BIONASYS

Here is the O° one-minute version.

Since childhood, I've seen the world as wholes. Systems rather than products. Constellations rather than planets. Soil rather than single trees. My education followed that instinct across a divide, moving from the medical sciences to architecture, between growing and making. Somewhere in between, I came to believe that when everything we make can be grown, design becomes ecology. I named that belief Material Ecology, and for a decade at the MIT Media Lab, my team, the Mediated Matter Group, set out to build it. We almost never designed something without first inventing the technology to make it. We spun pavilions with silkworms, printed glass at furnace heat, and made architectural skins from shells and apple peels, designed to return to the soil at the end of their use. Then, around 2020, the things humans make began to outweigh all living matter. Design was no longer a matter of style, but of consequence. "Mediated Matter: Design and Invention in the New Biological Age" gathers that work, and the conviction behind it: that we don't have to choose between nature and human endeavor. That we can design to add to life. Two decades after coining the term, we're finally building what it described: shoes grown as plants, masterplans grown as ecosystems, and more. The book is out now. With deep gratitude to MIT Press and Thames & Hudson for bringing it into the world with such care. MIT Press: mitpress.mit.edu/97802620491… Thames & Hudson: thamesandhudson.com/products… Amazon: amazon.com/dp/0262049171