Biodesign — A New Frontier of the Integration of Biology and Design!

Designing Biomaterials

Design is everywhere: from the smartphone you are scrolling through to the pizza box that you just ate from! Playing with colors, shapes, and proportions is not just design. There’s more to it! As quoted by the legendary Steve Jobs, co-founder of Apple, “Design is not just what it looks like and feels like. Design is how it works.” Design, at its heart, is about offering effective and sustainable solutions to problems. The ability of a design, physical, graphical or service-oriented, to have a sustainable approach while simulating user experience is what the new age revolutionary design-world is seeking.

Talking about sustainability, I would like you to ponder upon a few questions. First, have you heard about self-healing bricks made from microorganisms that fill cracks by themselves? For a change, would you wear clothes made from algae or eat a hamburger grown on a petri dish? Or would you ditch your plastic cups for coffee cups made from mycelium? While all of this sounds very fascinating and a little magical, these are typical instances of pure integration of Biology and Design.

Biodesign, to simply put, is the incorporation of living materials, including bacteria, plants and animals, as essential components into everyday design to explore the opportunity of building a more sustainable society than we are now. The integration of biology and design, better known as Biodesign essentially surpasses and blurs the conventional art, design and science boundaries in order to enhance design solutions. Biodesign is not about merely taking cues from nature and harnessing them into design, it is beyond ‘inspired approaches’. It leaps ahead of imitation to integration, offering a range of perspectives that incorporates living matter into designing of fabrication, construction, waste management, architecture, decorative art and several more realms.

With the emergence and advancement of this interdisciplinary domain, powered by artists, designers, scientists and researchers, a novel window is sure to open into how our lifestyle choices — what and how we eat, what we wear, what we buy are drastically going to be influenced in the near future. Biodesign is truly the sustainability revolution we’ve been waiting for!

As this field finds its way into our world, the new age designers need a fair understanding of how to integrate biology and design creatively, thoughtfully and ethically. This is where the need for an opportunity or a learning platform for exploring, discovering and experimenting with Biodesign comes into play. The Bachelor of Design course at Riidl Academy, Somaiya Vidyavihar University is one of the first design courses to include Biodesign in the course’s learning outcomes. The course, along with other fundamentals, includes a biology and design framework in their curriculum. If you’ve got a knack for designing and are keen towards Biodesign, this course might be the ideal match for you. You can check it out here: riidlacademy.somaiya.edu