Designing a Living Material Through Bio-Digital-Fabrication - Guiding the growth of fungi through a robotic system

Abstract

Designing with living materials require designers to look for new methods of fabrication since living cells exhibit their own agency, and are able to sense and respond to environmental stimuli. Therefore, there is an urgent demand to design a framework for fabricating living materials. This paper investigates the digital-fabrication of fungi as a new way of designing and crafting living materials without genetic manipulation. In this research, fungi act as a bio-material probe to generate and test new design strategies that enable a dialogue between digital and biological systems. Conceptual experiments, that use fungi to investigate the proposed bio-digital-fabrication scenarios, are central in this study. The research attempts to generate new information for the design process of an organism in the field of architecture. The project will expand on the latest thinking on the bio-material fabrication by allowing the living material to be engaged in the fabrication process.