Chapter Four: The Mutant
An Introduction from the Editor
In the natural world, mutations happen when genetic information is not replicated in a specific, pre-ascribed way it was “programmed” to.
The data of how our cells in DNA are transcribed into RNA so it can be translated into the building blocks of a physical body.
Sometimes there are prompters for these mutations, such as a carcinogenic exposure or a genetic inheritance. But often, mutations happen completely by chance.
Whether a mutation is harmful or beneficial ultimately depends on how its DNA changes relative to the organism’s situation. The world of design and the practitioners who represent the craft needs to evolve now more than ever. The systems of thought of how we have been creating are no longer benefiting humanity’s collective needs, and we, as designers, makers, and consumers.
Are there alternative approaches to how we engage with the world around us and the powerful tools we now have access too?. Cyberspace has created a new realm to exist, let us resist its colonization by those with dubious intentions. Designers have become hired guns for the rampant consumerism that is suffocating us with what we should buy next. And we now have the tools to grow instead of build the environment around us, so why are we still crudely constructing against nature? How can we change our situation so that they can push design, our craft, into the next stage of evolution? Mutations happen more than we may think.
by John Perry Barlow
John Perry Barlow (1947-2018) was an influential American poet, essayist, and internet activist. In 1971 Barlow began writing lyrics for the Grateful Dead. Beyond his work in music, Barlow was a visionary thinker who foresaw the transformative potential of the internet. In 1990, he co-founded the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF), a nonprofit organization dedicated to defending civil liberties in the digital world. Barlow’s 1996 manifesto, “A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace,” articulated his belief in the internet as a space free from government control, championing freedom of expression and privacy. Barlow’s work bridged the countercultural ethos of the 1960s with the emerging digital age, making him a key figure in advocating for a free and open internet.
Governments of the Industrial World,
You weary giants of flesh and steel, I come from Cyberspace, the new home of Mind. On behalf of the future, I ask you of the past to leave us alone. You are not welcome among us. You have no sovereigny where we gather.
We have no elected government, nor are we likely to have one, so I address you with no greater authority than that with which liberty itself always speaks. I declare the global social space we are building to be naturally independent of the tyrannies you seek to impose on us. You have no moral right to rule us nor do you possess any methods of enforcement we have true reason to fear.
Governments derive their just powers from the consent of the governed. You have neither solicited nor received ours. We did not invite you. You do not know us, nor do you know our world. Cyberspace does not lie within your borders. Do not think that you can build it, as though it were a public construction project. You cannot. It is an act of nature and it grows itself through our collective actions.
You have not engaged in our great and gathering conversation, nor did you create the wealth of our marketplaces. You do not know our culture, our ethics, or the unwritten codes that already provide our society more order than could be obtained by any of your impositions.
You claim there are problems among us that you need to solve. You use this claim as an excuse to invade our precincts. Many of these problems don’t exist. Where there are real conflicts, where there are wrongs, we will identify them and address them by our means. We are forming our own Social Contract. This governance will arise according to the conditions of our world, not yours. Our world is different.
Cyberspace consists of transactions, relationships, and thought itself, arrayed like a standing wave in the web of our communications. Ours is a world that is both everywhere and nowhere, but it is not where bodies live.
We are creating a world that all may enter without privilege or prejudice accorded by race, economic power, military force, or station of birth.
We are creating a world where anyone, anywhere may express his or her beliefs, no matter how singular, without fear of being coerced into silence or conformity.
Your legal concepts of property, expression, identity, movement, and context do not apply to us. They are all based on matter, and there is no matter here.
Our identities have no bodies, so, unlike you, we cannot obtain order by physical coercion. We believe that from ethics, enlightened self-interest, and the commonweal, our governance will emerge. Our identities may be distributed across many of your jurisdictions. The only law that all our constituent cultures would generally recognize is the Golden Rule. We hope we will be able to build our particular solutions on that basis. But we cannot accept the solutions you are attempting to impose.
In the United States, you have today created a law, the Telecommunications Reform Act, which repudiates your own Constitution and insults the dreams of Jefferson, Washington, Mill, Madison, DeToqueville, and Brandeis. These dreams must now be born anew in us.
You are terrified of your own children, since they are natives in a world where you will always be immigrants. Because you fear them, you entrust your bureaucracies with the parental responsibilities you are too cowardly to confront yourselves. In our world, all the sentiments and expressions of humanity, from the debasing to the angelic, are parts of a seamless whole, the global conversation of bits.
We cannot separate the air that chokes from the air upon which wings beat.
In China, Germany, France, Russia, Singapore, Italy and the United States, you are trying to ward off the virus of liberty by erecting guard posts at the frontiers of Cyberspace. These may keep out the contagion for a small time, but they will not work in a world that will soon be blanketed in bit-bearing media.
Your increasingly obsolete information industries would perpetuate themselves by proposing laws, in America and elsewhere, that claim to own speech itself throughout the world. These laws would declare ideas to be another industrial product, no more noble than pig iron. In our world, whatever the human mind may create can be reproduced and distributed infinitely at no cost. The global conveyance of thought no longer requires your factories to accomplish.
These increasingly hostile and colonial measures place us in the same position as those previous lovers of freedom and self-determination who had to reject the authorities of distant, uninformed powers. We must declare our virtual selves immune to your sovereignty, even as we continue to consent to your rule over our bodies. We will spread ourselves across the Planet so that no one can arrest our thoughts.
In China, Germany, France, Russia, Singapore, Italy and the United States, you are trying to ward off the virus of liberty by erecting guard posts at the frontiers of Cyberspace. These may keep out the contagion for a small time, but they will not work in a world that will soon be blanketed in bit-bearing media.
Your increasingly obsolete information industries would perpetuate themselves by proposing laws, in America and elsewhere, that claim to own speech itself throughout the world. These laws would declare ideas to be another industrial product, no more noble than pig iron. In our world, whatever the human mind may create can be reproduced and distributed infinitely at no cost. The global conveyance of thought no longer requires your factories to accomplish.
These increasingly hostile and colonial measures place us in the same position as those previous lovers of freedom and self-determination who had to reject the authorities of distant, uninformed powers. We must declare our virtual selves immune to your sovereignty, even as we continue to consent to your rule over our bodies. We will spread ourselves across the Planet so that no one can arrest our thoughts.
by Arvind Lodaya
He earned his Ph.D. in Clinical Pharmacology from the University of Aberdeen and has held senior roles at Pfizer, Eli Lilly, and several biotech startups. He has been an Adjunct Professor at the University of Medicine and Dentistry of New Jersey since 2007 and previously served as Entrepreneur in Residence at UNC-Chapel Hill Eshelman School of Pharmacy.
Paraphrasing Herbert Simon, the concept that “any changing of existing conditions to better ones is an act of design”1 encapsulates the essence of human ingenuity. This broad and all-encompassing definition corroborates my hypothesis that at its core, design is an evolutionary progressive impulse to secure and improve our conditions for ourselves and our children.
From the simplest tools to complex systems, design permeates every aspect of human existence and endeavour, reflecting our never-ending pursuit of progress and innovation.
Following the Industrial Revolution, this organic impulse got harnessed and massively amplified by industry, leading to significant shifts in its priorities and scale. Elizabeth Shove’s characterization of design’s impact on “cleanliness, comfort, and convenience” underscores its transformative impact on everyday life of the masses after the Revolution. However, this integration with industrial processes also marked the beginning of design’s co-optation by commercial interests, to serve mass production and consumption rather than local and granular human needs and aspirations. Being now separated from technology, design assumed a specialist role as “humanizing technology”.
Victor Papanek and other critics have highlighted the detrimental effects of the commodification of design, particularly in fostering a culture of mass consumerism. The proliferation of products driven by manufactured desires, coupled with the pervasive influence of mass media and advertising, has resulted in a society inundated with goods that provide status and instant gratification over actual utility and long-term value. This phenomenon has not only contributed to environmental degradation but has also perpetuated a cycle of overconsumption and waste, undermining the principles of sustainability and wellbeing.
The exponential growth of consumer culture globally has led to a paradoxical situation where an abundance of material possessions coexists with a decline or at best marginal increase in overall wellbeing.
Despite the promise of enhancing “cleanliness, comfort, and convenience,” the abundance of goods has failed to translate into significant improvements in human flourishing. Instead, it has fuelled environmental crises and societal alienation, raising urgent questions about the efficacy and ethics of contemporary design practices in the service of the industrial economy.
Unlike other ancient professions such as medicine or law or even architecture, design has become completely beholden to industrial interests, relegating its role to serving mass markets rather than individual or even community needs. This profound shift in scale has limited the potential of designers and marginalized their capacity to address genuine human needs in a personal, holistic, and sustainable manner. Instead, design has become complicit in perpetuating systems of inequality and environmental degradation, highlighting the urgent need for transformative change within (and outside of) the field.
In light of these challenges, it is imperative to reassess the intrinsic value of design and its potential to serve people directly, bypassing industrial mediation. This raises fundamental questions about the nature of expertise within the design field and its capacity to promote human flourishing sustainably – or, as S. Balaram put it “First, can he? Next, will he?” By interrogating prevailing assumptions and exploring alternative paradigms, we can envision new possibilities for design practice that prioritize ethics, equity, and environmental stewardship – and the clue lies in the many kinds of “technologies” available to us, not merely the industrial variety.
Michel Foucault’s exploration of the history of “Technologies of the Self”(or “wellbeing technologies” if you like) offers a possible insight into the transformative potential of design in promoting individual and societal wellbeing.
By reframing design as enabling self reflection, empowerment, and collective action at personal as well as community levels, we can reimagine its role in fostering meaningful connections and facilitating positive social change.
This requires a departure from passive consumption towards active participation, where individuals are empowered to shape their environments and experiences in ways that align with their values and aspirations.
Central to this reimagining of design is the recognition that wellbeing encompasses more than material possessions; it encompasses holistic experiences, meaningful relationships, and a sense of belonging. By integrating insights (and “technologies”) from diverse disciplines and cultural traditions and retaining its “humanizing” emphasis, design can transcend its narrow focus on products and services to become a catalyst for human and ecological wellbeing, fostering resilience and sustainability in an increasingly complex world.
Papanek’s utopian, nomadic-inspired prototypes6 offer glimpses into alternative futures where design serves as a vehicle for social and ecological thriving. In these scenarios, industry provides the equipment and infrastructure necessary for creative production, while individuals and communities co-create solutions using local materials and knowhow that meet their unique needs and aspirations. This participatory approach not only fosters innovation and resilience but also promotes a sense of ownership and agency among all stakeholders, laying the foundation for a more equitable, resilient, and flourishing society.
Here, Mahatma Gandhi’s vision of “decentralized, autonomous village republics”7 provides a provocative framework for reimagining the role of design within communities. Rooted in principles of self-sufficiency, sustainability, and social fabric, Gandhi’s idea emphasizes the importance of restoring economic activities to human and ecological scales, anchored in local needs and resources. By prioritizing community autonomy and resilience, decentralized village republics promote economic equity, environmental stewardship, and cultural diversity, aligning closely with the goals of sustainable design.
In this context, design emerges not only as a means of problem-solving but also as a catalyst for collective progress, fostering collaborative approaches to resource management, infrastructure development, and cultural revitalization.
As elaborated by S. Balaram in “Barefoot Designer”8, embedded designers can contribute to the creation of vibrant, resilient communities that prioritize human wellbeing and ecological harmony, laying the foundation for a more just, equitable, and sustainable future.
Design’s evolution away from consumerism and in the service of humanity and the planet can also be achieved by shifting its focus to catalysing interdisciplinary innovation at the granular as well as systemic levels. By merging its “humanizing” expertise with transformative technologies/fields like education, healthcare and governance, embedding design into such “impact areas” can lead to collaborative development of human-, community- and planet-centric solutions and innovations that address complex societal challenges and foster sustainable development.
A few illustrative Case Studies:
– The Aravind Eye Care System in India revolutionized cataract treatment9 by streamlining operations and leveraging design principles to provide high-quality, affordable eye care to millions.
– Design for Change empowered students in Brazil10 to tackle local challenges through project-based learning and design thinking, fostering creativity and civic engagement.
– SEWA Bank’s financial inclusion initiative in India11 co-designed innovative banking solutions with low-income women, enhancing economic empowerment and social inclusion.
– Mumbai’s Slum Rehabilitation Authority used design thinking to develop inclusive housing solutions12 responsive to the needs of slum communities, promoting social equity and resilience.
with Neri Oxman
Since she created her interplanetary wardrobe, known as Wanderers (2014), Neri Oxman has pioneered a future-forward genre of biodesign that marries the curvaceous forms of life with the cool smoothness of digital fabrication. Over time her projects have gotten larger in scale, more ambitious, and have ceded more control to the organisms with which she works—bees, silkworms, fungus, and bioengineered bacteria. Now Neri is working on the scale of the city. What that means for the urban skyline might surprise you. Biodesigned interviewed Neri about her show, lab, and visions for living architecture. For Part One, we asked a single question. Neri’s response merited its own section
Biodesigned
What are three questions every biodesigner must consider?
Neri Oxman
What is life?
Artificial wombs and embryos made from skin cells are already revolutionizing reproductive biology. CRISPR-Cas9 genome-editing technology can be programmed to target specific stretches of genetic code and edit them at precise locations. Gene drives may soon provide an effective means of accelerating the inheritance of genetic modifications through specific wild populations or entire species. With these systems in place, we can permanently modify genes in living cells and organisms to treat genetic causes of disease, while also controlling genetic expression. From here, creating or permanently altering life is all too real.
Neri Oxman
What are the ethical implications?
There is a beautiful quote by Francis Bacon that states, “Nature, to be commanded must be obeyed.” Those who cannot obey nature are unable to command it. Every single project within the arc of our work has gotten us thinking about the ethical considerations associated with biodesign. For example, With Silk Pavilion I and II, we were introduced with opportunities to experiment with transgenic silkworms, but we decided against them. In both of these projects, relationships created between the designers, the robots, and the silkworms were ones of synergy. We co-designed and co-fabricated silkworm-spun architecture while enabling healthy metamorphosis for the silkworms. This way of producing silk products represents a vast departure from age-old traditions in sericulture wherein the procurement of silk thread comes at the cost of thousands of silkworm lives per product.
Neri Oxman
How can we design on the scales of nature?
Design structures are often static and materially homogenous, while biological structures are dynamic and materially heterogeneous. Living things respond, grow, and adapt. They perform a multiplicity of simultaneous functions across scales, optimized for structural load, environmental pressures, spatial constraints, etc. Consider a tree, which simultaneously communicates, nourishes, bends, and stands tall. Bricks exhibit no hint of intelligence and synthetic fibers have yet to fire electrical signals into the textiles they inhabit. While we crudely assemble polymers, concrete, steel, and glass, biology grows intricate structures using material practices refined over eons of evolution. Can we close the gap?
Biodesigned
How has the field of biodesign evolved since you started your practice?
Neri Oxman
It depends on who and how you ask. There are generally three approaches to biodesign, each distinguished by its relationship with nature—from nature-inspired design to design-inspired nature. They are:
1) Nature-inspired projects that have co-evolved with digital fabrication;
2) Nature-informed projects that have co-evolved with materials engineering; and
3) Nature-grown projects that have co-evolved with biology and/or synthetic biology.
Another lens through which to see the evolution of biodesign over past decades is the relationship between elements that make up bio and elements that make up design. This relationship has progressed from one of containment (e.g. a 3D printed glass vessel containing bio-based materials) to one of synergy between the two (e.g. a structure designed to vary its properties both as a function of external environmental conditions and internal biological processes).
In our own practice—first with the Mediated Matter Group at MIT and now with my team at OXMAN—we’ve made it our intention to lace and intertwine the disciplines. Digital fabrication, materials science and engineering, and synthetic biology have all contributed to our approach—Material Ecology—in ways that express synergy across physical, digital, and biological domains.
Our Turing test of biodesign is a test of a designed object’s ability to exhibit intelligent behavior indistinguishable from a living material. If the evaluator cannot reliably tell the grown from the made, the design artifact is said to have passed the test.
Biodesigned
So what is your current vision for the future of the built environment and its relationships with people and other organisms in the environment?
Neri Oxman
The vision? Grow everything.
In the future, human-made materials will be a combination of grown and made, created using a mixture of natural and synthetic techniques. Relationships between materials, humans, and organisms of the natural world will embody complete synergy. Embracing complexity and diversity across systems and scales in design, we open ourselves to advancing beyond mere maintenance (i.e., conservation) towards the betterment (i.e., augmentation) of nature.
In A Thousand Plateaus, Deleuze and Guattari use the narrative of a wasp and an orchid to illustrate the concept of “becoming” [1]. In this view, it becomes challenging to separate between the “parts” (the wasp and the orchid) that make the “whole” (the reproductive cycle of the orchid, ecology at work). Certain orchids are known to display physical and sensory features of female wasps to attract male wasps into a “trans-species courtship dance,” which unfolds as the wasp attempts to mate with a flower. During this “dance,” pollen is transferred to the wasp’s body. The wasp—seduced by a plant—is literally co-opted into the orchid’s reproductive apparatus.
In our practice, my team and I see socially constructed dichotomies as one: city and environment, product and body, social fabric and micro-climate, etc. As activist designers, we collaborate with both nature and the companies working with us to create designs that embody a set of first principles in service of nature, and thereby, in service of humanity.
Biodesigned
Interesting! At the SFMOMA exhibition you display a scale model of New York City and how it might evolve over the next 400 years called Man-Nahāta. It looks like a sort of fungus overtakes the city. Can you describe what’s happening in the piece?
Neri Oxman
The backdrop for Man-Nahāta is the forthcoming film by Francis Ford Coppola—Megalopolis—in which an architect and scientist seek to rebuild New York City as a utopia with an intelligent, infinitely adaptable material called “megalon”. In a series of studies for the film, we look back to pre-1600s Manhattan, when the Island was a diverse, natural landscape of hills, valleys, forests, fields, and wetlands, home to the Lenape people and known as Mannahatta (“land of many hills”). We then look ahead to an imagined urban future, using computational growth algorithms that can be applied across material, architectural, and urban scales to offer a design framework based on principles of growth and self-organization. This enables the generation of a vast and diverse set of forms not unlike the structures that emerge through biological growth—including the networks of fungal mycelium extending across the globe for trillions of miles.
In our studies, we propose synergy between contemporary Manhattan’s cultural diversity and ancient Mannahatta’s biotic livelihood: the grid and the garden.
Informed by climate projections and inspired by urban habitats such as stone circles and megaliths, the series transitions from a human-centric biosphere to a distributed nature-centric landscape, evolving harmony between the built and the grown. Across four centuries, Man-Nahāta experiences emergence, growth, decay, and rebirth as a built-grown singularity.
Biodesigned
Let’s talk a bit about consensus: there are 8.5 million people in New York City. Is this future something you believe people would agree to or something they would succumb to?
Neri Oxman
In a way, it is not up to us—it is and it isn’t. If we do not agree to a future of social and urban design which emphasizes adaptation, flexibility, and collaboration, we will succumb to a future foretold by climate change.
Manhattan today is a precarious habitat threatened by extreme forces of rapid climate change, with future projections reported by the 2021 Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, including higher temperatures, increasingly frequent heavy downpours, and a rising sea level that will further increase storm surges and coastal flooding. In an extreme scenario, global surface temperature is projected to rise 10 degrees Fahrenheit and global mean sea level 16 meters by the year 2400 [2].
We designed our way into this crisis through our short-sighted choices in materials, products, and buildings at the expense of the natural world. If we are to survive the sixth extinction, it is on us to design solutions to resolve, renew, and revisit our place on this planet.
Biodesigned
You’re creating a new 36,000 square-foot research facility in New York City. I’m reminded of the original Bell Labs, which was also here. What makes NYC the appropriate site?
Neri Oxman
Only in the Big Apple can we recreate the Garden of Eden!
NYC is my new home. After more than 20 years in academia—first as a student and then as a tenured professor—it was time for a fresh perspective. I moved here out of love, married, fully pregnant, and eager to write the next chapter of my life.
But beyond my personal life, I am keen to nurture a new kind of biodesign “mecca” for makers in a city so saturated with cultural motion. In NYC, there is boundless opportunity to question and hopefully reinvent how we make products, how we build architecture, and how we plan cities.
Bell Labs circa 1940 was the Silicon Valley of its day. Its scientists and engineers took center stage in creating the greatest innovations of the Information Age. The protagonists of the “wet” version—think “Bell Labs goes Bio”—will be designers. I have no doubt that biodesign will be among the most important vocations in this century, and my team and I look forward to working with many of them within and alongside our new lab.
Biodesigned
In one word, what is the most pressing crisis for designers operating today? Climate, social inequality, violence, pollution, hunger?
Neri Oxman
Empathy.
