit bending and instruments that run on unusual signals, including his own blood and brain activity. https://vtol.cc - **DnA_Design and Architecture** (2) — Architecture office led by Xu Tiantian. Beijing architecture office known for small rural interventions in Songyang County and for landscape-scale projects that reuse existing structures. - **Donald Degraen** (2) — HCI researcher, HIT Lab NZ, University of Canterbury; formerly Saarland University and DFKI. Donald Degraen studies haptics and 'living media' interfaces that use real plants for ambient feedback. https://www.donalddegraen.com/ - **EASD Castelló Biodesign Challenge team** (2) — Student team, EASD Castelló; Biodesign Challenge 2024–2025. Students at EASD Castelló who took part in the Biodesign Challenge, the international competition that pairs art and design students with biologists. https://www.biodesignchallenge.org/ - **Edward O. Wilson** (2) — Biologist, Harvard University (1929–2021). Biologist known for sociobiology, island biogeography and his work on ants and biodiversity. - **Elena Sabinson** (2) — Designer and researcher, Cornell University. Elena Sabinson designs soft robotic surfaces and interiors, including pheB, which moves in response to a plant's signals. - **Eric Paulos** (2) — Professor of Electrical Engineering and Computer Sciences, UC Berkeley; director of the Hybrid Ecologies Lab. HCI researcher who started citizen and participatory environmental sensing in HCI. - **Erik Winfree** (2) — Professor of Computer Science, Computation and Neural Systems, and Bioengineering, Caltech. Computer scientist who founded algorithmic DNA self-assembly and molecular programming. https://www.dna.caltech.edu/ - **Fab Lab Barcelona** (2) — Digital fabrication lab at the Institute for Advanced Architecture of Catalonia (IAAC). Lab that develops open hardware for cities, including the Smart Citizen Kit. - **Fabienne Felder** (2) — Designer and creative strategist; founder of the studio Lumot. Fabienne Felder designs with emerging biotechnologies, most notably moss-powered electronics. - **Ferdinand Ludwig** (2) — Professor of Green Technologies in Landscape Architecture, TU Munich. Architect Ferdinand Ludwig developed Baubotanik, a method of building with living trees joined to technical structures. https://www.arc.ed.tum.de/en/gtla/ - **Forensic Architecture** (2) — Research agency at Goldsmiths, University of London, directed by Eyal Weizman. Forensic Architecture uses spatial, architectural and media analysis to investigate state and corporate violence, including violence against environments. https://forensic-architecture.org - **Francesco Vergani** (2) — Researcher, Department of Design, Politecnico di Milano. Design researcher who runs workshops and living labs with plants in La Goccia, a former industrial site in Milan that has become an urban forest. - **George Church** (2) — Professor of Genetics, Harvard Medical School; core faculty, Wyss Institute. Geneticist behind genome sequencing and editing methods, DNA data storage and many synthetic-biology companies. https://arep.med.harvard.edu/ - **Gerd Geleff Nielsen** (2) — Designer and researcher in interaction design, IT University of Copenhagen. Designs speculative wearables that bring the immune system and microbes into more-than-human design. - **Giulia Gualtieri** (2) — Researcher, Windesheim University of Applied Sciences; PhD candidate, Eindhoven University of Technology. Urban designer researching how plants, animals and ecosystems can take part in participatory urban design. - **Gizem Oktay** (2) — Researcher, Eindhoven University of Technology. Design researcher working on care and time in more-than-human design, using living materials such as mycelium as probes. - **Guto Nóbrega** (2) — Artist; professor at the School of Fine Arts, UFRJ, and coordinator of the NANO lab (Núcleo de Arte e Novos Organismos). Brazilian artist-researcher whose PhD at the University of Plymouth produced plant-machine hybrids read through galvanic response sensors. - **Hanuma Teja Maddali** (2) — HCI researcher, University of Maryland (with Amanda Lazar). Researcher who studies how older adults and novices share gardening skills, and how XR could support them. - **Jalila Essaïdi** (2) — Artist and bio-entrepreneur. Jalila Essaïdi is a Dutch artist who works with biomaterials, from spider-silk skin to materials made from manure. https://jalilaessaidi.com - **Janet Cardiff & George Bures Miller** (2) — Artist duo working with sound installations and audio walks. Canadian artists known for binaural audio walks and multi-speaker installations. https://cardiffmiller.com/ - **Jasmine Lu** (2) — HCI researcher, Human Computer Integration Lab, University of Chicago. Jasmine Lu builds interactive devices that live, age and decay: a smartwatch powered by a slime mould, plant-driven robot actuators, and tools for reusing e-waste. https://lab.plopes.org/ - **Jeff Jones** (2) — Researcher, Unconventional Computing Laboratory, UWE Bristol. Computer scientist who models Physarum polycephalum as swarms of simple particles that lay and follow trails. - **Jen Keane** (2) — Designer and researcher; co-founder of Modern Synthesis. Jen Keane studied Material Futures at Central Saint Martins and co-founded Modern Synthesis to grow textiles with bacteria. https://www.jenkeane.com/ - **Jennifer Preece** (2) — Professor and Dean Emerita, College of Information Studies, University of Maryland. HCI pioneer who turned to biodiversity citizen science, including the NatureNet and Floracaching projects. - **Jiaqi Wang** (2) — PhD researcher, School of Computing Science, University of Glasgow. Researcher who designs multisensory devices that lemurs and zoo visitors can both control. - **Jiwei Zhou** (2) — Design researcher, Faculty of Industrial Design Engineering, TU Delft. Jiwei Zhou designs living artefacts with cyanobacteria and studies how people care for them in daily life. - **Joelle Alcaidinho** (2) — Researcher, Georgia Institute of Technology (Animal–Computer Interaction). Researcher who designed collar-sensed gestures for dogs and mobile tools for police explosive-detection teams. - **Jon Back** (2) — Senior Lecturer, Department of Informatics and Media, Uppsala University. Game and play researcher who designs digital play for forests and playgrounds. - **Jon E. Froehlich** (2) — Professor, Paul G. Allen School of Computer Science & Engineering, University of Washington; director of the Makeability Lab. HCI researcher on sustainability sensing, accessibility and urban data. - **Jonas Edvard** (2) — Material designer. Jonas Edvard is a Danish designer who works with mycelium, seaweed and stone to make lamps, tiles, chairs and shelters. https://www.jonasedvard.com/ - **Jonna Häkkilä** (2) — Professor of Industrial Design, University of Lapland. Interaction designer working in Finnish Lapland on wearables, displays and technology for nature and the Arctic. - **Josiah Hester** (2) — Associate Professor, Georgia Institute of Technology; directs the Ka Moamoa lab on sustainable, battery-free computing. Josiah Hester builds battery-free and intermittent computing systems powered by the environment. - **Judith Dörrenbächer** (2) — Researcher, Ubiquitous Design / Experience and Interaction, University of Siegen. Designer and researcher working on more-than-human and critical design, including techno-mimesis methods in which designers take on the perspective of robots and other nonhumans. - **Julia Moser** (2) — Textile designer and researcher, University of Arts Linz. Julia Moser dyes textiles with living pigment-producing bacteria and develops ways to design patterns with them. https://www.juliamoser.com - **Julian Melchiorri** (2) — Designer and engineer, founder of Arborea. Julian Melchiorri embeds chloroplasts and microalgae in silk protein and glass, from the Silk Leaf prototype to Exhale, a chandelier of 70 bioreactor leaves shown at the V&A. https://www.julianmelchiorri.com/ - **Julian Oliver** (2) — Critical engineer and artist. New Zealand artist and co-author of the Critical Engineering Manifesto. https://julianoliver.com/ - **Jun Rekimoto** (2) — Professor, Interfaculty Initiative in Information Studies, The University of Tokyo; Sony Computer Science Laboratories. Pioneer of augmented reality and ubiquitous interfaces whose lab has also built sensing and display systems for cats and aquarium animals. - **Karen Bakker** (2) — Professor, University of British Columbia; author (1968–2023). Karen Bakker was a geographer and writer who studied digital environmentalism and the rise of bioacoustics as a way of listening to nonhuman worlds. https://karenbakker.org - **Karen Sarkisyan** (2) — Group leader, MRC Laboratory of Medical Sciences and Imperial College London; co-founder of Light Bio. Karen Sarkisyan's group transferred the four-gene bioluminescence pathway of the mushroom Neonothopanus nambi into plants, producing tobacco and petunias that glow visibly without added chemicals. https://www.sarkisyanlab.org/ - **Kat Austen** (2) — Artist and researcher. Kat Austen is a British artist working on environmental change through sound, sculpture and science. - **Katerina Inglezaki** (2) — Researcher, University of Lisbon / Interactive Technologies Institute. Designer and researcher who does multispecies ethnography in the salt marshes of the Tagus estuary and turns fieldwork into interactive maps. - **Katie Paterson** (2) — Visual artist. Scottish artist whose works deal with deep time, distance and scale, from glaciers to dead stars. https://katiepaterson.org/ - **Khasi and Jaintia communities of Meghalaya** (2) — Indigenous communities who grow living root bridges. Villages of the Khasi and Jaintia hills in north-east India have guided the aerial roots of Ficus elastica across rivers for generations. - **Kristina Lindström** (2) — Design researcher, School of Arts and Communication, Malmö University. Participatory design researcher who, with Åsa Ståhl, works on plastics, compost and living in the aftermath of design. - **Kuan-Ju Wu** (2) — PhD researcher, Kakehi Laboratory, The University of Tokyo. Designs interactive systems with water as material, metaphor and collaborator. - **Kyungwon Lee** (2) — Researcher and media artist, Yonsei University. Kyungwon Lee creates interactive installations with living Euglena cells, such as MicroAquarium and EuglPollock. - **Laura Devendorf** (2) — Associate Professor, ATLAS Institute and Information Science, University of Colorado Boulder; director of the Unstable Design Lab. Laura Devendorf is an HCI researcher and artist who works with weaving, smart textiles and fabrication, often treating machines, materials and weather as collaborators. https://unstable.design - **Liz Edwards** (2) — Design researcher, ImaginationLancaster, Lancaster University. Works on design for place and nature engagement; co-led Biodiversity Logbooks with Serena Pollastri, a cyanotype toolkit for schoolchildren in Morecambe Bay. https://imagination.lancaster.ac.uk/project/biodiversity-logbooks/ - **Luisa Ruge** (2) — Designer and researcher; PhD, The Open University ACI Laboratory. Industrial designer who developed methods for evaluating animal usability and an ethics toolkit for animal-centred research. - **Madlen Kneile** (2) — Researcher, Interaction Design for Sustainability and Transformation, University of Siegen. Design researcher who studies how technology can mediate relations between humans and nature, and the challenges of designing technology for nonhumans. https://artifact-archive.org - **Maja Smrekar** (2) — Artist. Maja Smrekar is a Slovenian artist working with biotechnology and human–animal co-evolution. https://www.majasmrekar.org - **Marc Hassenzahl** (2) — Professor of Ubiquitous Design / Experience and Interaction, University of Siegen. Psychologist and design researcher known for foundational work on user experience and experience design, now also exploring wellbeing, relatedness and more-than-human perspectives. https://www.experienceandinteraction.com - **Marcos Cruz** (2) — Professor of Innovative Environments, The Bartlett (UCL); co-director of BiotA Lab. Marcos Cruz is an architect who designs bioreceptive façades that invite moss, lichen and algae to grow. - **Marcus Coates** (2) — Artist and ornithologist. British artist whose performances and videos use shamanic ritual, bird mimicry and collaboration with scientists to step into animal perspectives. https://www.marcuscoates.co.uk/ - **Margrete Lodahl Rolighed** (2) — Design researcher, Digital Design and Information Studies, Aarhus University. Works on posthumanist interaction design with plants, including the Plant Radio and plant-sensing design experiments. - **Marie Louise Juul Søndergaard** (2) — Associate Professor, Oslo School of Architecture and Design (AHO). Interaction designer working on feminist, intimate and more-than-human design, including menstruation, fertility and mosses. - **Marin Sawa** (2) — Research fellow, Imperial College London; designer and bioengineer of printed biophotovoltaics. Marin Sawa, trained in textile design and bioengineering, inkjet-prints living cyanobacteria to make paper-based solar bio-batteries. - **Marine Zorea** (2) — Sound designer and design researcher. Designs domestic soundscapes and sound interventions for homes and care settings. - **Markus Wernli** (2) — Design researcher, Hong Kong Polytechnic University. Eco-social designer who runs soil-regeneration projects that link farms, hotels and retailers through food-waste composting. - **Mary Maggic** (2) — Artist and researcher working on hormones, biopolitics and DIY biology. Mary Maggic makes protocols, workshops and videos for extracting and detecting hormones outside institutions, including Open Source Estrogen and the soap-opera instructional Housewives Making Drugs. https://maggic.ooo/ - **Matthias Laschke** (2) — Head of Interaction Design for Sustainability and Transformation, University of Siegen. Designer known for 'pleasurable troublemakers', everyday objects that create small frictions to support behaviour change, now working on sustainability and human–nature relations. - **Maurizio Rossi** (2) — Researcher in embedded systems and energy harvesting, University of Trento. Maurizio Rossi designs ultra-low-power sensors that run on energy harvested from the environment, including plant-microbial fuel cells. - **Maya Livio** (2) — Artist, writer and curator; PhD, University of Colorado Boulder. Makes films, media and curatorial projects about the contact zones between ecosystems and technological systems, including Salvaging Birds and Thermopower. https://mayalivio.com - **Metin Sitti** (2) — Roboticist; founding director of the Physical Intelligence Department, Max Planck Institute for Intelligent Systems. Roboticist working on small-scale, soft and bio-inspired robots, including microrobots propelled by bacteria. https://pi.is.mpg.de/ - **Michael Burton** (2) — Designer; co-founder of the studio Burton Nitta. British designer from the Royal College of Art Design Interactions programme who, with Michiko Nitta, makes speculative projects on bodies, biotechnology and the environment. https://www.burtonnitta.co.uk/ - **Michael Haldrup** (2) — Professor, Department of Communication and Arts, Roskilde University. Researcher in performance design and participatory spatial design. - **Michael McAlpine** (2) — Professor of Mechanical Engineering, University of Minnesota. Michael McAlpine prints electronics and living cells together, from the 2013 bionic ear with a coiled silver antenna to bacteria printed onto a fingertip. https://mcalpinegroup.umn.edu/ - **Michael R. Stead** (2) — Lecturer in sustainable design futures, Lancaster University. Design researcher working on the environmental footprint of IoT and AI through speculative design. - **Michael Strano** (2) — Professor of Chemical Engineering, MIT; pioneer of plant nanobionics. Michael Strano's lab embeds nanoparticles in living plants so they detect chemicals, report through infrared light, or glow. - **Michel Maharbiz** (2) — Professor of Electrical Engineering and Computer Sciences, UC Berkeley. Michel Maharbiz builds interfaces between microelectronics and living cells, from bacterial self-assembly on chips to neural dust implants. - **Mick Lorusso** (2) — Cross-disciplinary artist. Artist who builds microbial fuel cells, DIY microscopes and shadow theatres to stage microbial communities as energy producers and storytellers. https://micklorusso.net - **Mileece** (2) — Sonic artist and environmental designer. Sound artist who has performed and installed generative music made from the bioelectric signals of plants, including a 2013 performance at MoMA. https://www.mileece.is - **NYU Integrated Design & Media Biodesign Challenge team** (2) — Student team, NYU Integrated Design & Media; Biodesign Challenge 2020–2025. Students at NYU Integrated Design & Media who took part in the Biodesign Challenge, the international competition that pairs art and design students with biologists. https://www.biodesignchallenge.org/ - **Naohiro Isokawa** (2) — Researcher, Keio University Shonan Fujisawa Campus. Naohiro Isokawa designs aquarium systems that sense fish and tank conditions and show them as speech bubbles. - **Nonhuman Rights Project** (2) — US civil rights organisation for nonhuman animals, founded by Steven M. Wise. The Nonhuman Rights Project files habeas corpus cases in US courts to have cognitively complex animals such as chimpanzees and elephants recognised as legal persons. https://www.nonhumanrights.org - **Notpla** (2) — Packaging company making materials from seaweed. Notpla, founded as Skipping Rocks Lab by Rodrigo García González and Pierre Paslier, makes edible and compostable packaging from seaweed and plants. https://www.notpla.com/ - **Nova Innova** (2) — Dutch design and innovation studio for nature-based technology. Nova Innova designs public installations and products that run on nature-based energy, such as microbial fuel cells in city water. - **Olafur Eliasson** (2) — Artist; founder of Studio Olafur Eliasson. Danish-Icelandic artist whose installations work with light, water, air and temperature; the artist's Berlin studio employs craftspeople, architects and researchers. https://olafureliasson.net/ - **Pascal Leboucq** (2) — Set designer and artist. Pascal Leboucq is a Dutch set designer who initiated the Growing Pavilion with the organisation Biobased Creations. https://thegrowingpavilion.com/ - **Patrizia Paci** (2) — Researcher; PhD, The Open University ACI Laboratory. Researcher on the wearability of animal biotelemetry who measured how cats react to commercial GPS trackers. - **Paulo Tavares** (2) — Architect and researcher; founder of autonoma. Brazilian architect whose spatial research maps how Indigenous peoples shaped the Amazon and argues for the rights of forests. - **Pedro Lopes** (2) — Associate Professor of Computer Science, University of Chicago; director of the Human Computer Integration Lab. Pedro Lopes studies devices that integrate with the user's body, from electrical muscle stimulation and chemical haptics to devices that contain living organisms. https://lab.plopes.org/ - **Pei-Ying Lin** (2) — Designer and artist. Taiwanese designer and researcher making speculative work on viruses, microbes and human–nonhuman relations. https://peiyinglin.net - **RISD Terra Carta teams** (2) — Student teams, Rhode Island School of Design. Student teams from the Rhode Island School of Design that won the 2024 Terra Carta Design Lab with BIOPOD and Shellf Life. - **Raune Frankjær** (2) — Designer and researcher in wearable and interaction design, Aarhus University. Designs light and textile interfaces that make plant and insect signals perceptible, from Flora Luma to the Rewilding Wearables and Plant Radio. - **Refik Anadol** (2) — Media artist; co-founder of Refik Anadol Studio and Dataland. Turkish-American artist who trains AI models on large image datasets to make fluid 'data paintings'. https://refikanadol.com/ - **Rewa Wright** (2) — Artist and researcher in computational arts and mixed reality, Queensland University of Technology. Māori artist-researcher who, with Simon Howden as UnCalculated Studio, makes mixed-reality performances in which plants act as co-composers through their bioelectric signals. https://rewawright.com - **Roger S. Ulrich** (2) — Professor of Architecture and Landscape Architecture, Texas A&M University (emeritus). Environmental psychologist whose hospital studies founded evidence-based healing design. - **Roosa Piitulainen** (2) — HCI researcher, Aalto University. Researcher who co-designed audio enrichment devices with white-faced sakis in a zoo. - **SWAMP** (2) — Art collective of Douglas Easterly and Matt Kenyon (Studies of Work Atmosphere and Mass Production). SWAMP (Douglas Easterly and Matt Kenyon) makes critical media art about technology, labour and living systems. - **Satoshi Kuribayashi** (2) — Designer and researcher, Keio University SFC (at the time of I/O Plant). Satoshi Kuribayashi created I/O Plant and Plant Feeling Light, toolkits and lamps that treat plants as input and output modules. - **Sena Cucumak** (2) — Researcher, Futurewell: CoCreation Lab, Media and Visual Arts, Koç University. Design researcher who studies street animals and multispecies cohabitation in Turkish cities. - **Sissel Tolaas** (2) — Smell researcher and artist. Sissel Tolaas is a Norwegian artist who researches, collects and reconstructs smells. - **Studio Drift** (2) — Artist duo Lonneke Gordijn and Ralph Nauta. Dutch studio making kinetic sculptures inspired by natural behaviour. https://studiodrift.com/ - **Susan Loh** (2) — Design researcher, Queensland University of Technology. Interaction design researcher who has built plant-based interfaces and reviewed two decades of human-plant interaction research. - **Suzanne Lee** (2) — Designer; founder of BioCouture and Biofabricate. Suzanne Lee grew garments from kombucha bacterial cellulose at Central Saint Martins, later founded the Biofabricate conference and was Chief Creative Officer at Modern Meadow. https://www.biofabricate.co/ - **SymbioticA** (2) — Centre of excellence in biological arts at the University of Western Australia (founded 2000). SymbioticA is an artistic laboratory inside a life-science school where artists do hands-on work with biological techniques. https://www.symbiotica.uwa.edu.au/ - **Tagny Duff** (2) — Artist-researcher and curator. Tagny Duff works with tissue culture, viruses and bookbinding to explore how biotechnology archives and transmits life. - **Takuya Isomura** (2) — Team Leader, Brain Intelligence Theory Unit, RIKEN Center for Brain Science. Theoretical neuroscientist who tests the free-energy principle with cultured neurons that learn to separate mixed signals. - **Tarun Nayar** (2) — Musician and former biologist; creator of the Modern Biology project. Canadian electronic musician who performs and records with plants and mushrooms wired to synthesizers under the name Modern Biology. http://modernbiology.xyz - **Tecnológico de Monterrey Biodesign Challenge team** (2) — Student team, Tecnológico de Monterrey; Biodesign Challenge 2020–2025. Students at Tecnológico de Monterrey who took part in the Biodesign Challenge, the international competition that pairs art and design students with biologists. https://www.biodesignchallenge.org/ - **Thomas B. DeMarse** (2) — Former Associate Professor of Biomedical Engineering, University of Florida. Neuroengineer who trained a culture of about 25,000 rat cortical neurons to stabilise a simulated aircraft, after co-developing the animat with Steve Potter. - **Tiffany Wun** (2) — Design researcher, Everyday Design Studio, Simon Fraser University. Researcher who designs probes that bring more-than-human ideas into everyday design practice, such as vermicomposting kits. - **Tim Landgraf** (2) — Professor of Artificial and Collective Intelligence, Freie Universität Berlin; Dahlem Center for Machine Learning and Robotics. Computer scientist who builds biomimetic robots, RoboFish and RoboBee, that interact with live guppies and honeybees. - **Timothy Morton** (2) — Rita Shea Guffey Chair in English, Rice University. Timothy Morton is a philosopher of ecology associated with object-oriented ontology, known for the concepts of dark ecology and hyperobjects. - **Tom Ellis** (2) — Professor of Synthetic Genome Engineering, Imperial College London. Tom Ellis leads a synthetic biology lab that engineers yeast and bacteria, including cellulose-producing Komagataeibacter, for new materials. https://www.imperial.ac.uk/people/t.ellis - **Wil V. Srubar III** (2) — Associate Professor, University of Colorado Boulder; co-founder of Prometheus Materials. Wil Srubar leads the Living Materials Laboratory at CU Boulder, researching engineered living building materials and low-carbon cement. https://www.colorado.edu/lab/srubar/ - **William Odom** (2) — Associate Professor, School of Interactive Arts and Technology, Simon Fraser University; Everyday Design Studio. Design researcher who builds slow, long-term technologies for everyday life. - **Xuanhe Zhao** (2) — Professor of Mechanical Engineering, MIT; directs the Soft Active Materials Lab. Xuanhe Zhao develops hydrogel machines and bioadhesives, including hydrogels that host living engineered bacteria. - **Yaniv Erlich** (2) — Computer scientist and geneticist; formerly Columbia University and the New York Genome Center. Researcher who designed DNA Fountain, a near-optimal coding scheme for DNA storage, and co-created the DNA-of-Things architecture. - **Youyang Hu** (2) — Researcher, Kakehi Lab, The University of Tokyo. Youyang Hu makes installations that read plant biosignals and render how plants experience wind, rain and light. - **Yvonne Rogers** (2) — Professor of Interaction Design, University College London; director of the UCL Interaction Centre. HCI researcher known for ubiquitous computing in the wild and for the textbook Interaction Design. - **Zooniverse** (2) — People-powered research platform of the University of Oxford, Adler Planetarium and University of Minnesota. Platform where volunteers classify images and sounds for research projects. https://www.zooniverse.org/ - **Zoë Breed** (2) — Researcher, Knowledge and Intelligence Design, Delft University of Technology. Zoë Breed designs and engineers bio-digital systems, from the bioluminescent-algae display Algae Alight to a computational taxonomy of how organisms and electronics share computing work. - **iGEM Paris Bettencourt** (2) — Student synthetic-biology team at the Learning Planet Institute, Paris. iGEM Paris Bettencourt is a student team competing in the international iGEM synthetic-biology competition. - **iGEM Team Imperial College London** (2) — iGEM student team (2011–2014). The Imperial College London student team competed in iGEM, the International Genetically Engineered Machine competition, with a project that crossed synthetic biology and design. https://2014.igem.org/Team:Imperial - **mischer'traxler studio** (2) — Design studio of Katharina Mischer and Thomas Traxler. Austrian studio known for process-driven machines and installations about nature and biodiversity, such as The Idea of a Tree and Curiosity Cloud. https://mischertraxler.com - **Çağlar Genç** (2) — Researcher, Tampere University (previously University of Lapland). HCI researcher working with mycelium and other living materials in interactive products and playful more-than-human design tools. - **Đan Vy Vu** (2) — Researcher, Industrial Design, Eindhoven University of Technology. Đan Vy Vu studies how digital twins can help designers handle the uncertainty of growing materials with mycelium. - **3DBio Therapeutics** (1) — Regenerative medicine company, founded 2014. 3DBio Therapeutics developed AuriNovo, an ear implant printed from a patient's own cartilage cells and implanted in a clinical trial in 2022. https://www.3dbiocorp.com/ - **ALGBIO (Selen Şenal & Ceyda Güneş)** (1) — Student start-up. Selen Şenal and Ceyda Güneş developed ALGBIO, a microalgae system that treats wastewater and makes bioproducts, Turkish national winner of the 2024 James Dyson Award. http://alg-bio.com - **ALT TEX** (1) — Company. ALT TEX, founded by Myra Arshad and Avani Patel, ferments food waste into a biodegradable polyester alternative. https://thealttex.com/ - **AMAM** (1) — Design collective. AMAM is a Tokyo design collective (Kosuke Araki, Noriaki Maetani, Akira Muraoka) that won the 2016 Lexus Design Award Grand Prix with Agar Plasticity. - **AMSilk** (1) — Biotech silk protein manufacturer, founded 2008 as a spin-off of TU Munich. AMSilk ferments spider-silk-like proteins into Biosteel fibre and silk protein coatings; adidas used its fibre for the Futurecraft Biofabric shoe prototype in 2016. https://www.amsilk.com/ - **Aagje Hoekstra** (1) — Designer. Aagje Hoekstra is a Dutch designer who made a chitosan bioplastic from mealworm beetle wing cases. - **Aalto University Biodesign Challenge team** (1) — Student team, Aalto University; Biodesign Challenge 2021–2023. Students at Aalto University who took part in the Biodesign Challenge, the international competition that pairs art and design students with biologists. https://www.biodesignchallenge.org/ - **Aaron V. Bradshaw** (1) — Researcher, University College London. Studies human-microbe collaboration in environmental research. - **Ackroyd & Harvey** (1) — Artist duo: Heather Ackroyd and Dan Harvey. British artists working together since 1990 on growth and decay in living materials, known for photographs grown in grass; co-founders of Culture Declares Emergency. https://www.ackroydandharvey.com/ - **Aditi Maheshwari** (1) — Research scientist, Accenture Labs. HCI researcher studying technology for plants, ecological restoration and human-plant interaction. - **Adrian Wong** (1) — Researcher, The University of Sydney. HCI researcher studying conversational agents and more-than-human perspectives in design. - **Adrienne Adar** (1) — Artist and plant-sound researcher. Makes interactive installations that amplify the vibrations and sounds of living plants. https://www.adrienneadar.com - **Aerseeds (Bike & Begum Ayaskan)** (1) — Design duo, Royal College of Art. Twin designers Bike and Begum Ayaskan created Aerseeds, winner of the 2022 Terra Carta Design Lab. - **After Life team (RCA)** (1) — Designer; Royal College of Art. After Life team (RCA) is a designer from Royal College of Art whose project After Life was selected by the Green Product / Green Concept Award. - **Aganetha Dyck** (1) — Artist. Canadian artist who has worked with honeybees since the early 1990s, placing objects in hives so the bees cover them with comb. https://www.aganethadyck.ca/ - **Agata Jaworska** (1) — Designer and curator; Design Academy Eindhoven graduate. Polish-Canadian designer whose graduation project Made in Transit proposed food that grows during shipping instead of spoiling. - **Aidan Mark Puse** (1) — Interaction design student, University of Sydney (at the time of Synthium). Aidan Mark Puse co-designed Synthium, an installation that turns electrical signals from mushrooms into sound in urban green spaces. - **Ailton Pereira** (1) — Designer; State University of Londrina. Ailton Pereira is a designer from State University of Londrina whose project AIPER was selected by the Green Product / Green Concept Award. - **Akira Wakita** (1) — Professor, Faculty of Environment and Information Studies, Keio University. Akira Wakita works on information design, ambient displays and digital fabrication. - **Albert Keung** (1) — Associate Professor of Chemical and Biomolecular Engineering, North Carolina State University. Bioengineer working on DNA data storage and computing, and on synthetic epigenetics. - **Alejandro Alfaro Enguídanos** (1) — Designer; EASD Alicante. Alejandro Alfaro Enguídanos is a designer from EASD Alicante whose project Algee was selected by the Green Product / Green Concept Award. - **Aleksi Vesaluoma** (1) — Designer and researcher, mycelium structures. Aleksi Vesaluoma grew Grown Structures at Brunel University, coaxing mycelium through cardboard tubes wrapped by hand into tree-like frames that become rigid as the fungus digests the substrate. - **Aleph Farms** (1) — Cultivated meat company, founded 2017. Aleph Farms grows beef steaks from cow cells and used 3D bioprinting to produce a cultivated ribeye with marbling and internal structure. https://www.aleph-farms.com/ - **Alex Metcalf** (1) — Artist and sculptor; creator of the Tree Listening Project. British artist who since 2007 has toured installations that let people listen to the inside of living trees through sensitive microphones. https://treelistening.co.uk/ - **Alex Wilkie** (1) — Reader in design, Goldsmiths, University of London. Works between design research and science and technology studies, including energy demand and speculative design. - **Alexandra Dementieva** (1) — Media artist. Media artist who makes immersive interactive installations about perception and communication. - **Alexandra Weilenmann** (1) — Professor of Interaction Design, University of Gothenburg. Ethnographer of mobile technology who studied how hunters use GPS dog-tracking devices in the field. - **Alexandre Pongrácz Rossi** (1) — Animal behaviourist and dog trainer. Brazilian animal behaviour specialist known for training dogs to use communication devices and video calls. - **Algaeing** (1) — Company. Algaeing, founded by Renana Krebs, formulates algae biomass into bio-based fibres and dyes. https://www.algaeing.com/ - **Amino Labs** (1) — Educational genetic engineering hardware company, founded 2015 by Julie Legault and Justin Pahara. Amino Labs designs desktop biolab appliances and kits with a product-design sensibility, letting beginners engineer pigment-producing bacteria in a few days. https://amino.bio/ - **Ana Goidea** (1) — Architect and researcher, Lund University. Ana Goidea is an architect and researcher at Lund University who, with David Andréen, 3D-printed and grew the mycelium column Protomycokion. - **Ana María Gómez López** (1) — Artist. Ana María Gómez López is a Colombian artist whose self-experiments merge her body with plant life. - **Anand Kumar Mishra** (1) — Research associate, Organic Robotics Lab, Cornell University. Engineer who built electrical interfaces that read mycelium signals and used them to drive soft and wheeled robots. - **Andrea Bandoni** (1) — Designer and researcher, Faculty of Fine Arts, University of Lisbon. Andrea Bandoni is a Brazilian designer who studies Amazonian craft and biofabrication with living trees. - **Andrea Lavazza** (1) — Philosopher; Senior Research Fellow, Centro Universitario Internazionale, Arezzo. Philosopher of mind and neuroethicist who, with Marcello Massimini, first set out how to assess possible consciousness in cerebral organoids. - **Andrea Macruz** (1) — Associate Professor, College of Design and Innovation, Tongji University. Architect and designer working on biomimetic, multispecies and neuroscience-informed design. - **Andrea Polli** (1) — Professor of Art and Ecology, University of New Mexico. Environmental artist who works with air, weather and climate data. - **Andrea Wiggins** (1) — Associate Professor of Information Systems, University of Nebraska Omaha. Information scientist who studies how citizen science projects are organised and how they manage data. - **Andrew Whitcomb** (1) — Assistant Professor, The Design School, Arizona State University. Design researcher working on climate futures and affect in the Sonoran Desert. - **Angela Kilford** (1) — Māori artist and designer, Massey University. Works with harakeke (New Zealand flax) and Māori textile practices. - **Angella Mackey** (1) — Researcher, Amsterdam University of Applied Sciences. Designer and researcher working on wearables and solar energy through first-person design research. - **Aniela Hoitink** (1) — Designer; founder of NEFFA and MycoTEX. Aniela Hoitink founded NEFFA in 2016 to make custom garments from mycelium grown in moulds. https://www.neffa.nl/ - **Ann-Kristin Abel** (1) — Designer; MA Textile Futures, Central Saint Martins. Ann-Kristin Abel is a designer who made speculative films about semi-living devices while studying at Central Saint Martins. - **Anna Budnikova** (1) — Architect and designer; HSE Graduate School of Urbanism alumna. Anna Budnikova is an architect who developed Mycokarst, a fungal biomineralisation proposal for karst sinkholes, which won Outstanding Science at the 2019 Biodesign Challenge. - **Anna Madeleine Raupach** (1) — Media artist and researcher. Australian artist whose kinetic and data-driven works, such as Unequal Hours and Augmented Tree Rings, visualise how natural and human timescales intersect. https://www.annamadeleine.com - **Anna Vershinina** (1) — Architect and designer. Architect and designer working on regenerative habitats that combine building and food growing. - **Annah-Ololade Sangosanya** (1) — Designer; IAAC. Annah-Ololade Sangosanya is a designer from IAAC whose project The Purhyphae project was selected by the Green Product / Green Concept Award. - **Annarita Bianco** (1) — Design researcher, University of Campania Luigi Vanvitelli. Design researcher working with soil, environmental humanities and participatory workshops. - **Anne Bowser** (1) — Deputy Director and Chief Innovation Officer, Wilson Center (former PhD student at the University of Maryland). Researcher on citizen science, games and open data. - **Annika Wolff** (1) — Researcher, Lappeenranta-Lahti University of Technology (LUT). Researcher in data literacy and sustainable city design who uses arts-based methods. - **Anniken Førde** (1) — Researcher, UiT The Arctic University of Norway. Human geographer working on place, planning and multispecies cities. - **Ant Farm** (1) — Architecture, graphic arts and environmental design collective (1968–1978). Radical collective founded by Chip Lord and Doug Michels, later joined by Curtis Schreier, known for Cadillac Ranch, inflatables and media performances. - **Anton Vervoort** (1) — Designer; University of Antwerp. Anton Vervoort is a Belgian designer whose mussel-hosting structure The Reef was a 2024 James Dyson Award International Top 20 project. - **Antti Tenetz** (1) — Artist working with animals, landscape and tracking technology. Antti Tenetz makes videos and installations from GPS tracks, drone and underwater footage of wild animals in northern landscapes. - **Aphrodite Theodora Andreou** (1) — Researcher, Institute of Digital Games, University of Malta. Designer-researcher who co-designed enrichment toys with a group of bottlenose dolphins. - **Aquacycl** (1) — Company. Aquacycl, founded by Orianna Bretschger, treats industrial wastewater with microbial fuel cells. https://www.aquacycl.com/ - **Arianna Mastali** (1) — PhD researcher, Georgia Institute of Technology. Researcher who designed an audio enrichment system for the elephants at Zoo Atlanta. - **Armi Behzad** (1) — Researcher, Everyday Design Studio, Simon Fraser University. Design researcher in the Everyday Design Studio exploring how nonhuman agency such as breakage can take part in design iteration. - **Arnaud Tantet** (1) — Designer; ECAL. Arnaud Tantet is a designer from ECAL whose project Brio was selected by the Green Product / Green Concept Award. - **Arne Berger** (1) — Professor of Human-Computer Interaction, Anhalt University of Applied Sciences. HCI researcher working on participatory design, smart homes and more-than-human design in practice. - **Arne Hendriks** (1) — Artist and researcher; long-term collaborator of Mediamatic. Arne Hendriks works on speculative and practical projects about living with less, including The Incredible Shrinking Man and a series of mycelium pigeon towers built with Mediamatic. - **Art Orienté Objet** (1) — Artist duo of Marion Laval-Jeantet and Benoît Mangin. French duo formed in 1991 by Marion Laval-Jeantet and Benoît Mangin, working between ethology, biology and transcultural psychiatry. - **ArtSilk** (1) — Company. ArtSilk, founded by researchers Anna Rising and Benjamin Schmuck, spins fibre from spider-silk-inspired proteins made by microorganisms. - **Arthur Wiechula** (1) — Landscape architect (1868–1941). Arthur Wiechula was a German landscape architect who proposed growing houses and structures from living, grafted trees. - **Arturo Escobar** (1) — Professor Emeritus of Anthropology, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Anthropologist of development and political ecology who argues for autonomous, place-based design. - **Arup** (1) — Engineering and design firm. Arup is a global engineering firm that co-developed the SolarLeaf algae façade. https://www.arup.com - **Asa River Jackson** (1) — Designer and artist. Designs furniture and objects with a mutualistic method that serves both people and other species. https://asariverjackson.com - **Ashley Boone** (1) — PhD researcher, Georgia Institute of Technology. Researcher who studies data practices of community science, such as volunteers monitoring bird collisions with buildings. - **Ashley Colley** (1) — Researcher, User Experience group, University of Lapland. Ashley Colley designs ambient and peripheral displays, including one that morphs the shadow of a houseplant. - **Aspect Biosystems** (1) — Microfluidic bioprinting company, founded 2013. Aspect Biosystems prints tissue with a microfluidic printhead that mixes cells and hydrogel at the nozzle, and is developing printed tissue therapeutics. https://aspectbiosystems.com/ - **Athanassia Athanassiou** (1) — Principal Investigator, Smart Materials group, Istituto Italiano di Tecnologia. Athanassia Athanassiou leads research on bio-based and sustainable composite materials at IIT. https://www.iit.it/ - **Atmoph** (1) — Hardware startup. Kyoto company that makes a wall-mounted screen showing real-time and recorded landscape views. - **Atsushi Tero** (1) — Professor, Institute of Mathematics for Industry, Kyushu University. Mathematician who turned slime-mould tube growth into a mathematical model for designing adaptive networks. - **Auburn University Biodesign Challenge team** (1) — Student team, Auburn University; Biodesign Challenge 2024. Students at Auburn University who took part in the Biodesign Challenge, the international competition that pairs art and design students with biologists. Instructors include Devon Ward. https://www.biodesignchallenge.org/ - **Auger-Loizeau** (1) — Design studio of James Auger and Jimmy Loizeau. Speculative design partnership formed in 2000 by two Royal College of Art graduates, known for prototypes that question how technology enters everyday life. - **Augustine Leudar** (1) — Sound artist and researcher. Sound artist who combines plant electrophysiology with 3D spatial audio in installations. - **Auke Bleij** (1) — Co-founder, Respyre. Auke Bleij co-founded Respyre, which develops bioreceptive concrete that moss colonises spontaneously. https://www.respyre.com - **Aula Future + FirstHand Biodesign Challenge team** (1) — Student team, Aula Future + FirstHand; Biodesign Challenge 2023. Students at Aula Future + FirstHand who took part in the Biodesign Challenge, the international competition that pairs art and design students with biologists. https://www.biodesignchallenge.org/ - **Aurélie Mosse** (1) — Designer and researcher; associate professor at EnsadLab, École des Arts Décoratifs, Paris; leads ImpressioVivo. Aurélie Mosse works on responsive and bio-sourced materials; her project ImpressioVivo combines 3D printing and bacterially induced calcification to make circular materials. - **Avril Corroon** (1) — Artist. Avril Corroon is an Irish artist whose installations use moulds, fermentation and food to address housing and labour. https://www.avrilcorroon.com/ - **Axel Erlandson** (1) — Farmer and tree shaper (1884–1964). Swedish-American farmer Axel Erlandson grafted and bent trees into baskets, arches and ladders and opened the Tree Circus in 1947. - **Aybars Senyildiz** (1) — Designer and researcher, Aalto University. Designer who studies home fermentation as a site where people learn to relate to microbes. - **B. F. Skinner** (1) — Psychologist (1904–1990), Harvard University. Behaviourist who developed operant conditioning and, in World War II, trained pigeons to peck at screen images to steer a guided bomb. - **BIOMILQ** (1) — Company. BIOMILQ, founded by Leila Strickland and Michelle Egger, cultures human mammary cells to produce milk components outside the body. - **BIOTEOS (Romain Dhenin)** (1) — Start-up. Romain Dhenin founded BIOTEOS, which developed the microalgae air purifier OXYLON, French runner-up in the 2022 James Dyson Award. https://bioteos.com - **Backyard Brains** (1) — Neuroscience education company founded by Greg Gage and Tim Marzullo. Company making low-cost neuroscience kits for schools, including the RoboRoach. https://backyardbrains.com/ - **Barani Raman** (1) — Professor of Biomedical Engineering, Washington University in St. Louis. Neuroengineer who studies insect olfaction and reads locust brain signals to detect explosives. https://ramanlab.wustl.edu/ - **Barbara Mazzolai** (1) — Associate Director for Robotics and director of the Bioinspired Soft Robotics Lab, Istituto Italiano di Tecnologia. Biologist and roboticist who created the Plantoid, the first robot modelled on plant roots. https://www.iit.it/people-details/-/people/barbara-mazzolai - **Bas Emaus** (1) — Founder, JiTiBa Algae Technologies. Bas Emaus founded JiTiBa Algae Technologies, which uses immobilised microalgae for wastewater treatment. - **Basse Stittgen** (1) — Designer; tutor in the Social Design master at Design Academy Eindhoven. Basse Stittgen graduated from Design Academy Eindhoven in 2017 and turns overlooked waste streams, such as slaughterhouse blood and urban wood, into objects that make hidden processes visible. https://www.bassestittgen.com - **Baum & Leahy** (1) — Artist duo (Amanda Baum and Rose Leahy). Artist-designer duo making speculative installations about microbes, deep time and more-than-human futures. - **Beatrice Maggipinto** (1) — Researcher, Carnegie Mellon University. Designer of virtual reality experiences about ocean ecosystems, working with the Interactive Technologies Institute in Portugal. - **Beatriz da Costa** (1) — Artist and educator; UC Irvine (1974–2012). Beatriz da Costa was an interdisciplinary artist who combined tactical media, citizen science and biology, often working with animals as partners. - **BeeHaven team (Yao Yulu, Liu Xinyi, Dai Yanning)** (1) — Designer; China Academy of Art. BeeHaven team (Yao Yulu, Liu Xinyi, Dai Yanning) is a designer from China Academy of Art whose project BeeHaven was selected by the Green Product / Green Concept Award. - **Beewise** (1) — Company that makes the BeeHome, a robotic, solar-powered beehive. Start-up founded in 2018 that automates beekeeping with cameras, AI and a robotic arm inside a hive container. - **Bence Czibik** (1) — Designer; Széchenyi István University. Bence Czibik is a designer from Széchenyi István University whose project HyphaL was selected by the Green Product / Green Concept Award. - **Benioff Ocean Science Laboratory** (1) — Ocean science lab at the University of California, Santa Barbara. Lab that built Whale Safe, a system combining acoustic whale detection, models and ship tracking to reduce ship strikes. - **Benjamin Ward-Cherrier** (1) — Robotics researcher, University of Bristol. Robotics researcher working on neuromorphic tactile sensing; his group used FinalSpark organoids to classify Braille from an artificial fingertip. - **Bento Lab** (1) — Portable DNA laboratory company founded by Bethan Wolfenden and Philipp Boeing, 2015. Bento Lab packs a centrifuge, PCR thermocycler and gel imager into a laptop-sized case, designed for fieldwork, classrooms and community labs. https://bento.bio/ - **Berilsu Tarcan** (1) — PhD researcher, Department of Design, Norwegian University of Science and Technology (NTNU). Design researcher who explores practice-based ways of making with the environment as an alternative to human-centred design. - **Bernie Krause** (1) — Soundscape ecologist and musician; founder of Wild Sanctuary. Former synthesizer musician who began recording wild soundscapes in 1968 and built an archive of thousands of hours from habitats worldwide. Krause coined the terms biophony, geophony and anthropophony. https://www.wildsanctuary.com/ - **Berre Su Demir** (1) — PhD researcher, Koç University (also published as Berre Su Yanlıç). Design researcher building tools and methods for representing plants and other nonhumans in more-than-human design. - **Berre Su Yanlıç** (1) — Researcher, Koç University. Design researcher studying how plant perspectives can be brought into early design stages. - **Bert De Roo** (1) — Design researcher; co-author of the Umwelt-sketch method. Researcher who builds practical methods for bringing nonhuman perspectives into design workshops. - **Berta Daina** (1) — Designer; ELISAVA. Berta Daina is a Spanish designer whose home bioplastic kit Agro Biomaterials was a 2022 James Dyson Award International Top 20 project. https://www.agrobiomaterials.com - **Betti Marenko** (1) — Reader in design and philosophy, Central Saint Martins, University of the Arts London. Design theorist working at the meeting point of philosophy, digital technology and material culture. - **Bingjie Gao** (1) — Design researcher, Beijing Institute of Technology. Bingjie Gao co-designed Plant Playmate, a smart office plant with lights and expressions that offers short breaks from work stress. - **Biohm** (1) — Biomanufacturing company for mycelium building materials. Founded by Ehab Sayed in 2016, Biohm makes mycelium insulation panels and Orb, a board material made from food and industrial waste. https://www.biohm.co.uk/ - **Biomason** (1) — Biocement company founded by Ginger Krieg Dosier. Architect Ginger Krieg Dosier developed a way to grow masonry with bacteria and founded Biomason to make biocement tiles and blocks. https://biomason.com/ - **Biomemory** (1) — DNA data storage company, spin-out of CNRS and Sorbonne Université. Company that stores data in DNA made by engineered cells and is building DNA storage for data centres. https://www.biomemory.com/ - **Biorealize** (1) — Biodesign hardware company founded by Orkan Telhan and Karen Hogan, 2015. Biorealize built the Microbial Design Studio, a desktop appliance that automates culturing, testing and harvesting microbes so designers can run biological experiments like a print queue. https://www.biorealize.com/ - **Bios Urn (Gerard Moliné & Martín Ruiz de Azúa)** (1) — Design studio / company. Gerard Moliné and Martín Ruiz de Azúa designed the Bios Urn, a biodegradable urn that grows a tree from cremated ashes. https://urnabios.com/ - **Biosphere 2** (1) — Earth system science facility, University of Arizona (built by Space Biospheres Ventures). Sealed glass building containing a rainforest, ocean, desert and farm. - **Block Research Group** (1) — Research group at ETH Zurich led by Philippe Block. The Block Research Group studies compression-only structures, shell design and structural form finding. https://block.arch.ethz.ch/ - **Blond & Bieber** (1) — Design studio of Essi Johanna Glomb and Rasa Weber. Blond & Bieber work with microalgae as a colour source for textile printing and surfaces. https://www.blondandbieber.com/ - **Bluebrain** (1) — Music duo (Hays and Ryan Holladay). Brothers who make location-aware albums that change as listeners walk through a place. - **Bob Hendrikx** (1) — Designer; founder of Loop Biotech. Bob Hendrikx studied at TU Delft and founded Loop Biotech with Lonneke Westhoff to grow coffins and urns from mycelium. https://loop-biotech.com/ - **Boqun Huang** (1) — Designer; Central Saint Martins. Boqun Huang is a designer from Central Saint Martins whose project GROWN BLUR was selected by the Green Product / Green Concept Award. - **Borough of Manhattan Community College Biodesign Challenge team** (1) — Student team, Borough of Manhattan Community College; Biodesign Challenge 2023. Students at Borough of Manhattan Community College who took part in the Biodesign Challenge, the international competition that pairs art and design students with biologists. https://www.biodesignchallenge.org/ - **Botanicalls** (1) — Project team: Kati London, Rob Faludi, Kate Hartman and Rebecca Bray. Group formed at NYU ITP in 2006 that gave houseplants a voice through phone calls and, later, Twitter. https://www.botanicalls.com/ - **Botao Amber Hu** (1) — Researcher, University of Oxford; founder of Reality Design Lab. Designer and researcher working on mixed reality, multispecies experience and human augmentation. - **Brad Hakes** (1) — Artist; The University of Texas at Austin. Brad Hakes is an artist whose Orbweaver interventions about living with spiders were Runner-Up at the 2023 Biodesign Challenge. - **Brandon Ballengée** (1) — Artist and biologist. Brandon Ballengée is an American artist-biologist who studies amphibian deformities and species decline. https://brandonballengee.com - **Brilliant Dyes** (1) — Company. Brilliant Dyes is a London start-up extracting pigments such as phycocyanin from cyanobacteria through a low-energy biorefinery. - **Bryan C. Pijanowski** (1) — Professor of Landscape Ecology and director of the Center for Global Soundscapes, Purdue University. Landscape ecologist who records soundscapes around the world as ecological data. - **Budburst (Chicago Botanic Garden)** (1) — Plant phenology citizen science programme. Programme where volunteers record when plants leaf, flower and fruit. https://budburst.org/ - **Buro Belén** (1) — Design studio (Brecht Duijf, Lenneke Langenhuijsen). Buro Belén is an Amsterdam studio working with colour, textiles and natural dyes. https://www.burobelen.com - **Burton Nitta (Michael Burton & Michiko Nitta)** (1) — Artist-designer duo working on future bodies, food and ecology. Michael Burton and Michiko Nitta design bodily futures shaped by biotechnology, including Algaculture, a symbiotic suit that lets a person feed on algae grown in their own breath and light. https://www.burtonnitta.co.uk/ - **Buğra Karabey** (1) — Artist and designer. Artist who builds platforms that turn the bioelectrical signals of plants into sound. - **CELLINK** (1) — Bioprinter and bioink manufacturer, founded 2016 (now part of BICO). CELLINK started by selling a universal cellulose-based bioink and then the BIO X desktop bioprinter, which put bioprinting on ordinary lab benches. https://www.cellink.com/ - **Caleb Harper** (1) — Founder of the MIT Media Lab Open Agriculture Initiative (2015–2020). Architect-turned-researcher who promoted 'digital recipes' for growing food. - **California Academy of Sciences** (1) — Natural history museum and research institute. Museum that co-founded the City Nature Challenge and hosted iNaturalist. - **Cameron Beccario** (1) — Software engineer and visualization maker. Creator of earth.nullschool.net. - **Camila Marambio** (1) — Curator; founder of Ensayos. Camila Marambio is a Chilean curator who founded Ensayos, a nomadic research programme on the ecology of Tierra del Fuego, and curated the Chilean Pavilion Turba Tol Hol-Hol Tol. https://www.turbatol.org - **Camila Wandemberg** (1) — Designer; California College of the Arts alumna. Camila Wandemberg is an Ecuadorian designer whose algae-filter face masks were Runner-Up at the 2020 Biodesign Challenge. - **Carbios** (1) — Company. Carbios develops enzymes that break down PET plastic and polyester into monomers for recycling. https://www.carbios.com/ - **Carbon Polymerizing System team (Mahidol University)** (1) — Student engineering team. Saharat Chawaruechai, Sumeth Klomchitcharoen and Kanyapat Ploypradith designed a carbon-to-PHB bacterial system, Thai national winner of the 2024 James Dyson Award. - **Carla Alcalà Badias** (1) — Artist. Spanish artist working with sound, sediments and microorganisms, often with marine scientists. - **Carlos Peralta** (1) — Design researcher; Design in Science project, Institute for Manufacturing, University of Cambridge. Carlos Peralta is a design researcher who worked with Cambridge scientists on how design can communicate emerging science, including biophotovoltaics. - **Carolina De Lara** (1) — Textile designer and biodesign researcher (University of Borås; Kyoto Institute of Technology). Carolina De Lara works on bacterial cellulose textiles, combining broken-down cellulose fibres with knitted and crocheted structures. - **Carvey Ehren Maigue** (1) — Designer; Mapúa University. Carvey Ehren Maigue is a Filipino engineer whose AuREUS solar material made from crop waste won the first James Dyson Award Sustainability prize in 2020. - **Catalog** (1) — DNA data storage and computing start-up (key assets acquired by Biomemory in 2026). Company that built a machine to write data into DNA from pre-made pieces, and stored English Wikipedia in DNA in 2019. https://www.catalogdna.com/ - **Catherine Crockford** (1) — Director of Research, CNRS Institute for Cognitive Sciences; co-director of the Taï Chimpanzee Project. Catherine Crockford studies vocal communication and social bonds in wild chimpanzees in the Taï forest. - **Cayla Key** (1) — Design researcher, Northumbria University. Design researcher working on care ethics, posthumanism and more-than-human design in HCI. - **Cecilia Jonsson** (1) — Artist. Swedish artist working with metals, minerals and biological material, often extracting iron from living sources. https://www.ceciliajonsson.com - **Celestine Briët** (1) — Designer. Celestine Briët is a Dutch designer whose BeLeaf material is made from fallen leaves. http://celestine-briet.nl - **Cellsense team (Georgia Tech)** (1) — Student design team. Stefan Colton, Aradhita Parasrampuria and J Sebastian Garcia Medina designed Cellsense algae sequins, US runner-up in the 2023 James Dyson Award. - **Center for Genomic Gastronomy (Zack Denfeld & Cathrine Kramer)** (1) — Artist-led think tank on the biotechnologies and biodiversity of human food systems, founded 2010. Zack Denfeld and Cathrine Kramer research and stage food experiments about genetically modified organisms, pollution and agricultural biotech, including cooking shows made with fluorescent GM fish. https://genomicgastronomy.com/ - **Chadwick A. Wingrave** (1) — HCI researcher, University of Central Florida (at the time of the work). Researcher in 3D interaction who explored serious games for dogs and their owners. - **Chao Zhong** (1) — Professor, School of Life Sciences and Technology, ShanghaiTech University. Chao Zhong engineers bacterial biofilms as programmable living materials, with printable Bacillus subtilis strains whose secreted matrix carries designed protein functions. https://slst.shanghaitech.edu.cn/ - **Charles M. Lieber** (1) — Nanoscientist; former Professor of Chemistry, Harvard University. Chemist who pioneered nanowire and macroporous mesh electronics that can be merged with living tissue, including 3D 'cyborg' tissue scaffolds. - **Charlotte McCurdy** (1) — Designer and researcher. Charlotte McCurdy designs carbon-negative materials and fashion from marine algae. https://www.charlottemccurdy.com/ - **Chitofarm (Charlotte Böhning & Mary Lempres)** (1) — Design team. Charlotte Böhning and Mary Lempres designed Chitofarm, a mealworm-powered biodigester for polystyrene, a 2022 Lexus Design Award finalist. - **Chris Woebken** (1) — Designer and researcher; co-founder of the Extrapolation Factory. Chris Woebken is a design researcher who builds speculative wearables and participatory futures methods, trained at the Royal College of Art Design Interactions programme. https://www.chriswoebken.com - **Christa Sommerer & Laurent Mignonneau** (1) — Media-art duo; professors at the Interface Cultures department, University of Art and Design Linz. Christa Sommerer and Laurent Mignonneau have made interactive artworks about artificial life since the early 1990s. - **Christian Brems** (1) — Artist. Christian Brems is a Danish artist working with sound, plants and speculative bio-acoustics. - **Christian Kerrigan** (1) — Artist and architect. Christian Kerrigan is an artist-architect who draws and films with growing and self-organising matter, including protocells and trees. - **Christian Rutz** (1) — Professor of Biology, University of St Andrews; founding president of the International Bio-Logging Society. Christian Rutz is a behavioural ecologist known for work on tool-using New Caledonian and Hawaiian crows and on animal-borne tracking tags. https://www.st-andrews.ac.uk/biology/people/cr68 - **Christien Meindertsma** (1) — Designer. Christien Meindertsma is a Dutch designer known for tracing the full life of materials such as flax, wool and pigs. http://www.christienmeindertsma.com - **Christopher Bellamy** (1) — Biodesigner; founder of Biocrafted. Christopher Bellamy is a British biodesigner who develops living materials with bioluminescent microalgae. https://biocrafted.com/ - **Cinzia Ferrari** (1) — Designer; Central Saint Martins. Cinzia Ferrari is a designer from Central Saint Martins whose project CyanoFabbrica was selected by the Green Product / Green Concept Award. - **Circa (Ted Hunt)** (1) — Timekeeping design project by designer Ted Hunt. Circa makes solar and lunar watch faces and apps that replace clock time with the rhythms of the sun and moon. https://web.archive.org/web/2023/http://circa.bio/ - **Circular Systems** (1) — Company. Circular Systems is a materials company whose Agraloop process turns food-crop residues into textile fibres. https://circularsystems.com/ - **City of Melbourne Urban Forest team** (1) — Urban forest and open-space team of the City of Melbourne. The City of Melbourne manages about 70,000 public trees and published them on the open Urban Forest Visual map. https://www.melbourne.vic.gov.au - **Claudy Jongstra** (1) — Textile artist. Claudy Jongstra is a Dutch textile artist who keeps her own flock of Drenthe Heath sheep and grows dye plants for her felted works. http://claudyjongstra.com - **Clee Zhuo Wang** (1) — Researcher, School of Design, Hong Kong Polytechnic University. Design researcher studying plant time and temporality in human-plant interaction. - **Clemens Driessen** (1) — Philosopher, Wageningen University. Philosopher of technology and animal ethics who co-created Pig Chase, a game played between pigs and people. - **CleverPet** (1) — Company that makes the CleverPet Hub, a puzzle console for dogs. Start-up founded by cognitive scientists from UC San Diego that launched a light-and-sound game console for dogs in 2016. - **Click & Grow** (1) — Indoor gardening company. Estonian company that makes self-watering smart gardens with seed pods. - **Climate Clock (Gan Golan & Andrew Boyd)** (1) — Artist-activist project. Project by artists Gan Golan and Andrew Boyd that installs public countdown clocks for climate deadlines. - **Clive van Heerden** (1) — Designer; former head of Philips Design Probes; co-founder of Van Heerden Mama. Clive van Heerden led the Philips Design Probes programme, which produced the Microbial Home, and later made speculative design films with Jack Mama and Nancy Tilbury. - **Coast 4C** (1) — Company. Coast 4C is a Philippine social enterprise building a regenerative seaweed supply chain with small-scale fishing communities. https://www.coast4c.com/ - **CoeLux** (1) — Lighting company founded on research by Paolo Di Trapani (University of Insubria). Company that reproduces the look of sky and sunlight with nanoparticle optics. - **Colleen Flanigan** (1) — Artist; founder of Living Sea Sculpture. American sculptor who makes electrified steel structures that grow limestone underwater and serve as coral nurseries. - **Colorifix** (1) — Biotechnology company dyeing textiles with engineered microbes. Founded in 2016 by synthetic biologists Orr Yarkoni and Jim Ajioka, Colorifix uses engineered bacteria to make and fix dyes on fabric. https://colorifix.com/ - **Constitutional Court of Ecuador** (1) — Ecuador's highest constitutional court. Ecuador was the first country to write the rights of nature into its constitution (2008); its Constitutional Court enforces those rights in landmark cases. - **Cooking Sections** (1) — Spatial practice (Daniel Fernández Pascual and Alon Schwabe). Cooking Sections is a London-based duo that examines the systems that organise the world through food, using installation, performance and site-specific interventions. https://www.climavore.org - **Coral Vita** (1) — Company. Coral Vita, founded by Sam Teicher and Gator Halpern, runs land-based coral farms for reef restoration. https://www.coralvita.co/ - **Corentin Mahieu** (1) — Designer; co-founder of Bento Architecture. Belgian designer working with wood, waste streams and mycelium on furniture and interiors. - **Crème (Jun Aizaki)** (1) — Design studio. Crème is Jun Aizaki's Brooklyn design and architecture studio, known for the gourd-grown HyO-Cup. https://www.cremedesign.com/ - **Cyborg Nest** (1) — Sense-extension startup co-founded by Liviu Babitz and Scott Cohen. Company that sold North Sense, a body-worn device that vibrates when facing north. - **Céleste Boursier-Mougenot** (1) — Artist and composer. French artist and trained composer who builds installations where living systems, water or traffic generate music; he represented France at the 2015 Venice Biennale. - **César Rodríguez-Garavito** (1) — Professor of Law, NYU School of Law; founding director of the More-Than-Human Life (MOTH) Program. Colombian legal scholar and field lawyer working on the rights of nature, climate litigation and Earth rights. - **DISPERSEED team (Universitat Politècnica de València)** (1) — Student design team. Irene Badía Madrigal, Diego Polo García, Carmen Amorós Egea and colleagues designed DISPERSEED, Spanish runner-up in the 2022 James Dyson Award. - **DOGTV** (1) — Television network made for dogs. Network founded in 2012 whose programmes are edited for dogs' colour vision, hearing and home-alone hours. - **Damanhur** (1) — Ecovillage community in Piedmont; research group behind Music of the Plants. Intentional community founded in the 1970s whose researchers built devices that turn electrical changes in plants into MIDI music; the devices are now sold as Plant Music. https://www.plantmusic.com/ - **Damien Woods** (1) — Professor of Computer Science, Maynooth University. Computer scientist working on molecular computing and the theory of self-assembly. - **Dan Parker** (1) — Researcher, The University of Melbourne. Architectural researcher who uses computational design and digital fabrication to build habitat structures for owls and insects. - **Daniel Crawford** (1) — Data sonification artist (studied at the University of Minnesota). Sonifier who turns climate data into compositions for string instruments. - **Daniel Preston** (1) — Assistant Professor of Mechanical Engineering, Rice University; Preston Innovation Laboratory. Engineer working on soft robotics and energy; coined 'necrobotics' for robots made from dead organisms. - **Daniel Wangpraseurt** (1) — Marine biologist and bio-optics researcher, UC San Diego and University of Cambridge. Daniel Wangpraseurt prints coral-inspired hydrogel structures whose optics scatter light the way living coral tissue does, and uses them to grow dense algae cultures. https://www.wangpraseurt.com/ - **Daniela Rus** (1) — Professor and director of the Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (CSAIL), MIT. Roboticist working on distributed and soft robots. - **Daniela Vallentin** (1) — Research group leader, Max Planck Institute for Biological Intelligence. Daniela Vallentin studies the neural circuits of vocal learning and turn-taking in songbirds. - **Daniele Quercia** (1) — Director of Responsible AI, Nokia Bell Labs Cambridge. Computational social scientist whose team built a dog wearable to infer canine personality. - **Danielle Trofe** (1) — Designer; founder of MushLume Lighting. Danielle Trofe founded her studio in 2011 and began growing lamp shades from mycelium and hemp in 2014, working with Ecovative. https://danielletrofe.com/ - **Danielle Wilde** (1) — Professor of embodied design, Umeå Institute of Design / University of Southern Denmark. Design researcher working on embodied, participatory and food-related futures, including human-microbe relations. - **Daniëlle Ooms** (1) — Designer and researcher, Industrial Design, Eindhoven University of Technology. Daniëlle Ooms designed a toolkit for collecting mud to power Electric Life, a bacteria-powered light installation by Teresa van Dongen. - **Dasha Tsapenko** (1) — Designer. Ukrainian designer based in the Netherlands, working with fungi, plants and grown textiles. - **David Benqué** (1) — Designer and researcher; Design Interactions graduate, Royal College of Art. David Benqué is a French designer and researcher whose work looks at diagrams, prediction and the politics of science and technology. https://davidbenque.com/ - **David Dunn** (1) — Composer and sound artist; researcher at UC Santa Cruz. Composer who records and composes with the sounds of other species and environments, including the acoustic life inside trees. - **David H. Gracias** (1) — Professor of Chemical and Biomolecular Engineering, Johns Hopkins University. Engineer known for self-folding micro-devices. His group made shell-shaped 3D microelectrode arrays that close around a brain organoid. - **David L. Roberts** (1) — Professor of Computer Science, North Carolina State University. Computer scientist who applies machine learning and sensing to dog behaviour, welfare and guide dog selection. - **David OReilly** (1) — Artist, animator and game designer. Irish artist known for the games Mountain and Everything and animation for Her. https://www.davidoreilly.com - **David Omer** (1) — Principal Investigator, Safra Center for Brain Sciences, Hebrew University of Jerusalem. David Omer's lab studies the neural basis of vocal communication in common marmosets. - **Dean Brown** (1) — Designer and researcher, Interaction Research Studio, Goldsmiths, University of London. Member of the Interaction Research Studio, which designs research products for everyday and public settings. - **Debbie Jung** (1) — Student designer, Cornell University. Designer who created CoCo, a tail-wagging wearable that encourages composting on campus. - **Deep Time Walk** (1) — Community interest company behind the Deep Time Walk app. A UK social enterprise, grown out of Schumacher College, that makes walking audio experiences of Earth's 4.6-billion-year history. https://www.deeptimewalk.org - **Diana Scherer** (1) — Artist and designer. Diana Scherer trains the roots of plants to grow into patterned textile-like material, working with biologists at Radboud University. https://dianascherer.nl/ - **Diemut Strebe** (1) — Artist, affiliate at MIT Center for Art, Science & Technology. Diemut Strebe makes works with scientific laboratories, including Sugababe, a living replica of Van Gogh's ear engineered from cells of a Van Gogh descendant and kept alive in a nutrient vitrine. https://diemutstrebe.com/ - **Dirk Hebel** (1) — Professor of Sustainable Construction, Karlsruhe Institute of Technology. Dirk Hebel researches cultivated and recycled building materials, including bamboo composites and mycelium. https://nb.ieb.kit.edu/ - **Divya Verma** (1) — Designer; National Institute of Design. Divya Verma is an Indian designer whose algae leather Kudarat was Indian runner-up in the 2022 James Dyson Award. - **Diya Samit** (1) — Researcher, Eindhoven University of Technology. Design researcher linking biodesign and more-than-human design through relational data about soil. - **Dognosis** (1) — Research company training dogs to detect cancer by smell, with sensor-rich workstations. Start-up that combines trained detection dogs with sensors and machine learning to screen breath samples for cancer. - **Dominique Chen** (1) — Professor, Faculty of Letters, Arts and Sciences, Waseda University. Dominique Chen researches information technology and wellbeing; with the Ferment Media Research group he built Nukabot, a talking bucket of fermenting rice bran. - **Donghyeon Ko** (1) — HCI researcher, Department of Industrial Design, KAIST. Donghyeon Ko designed BubbleTalk, which turns a person's actions near a fish tank into bubbles inside it. - **Duane Rumbaugh** (1) — Comparative psychologist (1929–2017), Yerkes National Primate Research Center and Georgia State University. Psychologist who led the LANA project, in which a chimpanzee used a computer keyboard of lexigram symbols. - **Dunne & Raby (Anthony Dunne & Fiona Raby)** (1) — Critical and speculative design practice; professors at The New School, New York. Anthony Dunne and Fiona Raby established critical design as a practice, using designed objects and scenarios — including biotechnological ones — to argue about possible futures. https://dunneandraby.co.uk/ - **E-Line Media** (1) — Game publisher and developer. Studio behind Never Alone and Beyond Blue. - **Ebba Ahlqvist** (1) — Interaction design researcher, Chalmers University of Technology. Ebba Ahlqvist co-designed HoneyPot, a pair of networked plant pots that glow to connect two people at a distance. - **Ecosia** (1) — Search engine that funds tree planting. Berlin company that spends its profits on tree planting and climate projects. - **Ed Hawkins** (1) — Professor of Climate Science, University of Reading. Climate scientist who created the warming stripes and climate spiral graphics. - **Ed Key & David Kanaga** (1) — Game designer and composer. Makers of Proteus, an island exploration game without goals. - **Ed Yong** (1) — Science journalist; former staff writer at The Atlantic. Pulitzer Prize-winning science writer on animals, microbes and pandemics. - **Eden Harrison** (1) — Designer; Royal College of Art & Imperial College London. Eden Harrison is a British designer whose reef dB structure damps offshore wind noise while providing reef habitat, UK runner-up in the 2023 James Dyson Award. http://www.edenharrison.com - **Eduardo Kohn** (1) — Associate Professor of Anthropology, McGill University. Eduardo Kohn is an anthropologist who studied how the Runa people of Ecuador's Upper Amazon relate to forest beings, and developed an anthropology beyond the human. - **Eduardo Navarro** (1) — Artist. Argentine artist whose performances and drawings invite people to take on the perception of plants, animals and other beings. - **Edward Masui** (1) — Researcher, Public Works Research Institute, Japan. Researcher who looks at infrastructure through long histories of food, materials and the organisms that shape them. - **Edwin Blake** (1) — Professor Emeritus of Computer Science, University of Cape Town. Computer scientist who worked on the icon-based field computer used by CyberTracker and on HCI for development. - **Ehud Sharlin** (1) — Professor, Department of Computer Science, University of Calgary. Human–robot interaction researcher whose group observed how house cats react to social robots. - **Ekaterina Semenova** (1) — Designer. Ekaterina Semenova is a designer whose Care for Milk turns leftover milk into a ceramic glaze. http://ekaterinasemenova.com - **Eldy S. Lazaro Vasquez** (1) — Designer and HCI researcher (biomaterials and wearables). Eldy S. Lazaro Vasquez designs sustainable wearables and prototyping methods with biomaterials such as mycelium and bacterial cellulose. - **Eleni Margariti** (1) — HCI researcher, Open Lab, Newcastle University / Northumbria University. Designer of ActuAir, a shape-changing wall that shows indoor air quality. - **Eleni Stavrinidou** (1) — Associate Professor, Laboratory of Organic Electronics, Linköping University; leads the Electronic Plants group. Eleni Stavrinidou grows conductive polymer wires, sensors and supercapacitors inside living plants. - **Elias Thaddäus Pfuner** (1) — Designer; Umeå Institute of Design. Elias Thaddäus Pfuner is a designer who with Mario Kapsalis created Nemo, a coral-restoration service, the 2020 James Dyson Award national winner in Sweden. http://eliaspfuner.com - **Elio Caccavale** (1) — Designer; Royal College of Art Design Interactions graduate. Italian designer who works with scientists and ethicists on objects that help people, especially children, talk about biotechnology. - **Elise Elsacker** (1) — Bio-architect and researcher, Vrije Universiteit Brussel and Newcastle University. Elise Elsacker studies fungal and bacterial biofabrication for architecture, characterising mycelium composites, bacterial cellulose reinforcement and self-healing living materials. - **Elissa Brunato** (1) — Material designer; graduate of the MA Material Futures, Central Saint Martins. Elissa Brunato works on bio-based alternatives for fashion embellishment; her Bio Iridescent Sequin was developed with RISE Research Institutes of Sweden. https://www.elissabrunato.com - **Ella Gale** (1) — Researcher in memristors and unconventional computing; formerly at UWE Bristol. Chemist and computer scientist who studied memristive behaviour in slime mould, proteins and other soft matter. - **Emanuele Coccia** (1) — Associate Professor, École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales (EHESS). Emanuele Coccia is a philosopher who writes about plants, metamorphosis and the mixture of all living beings. - **Embassy of the North Sea** (1) — Research and design initiative representing the North Sea as a political subject. Founded in 2018, the Embassy of the North Sea works with artists, lawyers, scientists and fishers to listen to, speak with and eventually negotiate on behalf of the sea. https://www.embassyofthenorthsea.com - **Emilia Tapprest** (1) — Designer and filmmaker. Finnish designer and filmmaker who makes speculative films about technology, bodies and ecologies. - **Emilija Veselova** (1) — Doctoral researcher, Aalto University. Design researcher developing methods for mediating the needs of humans and natural nonhumans, including work on kombucha fermentation. - **Emily Salvi** (1) — Designer; Bartlett School of Architecture, UCL. Emily Salvi is a designer from Bartlett School of Architecture, UCL whose project The MECC was selected by the Green Product / Green Concept Award. - **Emma Money** (1) — Designer; co-founder of Cyanoskin. Emma Money is a designer who co-developed Cyanoskin, a living paint with cyanobacteria, with Holly Souza-Newman and Antoinette Nothomb. - **Emma van der Leest** (1) — Biodesigner; founder of BlueCity Lab. Dutch biodesigner who grows materials such as bacterial cellulose leather and runs the BlueCity Lab for biodesign in Rotterdam. - **Entangled Others** (1) — Artist duo (Sofia Crespo, Feileacan Kirkbride McCormick). Entangled Others is an artist duo using machine learning and scientific data to explore ecology and nonhuman life. https://entangledothers.studio - **Eric Klopfer** (1) — Professor and director of the Scheller Teacher Education Program, MIT. Learning scientist who builds simulations and augmented reality games for science education. - **Erzë Dinarama** (1) — Artist. Erzë Dinarama is a Kosovar artist whose research-based works deal with water, drought and the politics of ecological thresholds. - **Etsuko Yakushimaru** (1) — Musician, artist and producer. Etsuko Yakushimaru is a Japanese pop musician and artist who works across songs, instruments, satellites and biotechnology; she leads the band Soutaiseiriron. https://yakushimaruetsuko.com/ - **Eva Eriksson** (1) — Associate Professor, Department of Digital Design and Information Studies, Aarhus University. Interaction design researcher working on participatory design, children and more-than-human perspectives. - **Evert van Beek** (1) — Researcher, Faculty of Industrial Design Engineering, TU Delft. Design researcher who studies everyday life with smart-home automation through the lens of human-technology co-performance. - **Except Integrated Sustainability** (1) — Sustainability design consultancy. Except Integrated Sustainability is a Rotterdam design and research consultancy for sustainable systems. http://www.except.nl/en/ - **F. Stephan Mayer** (1) — Professor of Psychology, Oberlin College. Social psychologist who studies how connected people feel to the natural world. - **Fadi Botros** (1) — HCI researcher, InnoVis group, University of Calgary (at the time of Go & Grow). Fadi Botros built Go & Grow, a living plant that is watered according to its owner's physical activity. - **Fangyuan Chang** (1) — Researcher, School of Design, Shanghai Jiao Tong University. Design researcher who applies ACI principles to wearable health sensors for dairy cattle. - **Fara Peluso** (1) — Artist and designer. Fara Peluso is an Italian artist and designer in Berlin who works with algae as a living and material collaborator. - **FarmBot** (1) — Open-source farming robot company (founded by Rory Aronson). Company that makes an open-source CNC robot for garden beds. https://farm.bot/ - **Fashion Institute of Technology Biodesign Challenge team** (1) — Student team, Fashion Institute of Technology; Biodesign Challenge 2016–2024. Students at Fashion Institute of Technology who took part in the Biodesign Challenge, the international competition that pairs art and design students with biologists. Instructors include Theanne Schiros. https://www.biodesignchallenge.org/ - **Federico Rossano** (1) — Associate Professor, Department of Cognitive Science, University of California San Diego; director of the Comparative Cognition Lab. Cognitive scientist who leads the largest study of dogs that press soundboard buttons, such as FluentPet boards. - **Fei (Dillon) Shieh** (1) — Design researcher, Eindhoven University of Technology. Fei (Dillon) Shieh co-designed Minty Zoo, a cabinet of sensed mint plants whose water and light are redistributed by their collective behaviour. - **Feng Guo** (1) — Associate Professor of Intelligent Systems Engineering, Indiana University Bloomington. Bioengineer working on acoustofluidics and organoid-based computing. His group built Brainoware, which uses a brain organoid as the reservoir in a reservoir-computing system. - **Fergus Telfer** (1) — Designer; Glasgow School of Art. Fergus Telfer is a Scottish designer who grew Scobio, a packaging film from gin-distillery waste. - **Fernanda Viégas & Martin Wattenberg** (1) — Data visualization artists and researchers (Harvard; formerly Google PAIR). Visualization duo known for artistic, public data displays. - **Fernando Galdon** (1) — Senior Tutor, Design Products, Royal College of Art. Fernando Galdon teaches and researches regenerative materials and furniture, framing their aesthetics as Bio-Brutalism. - **Fernando Laposse** (1) — Designer; founder of Studio Fernando Laposse. Mexican designer who turns plant fibres such as corn husk, sisal and loofah into materials, often through long projects with rural communities. https://www.fernandolaposse.com/ - **Finn Petrie** (1) — Artist. Artist in Ōtepoti Dunedin who 3D-prints porcelain from LIDAR scans of ancient trees and places them in the landscape. - **Flash Forest** (1) — Company. Flash Forest uses drones to map land and fire germinated seed pods to reforest burned and logged areas. https://flashforest.ca/ - **Flavia Alice Mameli** (1) — Designer and researcher, University of Applied Arts Vienna. Designer working with mycelium and regenerative material education. - **Florian 'Floyd' Mueller** (1) — Professor, Exertion Games Lab, Monash University; formerly RMIT University. Designer of bodily play and exertion games whose lab also explored remote nurturing play with rescued dogs. - **FluentPet** (1) — Pet technology company making programmable soundboard buttons. Company that makes recordable buttons and hexagonal tiles that dogs and cats press to play words. - **FluidSolids** (1) — Swiss biocomposite company. FluidSolids AG develops a biocomposite made from by-products of renewable raw materials that can be processed like plastic. https://www.fluidsolids.com/ - **Foamlab** (1) — Biofabrication start-up (with Elvin Karana). Foamlab, with designer-researcher Elvin Karana, grows lightweight foams from bacterial cellulose. - **Formafantasma** (1) — Design studio (Andrea Trimarchi, Simone Farresin). Formafantasma is a research-driven design studio known for projects on materials, extraction and ecology. http://formafantasma.com - **Fragmentario (María-Elena Pombo)** (1) — Design studio. Fragmentario is María-Elena Pombo's studio designing materials from food and ocean waste, such as avocado seed and sargassum. - **Franca López Barbera** (1) — Design researcher, Technische Universität Braunschweig. Brings gender and decolonial thinking to more-than-human design. - **Frank Kolkman** (1) — Designer and researcher. Frank Kolkman is a Dutch designer who works on DIY medicine and technology; his Designs for Flies won the 2016 Dutch Design Award for Service & Systems. http://www.frankkolkman.nl - **Frank Noz** (1) — Designer; co-creator of Cat Cat Revolution. Designer who made an iPad game that a cat and its owner play together. - **François-Joseph Lapointe** (1) — Biologist and performance artist; Professor, Université de Montréal. François-Joseph Lapointe is an evolutionary biologist who uses DNA sequencing of his own microbiome as material for performances and portraits. - **Fredrik Aspling** (1) — Researcher in human-computer interaction, Stockholm University. Works on animal-computer and plant-computer interaction from a multispecies ethnography perspective. - **Fredrik Bernerstedt** (1) — Researcher, Uppsala University. HCI researcher exploring embodied, outdoor methods for more-than-human design. - **Free Lives** (1) — Game studio. South African studio behind Broforce and Terra Nil. - **Friedrich Gerlach** (1) — Designer; Bauhaus-Universität Weimar. Friedrich Gerlach is a German designer who with Julia Huhnholz made the Biocement Chair, German runner-up in the 2023 James Dyson Award and a Green Concept Award finalist. https://www.friedrichgerlach.de - **GROW Observatory** (1) — EU Horizon 2020 citizen science project led by the University of Dundee. Project in which growers across Europe placed soil sensors to validate satellite soil-moisture data. - **Gabe Tavas** (1) — Designer; University of Illinois. Gabe Tavas is an American designer who created Pyrus, a wood-like material from kombucha cellulose, a 2021 James Dyson Award International Top 20 project. http://symmetrywood.com - **Gabriela Munguía** (1) — Artist and researcher. Mexican artist who builds printed micro-architectures and measuring devices to study how microorganisms inhabit and change urban space. - **Gabrielle Hong** (1) — Design researcher, University of Sydney. Gabrielle Hong built a low-resolution display made of living moss that changes when sprayed with water. - **Galy** (1) — Company. Galy, founded by Luciano Bueno, grows cotton fibre from plant cells in bioreactors. https://www.galy.co/ - **Gardens by the Bay** (1) — National garden (masterplan by Grant Associates, conservatories by Wilkinson Eyre). Singapore's 101-hectare garden park with artificial Supertrees and cooled conservatories. - **Garnet Hertz** (1) — Artist and design researcher; Canada Research Chair in Design and Media Arts, Emily Carr University. Canadian artist and researcher known for critical making, DIY electronics and the cockroach-driven robot he built as a graduate student at UC Irvine. http://www.conceptlab.com/ - **Gavin Munro** (1) — Designer; co-founder of Full Grown. Gavin Munro co-founded Full Grown with Alice Munro and grows chairs, lamps and tables from living trees on a farm near Wirksworth. https://fullgrown.co.uk/ - **Genspace** (1) — Community biology laboratory, founded 2009. Genspace was the first community biolab open to the public, founded by Ellen Jorgensen and others, and hosts artists, designers and amateurs doing biotechnology projects. https://www.genspace.org/ - **Geocaching HQ (Groundspeak)** (1) — Company that runs geocaching.com. Seattle company that has run the main geocaching platform since 2000. - **Giancarlo Valentin** (1) — Researcher, Georgia Institute of Technology (FIDO project). Computing researcher who worked on gesture-based communication systems through which dogs can send messages to people. - **Gilbertto Prado** (1) — Artist and professor, Anhembi Morumbi University; coordinator of the Poéticas Digitais group. Brazilian media artist whose group Poéticas Digitais builds interactive installations about urban environments. https://www.poeticasdigitais.net - **Gina Czarnecki** (1) — Artist working with biological material and audience participation. Gina Czarnecki makes works with donated human material, including Palaces, a crystal sculpture grown with children's milk teeth, and Heirloom, live portraits of her daughters grown from their own skin cells on glass. https://ginaczarnecki.com/ - **Ginkgo Bioworks** (1) — Organism design company, founded 2008. Ginkgo Bioworks runs automated foundries that engineer microbes for industry, and from 2014 ran a Creative Residency and design-led collaborations that produced scents, pigments and consumer objects. https://www.ginkgobioworks.com/ - **Gionata Gatto** (1) — Designer and researcher. Gionata Gatto is an Italian designer whose Agricola lamps are made from agricultural by-products bound with natural gums. http://gionatagatto.com - **Giorgia Lupi** (1) — Information designer; partner at Pentagram. Italian information designer who co-founded Accurat and developed the idea of data humanism. http://giorgialupi.com - **Giulia Jiangxian Zhu** (1) — Design student, Politecnico di Milano. Designer who created Ripples, an interactive installation on the Venice Lagoon's MOSE gates and marsh species. - **Giulia Tomasello** (1) — Designer and researcher in biodesign and women's health. Italian designer whose Future Flora kit uses living bacteria for intimate care; STARTS Prize 2018 winner. http://gitomasello.com - **Gizem Gumuskaya** (1) — Researcher; developed Anthrobots as a PhD student in Michael Levin's lab at Tufts; trained as an architect at MIT. Architect turned synthetic morphologist who builds multicellular robots from adult human cells. - **Glowee** (1) — Start-up making light with bioluminescent bacteria. Glowee was founded by Sandra Rey in 2014 to develop lighting from bioluminescent marine bacteria for shop windows, events and cities. https://www.glowee.com/ - **Glowing Plant (Taxa Biotechnologies)** (1) — Crowdfunded synthetic biology startup by Antony Evans, Kyle Taylor and Omri Amirav-Drory, 2013. Glowing Plant raised over $480,000 on Kickstarter in 2013 to send engineered luminescent Arabidopsis seeds to backers; the plants never glowed brightly and the company pivoted to a scented moss before closing. https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/antonyevans/glowing-plants-natural-lighting-with-no-electricit - **Google Creative Lab** (1) — Google's in-house creative team for experiments and campaigns. Google Creative Lab makes public-facing experiments that let non-experts play with machine learning. https://experiments.withgoogle.com - **Google DeepMind** (1) — AI research lab of Google. Google DeepMind builds large AI models; its Gemma family of open models was adapted in 2025 to learn the structure of dolphin vocalisations. https://deepmind.google - **Gopinaath Kannabiran** (1) — Researcher in interaction design, IT University of Copenhagen. Brings ecofeminist and queer perspectives into HCI and computational art. - **Great Wrap** (1) — Company. Great Wrap, founded by Julia Kaisinger and Jordy Kay, makes compostable cling and stretch wrap from potato waste. https://greatwrap.com.au/ - **Green Nettle Textile** (1) — Company. Green Nettle Textile is a Kenyan venture that cultivates the giant nettle and processes it into linen-like fabric. https://greennettletextiles.com/ - **Green Spot Technologies** (1) — Company. Green Spot Technologies upcycles food-processing waste into ingredients with solid-state fermentation (Ferment'Up). - **Green&Blue** (1) — Cornish design company making wildlife habitats for buildings and gardens, founded by Kate and Gavin Christman. Green&Blue designs bee bricks, bird boxes and bat boxes that can be built into walls or placed in gardens. https://www.greenandblue.co.uk - **GreenWave** (1) — Nonprofit. GreenWave, founded by fisherman Bren Smith, develops and trains farmers in regenerative 3D ocean farming of seaweed and shellfish. https://www.greenwave.org/ - **Greener Games** (1) — Independent studio (John Carline). Small studio that makes relaxing VR nature environments. - **Greg Marshall** (1) — Marine biologist and filmmaker; inventor of Crittercam at National Geographic. Biologist who invented Crittercam in 1986, a camera and data logger worn by animals, and developed it at National Geographic. - **Greg Nijs** (1) — Researcher, Université Libre de Bruxelles. Researcher in urban studies and civic HCI who builds DIY tools for citizen interventions in the city. - **Güneş-Hélène Isitan** (1) — Bioartist and researcher. Güneş-Hélène Isitan makes interactive bioart installations in which people meet microorganisms such as paramecia through touch and electricity. - **Halter** (1) — Agricultural technology company making solar-powered virtual-fencing collars for cattle. Company founded in 2016 whose GPS collars guide cattle with sound and vibration cues instead of physical fences. - **Hang Su** (1) — Designer; Politecnico di Milano. Hang Su is a designer from Politecnico di Milano whose project Phytosphere was selected by the Green Product / Green Concept Award. - **Hanna Wirman** (1) — Game researcher; formerly The Hong Kong Polytechnic University, now IT University of Copenhagen. Game scholar who designed and studied touchscreen games for orangutans and asked how play can cross species lines. - **Haru Ji & Graham Wakefield** (1) — Artists; Graham Wakefield is Associate Professor at York University (Alice Lab). Artist duo who build immersive artificial ecosystems as their long-running series Artificial Nature. https://artificialnature.net/ - **Haruka Kasuga** (1) — Researcher, Hokkaido University. Haruka Kasuga studies science communication with VR, including videos that simulate how turtles, geckos and frogs see. - **HeHe (Helen Evans & Heiko Hansen)** (1) — Artist duo. Artists who make pollution and energy use visible in public space. http://www.hehe.org/ - **Heiko Hamann** (1) — Professor of Computer Science, University of Konstanz; coordinator of flora robotica. Roboticist working on swarm robotics and robot–plant biohybrids. - **Helen Pynor** (1) — Artist working with the body, organs and life-death thresholds. Australian artist who works with organs, tissue and medical science; she made The Body is a Big Place with Peta Clancy at SymbioticA and with transplant researchers. http://www.helenpynor.com - **Helena Nikonole** (1) — Artist and curator. Helena Nikonole is a new-media artist working with AI, bio art and DIY biotechnology. https://nikonole.com/ - **Henk Jonkers** (1) — Professor of Sustainable Building Materials, TU Delft. Microbiologist Henk Jonkers developed bacteria-based self-healing concrete, commercialised by the spin-off Basilisk. https://basiliskconcrete.com/en/ - **Herobeat Studios** (1) — Independent video game studio. Spanish studio that developed Endling: Extinction is Forever. https://herobeatstudios.com - **Het Nieuwe Instituut** (1) — Dutch national institute for architecture, design and digital culture. Het Nieuwe Instituut is a museum and research institute whose research team, led by Klaas Kuitenbrouwer, developed the Zoöp model. https://zoop.hetnieuweinstituut.nl/en - **Hildegard Westerkamp** (1) — Composer, radio artist and sound ecologist; member of the World Soundscape Project. Composer who shaped soundscape composition and the practice of the soundwalk. - **Hinako Takita** (1) — Researcher (co-author with Tokushu Inamura, Kyushu University). Design researcher who studies fermentation practices as sites of more-than-human participatory design. - **Hirokazu Takahashi** (1) — Professor of Mechano-Informatics, The University of Tokyo. Engineer whose lab uses living neuronal cultures as physical reservoirs to control robots. - **Hochul Hwang** (1) — PhD researcher, Manning College of Information and Computer Sciences, University of Massachusetts Amherst. Robotics and HCI researcher who studies handler–guide dog interaction to inform legged guide dog robots. - **Home Grown (RCA team)** (1) — Student team, Royal College of Art. Home Grown is an RCA team making consumer electronics from bio-based, locally sourced materials. - **Hong Luo** (1) — Researcher, Exertion Games Lab, Monash University. HCI researcher designing bodily, touch-based systems that connect people with plants. - **Hongjie Yang** (1) — Designer; Design Academy Eindhoven graduate. Chinese designer based in the Netherlands who works with tissue engineers on objects partly made of living human cells. http://www.hongjieyang.com/ - **Hongyi Zhang** (1) — Designer, Department of Industrial Design, Xi'an Academy of Fine Arts. Industrial designer who led Meow Meow Call, a prototype for communicating with deaf cats. - **Honoka** (1) — Design studio. Honoka is a Japanese design studio that 3D-prints furniture from a composite of igusa rush grass, the plant used for tatami mats. - **Hoyoung Youn** (1) — Design researcher, Yonsei University. Studies post-anthropocentric approaches to service and systems design. - **Hub for Biotechnology in the Built Environment Biodesign Challenge team** (1) — Student team, Hub for Biotechnology in the Built Environment; Biodesign Challenge 2020. Students at Hub for Biotechnology in the Built Environment who took part in the Biodesign Challenge, the international competition that pairs art and design students with biologists. https://bbe.ac.uk/ - **Hubert Duprat** (1) — Artist. French artist known for giving caddisfly larvae gold flakes and precious stones, from which they build their protective cases. - **Hutan** (1) — Conservation organisation. Hutan is a community-based conservation organisation founded by Isabelle Lackman and Marc Ancrenaz that reforests wildlife corridors in Sabah. https://www.hutan.org.my/ - **Huue** (1) — Biotechnology dye company founded by Tammy Hsu and Michelle Zhu, 2019. Huue engineers bacteria to make indigo through an enzymatic route, avoiding the cyanide and formaldehyde used in synthetic indigo for denim. https://www.huue.bio/ - **Hye Yeon Nam** (1) — Associate Professor of Digital Art, Louisiana State University. Hye Yeon Nam is a media artist whose recent work, including FloraWear, puts living plants on the body. - **Hyunseok An** (1) — Designer; Rhode Island School of Design. Hyunseok An is a Korean designer whose domestic microalgae farm Coral was a 2020 Lexus Design Award finalist. - **IAAC** (1) — Institute for Advanced Architecture of Catalonia. IAAC is an architecture school and research centre in Barcelona whose master's programmes explore digital fabrication, data and biomaterials. - **IDEO** (1) — Design and innovation consultancy. Global design consultancy; its San Francisco studio ran early speculative projects with synthetic biologists. https://www.ideo.com/ - **Ian Cheng** (1) — Artist. American artist who builds live simulations of artificial creatures that learn, change and die without a script. http://iancheng.com/ - **Ida Nilstad Pettersen** (1) — Associate Professor, Department of Design, NTNU. Design researcher working on sustainable urban development and nonhuman participation in design. - **Ilhan Aslan** (1) — Associate Professor, Department of Computer Science, Aalborg University (formerly University of Augsburg). HCI researcher on somaesthetics, implicit interaction and human–plant interfaces. - **Impossible Foods** (1) — Food company founded by Patrick O. Brown, 2011. Impossible Foods identified soy leghemoglobin as the molecule that makes meat taste like meat and produces it in engineered Pichia yeast for its plant-based burger. https://impossiblefoods.com/ - **Inbal Arnon** (1) — Professor of Psychology, Hebrew University of Jerusalem. Inbal Arnon studies how children learn language and how statistical structure shapes learning. - **Ingrid Nijhoff** (1) — Designer. Ingrid Nijhoff is a Dutch designer who grew inks from pigment-producing bacteria in Living Pixels. http://studionijhoff.nl - **Interactive Architecture Lab** (1) — Research group at the Bartlett School of Architecture, UCL (led by Ruairi Glynn). A multidisciplinary lab studying the behaviour and interaction of things, environments and their inhabitants through robotic and responsive architecture. http://www.interactivearchitecture.org - **Interspecies Internet** (1) — Initiative founded by Diana Reiss, Peter Gabriel, Neil Gershenfeld and Vint Cerf. Interspecies Internet is a think tank that brings together researchers, technologists and artists to explore communication between humans and other animals. https://www.interspecies.io - **Irene Pepperberg** (1) — Research associate, Harvard University; founder of The Alex Foundation. Irene Pepperberg is a comparative psychologist who spent three decades teaching the African grey parrot Alex to use English labels for objects, colours and numbers. https://alexfoundation.org - **Isaac Monté** (1) — Designer and artist. Dutch designer who works with biological tissue and material processes, including decellularised organs. - **Isabel Correa** (1) — Researcher, Teachers College, Columbia University. Learning designer working on biodesign tools and pedagogies for children. - **Isidora Correa** (1) — Artist and researcher. Isidora Correa is a Chilean artist working with extremophile bacteria and lithium extraction; she won the 2026 Falling Walls Art & Science Breakthrough. - **Iuliia Larikova** (1) — Architect and researcher, Technical University of Munich. Works on digital fabrication for multispecies architecture. - **Ivan Poupyrev** (1) — Interaction researcher; formerly Disney Research and Google ATAP (Project Soli, Jacquard). Ivan Poupyrev invented sensing technologies such as Touché, Botanicus Interacticus, Soli radar and Jacquard textiles. http://www.ivanpoupyrev.com/ - **Izabela Świca** (1) — Designer; University of Warmia and Mazury. Izabela Świca is a Polish designer whose algae–fungi biofertiliser capsule was a 2021 James Dyson Award national runner-up in Poland. - **J. Lomax Boyd** (1) — Assistant Professor, Berman Institute of Bioethics, Johns Hopkins University. Neuroscientist and bioethicist who studies public and expert attitudes toward brain organoids and embodied biocomputing. - **Jacqueline T. Chien** (1) — HCI researcher, Cornell University (at the time of Biogotchi!). Jacqueline T. Chien explored plants as living information displays by manipulating their growth to show personal data. - **Jae Rhim Lee** (1) — Artist; founder of Coeio. Korean-American artist who started the Infinity Burial Project and founded Coeio to produce a mushroom-based burial suit. - **Jakob Kukula** (1) — Designer. Jakob Kukula is a Berlin designer who created SpreeBerlin, a sensing buoy and platform that gives the river Spree a public voice. http://spreeberlin.de - **Jakob von Uexküll** (1) — Biologist (1864–1944), founder of the Institut für Umweltforschung, University of Hamburg. Baltic German biologist who described how each animal lives inside its own perceptual world. - **James Bridle** (1) — Artist and writer. James Bridle is an artist and writer working on technology, networks and nonhuman intelligence. https://jamesbridle.com - **James J. Collins** (1) — Termeer Professor of Medical Engineering and Science, MIT. Bioengineer, a founder of synthetic biology, who built the genetic toggle switch and later paper-based cell-free diagnostics. https://collinslab.mit.edu/ - **James King** (1) — Designer; Royal College of Art Design Interactions graduate. British designer whose graduate work at the Royal College of Art speculated on how lab-grown meat might look and be served. - **Jan Fell** (1) — Researcher, National Tsing Hua University. HCI researcher studying ethics and sustainability in interaction design that involves plants. - **Jan Klingler** (1) — Designer. Jan Klingler is a designer whose Bacteria Lamps preserve colonies of bacteria sampled from people and places in glass. https://janklingler.com/ - **Jana Winderen** (1) — Sound artist working with hydrophones and ultrasonic recording. Trained in mathematics, chemistry and fish ecology, Winderen records sounds in the sea, ice and rivers that humans usually cannot hear, and composes them into multichannel installations. https://www.janawinderen.com/ - **Jane Bennett** (1) — Professor of Political Science, Johns Hopkins University. Political theorist who develops a vital materialism in which things and materials have their own agency. - **Jane Tingley** (1) — Artist; Associate Professor, York University; director of SLOlab. Canadian artist who builds sensor networks and interactive installations about trees and forests. https://janetingley.com - **Jaz Hee-jeong Choi** (1) — Professor and director of the Care-Full Design Lab, RMIT University. Design researcher on care, urban food and more-than-human participation; co-founder of the More-than-Human Dérive and Open Forest projects. - **Jeffrey Bardzell** (1) — Professor of Informatics, Pennsylvania State University. Jeffrey Bardzell is an HCI theorist working on design criticism, aesthetics and feminist and posthumanist perspectives on interaction design. - **Jeffrey J. Tabor** (1) — Professor of Bioengineering and Biosciences, Rice University. Jeffrey Tabor engineers light-controlled genetic circuits in bacteria; his early work turned E. coli lawns into biological film and an edge-detecting computer. - **Jelte van Abbema** (1) — Graphic designer. Jelte van Abbema is a Dutch graphic designer who won the 2009 Dutch Design Award for Young Designer, partly for Symbiose, a poster column overgrown by bacteria. - **Jen Bervin** (1) — Poet and visual artist. American poet and artist whose books and installations work across text and textile, including collaborations with silk-materials scientists. https://jenbervin.com/ - **Jen Liu** (1) — Designer and researcher; PhD, Cornell University. Designer-researcher who made wearable tools for mushroom foraging to study how people and fungi survive together. https://jenliujenliu.com/ - **Jenn Leung** (1) — Designer and researcher, University of the Arts London; Antikythera studio. Designer and researcher who works on computation, simulation and games; co-author of a design-space study of organoid array computing for Antikythera. - **Jennifer Mankoff** (1) — Professor, Paul G. Allen School of Computer Science & Engineering, University of Washington. HCI researcher in accessibility and ubiquitous computing who co-authored an early UIST paper on peripheral displays for a family's dog. - **Jenny E. Sabin** (1) — Architect; Professor of Architecture, Cornell University; principal of Jenny Sabin Studio. Jenny Sabin is an architect who works across architecture, cell biology and materials science, building adaptive structures from insights into how cells behave. https://www.jennysabin.com/ - **Jesse Adler** (1) — Designer; Central Saint Martins. Jesse Adler is a designer from Central Saint Martins whose project Alchemical Mycology was selected by the Green Product / Green Concept Award. - **Jessica Frawley** (1) — Researcher, University of Technology Sydney; now The University of Sydney. HCI researcher who adapted personas to represent farm animals in the design of sustainable food systems. - **Jiahe Li** (1) — Researcher, Xi'an Jiaotong-Liverpool University. Design researcher working on virtual reality and nonhuman embodiment. - **Jian Yu** (1) — Researcher, Simon Fraser University. Design researcher working on weaving, craft and posthumanist design practice. - **Jihan Sherman** (1) — Designer and researcher; Digital Media, Georgia Institute of Technology. Digital media researcher who led Telling the Bees, an immersive piece based on the custom of telling bees household news. - **Jiho Kim** (1) — Design researcher, Delft University of Technology. Biodesign researcher studying how designers can develop sensibilities for working with microbes. - **Jingwen Zhu** (1) — PhD researcher, Hybrid Body Lab, Cornell University. Designs textiles and wearables that include living plants and care-based interactions. - **Jiwon Woo** (1) — Artist. Korean artist working with microbes, fungi and fermentation to explore identity and inheritance. - **Jixiang Jiang** (1) — Design researcher, Politecnico di Milano. Researches pluriversal and more-than-human design; led the Hokkhi project on Daoist practice and oyster reef restoration in Quanzhou with Shu Zhang and Yizao Wu. - **Joan Sol Roo** (1) — HCI researcher (PhD, Inria Bordeaux, Potioc team). Researcher on spatial augmented reality and mindfulness. - **Joana Moll** (1) — Artist and researcher. Joana Moll is an artist whose work examines the material and ecological costs of digital technologies. https://www.janavirgin.com/ - **Joana Pestana** (1) — Designer and researcher, University of Porto / ITI-LARSyS. Designs participatory assemblies that include nonhuman voices. - **Joanna Cheng** (1) — Designer; University of the Arts London. Joanna Cheng is a designer from University of the Arts London whose project AstroFeast was selected by the Green Product / Green Concept Award. - **Joaquín Fargas** (1) — Artist and engineer; director of Proyecto Biosfera. Argentine artist working across art, science and technology on climate and life, including sealed biospheres and Antarctic robots. https://www.joaquinfargas.com - **Jodi Forlizzi** (1) — Professor, Human-Computer Interaction Institute, Carnegie Mellon University. Jodi Forlizzi is an interaction design researcher known for work on product experience, robots and service design. - **Johanna Just** (1) — Researcher, Institute of Landscape and Urban Studies, ETH Zurich. Landscape architecture researcher drawing on multispecies studies to rethink landscape practice. - **Johanna Rotko** (1) — Visual artist working with living yeasts; Bio Art Lab (hiivagrammi.fi). Finnish artist who has made yeastograms, images grown from living yeast cells exposed through photographs, since a 2013 Bioart Society workshop. http://www.hiivagrammi.fi/portfolio2019/ - **Johanna Seelemann** (1) — Designer; founder of Studio Johanna Seelemann. German designer working between product design, material research and speculative projects on consumption and ecology. https://johannaseelemann.com/ - **John A. Rogers** (1) — Professor of Materials Science and Biomedical Engineering, Northwestern University. Materials scientist known for bio-integrated and 3D-assembled electronics, including pop-up frameworks that wrap around neural spheroids. https://rogersgroup.northwestern.edu - **John Fass** (1) — Designer and researcher, Royal College of Art. Information designer who ran an open-ended design project on how urban pigeons sense the city. - **John LaRocco** (1) — Research scientist, College of Medicine, The Ohio State University. Engineer who grows shiitake mycelium into memristors and other electronic components. - **Johnny DiBlasi** (1) — Artist; Assistant Professor, Department of Art, University at Buffalo; co-founder of Phylum. Johnny DiBlasi makes computational and bio-digital artworks, including Beauty, in which an AI agent tends cultures of social bacteria. - **Jon McCormack** (1) — Professor and director of SensiLab, Monash University. Artist and researcher in generative art and artificial life. https://jonmccormack.info/ - **Jonah Goodman** (1) — Designer; Parsons School of Design. Jonah Goodman is a designer whose kombucha-cellulose wound dressing ECO-SKIN won Outstanding Science at the 2025 Biodesign Challenge. - **Jonas Fritsch** (1) — Associate Professor, IT University of Copenhagen. Interaction design researcher working on affect, atmosphere and bodily experience in design. - **Jonathan Dessi-Olive** (1) — Architect; Assistant Professor of Architecture, University of North Carolina at Charlotte. Jonathan Dessi-Olive designs and grows large structures from mycelium composites, from the vaulted Monolito Micelio pavilion (2018) to the suspended acoustic sculpture Phoenix (2023). - **Jonathan Ho** (1) — Artist. Artist whose installations mix mythology, biology and gender, working with snail biologist Joris Koene on hermaphroditism. - **Jonne Verheij & Lidewei Reitsma** (1) — Designer; Studio Jonne Verheij. Jonne Verheij & Lidewei Reitsma is a designer from Studio Jonne Verheij whose project Interwoven was selected by the Green Product / Green Concept Award. - **Jordan Miller** (1) — Associate Professor of Bioengineering, Rice University. Jordan Miller works on stereolithographic printing of hydrogels with open-source hardware and software, including multivascular networks that mimic breathing lung tissue. https://millerlab.rice.edu/ - **Jorge Luis Siesquén Deza** (1) — Designer and researcher, University College London. Design researcher who extends inclusive design to nonhuman stakeholders. - **Joris Laarman** (1) — Designer; founder of Joris Laarman Lab and co-founder of MX3D. Dutch designer known for furniture generated by algorithms and robotic 3D metal printing, who has also experimented with biological materials. https://www.jorislaarman.com/ - **Joseph Samuel Johnson** (1) — Researcher, Information Technology University. Researcher who co-designs digital systems for human-wildlife cohabitation. - **Joycelyn Longdon** (1) — PhD researcher, University of Cambridge; environmental justice technologist. Works on ecoacoustics, AI and justice-led conservation with forest communities. - **Judith Antonia Zbanek** (1) — Designer; HTW Dresden. Judith Antonia Zbanek is a designer from HTW Dresden whose project Mycelium & Fiber was selected by the Green Product / Green Concept Award. - **Judith Doyle** (1) — Artist, filmmaker and professor at OCAD University. Media artist working with video, installation and interactive media. - **Jules Litman-Cleper** (1) — Artist; creator of Earth-Centered Communication Technology (Earth Tech Net). Artist who makes experimental works and frameworks that place computational media within ecological evolution. - **Julian Abraham 'Togar'** (1) — Artist, musician and self-described pseudo-scientist. Born in Medan in 1987, Julian Abraham 'Togar' makes installations and workshops that connect sound, open-source electronics, fermentation and ecology; he was shortlisted for the Future Generation Art Prize 2024. - **Julian Schwarze** (1) — Designer; HfG Offenbach. Julian Schwarze is a German designer whose mobile bee-colony system Bee2Bee was an International Top 20 project in the 2016 James Dyson Award. - **Julian Yasin Buchgraber** (1) — Designer; FH Joanneum. Julian Yasin Buchgraber is a designer from FH Joanneum whose project Algae Harvester was selected by the Green Product / Green Concept Award. - **Julie Elie** (1) — Researcher, University of California, Berkeley (Theunissen Lab). Julie Elie studies the vocal repertoire and meaning of calls in zebra finches, in the lab and in the wild. - **Julie Freeman** (1) — Artist and computer scientist; director of the data-art studio Translating Nature. Julie Freeman makes artworks from data produced by living systems, from fish movements to microbial electricity. - **Jun Yao** (1) — Associate Professor of Electrical and Computer Engineering, University of Massachusetts Amherst. Jun Yao develops bio-derived electronics, including protein-nanowire and biofilm devices that generate electricity from humidity and evaporation. - **Juniper (Jennifer T.) Harrower** (1) — Artist and ecologist; co-founder of the Algae Society BioArt Design Lab. Artist-ecologist who works across bioart and plant–microbe ecology. - **Justine Emard** (1) — Visual artist working with neuroscience, robotics and machine learning. French artist who combines photography, video, robotics and AI; her works draw on data from bees, brains and androids. https://justineemard.com - **K. Cassie Kresnye** (1) — Researcher; PhD, Indiana University Bloomington. HCI researcher who designed a smart habitat for rehabilitating orphaned opossums and studied volunteer work at wildlife centres. - **KBCols Sciences** (1) — Company. KBCols Sciences, founded by Vaishali Kulkarni, produces natural textile colourants from bacteria isolated from India's biodiversity. https://www.kbcolssciences.com/ - **Karen Alim** (1) — Professor of Theory of Biological Networks, Technical University of Munich. Physicist who studies how flow networks in slime moulds and other organisms store information and make decisions. - **Karen Barad** (1) — Distinguished Professor of Feminist Studies, Philosophy, and History of Consciousness, UC Santa Cruz. Karen Barad is a theoretical physicist and feminist theorist who developed agential realism. - **Karin Strauss** (1) — Senior Principal Research Manager, Microsoft Research; affiliate professor, University of Washington. Computer architect who leads Microsoft's DNA data storage research. - **Karola V. Kreitmair** (1) — Assistant Professor of Medical History and Bioethics, University of Wisconsin–Madison. Bioethicist who writes on neurotechnology and on how uncertainty about consciousness should shape brain organoid research. - **Karolina Sulich** (1) — Designer; NYU Integrated Design & Media. Karolina Sulich is a designer whose community LAMP biosensor for heavy metals in the Gowanus Canal was a top-8 finalist at the 2025 Biodesign Challenge. - **Kars Alfrink** (1) — Designer; founder of the studio Hubbub; researcher at TU Delft. Game designer who co-created Pig Chase and works on contestable AI and urban play. - **Katherine W. Song** (1) — Assistant Professor, Knowledge and Intelligence Design, Delft University of Technology. Katherine W. Song builds sustainable and biodegradable interactive devices and electronics, with a background in electrical engineering and HCI. - **Kathy High** (1) — Professor of Video and New Media, Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute. American artist and educator who works with living systems, animal sentience and biotech ethics; she coordinates the NATURE Lab at the Sanctuary for Independent Media. https://www.kathyhigh.com - **Kavita Gonsalves** (1) — Artist and researcher, Queensland University of Technology. Artist-researcher working with multispecies storytelling, locative media and decolonial perspectives. - **Kazuhito Takadoi** (1) — Artist. Kazuhito Takadoi is a Japanese artist in the UK who grows the grasses, reeds and branches he weaves into sculptures; he won the 2019 LOEWE Foundation Craft Prize. https://www.kazuhitotakadoi.com - **Keel Labs (formerly AlgiKnit)** (1) — Materials company making kelp-based yarn. Founded in 2017 as AlgiKnit by Tessa Callaghan and Aleksandra Gosiewski, Keel Labs makes Kelsun yarn from alginate extracted from kelp. https://www.keellabs.com/ - **Keer Hu** (1) — Designer; Tongji University College of Design and Innovation. Keer Hu is a Shanghai designer who, with Shuo Yuan, created Power Mutualism, a cyanobacteria wearable that won Outstanding Science at the 2022 Biodesign Challenge and the 2021 James Dyson Award in mainland China. - **Keili Koppel** (1) — PhD researcher, University of Edinburgh. Studies design methods that help people notice and relate to plants. - **Keio University Graduate School of Media Design Biodesign Challenge team** (1) — Student team, Keio University Graduate School of Media Design; Biodesign Challenge 2022–2025. Students at Keio University Graduate School of Media Design who took part in the Biodesign Challenge, the international competition that pairs art and design students with biologists. https://www.biodesignchallenge.org/ - **Kelpi** (1) — Materials company. Kelpi is a Bristol start-up developing seaweed-derived barrier coatings for paper and card packaging. https://www.kelpi.net - **Keltex** (1) — Company. Keltex is a Tanzanian venture that combines AI-optimised seaweed farming with biopolymer extraction to make leather alternatives. https://keltexleather.com - **Ken Goldberg** (1) — Roboticist and artist; professor, UC Berkeley. Robotics researcher and artist who pioneered internet-controlled robots in the mid-1990s, including The Telegarden with Joseph Santarromana. https://goldberg.berkeley.edu/ - **Kenichi Okada** (1) — Designer; Royal College of Art Design Interactions graduate. Kenichi Okada is a Japanese interaction designer who co-created Animal Superpowers with Chris Woebken at the Royal College of Art. - **Kenjiro Fukuda** (1) — Senior Research Scientist, Thin-Film Device Laboratory, RIKEN. Engineer developing ultrathin organic solar cells and electronics that can be worn by skin, plants and insects. - **Kenneth S. Kosik** (1) — Professor of Neuroscience, University of California, Santa Barbara. Neuroscientist whose lab recorded human brain organoids on high-density CMOS microelectrode arrays to map their circuits and oscillations. - **Kent State University Biodesign Challenge team** (1) — Student team, Kent State University; Biodesign Challenge 2020. Students at Kent State University who took part in the Biodesign Challenge, the international competition that pairs art and design students with biologists. https://www.biodesignchallenge.org/ - **Keri Facer** (1) — Professor of Educational and Social Futures, University of Bristol; formerly Research Director at Futurelab. Education researcher who led early mobile learning experiments at Futurelab. - **Kevin Blackistone** (1) — Artist and researcher, University of Arts and Design Linz (Kunstuniversität Linz). Kevin Blackistone builds installations that combine living microbial cultures with robotics and automated imaging. - **Kevin Coffey** (1) — Neuroscientist, Department of Psychiatry and Behavioral Sciences, University of Washington. Researcher who co-created DeepSqueak, deep-learning software that detects and classifies rodent ultrasonic calls. - **Kevin Warwick** (1) — Emeritus Professor of Engineering, Coventry University; formerly University of Reading. Cybernetics researcher known for implant experiments on himself; his Reading team built Gordon, a wheeled robot driven by cultured rat neurons. - **Kitti Butter** (1) — Designer, Moholy-Nagy University of Art and Design (MOME). Designer working on urban habitats for wild pollinators. - **Koby Barhard** (1) — Designer; Design Interactions graduate, Royal College of Art. Koby Barhard is an Israeli-born designer whose speculative projects use commercially available biotech services to test ideas about identity and heredity. - **Koniku** (1) — Wetware startup building smell sensors from living neurons. Founded in 2015 by Oshiorenoya Agabi, Koniku builds devices that combine engineered neurons carrying olfactory receptors with silicon, aimed at detecting explosives and disease. https://koniku.com - **Korey Wetherell** (1) — Researcher, LUT University (Lappeenranta-Lahti University of Technology). Design researcher working on regenerative ecological design and plural ways of knowing. - **Kristel Peters** (1) — Shoe designer; Studio COJAK. Belgian footwear designer who grew shoe prototypes from fungal mycelium for Officina Corpuscoli's Fungal Futures exhibition. https://www.cojak.be/ - **Kristine Samson** (1) — Associate Professor, Roskilde University. Researcher in urban design and performative urbanism, studying urban nature and planetary thinking in design. - **Kuang-Yi Ku** (1) — Bio artist, trained dentist. Taiwanese bio artist and researcher who uses biotechnology and speculative anatomy to explore queer sexuality and the body. - **Kunal Masania** (1) — Associate Professor of Aerospace Structures and Materials, TU Delft; Shaping Matter Lab. Kunal Masania designs printable material systems that grow, including hydrogel structures seeded with cyanobacteria that mineralise carbon while they photosynthesise. https://www.shapingmatterlab.org/ - **Kyeongho Park** (1) — Designer; Hanyang University ERICA. Kyeongho Park is a Korean designer who with Yejin Heo created Zero Bag, a dissolving alginate package that won the 2023 Lexus Design Award. - **Kyran Knauf** (1) — Designer; Design Academy Eindhoven. Kyran Knauf is a designer whose home cricket farm Crikorama won the 2024 James Dyson Award in the Netherlands. http://kyranknauf.com - **Laela Sayigh** (1) — Research specialist, Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution; Sarasota Dolphin Research Program. Laela Sayigh has studied the signature whistles of the Sarasota Bay bottlenose dolphin community for over 35 years. https://www.whoi.edu - **LanzaTech** (1) — Company. LanzaTech, led by Jennifer Holmgren, uses gas-fermenting bacteria to turn industrial off-gases into ethanol and chemicals. https://lanzatech.com/ - **Laura Cinti** (1) — Artist and researcher; co-founder of C-LAB. Artist working at the edge of art, biology and technology with living plants and conservation science. - **Laura Grebenstein** (1) — Researcher, Friedrich-Alexander-Universität Erlangen-Nürnberg (molecular communication). Laura Grebenstein builds microscale molecular-communication testbeds that use engineered bacteria to convert light into chemical signals. - **Lawrence Bonassar** (1) — Professor of Biomedical Engineering and Mechanical Engineering, Cornell University. Lawrence Bonassar's lab prints cartilage from 3D scans, including patient-specific ears grown from collagen hydrogel injected into printed moulds. https://bonassar.research.engineering.cornell.edu/ - **Le Qara** (1) — Company. Le Qara is a Peruvian biomaterials company, founded by Isemar and Jacqueline Cruz Loayza, that grows leather-like material with microorganisms. - **Lely** (1) — Dutch agricultural machinery and robotics manufacturer. Company that introduced the Astronaut milking robot in 1992, in which cows choose when to be milked. - **Leo Roth** (1) — Student designer, Rye Country Day School. Leo Roth is a high-school designer whose PolyNation artificial flowers for pollinators was a top-8 finalist at the 2024 Biodesign Challenge. - **Leonard Adleman** (1) — Professor of Computer Science, University of Southern California. Computer scientist, co-inventor of RSA encryption and founder of DNA computing. - **Leonardo Angelini** (1) — Professor, HES-SO University of Applied Sciences of Western Switzerland, Fribourg. Leonardo Angelini designs tangible and embodied interfaces for older adults and everyday objects. - **Leonardo Hummel** (1) — Designer and researcher, University of Washington. Leonardo Hummel developed SeaWeaver, a method for building artificial reefs from hand-woven metal forms. - **Lianne Toussaint** (1) — Researcher and lecturer, ArtEZ University of the Arts. Fashion and design researcher writing on biodesign, wearables and ecocentric approaches to clothing. - **Lieske Schreuder** (1) — Designer. Lieske Schreuder is a Dutch designer who fed garden snails coloured paper to make a linoleum-like material from their droppings. - **Light Bio** (1) — Synthetic biology company selling bioluminescent plants, founded 2019. Light Bio developed the Firefly Petunia, a petunia carrying a fungal bioluminescence pathway that glows continuously, and sold it to US households from 2024. https://light.bio/ - **Liliana E. Caughman** (1) — Researcher, Arizona State University. Researcher working on water governance, sustainability and civic chatbots. - **Linas Kristupas Gabrielaitis** (1) — Researcher, Tampere University. Game and design researcher who studies play with living, unpredictable partners such as fungi. - **Lisa L. Townsend** (1) — HCI researcher, LMU Munich (with Sven Mayer). Researcher on virtual reality and nature connectedness. - **Liv Bargman** (1) — Designer; Central Saint Martins MA Material Futures alumna. Liv Bargman is a London designer who works with biology and speculative material futures; with Nina Cutler she won the 2017 Biodesign Challenge with Quantworm Mine. - **Livin Studio** (1) — Design studio of Katharina Unger and Julia Kaisinger. Livin Studio, founded by Katharina Unger and Julia Kaisinger, designs food systems such as insect farms and fungal incubators. https://katharinaunger.com/ - **Living Colour** (1) — Research project of designers Laura Luchtman (Kukka) and Ilfa Siebenhaar. Living Colour, started in 2016 with Hogeschool Rotterdam, grows pigment-producing bacteria directly on fabric. https://livingcolour.eu/ - **Living Ink Technologies** (1) — Algae-based pigment company founded by Scott Fulbright and Steve Albers, 2013. Living Ink began with a kit for drawing with living algae and now makes Algae Ink, a black pigment from algae biomass that replaces petroleum carbon black in printing. https://www.livingink.co/ - **Living Tex'Celium team (University of Stuttgart)** (1) — Designer; University of Stuttgart. Living Tex'Celium team (University of Stuttgart) is a designer from University of Stuttgart whose project Living Tex'Celium was selected by the Green Product / Green Concept Award. - **Living Things (Jacob Douenias & Ethan Frier)** (1) — Design partnership of architectural designer Jacob Douenias and industrial designer Ethan Frier. Jacob Douenias and Ethan Frier designed bioreactor furniture for living spirulina cultures, shown at the Mattress Factory in 2015. http://www.ethanfrier.com/living-things - **Logan Shockey** (1) — Design researcher, University of Colorado Boulder. Designs biology-based interactive objects with microorganisms. - **Lotte Wigman** (1) — Designer; Design Academy Eindhoven. Lotte Wigman is a designer from Design Academy Eindhoven whose project Negotiating Boundaries was selected by the Green Product / Green Concept Award. - **Louis Liebenberg** (1) — Founder, CyberTracker Conservation. Tracker and scientist who co-created CyberTracker so that expert trackers who cannot read or write can record animal observations. - **Louis Rice** (1) — Associate Professor of Architecture, University of the West of England. Architect and urbanist who studies participatory design and the role of nonhuman actors in shaping places. - **Luca Alessandrini** (1) — Designer; Royal College of Art. Luca Alessandrini is a designer who made a violin from silkworm and spider silk composites. - **Lucas Ogasawara de Oliveira** (1) — Researcher, Keio University Graduate School of Media Design. Designer-researcher combining media archaeology and more-than-human design, working with the Minamata case in Japan. - **Lucrezia Alessandroni** (1) — Designer; Central Saint Martins. Lucrezia Alessandroni is a designer from Central Saint Martins whose project The Soothing Cup was selected by the Green Product / Green Concept Award. - **Lucy Hughes** (1) — Product designer; founder of MarinaTex. Lucy Hughes developed MarinaTex as her final-year product design project at the University of Sussex and won the 2019 James Dyson Award with it. https://marinatex.co.uk - **Luis Ceze** (1) — Professor of Computer Science and Engineering, University of Washington; co-director of MISL. Computer architect who co-leads research on storing and computing with DNA. - **Lynette Wallworth** (1) — Artist and filmmaker. Australian artist who makes immersive works with communities, including Collisions and Awavena. - **MAEID** (1) — Büro für Architektur und Transmediale Kunst (Daniela Mitterberger, Tiziano Derme). MAEID is an architecture and media art office that builds robotic, soil-based and living environments. - **MBARI** (1) — Monterey Bay Aquarium Research Institute. Ocean research institute behind FathomNet and Ocean Vision AI. - **MIT Design Lab** (1) — Design research lab at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. The MIT Design Lab works with industry partners on design research for future products, including biodesign for sportswear with Puma. https://design.mit.edu/ - **MIT Senseable City Lab** (1) — Research lab at MIT, directed by Carlo Ratti. Lab that studies cities through sensing and data. - **MYCL (Mycotech Lab)** (1) — Company. MYCL, co-founded by Adi Reza Nugroho and Annisa Wibi Ismarlanti, grows the mycelium leather Mylea on agricultural waste. https://mycl.bio/ - **Macromedia University Biodesign Challenge team** (1) — Student team, Macromedia University; Biodesign Challenge 2025. Students at Macromedia University who took part in the Biodesign Challenge, the international competition that pairs art and design students with biologists. https://www.biodesignchallenge.org/ - **Madalina Nicolae** (1) — HCI researcher (Saarland University, Télécom Paris and Léonard de Vinci Pôle Universitaire). Madalina Nicolae works on growable interactive devices, embedding electronics in living biofilms and bacterial cellulose so that the device body is grown rather than moulded. - **Mae-ling Lokko** (1) — Architectural scientist, designer and artist; Assistant Professor, Yale School of Architecture; founder of Willow Technologies. Ghanaian-Filipino architectural scientist who upcycles agricultural waste, fungi and plant fibres into building materials, linking material research to generative justice. https://www.maelokko.com/ - **Magnus Larsson** (1) — Architect. Magnus Larsson is a Swedish architect known for his proposal to solidify desert sand with bacteria. - **Maija Järviniemi & Outi Mustonen** (1) — Designers; Aalto University. Maija Järviniemi and Outi Mustonen made edible tableware from bacterial cellulose and pine-bark flour at Aalto University. - **Malai** (1) — Biomaterials studio founded by Zuzana Gombošová and CS Susmith. Malai grows bacterial cellulose on waste coconut water collected from coconut processors in Kerala and turns it into a flexible, leather-like material for bags and accessories. https://www.malai.eco - **Maliheh Ghajargar** (1) — Researcher, Internet of Things and People Research Center, Malmö University. Interaction design researcher working on tangible interaction, AI and multispecies storytelling. - **Manuel Simões** (1) — Design researcher, University of Lisbon. Design researcher working with bio-pigments and local materials of the Tagus estuary. - **Manuhuia Barcham** (1) — Design researcher and practitioner. Māori design researcher who writes on decolonial and pluriversal design, drawing on river restoration work in Aotearoa New Zealand. - **Marco Barotti** (1) — Media artist. Marco Barotti is an Italian media artist whose sound sculptures respond to environmental data and ecosystems. https://www.marcobarotti.com - **Margaret Rynning** (1) — Design researcher, Kristiania University College. Works on discursive design and design activism around biodiversity. - **Margarita Grinko** (1) — Researcher, University of Siegen. Works on socio-informatics and participatory technology projects in the Global South. - **Margent Farm** (1) — Company. Margent Farm grows hemp and makes bio-composite building products from it on the same farm. https://www.margentfarm.com/ - **Marina Otero Verzier** (1) — Architect, researcher and curator. Marina Otero Verzier is a Spanish architect whose research addresses data infrastructure, extraction and care. - **Markos Georgiou** (1) — Designer; Royal College of Art. Markos Georgiou is a designer whose bacterial-cellulose bioreactor Hydra was UK runner-up in the 2025 James Dyson Award. https://markosdesigns.com - **Markéta Dolejšová** (1) — Design researcher, Aalto University; co-founder of Open Forest. Works on speculative food futures, fermentation and more-than-human forest data through participatory events. - **Marley E. Townsend** (1) — Artist; CalArts alumna. Marley E. Townsend is an artist whose data and genetic portrait The Other Townsend won Outstanding Social Critique at the 2019 Biodesign Challenge. - **Marlène Huissoud** (1) — Designer and artist. French designer, raised by a beekeeper, who works with insect by-products such as propolis and silkworm cocoons and designs habitats for insects. - **Martin Kaltenbrunner** (1) — Professor, Soft Matter Physics and LIT Soft Materials Lab, Johannes Kepler University Linz. Physicist building soft, stretchable and biodegradable electronics and robots. https://www.jku.at/en/institute-of-experimental-physics/soft-matter-physics/ - **Martin Pumera** (1) — Director, Center for Advanced Functional Nanorobots, University of Chemistry and Technology Prague. Martin Pumera's group builds micro- and nanorobots, including biobots made from magnetotactic bacteria for water cleaning. - **Martin Tomitsch** (1) — Professor of design and interaction; formerly University of Sydney Design Lab, now UTS. Interaction design researcher working on cities, urban interfaces and planet-centred design. - **Martin Wikelski** (1) — Director, Max Planck Institute of Animal Behavior. Ornithologist who leads ICARUS and Movebank, global systems for tracking small animals from space. - **Masashi Soga** (1) — Associate Professor, Graduate School of Agricultural and Life Sciences, University of Tokyo. Conservation ecologist who studies how and why people's direct contact with nature is declining. - **Mathilde Gouin** (1) — Design researcher, University of Lisbon / ITI-LARSyS. Designs wearables for multisensory encounters with other species. - **Matilde Boelhouwer** (1) — Designer; founder of Atelier Boelhouwer. Dutch designer who creates products for insects, notably artificial flowers for urban pollinators. https://www.matildeboelhouwer.com - **Matthew H. E. M. Browning** (1) — Associate Professor, Department of Parks, Recreation and Tourism Management, Clemson University; director of the Virtual Reality & Nature Lab. Environmental health researcher who tests virtual nature against real nature. - **Matthijs Munnik** (1) — Artist. Dutch artist making audiovisual installations about perception, light and living systems. - **Maurizio Vrenna** (1) — Designer; Politecnico di Torino. Maurizio Vrenna is an Italian designer who designed The Algae Grower, a home spirulina bioreactor. - **Max Rheiner** (1) — Media artist; creator of Birdly; founder of Somniacs. Swiss interaction designer who built the full-body flight simulator Birdly at ZHdK in 2013–14 and later founded the company Somniacs to produce it. - **McGill University Biodesign Challenge team** (1) — Student team, McGill University; Biodesign Challenge 2024–2025. Students at McGill University who took part in the Biodesign Challenge, the international competition that pairs art and design students with biologists. https://www.biodesignchallenge.org/ - **Melanie Ford** (1) — Primate enrichment researcher; MSc, University of Exeter. Researcher who introduced two captive siamangs to tablet computers and recorded their choices on video. - **Melissa Ortiz** (1) — Designer; California College of the Arts. Melissa Ortiz is a designer whose citizen-science water-testing tool Colores del Rio won Outstanding Social Critique at the 2023 Biodesign Challenge. - **Mellissa Monsoon** (1) — Artist, illustrator and sculptor collaborating with microbiologists. British artist (MA Art and Science, Central Saint Martins) who casts her own body in agar and grows its skin bacteria; commissions include the Eden Project and the BBC. https://www.mmonsoon.com - **Mengyao Guo** (1) — Researcher, Future Design School, Harbin Institute of Technology (Shenzhen). Mengyao Guo designs bio-HCI games and visualisations driven by living organisms such as slime moulds. - **Menlin Ng** (1) — Designer; Universiti Sains Malaysia. Menlin Ng is a Malaysian designer who developed Citra, a leather-like material from citrus peel, a 2021 James Dyson Award International Top 20 project. - **Merlin Sheldrake** (1) — Biologist and writer; research associate at SPUN (Society for the Protection of Underground Networks). Merlin Sheldrake is a biologist who studies mycorrhizal fungi and writes about fungal life and its entanglements with plants, animals and people. https://www.merlinsheldrake.com - **Mette Gislev Kjærsgaard** (1) — Design anthropologist, University College South Denmark. Works on design anthropology, participation and futures. - **MiAlgae** (1) — Company. MiAlgae, founded by Douglas Martin, grows omega-3 microalgae on whisky-distillery by-products for fish feed. https://www.mialgae.com/ - **Michael D. Jones** (1) — Professor of Computer Science, Brigham Young University. HCI researcher who studies computing on trails, rivers and mountains. - **Michael Elowitz** (1) — Professor of Biology and Bioengineering, Caltech; HHMI Investigator. Biologist who built the repressilator, one of the first synthetic gene circuits, and studies how cells compute. https://www.elowitz.caltech.edu/ - **Michael Pinsky** (1) — Artist. British artist who makes public installations about air, water and urban space. https://www.michaelpinsky.com/ - **Michaela Honauer** (1) — Design researcher in e-textiles and child–computer interaction. Researches wearable and textile interfaces for play, performance and learning. - **Michela Chiappalone** (1) — Associate Professor of Bioengineering, University of Genoa; formerly Istituto Italiano di Tecnologia. Bioengineer who embodied modular neuronal cultures in closed-loop robot navigation tasks. - **Michelle Chang** (1) — Design researcher, Carnegie Mellon University (at time of publication). Studies how plants can take part in interaction design as living partners. - **Michi Kanda** (1) — Researcher, Keio University Graduate School of Media Design. Michi Kanda designed a plant whose grow light is driven by the owner's eye-blink fatigue data. - **Mickey Pardo** (1) — Behavioural ecologist; postdoctoral researcher at Cornell University and Colorado State University. Mickey Pardo studies elephant vocal communication and led the study showing that African elephants address each other with name-like calls. - **MicroBuild Masonry (Adrian Simone & Rania Al-Sheikhly)** (1) — Student start-up. Adrian Simone and Rania Al-Sheikhly developed Bio-Brick, masonry bound by bacteria, Canadian runner-up in the 2022 James Dyson Award. http://microbuildmasonry.com - **Microbeworks** (1) — Company. Microbeworks is an Indian start-up whose MicroBlue dye is brewed by microbial fermentation for existing dyeing machinery. https://www.microbeworksscientific.com/ - **Mike Thompson** (1) — Designer. Mike Thompson is a designer who makes speculative products about energy and everyday life. - **Milan Stojanovic** (1) — Professor of Medicine and Biomedical Engineering, Columbia University. Chemist who built MAYA, DNA-enzyme automata that play tic-tac-toe against people. - **Miles Richardson** (1) — Professor of Human Factors and Nature Connectedness, University of Derby. Psychologist who runs the Nature Connectedness Research Group and designs simple interventions such as noticing 'three good things in nature'. - **Milo Dool** (1) — Designer. Milo Dool is a Dutch designer whose Pendant Lights use beech wood transformed by white-rot fungi. http://milodool.nl - **Mirjana Erceg** (1) — Researcher, Aalborg University Copenhagen. Researcher who designed a bioacoustic system to warn ships about nearby North Atlantic right whales. - **Modern Meadow** (1) — Biofabrication company making protein-based materials. Modern Meadow, founded by Andras Forgacs, develops leather-like materials from proteins produced by fermentation. https://www.modernmeadow.com/ - **Modern Synthesis** (1) — Biomaterial company founded by Jen Keane and Ben Reeve, 2020. Modern Synthesis grows nanocellulose on textile scaffolds using Komagataeibacter bacteria, producing a leather alternative whose structure is set by the scaffold it is grown on. https://www.modernsynthesis.com/ - **Mogu** (1) — Italian company making mycelium interior products. Mogu, co-founded in 2015 with designer Maurizio Montalti, grows acoustic panels and floor tiles from fungal mycelium and textile or agricultural residues. https://mogu.bio/ - **Moholy-Nagy University of Art and Design Biodesign Challenge team** (1) — Student team, Moholy-Nagy University of Art and Design; Biodesign Challenge 2024–2025. Students at Moholy-Nagy University of Art and Design who took part in the Biodesign Challenge, the international competition that pairs art and design students with biologists. https://www.biodesignchallenge.org/ - **Molecular Information Systems Lab (MISL)** (1) — Joint lab of the University of Washington and Microsoft Research. Lab that builds DNA data storage and molecular computing systems, from random access to fully automated storage. https://misl.cs.washington.edu/ - **Monc** (1) — Company. Monc is a London design brand that packages its products in inserts grown from mushroom mycelium. https://www.monc.co/ - **Monica Gagliano** (1) — Research Associate Professor in evolutionary ecology; director of the Biological Intelligence (BI) Lab, Southern Cross University. Monica Gagliano is an evolutionary ecologist known for experiments on plant learning, memory and bioacoustics. - **Monica Laronda** (1) — Associate Professor of Pediatrics, Northwestern University; Stanley Manne Children's Research Institute. Monica Laronda works on reproductive tissue engineering and printed the gelatin scaffold ovary that restored fertility in sterilised mice. https://www.laronda-lab.org/ - **Monica Louise Hartvigsen** (1) — Designer; Royal Danish Academy. Monica Louise Hartvigsen is a Danish designer who developed bacterial dyeing of textiles with DTU laboratories and Gabriel Textile. - **Monika Brandić Lipińska** (1) — Designer; Hub for Biotechnology in the Built Environment. Monika Brandić Lipińska is a designer from Hub for Biotechnology in the Built Environment whose project Mycolith was selected by the Green Product / Green Concept Award. - **Monika Pocrnjić** (1) — Artist. Slovenian artist working with sound, analog electronics and living systems; co-author of Oscillatorium with Robertina Šebjanič. - **Monika Rosińska** (1) — Researcher and curator, Academy of Fine Arts in Warsaw. Design researcher and curator who co-curated the exhibition Zoepolis: Design for Plants and Animals. - **Moon Ribas** (1) — Cyborg artist and choreographer; co-founder of the Cyborg Foundation. Dancer who felt earthquakes worldwide through online seismic sensors implanted in her body. https://www.moonribas.com/ - **More-Than-Human Life (MOTH) Program, NYU School of Law** (1) — Research program on the rights of nature and nonhuman animals, directed by César Rodríguez-Garavito. MOTH brings together lawyers, scientists, artists and Indigenous knowledge holders to develop legal and ethical frameworks that include more-than-human beings. https://www.law.nyu.edu/ - **Mosquito Alert** (1) — Citizen science project of CEAB-CSIC, CREAF, UPF and ICREA. Spanish project that tracks invasive, disease-carrying mosquitoes with smartphone reports. - **Mu Design** (1) — Product design studio. Luxembourg studio that designed Lua, a planter with a face. - **Mycomerge team (Mai Thi Nguyen & Daniela Solueva)** (1) — Designer; University of Stuttgart. Mycomerge team (Mai Thi Nguyen & Daniela Solueva) is a designer from University of Stuttgart whose project Mycomerge was selected by the Green Product / Green Concept Award. - **Mélissa Berthet** (1) — Researcher, University of Zurich (Department of Comparative Language Science). Mélissa Berthet studies meaning and syntax in primate calls, using methods from formal semantics. - **NSF NOIRLab (Globe at Night)** (1) — US national optical-infrared astronomy centre. Astronomy centre that runs the Globe at Night light-pollution campaign. - **NYU ITP Biodesign Challenge team** (1) — Student team, NYU ITP; Biodesign Challenge 2017–2024. Students at NYU ITP who took part in the Biodesign Challenge, the international competition that pairs art and design students with biologists. Instructors include Stefani Bardin. https://www.biodesignchallenge.org/ - **Naleefa Nazurdeen** (1) — Design researcher, University of Moratuwa. Studies participatory design for human-elephant coexistence in rural Sri Lanka. - **Nanyang Technological University Biodesign Challenge team** (1) — Student team, Nanyang Technological University; Biodesign Challenge 2024. Students at Nanyang Technological University who took part in the Biodesign Challenge, the international competition that pairs art and design students with biologists. https://www.biodesignchallenge.org/ - **Nanyi Jiang** (1) — Researcher, Cornell University. HCI researcher who co-designs wearables with her companion parrot. - **Natalia Piórecka** (1) — Designer; Newcastle University / UCL. Natalia Piórecka is a designer from Newcastle University / UCL whose project MYCOsella was selected by the Green Product / Green Concept Award. - **Natalie Alima** (1) — Architect and researcher at the School of Architecture and Urban Design, RMIT University. Natalie Alima develops 'interspecies forms' in which robotically 3D-printed scaffolds are colonised by mycelium, using agent-based algorithms to shape the printed skins. - **Nathalie Miebach** (1) — Artist. Artist who weaves weather and ocean data into sculptures and musical scores. - **National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine** (1) — US non-profit institution that advises on science policy. Independent US institution that produces consensus reports; in 2021 it reviewed the science and ethics of human neural organoids, transplants and chimeras. https://www.nationalacademies.org - **Natural Fiber Welding** (1) — Company. Natural Fiber Welding, founded by Luke Haverhals, makes plastic-free materials such as the leather alternative MIRUM. https://www.nfw.earth/ - **NatureMetrics** (1) — Company. NatureMetrics, founded by Kat Bruce, measures biodiversity from environmental DNA in water and soil samples. https://www.naturemetrics.com/ - **Ned Cooper** (1) — Researcher, School of Cybernetics, Australian National University. Researcher who applies philosophy of mind to participatory design with trees and other nonhumans. - **Nefeli Manoudaki** (1) — Media artist and researcher, Media Arts and Technology, UC Santa Barbara. Architect and media artist who co-created Simulacra Naturae, an installation driven by recorded brain organoid activity. - **Neil Harbisson** (1) — Cyborg artist; co-founder of the Cyborg Foundation and Cyborg Arts. Artist born with achromatopsia who hears colour through an antenna implanted in his skull. https://www.cyborgarts.com/ - **Nelo Akamatsu** (1) — Artist. Japanese artist known for sound installations such as Chijikinkutsu, in which magnetised needles in water glasses sound through Earth's magnetism. http://www.neloakamatsu.jp - **Nervous System** (1) — Generative design studio of Jessica Rosenkrantz and Jesse Louis-Rosenberg. Studio that writes simulations of natural growth processes to generate jewellery, textiles and objects, and collaborates with scientists on biofabrication. https://n-e-r-v-o-u-s.com/ - **Nest Makerspace Biodesign Challenge team** (1) — Student team, Nest Makerspace; Biodesign Challenge 2019–2021. Students at Nest Makerspace who took part in the Biodesign Challenge, the international competition that pairs art and design students with biologists. Instructors include Corinne Okada Takara. https://www.biodesignchallenge.org/ - **Nestlé Purina PetCare** (1) — Pet food company; maker of the Friskies brand. Pet food company whose Friskies brand released tablet games designed for cats to play. - **New Reality Company** (1) — VR studio of Milica Zec and Winslow Porter. Studio founded by director Milica Zec and producer Winslow Porter, known for the VR works Giant (2016) and Tree (2017). https://www.treeofficial.com/ - **Niamh Damery** (1) — Designer; University of Limerick. Niamh Damery is an Irish designer whose mycelium beehive Econooc for native black bees was a 2020 James Dyson Award International Top 20 project. - **Niantic** (1) — Augmented reality game company. Maker of location-based AR games including Ingress and Pokémon Go. - **Nick Goldman** (1) — Group Leader, EMBL's European Bioinformatics Institute (EMBL-EBI). Bioinformatician who, with Ewan Birney, designed an error-tolerant scheme for storing files in synthetic DNA. - **Nicolas Mathevon** (1) — Professor, University of Saint-Étienne (ENES Bioacoustics Research Lab). Nicolas Mathevon is a bioacoustician who studies how animals, from crocodiles to mice, encode information in sound. - **Nicole Xu** (1) — Assistant Professor of Mechanical Engineering, University of Colorado Boulder. Bioengineer who embeds microelectronics in live jellyfish to control and speed up their swimming. - **Nigel Helyer** (1) — Sculptor and sound artist (a.k.a. Dr Sonique). Nigel Helyer makes large sonic installations and bio-acoustic works, and was an early artist in residence at SymbioticA (2002–03). https://www.sonicobjects.com - **Nikoletta Karastathi** (1) — Textile designer and researcher in biodesign, University College London. Nikoletta Karastathi develops knitted bio-textiles and responsive yarns, including algae-infused wearables and pH-responsive hydrogel yarns. - **Nina Cutler** (1) — Designer; Central Saint Martins MA Material Futures alumna. Nina Cutler is a designer who co-created Quantworm Mine, the 2017 Biodesign Challenge overall winner, at Central Saint Martins. - **Nina Rajcic** (1) — Researcher, SensiLab, Monash University. Artist and researcher who builds domestic AI objects and studies living with them through a posthumanist lens. - **Nina Williams** (1) — Researcher, University of Canberra. Cultural geographer and design researcher working with fungi and multispecies time. - **Nina van den Broek** (1) — Designer. Nina van den Broek is a Dutch designer who made Ivorish, an ivory substitute from human milk teeth, at Waag's Open Wetlab. - **Ninela Ivanova** (1) — Design researcher and strategist. Ninela Ivanova is a design researcher who studies biofabrication and the future of materials. https://www.ninelaivanova.co.uk/ - **Ning Gao** (1) — Researcher, Jiangnan University. Design researcher who reads Chinese architectural heritage through more-than-human design theory. - **Nirit Binyamini Ben-Meir** (1) — PhD researcher, Queen Mary University of London. HCI researcher studying how households care for houseplants and what that means for designing with living things. - **Nita A. Farahany** (1) — Professor of Law and Philosophy, Duke University. Legal scholar and ethicist of neurotechnology who led a 2018 call in Nature for ethical rules on experiments with human brain tissue, organoids and chimeras. https://law.duke.edu/fac/farahany - **Nomeda & Gediminas Urbonas** (1) — Artist duo; Gediminas Urbonas is Professor at MIT. Nomeda and Gediminas Urbonas run long-term projects on swamps, rivers and commons, including the Swamp School at the Venice Biennale 2018. - **Nordic Society for Invention and Discovery** (1) — Swedish design and invention studio. Studio that crowdfunded No More Woof, a speculative EEG headset claimed to translate dog thoughts into speech. - **Northeastern University Biodesign Challenge team** (1) — Student team, Northeastern University; Biodesign Challenge 2025. Students at Northeastern University who took part in the Biodesign Challenge, the international competition that pairs art and design students with biologists. https://www.biodesignchallenge.org/ - **Novameat** (1) — Food technology company founded by Giuseppe Scionti, 2018. Novameat extrudes plant proteins into micro-fibre bundles that imitate the anisotropic texture of muscle, using a printer adapted from tissue engineering. https://novameat.com/ - **O-GA team (Silpakorn University)** (1) — Student design team. Sorrawitch Upcha and team designed O-GA, algae cultivation units for a renewable-energy countryside, Thai national winner of the 2023 James Dyson Award. - **OFlow team (Shawn Navarednam, Kai Jie Chow, Frederick Wong)** (1) — Student engineering team. Shawn Navarednam, Kai Jie Chow and Frederick Wong designed OFlow, a bacterial biofilm filter for microplastics, UK runner-up in the 2020 James Dyson Award. - **ORLAN** (1) — Artist working with performance, surgery and biotechnology. ORLAN is a French artist known for her surgery-performances of the 1990s and for later work with cell culture and biotechnology. https://www.orlan.eu - **Ocean Alliance** (1) — Whale research and conservation nonprofit founded by Roger Payne in 1971; led by Iain Kerr. Ocean Alliance studies whales with non-invasive tools, from its long-running voyages to drones that collect whale breath. https://whale.org - **Olga Kisseleva** (1) — Artist; professor at Sorbonne University (Paris 1). Olga Kisseleva is a Russian-born French artist who works with scientists on trees, plants and ecological data, including the long-running EDEN project. https://www.kisseleva.org/ - **Oliver Bendel** (1) — Professor of Information Ethics and Machine Ethics, FHNW School of Business. Philosopher and information scientist who designs animal-friendly machines and AI apps that read animal body language. - **Olivia Seow** (1) — Designer and researcher, MIT Media Lab (at the time of Pudica). Olivia Seow proposed Pudica, a framework for plant-based interfaces built around the touch-sensitive Mimosa pudica. - **Omlab** (1) — Design studio. Omlab is a Dutch studio designing nature-inclusive building products, such as 3D-printed starter homes for swallows. https://omlab.nl - **Open Acoustic Devices** (1) — Open-hardware project making low-cost acoustic loggers, founded by researchers at the University of Southampton and University of Oxford. Team behind AudioMoth, an open-source, low-cost recorder used worldwide to listen to bats, birds, insects and forests. https://www.openacousticdevices.info - **Orange Fiber** (1) — Company. Orange Fiber, founded by Adriana Santanocito and Enrica Arena, makes a silk-like textile from Sicilian citrus-juice by-products. https://orangefiber.it/ - **Orangutan Outreach** (1) — Nonprofit organisation for orangutan conservation. Nonprofit that runs Apps for Apes, which donates iPads to zoos for orangutan enrichment. - **Organovo** (1) — Bioprinting company, founded 2007 on Gabor Forgacs's tissue self-assembly research. Organovo was the first publicly listed bioprinting company; it sold the NovoGen printer and printed human liver and kidney tissue for drug testing. https://organovo.com/ - **Ori Elisar** (1) — Designer, Bezalel Academy of Arts and Design graduate. Visual communication designer who trained in microbiology in Eshel Ben-Jacob's lab at Tel Aviv University and studied Hebrew linguistics. https://orielisar.com - **PLSTC** (1) — Company. PLSTC (Fashion to Food) is an Australian team that bio-engineers bacteria to digest polyester textile waste into edible biomass. https://fashiontofood.com/ - **Paola Torres Núñez del Prado** (1) — Artist. Paola Torres Núñez del Prado is a Peruvian artist who combines textiles, sound and technology, drawing on Andean knowledge systems. https://www.singingtextiles.com - **Paolina Kühr** (1) — Designer; Elisava. Paolina Kühr is a designer from Elisava whose project Sea Glass was selected by the Green Product / Green Concept Award. - **Parrot** (1) — Consumer electronics and drone company. French company known for drones and connected devices. - **Parsons & Charlesworth** (1) — Speculative design studio of Tim Parsons and Jessica Charlesworth. Chicago studio making speculative objects, drawings and fictional organisations about climate futures; both teach at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. https://parsonscharlesworth.com/ - **Parsons School of Design Biodesign Challenge team** (1) — Student team, Parsons School of Design; Biodesign Challenge 2019–2025. Students at Parsons School of Design who took part in the Biodesign Challenge, the international competition that pairs art and design students with biologists. https://www.biodesignchallenge.org/ - **Partizan Publik** (1) — Amsterdam think-and-do tank for social and ecological change; initiator of The Parliament of Things. Partizan Publik develops public programmes and speculative institutions, including The Parliament of Things, which led to the Embassy of the North Sea. https://theparliamentofthings.org - **Patricia (Tricia) Flanagan** (1) — Artist, designer and researcher in wearable art; founder of the Wearables Lab. Makes 'cyborganic' wearables that blend bamboo, natural fibres and electronics into prosthetic senses. https://triciaflanagan.com - **Patricia Ciobanu** (1) — Researcher in interaction design, Department of Computer and Systems Sciences, Stockholm University. Studies time and nature in posthuman interaction through research-through-design and autobiographical design. - **Patricia Domínguez** (1) — Artist. Chilean artist whose installations combine ethnobotany, healing practices and digital media to question colonial relationships with plants. - **Paul & Garrett Sutherlin Santo** (1) — Design studio. Paul and Garrett Sutherlin Santo are designers who combine natural biopolymers with digital fabrication; their Biocraft was a 2020 Lexus Design Award finalist. https://sutherlinsanto.com/ - **Paul Rothemund** (1) — Research Professor of Bioengineering, Computing and Mathematical Sciences, and Computation and Neural Systems, Caltech. Computer scientist who invented DNA origami: folding a long DNA strand into any 2D shape with short staple strands. - **Paula Andrea Molina** (1) — Designer; Central Saint Martins. Paula Andrea Molina is a designer from Central Saint Martins whose project Printing Herbarium was selected by the Green Product / Green Concept Award. - **Paulina Yurman** (1) — Designer and researcher, University of the Arts London. Uses drawing and material experiments to explore bodies, fluids and care. - **PeakFinder** (1) — App developer (Fabio Soldati). Swiss developer of a mountain-identification app with an offline database of peaks. - **Pedro Galvão-Ferreira** (1) — Researcher, Instituto Superior Técnico and ITI/LARSyS, Lisbon. Designs locative games and experiences about natural and cultural heritage. - **Peerasin Punxh Hutaphaet** (1) — Designer; Central Saint Martins. Peerasin Punxh Hutaphaet is a designer from Central Saint Martins whose project GROWinK was selected by the Green Product / Green Concept Award. - **Peng-Jung Lin** (1) — Researcher, Southern University of Science and Technology. Designer-researcher weaving wearables that host living moss on the body. - **Perfect Day** (1) — Precision fermentation dairy company founded by Ryan Pandya and Perumal Gandhi, 2014. Perfect Day makes cow-identical whey protein by fermenting engineered fungi, and licenses it to brands that sell ice cream, milk and protein powder made without animals. https://perfectday.com/ - **Perla Armaly** (1) — Architect and biodesign researcher at the Technion – Israel Institute of Technology. Perla Armaly develops co-fabrication workflows in which robots deposit sand-based mixtures and cyanobacteria mineralise them. - **PetPace** (1) — Pet health-monitoring company. Makes a sensor collar that monitors dogs' and cats' vital signs and reports to owners and vets. https://petpace.com - **Peter König** (1) — Professor of Neurobiopsychology, Institute of Cognitive Science, University of Osnabrück; co-founder of feelSpace. Cognitive scientist who studies sensory augmentation. - **Peter N. Belhumeur** (1) — Professor of Computer Science, Columbia University. Computer vision researcher who led Leafsnap with the University of Maryland and the Smithsonian. - **Peter Washington** (1) — Researcher, Riedel-Kruse Lab, Stanford University (at the time of the work). Peter Washington built a JavaScript API and online IDE for programming games and experiments with live Euglena under remote microscopes. - **Petra Lilja** (1) — Designer and researcher, Konstfack University of Arts, Crafts and Design. Swedish designer whose practice moved from products to multispecies coexistence. - **Philip Beesley** (1) — Architect and artist; professor at the University of Waterloo; director of the Living Architecture Systems Group. Philip Beesley builds immersive responsive environments that behave like near-living systems. https://www.philipbeesleystudioinc.com - **Philip Potthast** (1) — Designer; HTW Berlin. Philip Potthast is a German designer whose bee-centred hive HIIVE was a 2021 James Dyson Award International Top 20 project. https://www.hiive.eu - **Philip Wijesinghe** (1) — Researcher in optics and photonics, University of St Andrews. Philip Wijesinghe works on optical imaging and light manipulation and writes commentary on biophotonics research. - **Philips Design** (1) — Design division of Royal Philips. Philips Design ran the Design Probes programme, which explored far-future lifestyles in speculative concepts. https://www.philips.com/ - **Phool** (1) — Company. Phool, founded by Ankit Agarwal, recycles temple flower offerings from the Ganges into incense, packaging foam and Fleather. https://phool.co/ - **PhycoLabs** (1) — Company. PhycoLabs is a Brazilian biotech start-up developing textile fibres from marine algae. https://www.phycolabs.com/ - **Pierre Charreau, Martin Hertig & Pauline Lemberger** (1) — Designers; ECAL. ECAL students who turned household cacti into touch-sensitive musical instruments. - **Pili** (1) — Bio-based colour company founded by Thomas Landrain, Jérémie Blache and Guillaume Boissonnat, 2015. Pili started in the Paris community lab La Paillasse as a project to grow ink from bacteria, and now produces bio-based dyes and pigments for textiles and inks at industrial scale. https://www.pili.bio/ - **Pinar Yoldas** (1) — Artist; professor at UC San Diego. Pinar Yoldas is a Turkish-born artist and architect who designs speculative organisms. https://www.pinaryoldas.info - **Pl@ntNet** (1) — Plant identification project of CIRAD, INRAE, Inria and IRD. French research consortium behind one of the largest plant identification apps. https://plantnet.org/ - **Plant-e** (1) — Wageningen spin-off company producing plant microbial fuel cells. Plant-e, co-founded by Marjolein Helder, harvests electricity from bacteria that feed on organic matter released by the roots of living plants. https://plant-e.com/ - **PlantPoxy team (KMUTT)** (1) — Student design team. Jitapa Muangsiri and team developed PlantPoxy, a fungal biocontrol coating for seeds, Thai runner-up in the 2024 James Dyson Award. - **Plantix (PEAT)** (1) — Agritech company, Progressive Environmental & Agricultural Technologies. Company behind a crop-disease diagnosis app used by millions of smallholder farmers. - **Playfool** (1) — Design studio. Playfool is the design studio of Daniel Coppen and Saki Maruyama, making playful objects and games. https://playfool.net/ - **Plume Labs** (1) — Air-quality data company (acquired by AccuWeather in 2022). Company that forecast air pollution and made the Flow personal sensor. - **Polybion** (1) — Bacterial-cellulose materials company founded by brothers Axel and Alexis Gómez-Ortigoza. Polybion grows Celium, a leather-like bacterial cellulose sheet, by feeding bacteria with fruit waste from Mexican agro-industry in large fermentation facilities. https://www.polybion.bio - **Polymorf** (1) — Multisensory art and design studio. Dutch studio led by Marcel van Brakel that makes experiences combining VR, scent, taste, haptics and soft robotics. https://www.polymorf.nl/ - **Ponda** (1) — Company. Ponda (formerly SaltyCo), founded by Finlay Duncan and Julian Ellis-Brown at the Royal College of Art, makes fibres from Typha grown on rewetted peatlands. https://ponda.bio/ - **Pooktre** (1) — Tree-shaping practice of Peter Cook and Becky Northey. Peter 'Pook' Cook and Becky Northey have shaped living trees into chairs, people and other forms since the 1990s. https://www.pooktre.com/ - **Post Carbon Lab** (1) — Design and material research studio founded by Dian-Jen Lin and Hannes Hulstaert, 2018. Post Carbon Lab applies photosynthetic coatings of live algae and cyanobacteria to garments, so clothing sequesters carbon and releases oxygen while it is cared for like a plant. https://postcarbonlab.com/ - **Prellis Biologics** (1) — Holographic bioprinting company, founded 2016. Prellis Biologics prints capillary-scale structures with holographic light fields and uses printed lymph-node organoids to generate human antibodies. https://www.prellisbio.com/ - **Primavera De Filippi** (1) — Legal scholar and artist; researcher at CNRS Paris and faculty associate at the Berkman Klein Center, Harvard. Primavera De Filippi works on blockchain law and governance and, with the collective okhaos, makes artworks that test what autonomous code can own and decide. https://plantoid.org - **Primordial (RCA team)** (1) — Student venture, Royal College of Art. Primordial is an RCA team developing low-cost photobioreactors for microalgae. - **Prometheus Materials** (1) — Start-up making microalgae-based biocement. Spun out of CU Boulder, Prometheus Materials makes bio-cement from biomineralising cyanobacteria and has tested masonry blocks with SOM. https://prometheusmaterials.com/ - **Prophecy Sun** (1) — Artist, performer and researcher; PhD, School of Interactive Arts and Technology, Simon Fraser University. Makes sound, performance and installation work on the maternal body, ecology and more-than-human relations. https://prophecysun.com - **Public Lab** (1) — Public Laboratory for Open Technology and Science. Community that develops low-cost tools for environmental investigation. - **Qingyu Zhang** (1) — Design researcher, Tongji University. Works on ecological soundscapes and multispecies ethnography. - **Qiuyu Lu** (1) — PhD researcher, Morphing Matter Lab (Carnegie Mellon University / UC Berkeley). Qiuyu Lu designs plant-facing sensors and shape-changing materials, including a wearable paper chip that reads plant guttation droplets. - **RMIT University Biodesign Challenge team** (1) — Student team, RMIT University; Biodesign Challenge 2019–2020. Students at RMIT University who took part in the Biodesign Challenge, the international competition that pairs art and design students with biologists. Instructors include Ollie Cotsaftis. https://www.biodesignchallenge.org/ - **Rachel & Stephen Kaplan** (1) — Environmental psychologists, University of Michigan. Husband-and-wife research team who studied why natural settings restore people's attention. - **Rachel Ann Arredondo** (1) — Designer, Morphing Matter Lab (Carnegie Mellon University / UC Berkeley). Rachel Ann Arredondo led Blue Ceramics, digitally fabricated morphing ceramic tiles co-designed with marine scientists to restore seagrass meadows. - **Rachel Mayeri** (1) — Artist and filmmaker; Professor of Media Studies, Harvey Mudd College. Rachel Mayeri makes films and installations at the edge of art and primatology, including the Primate Cinema series of films made for chimpanzee and baboon audiences. https://www.rachelmayeri.com - **Rainforest Connection** (1) — Conservation-technology nonprofit founded by Topher White. Rainforest Connection (RFCx) builds solar-powered acoustic monitors from recycled phones that listen to forests for chainsaws and wildlife. https://rfcx.org - **Random International** (1) — Art collective founded by Hannes Koch and Florian Ortkrass. Studio making installations about behaviour and machines. - **Rasa Smite & Raitis Smits** (1) — Artist duo; founders of RIXC Center for New Media Culture. Rasa Smite and Raitis Smits make networked and data-based installations about forests, climate and the atmosphere. https://rixc.org - **Rasa Weber** (1) — Designer and researcher at Zurich University of the Arts (Interfacing the Ocean) and the Cluster of Excellence Matters of Activity, Berlin. Rasa Weber designs artificial reef structures and underwater habitats with marine biologists, testing prototypes in the Mediterranean and the Caribbean in her doctoral project Symbiocean. - **Raul Pereira Pinto** (1) — Design researcher, University of Aveiro. Raul Pereira Pinto worked on objects built by honeybees as creative agents in design. - **Redefine Meat** (1) — Alternative meat company, founded 2018. Redefine Meat industrialised the printing of plant-based whole cuts, printing muscle, fat and blood analogues together at production scale. https://www.redefinemeat.com/ - **Ren Ri** (1) — Artist and beekeeper. Chinese artist (b. 1984) who makes beeswax sculptures by steering how bee colonies build comb inside frames and acrylic boxes. - **Resorts World Sentosa** (1) — Integrated resort on Sentosa Island that operates the S.E.A. Aquarium. Tourism and leisure company whose S.E.A. Aquarium is one of the largest public aquariums in the world. https://www.rwsentosa.com - **Resting Reef (Louise Skajem & Aura Murillo)** (1) — Design duo, Royal College of Art. Louise Skajem and Aura Murillo founded Resting Reef, a marine burial service using reef structures. - **Riccardo Levato** (1) — Professor of Regenerative Medicine and Biofabrication, Utrecht University and UMC Utrecht. Riccardo Levato works on light-based biofabrication, including volumetric printing that forms a whole cell-laden object in seconds by projecting light patterns into a rotating resin. https://www.levatolab.com/ - **Richard Louv** (1) — Journalist and author; co-founder of the Children & Nature Network. Writer on children, nature and technology. - **Rick Bonney** (1) — Director Emeritus of Public Engagement in Science, Cornell Lab of Ornithology. Pioneer of bird-focused public participation projects at the Cornell Lab. - **Riel Bessai** (1) — Design researcher, Faculty of Industrial Design Engineering, TU Delft. Riel Bessai researches circular and more-than-human design, including the design of a festival stage attuned to local ecosystems. - **Riku Iwasaki** (1) — Researcher, Digital Nature Group, University of Tsukuba. Riku Iwasaki developed Silk fabricator, which guides silkworms to spin flat silk sheets over computer-designed forms. - **Rimini Protokoll** (1) — Theatre collective (Helgard Haug, Stefan Kaegi, Daniel Wetzel). Rimini Protokoll is a theatre collective known for documentary and participatory works; Holy Shit was made by Stefan Kaegi with Caroline Barneaud. https://www.rimini-protokoll.de - **Ritu Raman** (1) — Assistant Professor of Mechanical Engineering, MIT. Engineer who builds adaptive machines from living muscle and nerve tissue, and writes about biofabrication. - **Rob Shepherd** (1) — Faculty member, Sibley School of Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering, Cornell University; director of the Organic Robotics Lab. Roboticist working on soft robots, sensory skins and robots powered or controlled by biological systems. https://orl.mae.cornell.edu/ - **Robert College of Istanbul Biodesign Challenge team** (1) — Student team, Robert College of Istanbul; Biodesign Challenge 2025. Students at Robert College of Istanbul who took part in the Biodesign Challenge, the international competition that pairs art and design students with biologists. https://www.biodesignchallenge.org/ - **Robert Grass** (1) — Professor, Institute for Chemical and Bioengineering, ETH Zurich. Chemical engineer who encapsulates DNA in glass nanoparticles so data can survive for centuries and travel inside materials. - **Robert Root-Bernstein** (1) — Professor of Physiology, Michigan State University. American physiologist who studies the origins of life, creativity and the links between art and science; long-time collaborator of Adam W. Brown. - **Robeson High School + Aula Future + FirstHand Biodesign Challenge team** (1) — Student team, Robeson High School + Aula Future + FirstHand; Biodesign Challenge 2022–2023. Students at Robeson High School + Aula Future + FirstHand who took part in the Biodesign Challenge, the international competition that pairs art and design students with biologists. Instructors include Genefer Baxter and Marco Locatelli. https://www.biodesignchallenge.org/ - **Robin Wall Kimmerer** (1) — SUNY Distinguished Teaching Professor of Environmental Biology; director of the Center for Native Peoples and the Environment; enrolled member of the Citizen Potawatomi Nation. Robin Wall Kimmerer is a botanist and writer who brings together Indigenous knowledge and plant science. - **Roger Payne** (1) — Biologist (1935–2023), founder of Ocean Alliance. Whale biologist who, with Scott McVay, discovered that humpback whales sing. - **Roya Aghighi** (1) — Designer. Roya Aghighi is an Iranian-Canadian designer who worked with University of British Columbia labs on living, photosynthetic textiles. - **Rubi Laboratories** (1) — Company. Rubi Laboratories, founded by twin sisters Neeka and Leila Mashouf, turns captured CO2 into cellulose with enzymes. https://rubi.earth/ - **Rui Trindade** (1) — Researcher, Madeira Interactive Technologies Institute, University of Madeira. Game designer who led Purrfect Crime, a tablet game played by a cat and a person together. - **Ryohei Kanzaki** (1) — Professor, Research Center for Advanced Science and Technology, University of Tokyo. Neuroethologist who studies how silkmoths track odour, using robots driven by live moths. - **SCAPE Landscape Architecture** (1) — Landscape architecture office founded by Kate Orff. New York landscape practice known for coastal resilience projects that combine storm protection with habitat and community programmes. https://www.scapestudio.com/ - **SEAGRAFT team (RCA)** (1) — Student team, Royal College of Art. Hongyu Wu, Mingchuan Yang, Zexi Gong, Mengna Gao and Xiaozhuo Jiang designed SEAGRAFT, a tool for planting seagrass. - **SPACE10** (1) — Research and design lab supported by IKEA. SPACE10 explored future living, food and cities through exhibitions and prototypes until 2024. https://space10.com/ - **Sabrina Hauser** (1) — Design researcher; PhD, Simon Fraser University. Design researcher who studied the everyday work and play of guide dog teams and designed accessible dog toys. - **Saetbyeol LeeYouk** (1) — Researcher, MIT Media Lab. Designs interfaces that make the material costs of computing felt. - **Safecast** (1) — Volunteer environmental monitoring nonprofit. Group founded after the 2011 Fukushima disaster that builds open radiation and air sensors. https://safecast.org/ - **Sahara Forest Project** (1) — Company. The Sahara Forest Project combines seawater-cooled greenhouses, solar power and desalination to grow food and revegetate deserts; design by Exploration Architecture. https://www.saharaforestproject.com/ - **Sakura Kotokawa** (1) — Researcher, Kyoto Institute of Technology. Design researcher running art-based, co-designed interventions in schools with other species. - **Sam Droege** (1) — Wildlife biologist, USGS Patuxent Wildlife Research Center. Biologist known for native bee monitoring and macro photography. - **Sam Van Aken** (1) — Artist; Professor of Art, Syracuse University. American artist who uses grafting to preserve heirloom fruit varieties in living sculptural trees. - **Samar Khan** (1) — Designer and researcher. Designer and researcher who co-created the film Ecotonal Beings with Emilia Tapprest. - **Sanergy** (1) — Company. Sanergy is a Kenyan sanitation company that turns human and organic waste into insect protein and fertiliser. https://www.sanergy.com/ - **Sanne Visser** (1) — Material designer. Sanne Visser is a Dutch material designer who spins human hair into ropes and textiles. http://sannevisser.com - **Sarah Homewood** (1) — Assistant Professor, University of Copenhagen (previously IT University of Copenhagen). Interaction design researcher working on the body, self-tracking and reproductive health from feminist and posthuman perspectives. - **Sarah Selby** (1) — Artist and researcher. Sarah Selby is a British artist working with DNA data storage and critical technology. https://www.sarahselby.co.uk - **Sawyer Fuller** (1) — Faculty member in Mechanical Engineering, University of Washington; leads the Autonomous Insect Robotics Lab. Roboticist building insect-sized flying robots and sensors that borrow from insect biology. - **School of Visual Arts Biodesign Challenge team** (1) — Student team, School of Visual Arts; Biodesign Challenge 2016. Students at School of Visual Arts who took part in the Biodesign Challenge, the international competition that pairs art and design students with biologists. https://www.biodesignchallenge.org/ - **School of the Art Institute of Chicago Biodesign Challenge team** (1) — Student team, School of the Art Institute of Chicago; Biodesign Challenge 2021–2024. Students at School of the Art Institute of Chicago who took part in the Biodesign Challenge, the international competition that pairs art and design students with biologists. https://www.biodesignchallenge.org/ - **Scott Thrift** (1) — Artist, filmmaker and designer of The Present. American artist who designs timepieces that show slower scales of time, such as a clock that turns once a year. https://thepresent.is - **Sea Forest** (1) — Company. Sea Forest, founded by Sam Elsom, farms the red seaweed Asparagopsis to cut methane from cattle. https://www.seaforest.com.au/ - **SeaForester** (1) — Company. SeaForester, co-founded by Jan Verbeek, restores kelp forests by seeding small stones with seaweed spores ('green gravel'). https://www.seaforester.org/ - **Sealeo (Diana Epel & Emanuele Griccioli)** (1) — Start-up. Diana Epel and Emanuele Griccioli founded Sealeo, which makes seaweed-based thermal packaging for pharmaceutical cold chains. - **Sean Mealin** (1) — Computer scientist; PhD, North Carolina State University. Researcher who developed wearable sensing to help guide dog handlers and trainers read dogs' physiology and behaviour. - **Sebastian Cox** (1) — Furniture designer and maker. Sebastian Cox designs furniture from coppiced British hardwoods and runs his own woodland. https://www.sebastiancox.co.uk/ - **Sebastián González Quintero** (1) — Researcher, Northeastern University. Designer-researcher using underwater acoustic sensing to study urban rivers. - **Seedballs Kenya** (1) — Company. Seedballs Kenya, founded by Teddy Kinyanjui and Elsen Karstad, coats native seeds in charcoal dust for large-scale reforestation. https://seedballskenya.com/ - **Seekrtech** (1) — App developer, maker of Forest. Taiwanese studio that makes focus and habit apps built around growing plants. - **Sema Dumanli** (1) — Associate Professor of Electrical and Electronics Engineering, Boğaziçi University. Sema Dumanli designs implantable and wearable antennas, including bio-hybrid implants in which engineered bacteria change an antenna's signal. - **Sensor.Community** (1) — Open environmental data network (formerly Luftdaten.info, OK Lab Stuttgart). Volunteer network of home-built particulate sensors. - **Serena Pollastri** (1) — Lecturer in Design, ImaginationLancaster, Lancaster University. Serena Pollastri researches design for more-than-human cities and visual tools for multispecies futures. - **Serina Tarkhanian** (1) — Designer and researcher. Writes on decolonial critique of more-than-human design. - **Seth Shipman** (1) — Associate Investigator, Gladstone Institutes; Associate Professor, UCSF. Bioengineer who turns living cells into recorders that write events into their own DNA. https://gladstone.org/people/seth-shipman - **Shaina Garfield** (1) — Designer; Pratt Institute. Shaina Garfield is an American designer who created the Leaves Biocoffin, a burial shroud seeded with fungal spores. - **Shamees Aden** (1) — Biodesigner and materials researcher. Shamees Aden is a London designer who works with scientists on living and protocell-based materials for fashion and sportswear. https://www.shameesaden.com/ - **Shellworks** (1) — Materials company (Insiya Jafferjee, Amir Afshar). Shellworks is a London company founded by RCA graduates Insiya Jafferjee and Amir Afshar that makes packaging from the microbial biopolymer Vivomer. https://www.shellworks.com - **Sheng-Hung Lee** (1) — Designer; National Cheng Kung University. Sheng-Hung Lee is a Taiwanese designer who with Wan Kee Lee created TetraPOT, a mangrove-planting sea-defence block, a 2016 James Dyson Award International Top 20 project. - **Shijia Huang** (1) — Designer working on bio-printing and microbial habitats. Shijia Huang presented Microbial Oasis at Dutch Design Week 2024, a speculative design that uses bioprinted human tissue as habitat for microorganisms. - **Shimabuku** (1) — Artist. Japanese artist whose playful actions and objects are often made for or with animals, especially octopuses and fish. http://www.shimabuku.net/ - **Shimon Marom** (1) — Professor of Physiology, Technion – Israel Institute of Technology. Neurophysiologist who showed in 2001 that cultured cortical networks can learn a stimulus-response task when stimulation stops as a reward. - **Shinichi Takemura** (1) — Anthropologist and professor, Kyoto University of the Arts; creator of Tangible Earth. Cultural anthropologist who designs interactive globes. - **Shneel Malik** (1) — Architect and researcher, Bio-ID Lab, UCL. Shneel Malik is an architect and researcher at UCL's Bio-ID Lab who developed the algae bioremediation tile wall Indus with Brenda Parker and Marcos Cruz. - **Shonali Shetty** (1) — Designer; Mesh Labs. Shonali Shetty is a designer from Mesh Labs whose project AeR was selected by the Green Product / Green Concept Award. - **Shuai Zou** (1) — Researcher, The Hong Kong University of Science and Technology (Guangzhou). Media artist and researcher working on virtual reality, Gaussian splatting and Chinese philosophy. - **Silvia Ruzanka** (1) — Artist and Lecturer, Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute. Silvia Ruzanka is a media artist who makes games and glitch art, including a videogame played by a Venus flytrap. - **Sissel Marie Tonn** (1) — Artist. Danish artist whose research-based works deal with embodiment, pollution and how bodies sense their environment. - **Siyu Yao** (1) — Artist and designer, Musashino Art University. Siyu Yao makes silk installations from flat cocoons, where silkworms spin planar sheets instead of 3D cocoons. - **Soichiro Tsuda** (1) — Researcher in biological and unconventional computing; built the Physarum-controlled robot at the University of Southampton. Computer scientist who used living slime-mould cells as the controller of a walking robot, working with Klaus-Peter Zauner and Yukio-Pegio Gunji. - **SoilRevive team (Chia-Yi Liu & Yen-Chun Chen)** (1) — Student design team. Chia-Yi Liu and Yen-Chun Chen designed SoilRevive, a microbial bioremediation station, Taiwanese runner-up in the 2025 James Dyson Award. - **Solar Foods** (1) — Company. Solar Foods grows the protein Solein from hydrogen-oxidising bacteria fed on CO2 and electricity. https://solarfoods.com/ - **Sonia Levy** (1) — Artist and filmmaker. French-born artist whose films observe how humans and other species, such as corals and canal life, live with each other. - **Sonja Bäumel** (1) — Artist. Sonja Bäumel is an Austrian artist who works with the microbes living on and around the human body. https://www.sonjabaeumel.at - **Sophie Cohen-Bodénès** (1) — Researcher, École normale supérieure (with Peter Neri). Sophie Cohen-Bodénès studies visual and vibrational signalling in cuttlefish. - **Sorawut Kittibanthorn** (1) — Designer; Design Academy Eindhoven alumnus. Sorawut Kittibanthorn is a Thai designer working on food systems and waste streams. - **Southern California Institute of Architecture (SCI-Arc) Biodesign Challenge team** (1) — Student team, Southern California Institute of Architecture (SCI-Arc); Biodesign Challenge 2016. Students at Southern California Institute of Architecture (SCI-Arc) who took part in the Biodesign Challenge, the international competition that pairs art and design students with biologists. https://www.biodesignchallenge.org/ - **Spiber** (1) — Japanese company producing Brewed Protein fibres. Spiber, founded in 2007 at Keio University, ferments designed structural proteins with microbes and spins them into fibres and films. https://spiber.inc/en/ - **Stacey D. Scott** (1) — Professor, School of Computer Science, University of Guelph. HCI researcher whose group studies collaborative interfaces and applies user-centred and animal-centred design to livestock farming. - **Stanford University Biodesign Challenge team** (1) — Student team, Stanford University; Biodesign Challenge 2025. Students at Stanford University who took part in the Biodesign Challenge, the international competition that pairs art and design students with biologists. Instructors include Charlotte McCurdy. https://www.biodesignchallenge.org/ - **Stefan Kahl** (1) — Computer scientist; BirdNET lead, K. Lisa Yang Center for Conservation Bioacoustics (Cornell) and TU Chemnitz. Stefan Kahl develops deep-learning models that recognise bird and other animal sounds for biodiversity monitoring. https://birdnet.cornell.edu - **Steffie de Gaetano** (1) — Artist-researcher, Hasselt University. Works on art-led participatory design with landscapes and more-than-human collaborators. - **Stephan Huber** (1) — Researcher, Chair of Psychological Ergonomics, Julius-Maximilians-Universität Würzburg. HCI researcher who explores co-creation with honeybees, offering them wax shapes to build on. - **Stephan Wensveen** (1) — Professor of Constructive Design Research, Industrial Design, Eindhoven University of Technology. Stephan Wensveen studies how products couple action and function, and how research through design produces knowledge. https://research.tue.nl/en/persons/stephan-sag-wensveen - **Stephen R. Kellert** (1) — Professor of Social Ecology, Yale School of the Environment (1943–2016). Social ecologist who turned the biophilia hypothesis into principles for architecture and design. - **Steve North** (1) — Researcher in human–horse interaction, University of Exeter. Researcher who studies how horses and people communicate and builds equine prototypes such as robotic horse ears. - **Stijn Ossevoort** (1) — Interaction designer; Eindhoven University of Technology (Industrial Design). Designed Flare, a wind-responsive dress, with Miguel Bruns and proposed 'participation of natural phenomena' as a strong concept for interaction design (TEI 2023). - **Strange Loop Games** (1) — Game studio. Studio behind Eco, a multiplayer ecosystem-and-economy simulation. - **Stuart Gray** (1) — Lecturer in Engineering Design, University of Bristol. Engineer and designer who led Gorilla Game Lab, building modular cognitive puzzles with Bristol Zoo's gorillas. - **Studio Makkink & Bey** (1) — Design studio (Rianne Makkink and Jurgen Bey). Studio Makkink & Bey is a Rotterdam design studio working across architecture, landscape and objects. https://www.studiomakkinkbey.nl - **Studio PSK** (1) — Design studio (Patrick Stevenson-Keating). London design studio making speculative objects and narratives about science, technology and economics. - **Studio diip** (1) — Design studio for computer vision and interactive installations. Dutch studio that builds interactive projects based on computer vision. http://www.studiodiip.com - **Sue Savage-Rumbaugh** (1) — Primatologist; former researcher at Georgia State University's Language Research Center. Sue Savage-Rumbaugh is known for her work with the bonobo Kanzi, who learned to communicate using a keyboard of abstract symbols called lexigrams. - **Sungjae Hwang** (1) — HCI researcher, KAIST (at the time of My Green Pet). Sungjae Hwang built My Green Pet, a plant that senses touch through small electrical currents and answers children with sounds and lights. - **Suomi/Koivisto Architects** (1) — Architecture practice of Maiju Suomi and Elina Koivisto. Finnish architects working on landscape, natural building materials and practice-led research at Aalto University into architecture for more-than-human communities. https://www.suomikoivisto.fi/ - **Surayyn UthayaSelvan** (1) — Architectural researcher, ECOLOPES project. Works on computational methods for ecological building design. - **Susana Soares** (1) — Designer; senior lecturer, London South Bank University. Portuguese designer whose speculative projects explore how other species' senses could be used in health and everyday life. http://www.susanasoares.com/ - **Susanne Fredholm** (1) — Heritage researcher. Researcher in critical heritage studies who examines art-based projects in urban planning in Gothenburg. - **Suzanne Simard** (1) — Professor of Forest Ecology, University of British Columbia. Suzanne Simard is a forest ecologist whose research on carbon transfer between trees through mycorrhizal networks popularised the idea of the "wood wide web". - **Sybille Neumeyer** (1) — Artist and researcher. Sybille Neumeyer works on insects, viruses and environmental data, combining archives, specimens and field research. - **Sylvain Martel** (1) — Professor, Polytechnique Montréal; director of the NanoRobotics Laboratory. Sylvain Martel pioneered steering magnetotactic bacteria with magnetic fields to move microrobots and deliver drugs. - **Tak Keung Chan** (1) — Designer; The Hong Kong Polytechnic University. Tak Keung Chan is a Hong Kong designer whose oyster-reef structure Reef of Hope won the 2025 James Dyson Award in Hong Kong. http://www.teamorz.com - **Taku Onozato** (1) — Design researcher, Kyoto Institute of Technology. Studies ontological and relational design for sustainability. - **Takuma Yamazaki** (1) — Designer; Lexus Design Award 2016 panel finalist. Takuma Yamazaki is a Japanese designer whose Bio-Vide leaf-litter material was a 2016 Lexus Design Award finalist. - **Takumi Saeki** (1) — Artist and researcher, Kyushu University. Takumi Saeki prints images with bioluminescent bacteria as ink, so the image glows, fades and disappears as the bacteria live and die. - **Tal Dvir** (1) — Professor and director of the Sagol Center for Regenerative Biotechnology, Tel Aviv University. Tal Dvir's group prints cardiac tissue from a patient's own reprogrammed cells suspended in a personalised hydrogel made from their tissue. https://en-lifesci.tau.ac.il/profile/dvirt - **Tamara Orjola** (1) — Designer; graduate of Design Academy Eindhoven (2016). Tamara Orjola researches unused parts of plants as material; her graduation project Forest Wool turns discarded pine needles into textiles, composites and paper. https://tamaraorjola.com - **Tandem Repeat** (1) — Biotech textile company co-founded by Melik Demirel and Gözde Senel-Ayaz. A Penn State spin-out that produces Squitex, a protein fibre based on the tandem-repeat structure of squid ring teeth, made by microbial fermentation. https://www.tandemrepeat.com - **Tarsh Bates** (1) — Artist and researcher; PhD in Biological Art, SymbioticA, University of Western Australia. Australian artist whose long-term practice centres on living with the yeast Candida albicans and other organisms, exploring interspecies care and the human body as an ecosystem. https://www.tarshbates.com/ - **Tera Mira** (1) — Company. Tera Mira, founded by Jeanne Begon-Lours and Lucy Dain-Williams, wet-spins seaweed into stretch fibres. https://teramira.com - **Teresa Vicente** (1) — Professor of Philosophy of Law, University of Murcia; led the Mar Menor citizens' legislative initiative. Teresa Vicente led the popular legislative initiative that gathered over 600,000 signatures to give the Mar Menor lagoon legal personhood. - **The Mycological Twist** (1) — Artist collective (Eloïse Bonneviot and Anne de Boer). An art project by Eloïse Bonneviot and Anne de Boer that runs a mushroom garden and a nomadic programme of works, talks and performances timed to inoculation, growth and harvest. - **The ODIN** (1) — DIY genetic engineering kit company founded by Josiah Zayner, 2016. The ODIN sells mail-order kits for bacterial genetic engineering, including a CRISPR kit, along with lab equipment cheap enough for kitchen use. https://www.the-odin.com/ - **The Thought Emporium** (1) — DIY science YouTube channel run by Justin Atkin. A hobbyist biology and engineering lab on YouTube that grows rat neurons on home-made electrode arrays and tries to make them play Doom. - **Theo Jansen** (1) — Artist. Dutch artist who has built wind-walking 'beach animals' from PVC tubing since 1990. - **Thom van Dooren** (1) — Environmental humanities scholar; co-founder of the field of multispecies studies. Writes on extinction, ethics and the entangled lives of birds, snails and other species; edited the Environmental Humanities special issue that introduced multispecies studies. - **Thomas Boland** (1) — Professor of Metallurgical, Materials and Biomedical Engineering, University of Texas at El Paso. Thomas Boland converted a desktop inkjet printer into the first cell printer at Clemson University and published the founding papers of bioprinting in 2003. https://www.utep.edu/engineering/metallurgical-materials-biomedical/faculty-and-staff/faculty-profiles/thomas-boland.html - **Thomas Nagel** (1) — University Professor of Philosophy and Law Emeritus, New York University. Philosopher of mind, ethics and political philosophy. - **Thomas Thwaites** (1) — Designer. Designer known for The Toaster Project and GoatMan. - **Tian Min** (1) — Researcher, Keio University. Works on sustainable and ecological tangible interfaces. - **Tianjin University Haptics & Brain-Computer Interface Team** (1) — Research team at Tianjin University working with the Southern University of Science and Technology. University team that built MetaBOC, an open-source brain-on-chip system that lets a brain organoid steer a small robot. - **Till Fastnacht** (1) — Media artist and researcher, Bauhaus-Universität Weimar (at the time of Sonnengarten). Till Fastnacht co-created Sonnengarten, an urban light installation in which touching plants triggers light. - **Tim Dobbs** (1) — Community biologist; founder of BioArtBot at Counter Culture Labs. Tim Dobbs runs BioArtBot, an open-source project at Counter Culture Labs that lets anyone online design pixel art printed with coloured E. coli by a lab robot. - **Timothy Merritt** (1) — Associate Professor, Department of Computer Science, Aalborg University. Timothy Merritt researches shape-changing, tangible and living media interfaces. - **Tina Gorjanc** (1) — Slovenian designer and researcher; graduate of the MA Material Futures, Central Saint Martins. Tina Gorjanc works on the legal and ethical side of biotechnology in fashion, using speculative prototypes to expose gaps in the protection of genetic information. https://www.tinagorjanc.com - **Tobie Kerridge** (1) — Designer and researcher, Goldsmiths, University of London. British designer who studied in the Royal College of Art Design Interactions programme and researches public engagement with science through design. - **Tomáš Gabzdil Libertíny** (1) — Artist and designer. Slovak-born, Netherlands-based artist who makes sculptures and vessels by letting honeybees build comb over prepared forms. https://www.tomaslibertiny.com/ - **Tongji University College of Design and Innovation Biodesign Challenge team** (1) — Student team, Tongji University College of Design and Innovation; Biodesign Challenge 2021–2022. Students at Tongji University College of Design and Innovation who took part in the Biodesign Challenge, the international competition that pairs art and design students with biologists. Instructors include Hongtao Zhou, Lisha Ren and Francesca Valsecchi. https://www.biodesignchallenge.org/ - **Tony Fry** (1) — Design theorist; founder of The Studio at the Edge of the World. Design philosopher who writes on sustainment, defuturing and design after unsustainability. - **Tracy Fullerton** (1) — Professor and director of the USC Game Innovation Lab. Game designer and educator who makes experimental games. - **Troika** (1) — Art and design studio (Eva Rucki, Conny Freyer, Sebastien Noel). London art collective making installations and speculative objects about perception, technology and nature. https://troika.uk.com/ - **Turenscape** (1) — Landscape architecture firm. Turenscape is the landscape architecture firm founded by Kongjian Yu, known for 'sponge city' designs that work with water. https://www.turenscape.com/ - **Tuurm** (1) — Interactive design studio founded by Zurich University of the Arts graduates. Zurich studio that builds tactile installations for museums and public spaces; its founders made SOMA at ZHdK with FinalSpark. https://tuurm.ch - **Tyler Luong** (1) — Engineering researcher, Bucknell University. Tyler Luong tested plant and mud microbial fuel cells as power sources for low-power plant sensors. - **TômTex** (1) — Materials start-up founded by designer Uyen Tran. TômTex makes a plastic-free leather alternative from chitosan extracted from seafood shells and mushroom waste; it started as Uyen Tran's student project at Pratt Institute. https://www.tomtex.com - **United Visual Artists** (1) — Art and design practice working with light, sound and code. London studio founded in 2003 by Matt Clark that makes large installations with light, sound and software. https://www.uva.co.uk/ - **Universidad del Istmo Biodesign Challenge team** (1) — Student team, Universidad del Istmo; Biodesign Challenge 2024. Students at Universidad del Istmo who took part in the Biodesign Challenge, the international competition that pairs art and design students with biologists. https://www.biodesignchallenge.org/ - **University of British Columbia Biodesign Challenge team** (1) — Student team, University of British Columbia; Biodesign Challenge 2018. Students at University of British Columbia who took part in the Biodesign Challenge, the international competition that pairs art and design students with biologists. Instructors include Steven Hallam and Joseph Dahmen. https://www.biodesignchallenge.org/ - **University of California, Davis Biodesign Challenge team** (1) — Student team, University of California, Davis; Biodesign Challenge 2018–2025. Students at University of California, Davis who took part in the Biodesign Challenge, the international competition that pairs art and design students with biologists. https://www.biodesignchallenge.org/ - **University of Cincinnati Biodesign Challenge team** (1) — Student team, University of Cincinnati; Biodesign Challenge 2020. Students at University of Cincinnati who took part in the Biodesign Challenge, the international competition that pairs art and design students with biologists. https://www.biodesignchallenge.org/ - **University of Edinburgh Biodesign Challenge team** (1) — Student team, University of Edinburgh; Biodesign Challenge 2017. Students at University of Edinburgh who took part in the Biodesign Challenge, the international competition that pairs art and design students with biologists. https://biodesign.eca.ed.ac.uk/ - **University of Pennsylvania Biodesign Challenge team** (1) — Student team, University of Pennsylvania; Biodesign Challenge 2024–2025. Students at University of Pennsylvania who took part in the Biodesign Challenge, the international competition that pairs art and design students with biologists. Instructors include Laia Mogas-Soldevila. https://www.biodesignchallenge.org/ - **University of Technology Sydney Biodesign Challenge team** (1) — Student team, University of Technology Sydney; Biodesign Challenge 2019. Students at University of Technology Sydney who took part in the Biodesign Challenge, the international competition that pairs art and design students with biologists. https://www.biodesignchallenge.org/ - **University of Toledo Biodesign Challenge team** (1) — Student team, University of Toledo; Biodesign Challenge 2018. Students at University of Toledo who took part in the Biodesign Challenge, the international competition that pairs art and design students with biologists. Instructors include Eric Zeigler and Brian Carpenter. https://www.biodesignchallenge.org/ - **VEGEA** (1) — Company. VEGEA is an Italian company that makes leather alternatives from grape marc left over from winemaking. https://www.vegeacompany.com/ - **Valentin Postl** (1) — Researcher, University of Applied Sciences Upper Austria (Media Interaction Lab). Valentin Postl builds fabrication tools for living media, including a 3D printer modified to print mould spores into drawings. - **Vanessa Monna** (1) — Design researcher, Delft University of Technology. Design researcher working on citizenship, urban participation and the more-than-human political. - **Vasco Costa** (1) — Design researcher. Design researcher working with children, storytelling and tangible making for planetary care. - **Vasiliki Tsaknaki** (1) — Associate Professor, IT University of Copenhagen. Interaction design researcher working on biodata, somaesthetics and more-than-human bodies. - **Vasily Sitnikov** (1) — Architect and researcher (ice formwork). Vasily Sitnikov is an architect who develops ice formwork for casting concrete, including façades that host plants, insects and birds. https://iceformwork.com - **Verena Fuchsberger** (1) — Senior Scientist, Human-Computer Interaction Division, University of Salzburg. HCI researcher working on materiality, posthumanism and responsibility in interaction design. - **Victoria Webster-Wood** (1) — Associate Professor of Mechanical Engineering, Carnegie Mellon University; Biohybrid and Organic Robotics Group. Engineer who builds biohybrid robots from sea-slug (Aplysia) muscle and nerve tissue and organic materials. https://engineering.cmu.edu/borg/ - **Vidhi Mehta** (1) — Designer; Royal College of Art / Imperial College London. Vidhi Mehta is a designer who created Post/Biotics, a citizen-science toolkit for discovering antibiotics in local soils and plants. - **Vincent Fournier** (1) — Photographer and artist. French photographer whose series look at space exploration, robots and imagined future life forms. https://www.vincentfournier.co.uk/ - **Vinciane Despret** (1) — Philosopher of science, University of Liège. Vinciane Despret is a philosopher who studies how scientists and animals shape each other in research, from birds to primates. - **Vito Gentile** (1) — Researcher, Ubiquitous Systems and Interfaces group, University of Palermo. Vito Gentile researches pervasive displays and touchless interaction in public spaces. - **Vivian Xu** (1) — Media artist and researcher working between bio and electronic media. Vivian Xu builds hybrid machines and wearables that combine insects such as silkworms with electronics and computation. - **Vollebak** (1) — Clothing company (Steve and Nick Tidball). Vollebak is a London clothing company known for experimental garments, including a T-shirt made from plants and algae. https://www.vollebak.com - **Weird Ecologies (RCA team)** (1) — Student team, Royal College of Art. Weird Ecologies is an RCA team designing devices that support toxin-tolerant organisms on contaminated land. - **Wenjia Sun** (1) — Design researcher, National Chung Cheng University. Design researcher working on speculative design, legal fiction and nonhuman rights. - **Werewool** (1) — Biotech fibre start-up co-founded by Chui-Lian Lee and Valentina Gomez. Werewool designs textile fibres from protein sequences found in nature, such as fluorescent coral proteins, so that colour, stretch or moisture handling are built into the fibre itself. https://www.werewool.bio - **Werner Aisslinger** (1) — Industrial designer; founder of Studio Aisslinger. Werner Aisslinger designs furniture, interiors and experimental material projects such as the Hemp Chair. https://aisslinger.de/ - **Wevr** (1) — VR studio. Los Angeles company known for theBlu VR series. - **Whale-SETI** (1) — Research team of the SETI Institute, UC Davis and the Alaska Whale Foundation (Brenda McCowan, Laurance Doyle, Fred Sharpe). Whale-SETI studies humpback whale communication with information theory as a test case for recognising intelligent signals from unknown senders. https://www.seti.org - **Whanganui Iwi** (1) — Māori tribes of the Whanganui River, represented in the Te Awa Tupua settlement. The iwi of the Whanganui River pursued recognition of the river as an ancestor and living whole for about 140 years, leading to the Te Awa Tupua Act 2017. - **Where Dogs Run** (1) — Art group from Yekaterinburg (Natalia Grekhova, Olga Inozemtseva, Alexey Korzukhin and others). Where Dogs Run is an art group that builds robotic and biological installations about memory, information and living systems. - **Wild Me** (1) — Nonprofit behind Wildbook, now part of Conservation X Labs. Wild Me builds open-source software that identifies individual animals from photographs contributed by researchers and the public. https://www.wildme.org - **WildWatch team (NID Ahmedabad)** (1) — Student team, National Institute of Design. Students at India's National Institute of Design who won the 2024 Terra Carta Design Lab with WildWatch, a wildlife-collision warning system. - **Wildlife Insights** (1) — Camera-trap data platform of Conservation International, WWF, WCS, ZSL, Smithsonian and Google. Cloud platform that uses AI to identify animals in camera-trap photos. - **William Myers** (1) — Curator, writer and teacher. William Myers is an American curator based in Amsterdam who writes about the use of living systems in design and art. https://www.william-myers.com - **Wolfgang Buttress** (1) — Artist and sculptor. British artist who makes large sculptures about landscape and nature, often with scientists; best known for The Hive, which is driven by live honeybee signals. https://www.wolfgangbuttress.com/ - **Woohun Lee** (1) — Professor, Department of Industrial Design, KAIST. Industrial design professor whose lab designed BubbleTalk for fishkeeping and MeowPlayLive for cat live streams. - **World Resources Institute** (1) — Global research nonprofit. Research organisation that runs Global Forest Watch. - **Xandra van der Eijk** (1) — Artist. Dutch artist working on ecological change, landscapes and the sea through sound, material and long-term research. - **Xiaodong Chen** (1) — Professor of Materials Science and Engineering, Nanyang Technological University, Singapore. Xiaodong Chen develops soft bio-interfaced electronics, including conformable electrodes for plants. - **Xiaoge Wang** (1) — Interaction design researcher. Designer of Nature Jar, a tangible device that brings outdoor nature into the home. - **Xinquan Wen** (1) — Design researcher, School of Design, Hong Kong Polytechnic University. Xinquan Wen designed Sloooooooooow, a smart home in which curtains move with the humidity that plants transpire. - **Xuewei Zhao** (1) — Designer; Central Academy of Fine Arts. Xuewei Zhao is a designer from Central Academy of Fine Arts whose project Mr. Kombucha's Lab was selected by the Green Product / Green Concept Award. - **Yangyang Yang** (1) — Researcher, School of Information, University of California, Berkeley. Designer-researcher making mobile augmented reality experiences that invite people to take nonhuman perspectives. - **Yannick Rondelez** (1) — CNRS Research Director, Gulliver laboratory, ESPCI Paris. Chemist who builds dynamic molecular programs from DNA and enzymes that oscillate, compute and decide. - **Ye Wen** (1) — Designer; Hunan University. Ye Wen is a designer from Hunan University whose project Algae-Symbiont was selected by the Green Product / Green Concept Award. - **Yen-Fu Chen** (1) — Design researcher, Tatung University. Design researcher working on citizen science, sound and more-than-human participation. - **Yi Sui** (1) — PhD researcher, Department of Design, Politecnico di Milano. Design researcher studying shape-changing and responsive materials in more-than-human design. - **Yi Zhijian** (1) — Professor, Chongqing Jiaotong University. Yi Zhijian is a professor at Chongqing Jiaotong University who developed 'desert soilization', turning sand into soil-like ground with a plant-derived binder. - **Yihan Liu & Yang Zhang** (1) — Designers; Zhejiang University / Nanchang University. Yihan Liu and Yang Zhang designed Coral Reef Rescuer, a robot system for coral restoration. - **Ying Zhou** (1) — Design researcher, Zhejiang University. Ying Zhou co-designed MossWater, a moss display that is watered when office workers drink water. - **Yingting Gao** (1) — Researcher, Georgia Institute of Technology. Works on biodegradable and plant-based materials for wearables. - **Yiran Ma** (1) — Designer and researcher, Xi'an Jiaotong-Liverpool University. Design researcher who builds probes that let animals steer human bodies and machines. - **Yixiong Wang** (1) — Researcher, Computational Media and Arts Thrust, HKUST (Guangzhou); Design Academy, Sichuan Fine Arts Institute. Design researcher who develops methods for shaping honeycomb together with bees and beekeepers. - **Yiying Wu** (1) — Design researcher, Hong Kong Polytechnic University / University of Sydney. Studies community design, everyday imageries and human-plant relations. - **Yoav Golan** (1) — Researcher, Department of Mechanical Engineering, Ben-Gurion University of the Negev. Engineer who built a vibration vest and showed that a dog can learn to follow distinct haptic commands. - **Yoko Akama** (1) — Professor of Design, RMIT University. Yoko Akama is a design researcher working on participatory and relational design, drawing on Japanese and Indigenous philosophies. - **Yoonji Lee** (1) — Researcher, KAIST. HCI researcher designing digital games in which living plants act as players. - **Yorktown Technologies (GloFish)** (1) — Company that commercialised fluorescent transgenic aquarium fish, founded 2001. Yorktown Technologies licensed fluorescent zebrafish developed as pollution sensors in Singapore and sold them as GloFish from 2003, the first genetically modified pet. https://www.glofish.com/ - **Yossi Yovel** (1) — Professor of Zoology, Tel Aviv University; head of the Bat Lab for Neuro-Ecology. Yossi Yovel studies how bats sense, navigate and communicate, using miniature GPS and audio tags on wild Egyptian fruit bats. https://www.yossiyovel.com - **Youngsil Lee** (1) — Design researcher, University of Edinburgh. Youngsil Lee researches data practices for ecological worlds, using plants such as tomatoes to rethink what counts as data. - **Yu Fukasawa** (1) — Associate Professor, Graduate School of Agricultural Science, Tohoku University. Fungal ecologist who studies how wood-decay fungi and mycorrhizal networks sense, remember and signal. - **Yuanpeng Nie** (1) — Design researcher, Guangdong University of Technology. Design researcher exploring speculative more-than-human social media. - **Yuga Tsukuda** (1) — Researcher, Digital Nature Group, University of Tsukuba. Yuga Tsukuda develops Calmbots, cockroaches with small backpacks steered as a swarm to draw, carry and display. - **Yuichi Oba** (1) — Biologist, Chubu University. Bioluminescence researcher who led the reconstruction of the ancestral firefly luciferase published in Science Advances in 2020. - **Yuichiro Takeuchi** (1) — Researcher, Sony Computer Science Laboratories. Yuichiro Takeuchi works on digital fabrication for cities and ecologies, including 3D-printed hydroponic landscapes. - **Yumi Sasaki** (1) — Artist (with Dorita Takido). Yumi Sasaki is a Japanese artist who with Dorita Takido created Bug's Beat, which lets people hear and feel an insect's footsteps. - **Yuning Chan** (1) — Designer (Project Habitate, with Tom Hartley and Yishan Qin). Yuning Chan is a designer who, with Tom Hartley and Yishan Qin, created Project Habitate, a living wearable that hosts species displaced by ash dieback. - **Yuxi Liu** (1) — Researcher, TU Delft. Design researcher who uses drifting and recipe-making as methods for noticing humans and nonhumans in the city. - **Yuyao Lin** (1) — Design researcher, Royal College of Art. Design researcher working on more-than-human design and species that people find disgusting. - **ZKM | Center for Art and Media Karlsruhe** (1) — Art and media museum and research centre. ZKM is a German institution for media art that produces large thematic exhibitions on technology, science and society. https://zkm.de - **Zahra Jajarmikhayat** (1) — Designer; California College of the Arts alumna. Zahra Jajarmikhayat is a designer whose lemon-rind mosquito nets were Runner-Up at the 2022 Biodesign Challenge. - **Zeefier** (1) — Seaweed-dye company founded by designers Nienke Hoogvliet and Anne Boermans. Zeefier scales up Nienke Hoogvliet's seaweed-dye research from SEA ME into natural textile colours made from 100 percent seaweed and its waste streams. https://www.zeefier.nl - **Zena Holloway** (1) — Photographer and biodesigner; founder of Rootfull. Former underwater photographer Zena Holloway founded Rootfull in 2018 to grow textiles and objects from grass roots in beeswax templates. https://www.zenaholloway.com/ - **Zhang Tianyi** (1) — Artist. Zhang Tianyi is a Chinese artist working on ecological art and plant intelligence. - **Zhenan Bao** (1) — Professor of Chemical Engineering, Stanford University. Materials scientist working on skin-like stretchable electronics, including kirigami-cut electrode sheets that follow growing organoids. https://baogroup.stanford.edu - **Zhenchi Lai** (1) — Design researcher, National Taiwan University of Science and Technology. Researches AI tools for human–cat relationships. - **Ziming Wang** (1) — Researcher, t2i Lab, Chalmers University of Technology. HCI researcher who creates speculative designs about biohybrid robots and human–food interaction. - **Zoe Qi-Jing Li** (1) — Artist and researcher, Hong Kong University of Science and Technology (Guangzhou). Makes computational artworks that couple human expression with natural phenomena such as moonlight. - **Zsofia Kollar** (1) — Designer; founder of Human Material Loop. Zsofia Kollar is a designer who founded Human Material Loop, turning waste human hair into textiles. - **Zurich University of the Arts (ZHdK) Biodesign Challenge team** (1) — Student team, Zurich University of the Arts (ZHdK); Biodesign Challenge 2025. Students at Zurich University of the Arts (ZHdK) who took part in the Biodesign Challenge, the international competition that pairs art and design students with biologists. https://www.biodesignchallenge.org/ - **crafting plastics! studio** (1) — Design studio. crafting plastics! studio (Vlasta Kubušová, Miroslav Král) develops the oil-free bioplastic NUATAN with Slovak scientists. https://www.crafting-plastics.com/ - **doxiadis+** (1) — Landscape architecture office led by Thomas Doxiadis. doxiadis+ is a Greek landscape and architecture practice working on ecological landscapes, drylands and multispecies design. https://www.doxiadisplus.com - **explore.org** (1) — Live nature camera network of the Annenberg Foundation. Nonprofit that streams dozens of live cameras from bear rivers, eagle nests and reefs. - **hOrO mO X** (1) — Digital artist. Paris-based artist working with quantum randomness, AI and biocomputers; the MindWare series connects him to FinalSpark organoids. https://horomox.com - **iGEM Team Cambridge** (1) — iGEM student team (2009–2010). The Cambridge student team competed in iGEM, the International Genetically Engineered Machine competition, with a project that crossed synthetic biology and design. https://2010.igem.org/Team:Cambridge - **iGEM Team Cornell** (1) — iGEM student team (2013). The Cornell student team competed in iGEM, the International Genetically Engineered Machine competition, with a project that crossed synthetic biology and design. https://2013.igem.org/Team:Cornell - **iGEM Team Harvard** (1) — iGEM student team (2010). The Harvard student team competed in iGEM, the International Genetically Engineered Machine competition, with a project that crossed synthetic biology and design. https://2010.igem.org/Team:Harvard - **iGEM Team KIT-Kyoto** (1) — iGEM student team (2010). The KIT-Kyoto student team competed in iGEM, the International Genetically Engineered Machine competition, with a project that crossed synthetic biology and design. https://2010.igem.org/Team:KIT-Kyoto/Home - **iGEM Team NYU Gallatin** (1) — iGEM student team (2012). The NYU Gallatin student team competed in iGEM, the International Genetically Engineered Machine competition, with a project that crossed synthetic biology and design. https://2012.igem.org/Team:NYU_Gallatin - **iGEM Team UCL London** (1) — iGEM student team (2012). The UCL London student team competed in iGEM, the International Genetically Engineered Machine competition, with a project that crossed synthetic biology and design. https://2012.igem.org/Team:UCL_London - **junya.ishigami+associates** (1) — Architecture office. junya.ishigami+associates is the Tokyo architecture office of Junya Ishigami, known for architecture that blurs building and landscape. https://www.jnyi.jp/ - **rrreefs** (1) — Non-profit reef restoration venture, founded 2020. rrreefs 3D prints interlocking clay bricks that are assembled underwater into reef walls, first installed off San Andrés, Colombia. https://rrreefs.com/ - **terra0** (1) — Art collective (Paul Kolling, Paul Seidler, Max Hampshire). terra0 is an art collective, founded in 2015, that explores how ecosystems could become economic and legal agents through blockchains and smart contracts. https://www.terra0.org - **thatgamecompany** (1) — Game studio co-founded by Jenova Chen. Studio behind flOw, Flower, Journey and Sky. - **ustwo games** (1) — Game studio. London studio known for Monument Valley and Alba. - **Åsa Ståhl** (1) — Design researcher, Linnaeus University. Design researcher who works with Kristina Lindström on participatory design with plastics, compost and other more-than-human matters. - **Çağdaş Dedeoğlu** (1) — Researcher in computing and design (co-author with Priyank Chandra, University of Toronto). Researcher who surveys how posthumanist ideas are put into practice across ACM design and computing papers.