Biologically Motivated: Exploring Future Connections Between Biology, Art, and Architecture

Biologically Motivated Exploring future connections between biology, art, and architecture  David Benjamin Jeff Karp Amy Youngs

Biologically Motivated

Biologically Motivated Exploring future connections between biology, art, and architecture  David Benjamin Jeff Karp Amy Youngs

Biologically Motivated Interdisciplinary Graduate Group Blaine Brownell Neil Olszewski Emilie Snell-Rood Marc Swackhamer Diane Willow

Contents

Introduction 7

Working — Interdisciplinary Graduate Group 9

Material Work — Jeff Karp 15 Embracing Interdependencies — Amy Youngs 29 Living Systems — David Benjamin 49

Panel Discussion 63 Conversation with Students 77

Biologically Motivated

Participants 97

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Introduction

Fields from architecture and art to engineering and nanotechnology are increasingly looking to biology for inspiration.

Strategies such as biomimicry and biodesign have produced electronic screen designs based on butterfly wing scales and gecko-inspired adhesives, pavilions constructed from mycological bricks, and aerial art installations derived from organic structures. Given the 1.5 million described species on earth, there is a vast repository of knowledge that can inform future bio-based research and design. However, spanning these diverse fields comes with challenges. How do researchers from disparate backgrounds communicate effectively? How can varied disciplinary perspectives expand the questions that we ask? What are the most productive approaches to biology-based interdisciplinary collaborations? How can students structure interdisciplinary learning within a discipline-focused curriculum?

An interdisciplinary symposium held at the University of Minnesota in April 2016 explored these ideas with three pioneers in the fields of biology, art, and architecture.

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Working — Interdisciplinary Graduate Group Biologically Motivated

Biologically Motivated is an interdisciplinary graduate group at the University of Minnesota that emerged from conversations among faculty from the College of Biological Sciences, the School of Architecture in the College of Design, and the Department of Art within the College of Liberal Arts. In bringing together these diverse fields, this group hopes to provide an opportunity for students of biology, design, and art to engage with potential peer collaborators from divergent disciplinary backgrounds. We share an interest in posing new questions and solutions by looking to the diverse ways in which organisms adapt and survive.

Our inaugural symposium, Biologically Motivated, convened students, faculty, and guest speakers for a series of talks and discussions that centered on three interdisciplinary researchers whose work is informed by biology, architecture, engineering, and art. Jeff Karp, an associate professor of medicine at Harvard University Medical School’s Brigham and Women’s Hospital, in Boston; Amy Youngs an associate professor of art at The Ohio State University, in Columbus, Ohio; and David Benjamin, an assistant professor at the Columbia University Graduate School of Architecture, Planning and Preservation and the founding principal of The Living, in New York each illuminated multiple ways that interdisciplinarity operates in their work.

The symposium served as both a generative and reflective moment for our group. It highlighted questions related to the emergence of insights or breakthroughs and the role that methodologies, attitudes, and the configuration of collaborators play in the revealing of unconventional solutions, revelatory questions, and new propositions. Several commonalities were evident among our disciplines, research modalities, and practices.

Individual commitments to active exploration, experimentation, and the process of making that translate ideas into physical and experiential things were essential to all. This habit of mind, combined with a high tolerance for failure, agility in shifting perspectives, and receptivity to unfamiliar approaches were repeatedly enacted as core to our novel approaches in biology, architecture, and art.

Collectively, we offer the following attitudes, gleaned from the Biologically Motivated Symposium, to guide interdisciplinary

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groups towards emergent insights and breakthroughs. Each of these attitudes relies on the active receptivity of all collaborators. A shared commitment to openness stretches and transforms each person’s capacity to be inclusive of communication styles, disciplinary cultures, modes of working and questioning–creating in its wake a heightened sense of curiosity.

New perspectives and seemingly unrelated approaches become catalysts for expanding one’s conception of what may be possible and how these possibilities might be realized.

The first of these guiding attitudes posits that making is essential. Breakthroughs are catalyzed by efforts to externalize ideas and translate them into physical things. This potential is magnified when multiple artifacts from various collaborators are realized. Ideas can now cross-pollinate and build upon one another such that incompatibility, productive mistakes, and unlikely pairings yield novelty and innovation. Only through a collective commitment to “making” do serendipitous discoveries occur and with them, an allied language is established. Few methodologies break down disciplinary language barriers more effectively than a physical artifact produced collectively by the group.

The second attitude common to most successful interdisciplinary groups is that there is no substitute for hands-on research. Related to the importance of making, this principle refers to the importance of working directly with biological material itself. In addition to conducting more traditional forms of biological research, like reading, interviewing experts, or watching video documentation, it is also valuable to get one’s hands dirty, to more directly interface with one’s research subject. There are myriad ways for non-biologists to explore biodiversity in a more visceral capacity, like walking outside to engage physically with natural systems and organisms, selfexperimentation, viewing living organisms under a microscope or attuning to their behavior by recording audio or video, and even conducting rudimentary experiments. Non-biologists often underestimate the sophistication of information they can gather from relatively simple, direct, observation.

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Working — Interdisciplinary Graduate Group Biologically Motivated

Third, we suggest that groups must be diverse and complementary. We all benefit, especially in an interdisciplinary setting, from voices and perspectives that differ from our own. Some might excel at identifying a unique problem or question, others at drawing unlikely connections to solve that problem, and others yet at synthesizing input to determine the best solution. Some collaborators might like to open the problem to expansively brainstorm in as broad a way as possible, while others might like to zero-in on a specific approach in pursuit of a solution. There is a place in an interdisciplinary group for all of these voices.

Each is essential to the development of unique and meaningful solutions to complicated problems. To maximize the benefits from a plurality of ideas, every member of the group must be willing to relinquish control over outcomes. Every voice is important to a successful collaboration. Where one group member might have blind spots, another has expertise. Effective groups learn to rely on one another’s strengths and differences in points of view.

Of utmost importance to any creative endeavor, especially one venturing into previously unexplored terrain, is the attitude that failure is good. Effective interdisciplinary groups are open to risk, failure, and the trial-and-error process. Usually, first ideas do not represent the most insightful approach. They may be naïve, revealing a lack of basic experience or knowledge. However, when we remain open to learning from these intuitive leaps, we can benefit from them. It is essential that our failed attempts are embraced, examined, and further explored, not discarded. The iterative, or trial-and-error creative process is essential to critical insights and breakthroughs.

Through our group’s collective experience, we have come to learn that effective communication is key. Interdisciplinary groups must, more so than is necessary for a group of likeminded collaborators, generously allow significant time for lucid communication. Often, members of a diverse group come from varied disciplinary backgrounds that employ unique vocabularies. Two people may be discussing the very same topic using completely different terminology. In such a scenario, those group members may think they just aren’t communicating. In reality,

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they’re just not familiar with each other’s lexicon. It is important that an effective interdisciplinary group cultivate an ethos of patience and listening, especially when first convening. The development of a coherent language requires time and space.

Another attitude we have come to embrace, through our collective observations, is that interdisciplinary is the new disciplinary. When we examine where creative insights and meaningful breakthroughs are occurring, we often see, in architecture, art, medicine, engineering, and biology, that the groups responsible are diverse and varied. It is no longer strange or dubious to work this way. In fact, it is becoming expected. The problems our society faces, whether technical or poetic in nature, have grown too complex, sophisticated, and far-reaching to address through traditional approaches. The contributions of a wide array of collaborators are pivotal to the development of solutions and propositions that match the magnitude of the questions that they are asking and the problems they are addressing.

Assessing risk and reward in interdisciplinary work requires an attitude shift as well. The pace of recognizable progress can be quite subtle initially. The paths of exploration and group conversation may meander. Working within constraints shaped by the usual timeframe, anticipated outcomes, and familiar processes may not be achievable in new interdisciplinary groups.

Risking this realignment and being open to exploring new modalities makes possible the rewards in interdisciplinary work. In general, it is an approach that benefits from working relationships that deepen over time in sustained or reconfigurable groups. It is a practice that becomes more facile, fluid, and rewarding with practice.

Lastly, we submit the attitude that the nature of collective intelligence is simply different. Even in the best case scenario, when an artist, researcher, or designer is performing at her peak capacity, the innovations are groundbreaking or award-winning; and the result inspiring, the work is still different than when approached through an interdisciplinary lens. This is not to suggest that singular works of genius are not inspiring. We are all drawn to the lore of the brilliant solo artist or the scientist toiling

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Working — Interdisciplinary Graduate Group Biologically Motivated

in the lab. Some of our greatest leaps, our most inspiring breakthroughs have originated from a single person who has honed her craft. But the work that grows organically, from the bottom-up, from the cross-pollination of seemingly disparate ideas, is often beautifully strange and shockingly insightful.

There is something in the mixing of unlikely ingredients that culminates in a new kind of creation, a new brand of invention that stands in stark contrast with work produced by the solitary genius. With interdisciplinary work, we see new ideas and tangible solutions emerge in ways not predictable by the activity of individual group members.

This is, for us, ultimately the impetus for working in an interdisciplinary capacity. The work is slower, riskier, clumsier, less guaranteed, and less certain than its siloed counterpart. But what we have learned from Biologically Motivated, is that the potential rewards outstrip the liabilities and point to solutions and propositions that embody success in ways that are much more layered and generative.

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Material Work—Jeff Karp Biologically Motivated

What I thought I would do is not just tell you about some of the projects that are ongoing in my laboratory, but try to share some of the insights to the process that have evolved over time in my lab and during my professional development. We have two different types of projects in the lab. One is the basic discovery project, and we have a few of those—but the majority of projects focus on translation. How can we take what is currently known, put a team together and work on a particular problem in medicine where we have a chance of helping a patient in the soonest possible time frame? In science, and especially in biology, we encounter a lot of failures. Sometimes an experiment fails nine times out of ten. But to think about how you take what you’ve achieved and then translate it to the clinic and help patients— I think the number of challenges, the number of walls you run into, the number of failures that you encounter, actually grow exponentially.

To do this, we have to become great problem solvers. In my personal experience, I find that when we face a problem, we end up approaching it the same way every time and expecting different outcomes. We are biased against solving tough problems, partly because of the way the educational system works. I don’t know how many of you have watched the TED talk by Ken Robinson—I think it is the most watched TED talk of all time—if you haven’t seen it, I highly recommend it. In his talk, Robinson describes the educational system. Kids are born super-creative; they can take things we would never think of and make new things and have fun. He discusses how the educational system actually educates children out of being creative. So in many ways, because of our educational system, we are biased against being creative.

To emphasize this point, I thought I would show the following example. A car has fallen into the water, and the problem-solvers are lined up, and they probably have a few different options. They have chosen to bring in a crane. Things seem to be going well until the following happens [image of crane falling in water]. So one problem has become two, and the second problem is even bigger than the first. What do the problem-solvers do next? The answer is what we would all do: put in more resources while

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approaching the problem from the same angle. They bring in a bigger crane. And what happens, success or failure? [image of second crane falling in water] How do we break free from that repetitive thought process? I would argue that our brains like to operate in the super low energy states where they anticipate what comes next. How do we hijack our brains continually so we can bring in fresh ideas? I’ll give you a couple of examples. I bet if you go home today, and you change the location of the shampoo or soap in your shower—just put it to a different side—tomorrow when you go to take your shower, you’ll reach for the old location. It’s the same thing as when we change the password on our phone: how many of us go and enter the old password? It takes a few times before we remember the new one. Our brains operate in the super low energy states and anticipate what comes next—an almost robotic, repetitive state. How do you hijack that? I would argue there are many ways to do it. Today I will share a few of them with you, based on how we’ve been using tools in my laboratory.

One of the tools for solving problems is to turn to nature for inspiration. It’s the idea that every living creature—every plant, every animal, anything that’s living—exists here today because it has overcome an insurmountable number of challenges. In essence, we are surrounded by solutions, which I see as ideas for solving problems. When I look at nature, I believe evolution is the best problem-solver. Hundreds of millions of years of research and development have been happening all around us. We are only limited by two things: the first is our ability to go beyond the activation energy to get out into nature and start looking for examples, and the second is the tools available to uncover the mechanisms that have evolved in nature to solve problems. As our tools get better and better, and we can look at things differently or with higher resolution, we can uncover new mechanisms all the time. It’s almost like an encyclopedia of solutions that is never-ending and growing; new chapters are continuously being written.

Let me share an example from my lab where we were advancing on a project, we hit a wall, and then we turned to nature for inspiration to bring in entirely new ideas. Dr. Pedro

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Material Work—Jeff Karp Biologically Motivated

del Nido is the chief of cardiac surgery at Boston Children’s Hospital. He sent me an email one late summer evening in August 2009 that said: “I’m treating these patients who have septal defects (holes in between the chambers of the heart), and sometimes we go to suture them, and the tissue just tears because it’s so fragile.” He added: “We have these devices used in adults, but they are made of permanent wire-like materials, and we can’t just downsize them and put them into a child because their hearts are growing over time. We can’t come back every two or three years and do this invasive open heart procedure.” He asked if we could collaborate on a tissue adhesive that would work inside a beating heart. It could be a patch that you would put into the heart and push up against the hole, and it would seal the hole immediately. Then cells would be able to migrate on top of the patch and form new tissue. Later the material would fully degrade, and the patient would be left with his or her own tissue sealing the hole, which would be able to grow with the patient over time. I met with Dr. Nedo and told him that this was potentially the most challenging environment inside the human body where an adhesive would have to work. But we were really excited about this opportunity, and we decided to pursue it.

First, we looked to the clinic to find existing materials that could work in this environment, and we found nothing. The closest material is medical grade superglue—a cyano-acrylate based material. As soon as it contacts water, it cures, so there’s no way it can work inside a beating heart. In fact, for this superglue to work, you have to dry the tissue before you put it on. This challenge gives you a sense of the limitations of the current state-of-the-art of sealing tissues in the body. So we began to list design criteria. The formulation of design criteria is the first part of the process, but it is a challenge. We can come up with a list of 20 or 30 design criteria, but how do you narrow that down to a handful on which you focus?

When you put many materials in blood, the enzymes and the wet environment react right away—or the proteins in the blood bind to the material and it won’t work well. First, the material has to be resistant to blood. It can’t be fouled, which would prevent it from attaching to the heart tissue. Second, the substance needs

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Right page: Slug-inspired surgical glue, The Karp Lab Left page : Synthetic slug glue—detail, The Karp Lab

to be biodegradable. Third, it needs to be elastic, because the heart is expanding and contracting 60 beats a minute. If we make the material too stiff it could just delaminate, so we have to match it closely to the tissue properties. Fourth, it has to be biocompatible, meaning that cells can migrate to the material and form new tissue. Fifth, we talked to some clinicians that said some materials cure fast—in a few seconds—and some cure within 10 minutes. They stated that they would like to be in control because lots of things go wrong, and they don’t want to be at the mercy of the technology. So we made on-demand adhesion one of the criteria. When the clinician is ready, and the material is in the right place, it can be sealed and cured on demand. A final design criterion is that this material can’t be washed away inside the heart, where it is subject to a lot of shear forces.

In my laboratory, we develop a lot of different materials. Some are degradable, and some are elastomeric. We had existing materials that could address many of these criteria—except two of them: resistance to blood and resistance to washout. We couldn’t think of a way around this, so we turned to nature for examples of creatures that exist within wet, dynamic environments—similar to the inside of a beating heart. We found some creatures—in particular, sandcastle worms that attach to rocks in the sea, and can withstand the constant surf. We also found slugs and snails, which are often attached to leaves in the pouring rain. We asked what these creatures have in common, and we noticed that they have viscous secretions. Things that are viscous tend to have adhesive properties. For instance, if I put honey on the floor and try to remove it with a hose, it takes some time to remove it

Material Work—Jeff Karp Biologically Motivated

because of the viscous adhesive interactions. When we look at these viscous secretions, we notice they also contain hydrophobic agents that repel water. So we thought: what if we make a glue that is entirely hydrophobic? This direction goes against what others have been doing, trying to make a hydrophilic material that mimics the tissue. But a hydrophobic material, when put up against the tissue, could repel blood away from the surface.

If the material is viscous, it could stay there long enough for the clinician to put it in the right spot. Even with the constant shear, the viscous adhesive interactions would allow it to remain in place temporarily.

But we still didn’t solve one significant problem: how is this thing going to attach to the tissue? For that, we turned to ivy.

In Boston, a lot of buildings are covered with ivy. If you ever try to pull ivy off a building, you will notice that it takes a lot of force.

Just recently, the mechanism through which the plant attaches to surfaces was elucidated: it has these root hairs that are like heat-seeking missiles. They go up and down a surface looking for crevices. When the hairs find a crack, they insert into it, and then they shrivel up and mechanically interlock. So we thought about using this process as a mechanism of adhesion. The current paradigm was to use reactive chemistry to form bonds with the tissue—the problem is that in the presence of proteins in the blood, you foul that chemistry. We thought about trying to mimic the ivy, creating a glue that would infiltrate skin between the collagen fibers. Such a mechanism wouldn’t be fouled by the blood and could act as a universal adhesive.

With all of this in mind, we put together a team. This approach is standard for the projects in my laboratory: we never go at it

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alone, we always bring in others and are very strategic in how we pick team members. We make sure there’s enough complementary expertise and minimize the overlap. So we found some clinicians who could provide clinical insight as well as biomaterials experts who could help us with biocompatibility, testing, and strategy. We decided to use light to activate the material, so we needed fiber optics experts to deliver light inside the beating heart. After two to three years of multiple iterations, we were able to develop a material that addressed all of these design criteria.

It looks like honey at room temperature. It’s synthesized from glycerol and sebacic acid, both of which exist in the body. We formed these double bond structures—acrylate groups—on some of the hydroxyls; then we added a photoinitiator: when you shine UV light on this particular chemical, it generates a free radical that links the double bond structures together. When the material cures, it is very much like an elastic band: you can stretch it over and over again, but it’s also fully degradable, and cells can migrate on top of it. There’s no recipe in the literature for how to make a material that infiltrates tissue—this substance came out of trying lots and lots of different permutations.

To test the material, we put the glue onto rigid tissue and then shine a light for five seconds to cure it. When you cure it in place, it locks, almost like Velcro. Next, we made a 2 mm defect in a rat heart—a very large hole that we attempted to patch without any sutures or any staples. We are also testing a patch we developed that is transparent, degradable, and glues to the underside facing the tissue. With this particular animal, we were caught off guard when the patch, which turned out to be too small, slipped and we were left with a hole. We quickly scrounged up as much glue as possible with the spatula and moved it into place.

Because of its viscosity, the adhesive remained in place long enough for another pulse of light to cure it. We followed up with these animals in six months. They did fine: the material was degrading, and there was a full tissue bridge over the hole.

Next, we moved to an even more challenging environment that was closer to sealing holes inside a beating heart. We moved to a pig model—here we made a small incision in the myocardium and then pushed the patch and glue up against the septum,

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Material Work—Jeff Karp Biologically Motivated

shone the light for 20 seconds, and then looked to see if the patch remained attached inside the beating heart. We came back after four hours and added epinephrine to increase the heart rate from 85 to 165 bpm, and the patch remained attached under these conditions. This moment was really exciting because it demonstrated that this glue could work inside a beating heart— one of the most challenging environments inside the human body. Next, we developed a device so we wouldn’t have to go through the myocardium. Now there are a few more experiments we need to do to de-risk the device further as the regulatory bars are higher for children (as they should be).

We formed a company called Gecko Biomedical in 2013. We were making this material on the order of a gram or two at a time, and using it right away. The company required hundreds of kilograms of material that could remain shelf-stable for a year. I never fully appreciated how challenging it is to scale up a technology developed in the lab—it is amazing how many iterations we had to go through. But we were successful, and the final product is scheduled to be first used in humans in the coming weeks in Europe for vascular reconstruction procedures.

In addition to glues, we’ve also been interested in asking about replacements for sutures and staples. In the clinic, we’ve been using sutures and staples for decades, but they have a lot of limitations. You have to realign the tissue with each pass of the suture. This process is very time-consuming, especially when a procedure requires hundreds of stitches, and the longer someone is on the operating table, the greater the risk of complications. For staples, you always make a bigger hole than the staple because the staple tears the tissue on the way in—so bacteria can get in, and you have tissue damage. And because staples and sutures have different mechanical properties than tissue, they can cause mechanical damage, and you can get necrosis and leaks. We can do much better.

We wanted to develop an adhesive material that didn’t require any reactive chemistry at all—something that gripped the tissue.

When you look at available bioinspired materials, you think of things like Velcro, which was inspired by burrs that attach to clothing. When you look at burrs under the electron microscope,

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Right: Spiny headed worm-inspired tape, The Karp Lab Left: Spiny headed worm

you see hooks grabbing onto fibers This structure inspired the hooks and loops of Velcro, which fuses two surfaces. We were interested in asking whether there were creatures in nature that utilize unique and exciting adhesive mechanisms that haven’t been exploited before.

We had the idea that maybe parasites had some unique ways of attaching to their hosts. So what we did was something completely unsophisticated and perhaps surprising: we went to Google images and typed in the word “parasite,” and then looked at pages and pages of pictures. We stumbled upon the spinyheaded worm. It has a needlelike proboscis that inserts into the intestine of fish and then it swells the tip using muscular structures, pushes against the tissue and locks into place. This approach is just mechanical interlocking—no chemistry here. We thought we would develop a patch using an array of microneedles, similar to this proboscis. When pushed into tissue, the tips would swell and lock into place. Instead of using a muscular structure, we utilized the concept that most tissues have an abundance of water. So we made a two-layer system composed of an inner core of polystyrene and an outer layer of a block copolymer of polystyrene and polyacrylic acid. Polyacrylic acid is the material used in diapers—it swells a lot with water. After a lot of iterations, we figured out we had to put more swellable material in the tip. The result was polystyrene in this outer coating that self-organized with the inner polystyrene core so that it wouldn’t delaminate. We had to ensure that the entire swellable material didn’t just pop out of the tissue. In nature, this mushroom-like or asymmetric swelling is critical to achieving adhesion. We found

Material Work—Jeff Karp Biologically Motivated

through trial and error that this is the best way to achieve adhesion with this kind of a system.

So we developed a material in which the tip swells asymmetrically with water and locks into place. Working with a group at Mass General, we could image the process and watch the swelling in real time. Using pigskin and a blood substitute, we tested three different adhesives: medical grade superglue, a patch with standard microneedles, and a patch with microneedles with swellable tips. We pushed each into the pigskin, applying a pre-load equally, and then tried to pull each one off.

For the system with the swellable tips, it lifts the entire skin up, so it is very well-adhered. In talking with a plastic surgeon about this material, he mentioned that one of the most promising applications would be skin grafts. With skin grafts, you take skin from another part of the body, mesh it to get greater surface area, and then attach it to the burned area using staples at the edge.

The problem is that the middle part of the graft often doesn’t adhere. Instead, you could take these microneedles and push them through the graft into the underlying burned tissue to achieve 100% contact. We did some tests with this, and indeed, we got much better adhesion than with staples. So we are currently in the process of moving this to a pig model for testing.

In addition to slugs, snails, sandcastle worms, and spinyheaded worms, we’ve also been inspired by porcupines. A colleague of mine at MIT—Rohit Karnik in the mechanical engineering department—and I were sitting around discussing what creatures achieve adhesion in tissue, and we thought about porcupine quills. We looked into the literature to see what people had done, and surprisingly, there are almost no papers that describe the mechanism of how porcupine quills stick into tissue so easily—yet are so hard to remove. I like to self-experiment a little bit in the laboratory, so at one point, I put these porcupine quills into my chin. It was incredible to me how easily they go into tissue. You just have to touch a quill to the skin, and you don’t even feel it go in; yet the force required to remove it is amazing.

We were interested in figuring out how this works. Porcupine quills have these backward-facing barbs. So we did an experiment where we shaved these barbs off while maintaining the

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Bottom: Porcupine quill — detail Top: Porcupine quill

same geometry and angle at the surface of the tip. When you put this into tissue and pull, the barbed tip achieves much greater adhesion with the tissue. The porcupine quill took 11 times more force to remove compared to a standard 18 gauge needle, which has a similar diameter. What was most exciting to us was that when the barbs were present, it wasn’t just the pull-out force that was enhanced, but also the force required to push the quills into the tissue was reduced by two times. This quality is important because the harder you push on a needle, the greater the chance you will overshoot the target. So needles with barbs on them might reduce the penetration force, limiting overshoot injuries from needle placement.

The other property that I was amazed by was that when you put the porcupine quills into tissue, you get a perfect interface with the tissue. The staple makes a bigger hole than the staple itself, but the quill forms a complete interface. We envisioned that if we could make a staple with quills on either end, we could push it into the tissue with less force, and it would make perfect holes—resulting in less risk of bacteria getting in and

Material Work—Jeff Karp Biologically Motivated

subsequent infection. If you make the whole thing biodegradable, then you won’t have to worry about later removal. That is something we’ve been working on now, and we’ve developed a synthetic patch made out of polymers of a polyurethane material.

I tell people in my lab that they should go out into nature and experience things to look for ideas. Sometimes people take this a little too seriously—like a postdoc in my lab who wanted to experience cacti firsthand. There are these cacti—chain fruit and jumping cholla—that just grab onto passers-by who slightly touch them. I was interested in the mechanism of how this happens and how it compares to the porcupine. I brought some cactus spines into the lab and looked at them under the electron microscope, and was amazed to see that their structure is nearly identical to the quill—with backwards-facing micro-barbs. When the spine goes into the skin, the barbs splay outward and catch the tissue. Cactus needles also have a sheath over them for protection from sand and wind. This sheath breaks open after it contacts the surface.

The last thing I want to share with you is one additional concept that we apply in our research: radical simplicity. I’m determined not just to work on projects that end up in scientific journals, but to make a difference in the world. Given the timeframe of moving things to market, I’ve realized you cannot achieve this goal unless you simplify at every single step along the way. When starting projects, we need to think about whether the product will be scalable and cost-effective; otherwise, it’s just a basic discovery project. We have worked on many projects in the lab without this concept of radical simplicity, and they have not translated, so we started employing it 5-6 years ago for particular projects.

About five years ago I was at home looking at my hand and realized I had inflammation on my finger where my wedding ring had been. I started reading up and realized that this was potentially a nickel allergy. So I brought my ring into the lab, ordered a substrate for nickel, performed an analysis, and sure enough, the substrate turned red, indicating there was nickel in the ring. I have a 24-karat gold ring, and it shouldn’t contain nickel, but it turns out that the metal is a cheap filler with great mechanical

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properties. It’s in doorknobs and all over the place—you can’t avoid it. I continued reading and learned there are 630 million people on the planet with a nickel allergy—nine percent of the population! Once you get to some exposure, you are allergic, and you are allergic for life. Nickel is in coins, keys, eyeglass frames, zippers, even some Fitbit lines—when these came out, a lot of people were having reactions, so they recalled them. When the Euro first came out, there was an alloy that releases nickel in the presence of sweat and a lot of people started having reactions.

Even your Apple Watch and iPad have nickel in them! Nickel is everywhere. I began looking into ways to prevent people from becoming allergic to nickel—or to prevent reactions in those who are allergic—and there was nothing available. So we wanted to develop a prophylactic cream that would prevent nickel from getting into the skin—almost like a sunscreen for nickel, where nanoparticles form a layer of particles for protection. Could we make a cream that had something in it that would bind to the nickel and prevent it from going into the skin? In doing so, we wanted to employ this concept of radical simplicity.

We can think of many different ways of synthesizing materials, but we decided to start with the safe list of materials from the FDA. This is a long list of chemicals that are deemed safe if you use them topically in certain concentrations. We thought if we could find agents on this list that bind nickel, we could formulate a cream with this material. We went through the list and had a hunch about a few of the materials, and we formulated them into nanoparticles to test them. Some of these are very simple materials like calcium carbonate (chalk) and calcium phosphate.

We reformulated these into different sized particles and put them into a cream with glycerin. Then we added a high amount of nickel, which co-localizes to the calcium. Alternatively, if you don’t have the particles, the metal goes right through the skin, and when you wash the skin, the cream and the nickel on the surface wash off, but not the particles. We ran a bunch of tests, including a mouse model, and we published a paper that a few news outlets including CNN picked up. People started writing to ask when this cream would be available because they needed it immediately—especially people in careers with high daily nickel

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Material Work—Jeff Karp Biologically Motivated

exposure, such as cashiers. So I teamed up with an entrepreneur, Jacques, who has been amazing to work with regarding his expertise in bringing products to market. He figured out how to scale this material and reformulated it so would be stable. We tried this cream on dozens of people, and it works. Within two years of our publication, we had our first clinical trial, and a year later, we had products on the market.

The company—Skintifique, based in Paris—applies the concept of radical simplicity to every product it makes. For example, I get seasonal eczema that I’ve inherited from my mother. The company makes a cream with only eight ingredients. The skin has self-repair mechanisms, but conventional face cream has 20 or 30 ingredients, leading to a high chance that the skin will be irritated by one of the ingredients. So Skintifique makes a very simple cream, selecting each ingredient to maximize safety across the population. One of the agents binds to water, maximizing the moisturizing ability of this cream. Each of these ingredients is from the FDA safe list, meaning this cream can be regulated as a cosmetic. This product helps people measurably.

I want to come back to bio-inspiration for a moment. We are constantly trying to learn from creatures, and I realized that the solution for the nickel protection cream already exists.

Phytoplankton in the ocean have calcium carbonate shells that may function to protect them from heavy metals—suggesting that any solution likely already exists in nature. In closing, I will reiterate the two tools that I talked about that we use in my lab.

The first is bio-inspiration—not biomimicry because we are not copying every single detail—we’re just taking a basic idea and then improving on it for our purposes. The second is radical simplicity, which is trying to simplify when considering downstream translations.

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Embracing Interdependencies — Amy Youngs Biologically Motivated

Embracing interdependencies is how I am framing this conversation. There are separate things I do as an artist: investigations as an individual artist and as a collaborative artist. With these investigations, I try to put myself in this strange place of interdependencies—a position of vulnerability. If we are interdependent, we are vulnerable. I try to embrace this concept as an artist and teacher.

When you Google “interdependency” you come up with all kinds of silly images of humans and the planet. I love Googling things to think about how an idea represented in the world.

I think the images associated with interdependency are silly not because of vulnerability, but because of the opposite. They make the earth look vulnerable while making us look powerful.

We are going to cradle that seed, or hold up the entire earth with our hands. The images make it seem as if we are the reason the earth is here.

Interdependencies make us very nervous as humans in the western world. We feel very individual when in fact we are interdependent. The clothes that touch your body, the light that’s here—these are all here not just because of us. They are here because of our interactions with what we are calling nature— waterfalls, coal, animals. Many things go into making the stuff all around us that give us the illusion that we are independent, technological beings. We may think all we need is our iPhone, and we are set, and a plug—and, oh wait—and a waterfall to run the power that creates the electricity.

So those kinds of interdependencies and that way of thinking is what I’m trying to evoke in my art, and not just evoke for others but also experience myself. I come from a position of thinking through making and interdependencies are messy and complex.

Luckily we have a cactus theme going so I will show you some of my older work dealing with grafted cacti. I was interested in Jeff’s conversation around cacti spines and how they attach to hosts, but I came at this from another approach. I first responded to those little fluorescent cacti as the cutest things I’ve ever seen and knew I must play with them. I thought to myself, “I am going to make organic, living sculptures using multiple grafted cacti, and this is going to be amazing.”

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Cute Parasite, Amy Youngs

So I set about learning to graft and also learning about the different cacti and what they are doing. I discovered that the fluorescent ones are mutants, completely unable to feed themselves. They can’t make roots or photosynthesize, so they completely rely on humans to keep them alive by grafting them to hosts who feed them. This grafting process involves us taking that little mutant cactus and attaching it to a host for the purpose of human enjoyment. So I began to think about what might be the tool, or hook, for getting the cactus onto the host and I believe it is eyelashes. Eyelashes and cuteness are the keys for

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Embracing Interdependencies — Amy Youngs Biologically Motivated

these parasites—and these are actually parasites. Humans are the ones who are doing the attaching because we find them cute.

These fluorescent cacti are a commodified entity; we can buy them at Home Depot to give to somebody or keep them on our shelf. They are alive, they are cute, and they are here because of us. They are in fact a nature-culture thing like us. I think of ourselves as perhaps the sexual organisms of this cactus now. The project I did, called Cute Parasites, was about amplifying that. It is one example of the ways I think about hyper-nature—a way to amplify nature, or our conception of nature, to put ourselves back into it. Rather than think of nature as separate, I try to think of myself as messily and intricately involved with this thing we call nature. I am of it too; I am playing a part.

Farm Fountain is a project I did with my husband Ken Rinaldo back in 2007. Our questions were: “Can we enjoy our food differently if we are making it ourselves in our house, and can we grow food in our house in Ohio year-round and feed ourselves fish and plants? Can we make a hyper-local food environment, right here?” So we created this Farm Fountain out of used 2-liter soda bottles based on the system of aquaponics, which is a known concept, but is still pretty experimental and used only in an outdoor context. We designed ours for the indoors and had our system running for about six years. We ate tilapia fish—they were delicious—and we also had beautiful Koi fish as part of the system. The fish waste circulated throughout the system on a timer cycle. The plant roots cleaned the water and received fertilizer through the metabolic processes of naturally occurring bacteria. This system is a kind of natural cleansing processor. We were working with what is already happening in nature, but we were putting it into a small scale in our house. This is an example of how I am trying to think about how I am in that system. I needed to scale it down to experience it more directly. It’s difficult to contemplate the systems of the earth that go into the food I eat, but easier when I am eating food from a system that is right inside my home.

We did successfully raise fish and eat them. We also successfully raised a lot of greens in the system. And as soon as that was working we put it online. We open-sourced this project, with

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Farm Fountain, Amy Youngs

online instructions, so that it would be shared by other people.

This project wasn’t just about us and our individual experience; it was also about wanting to share that experience with others.

Yes, food does taste different when you grow it yourself. And yes, I appreciate fish in a way that I never did before, when it takes you almost a year to grow that thing from a baby to a big fish, and even more, have to kill it yourself. First of all, how do you even catch a fish? Even in a small container, those things are hard to catch. They want to live. They are mean and spiny, and there’s so much about the act of catching, killing and cooking that was a surprise to us. So when I eat fish now, it’s a very different experience.

As I mentioned, we wanted to have that experience and share it with other people, and so we put it online. We also made a large-scale museum version so that we could involve additional viewers and new audiences and say, “Here’s a system that works, everybody should do it, this is great.” We showed it in a museum in New Zealand, and it was quite successful. They did not allow us to have tilapia fish there because they are considered pests.

So we just had ornamental fish. But the ornamental fish still operated as nutrient-producers for the plants. In traditional hydroponic systems, you have to add petrochemicals to keep the plants happy with fertilizer. In this case, all natural fertilizer comes from fish.

Now there are all of these indoor aquaponics systems for your kitchen countertop. I have mixed feelings about this. I find the systems all a little bit plasticky, and a little bit too well packaged and marketed. They don’t quite get across the same messy experiment that Ken and I were doing. But I do see that some of that messy experiment that we put out in the world has an interesting life as it percolates through the marketplace.

One of the things that I think about in my practice is the concept of ego and eco, of me being a part of the ecosystem. How do you represent that, or how do you feel that, and how do you frame that in the work very clearly? One of the things we learned from the Farm Fountain project is that killing fish is a big focus for a lot of people. “Oh wow, you killed the fish. You have made your own food. You have prevailed as a human.” It is almost a

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Biologically Motivated

Embracing Interdependencies — Amy Youngs

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Right: Holodeck for House Crickets, Amy Youngs

survivalist way of thinking. A lot of the online dialogue around aquaponics is from survivalists who feel there is going to be a catastrophe, and they need an aquaponics system in their basement to survive. They are going to be independent, not interdependent with the world. And I didn’t want to think of myself as being the conqueror of the fish and the plants.

By 2010, Ken and I developed separate interests in the Farm Fountain work. His went towards soil-based hanging gardens, and mine went towards worm-based hydroponic systems. This approach is called vermiponics and is a much lesser known, more experimental type of hydroponics. Vermiponics is more ecological because you don’t have fish which, it turns out, are difficult to feed sustainably. The River Construct project is based on worms and bacteria as the nutrient-producers for the plants.

The composting worms eat food waste, which is something we have in abundance. I set up a solar powered vermiponics system in a gallery using one of their ladders. In a residency I did in Denver, Colorado, I went to Home Depot to get some buckets and plants and to a hydroponics supply store for tubing and clay balls. I built a timer-based system powered by a pump, with electronics powered by the sun, for both humans and a rabbit. The rabbit was a failed show animal, a $15 pet-only bunny I bought from a breeder in Colorado. I transformed him into a nutrient producer in an art show, and afterward, he became a house pet—so I’m rescripting the fluidity of relationships we have with other organisms. During the exhibition, the rabbit provided poop that the gallery maintenance crew swept up and put into worm buckets. The worms ate rabbit manure as well as hay and food waste. We can now see ourselves as part of that system by petting the rabbit and eating some of the greens that grow as a result. The rabbit turned out to be quite athletic and social. He was able to jump in and out of the enclosure and would snack on the hydroponic greens and visit the gallery-going humans. A variety of unexpected relationships developed in the River Construct 2010 installation. I am interested in rethinking not only how humans act, but also how animals function differently as well. The rabbit’s food dishes were cookpots, to remind us that humans and other predators often consider rabbits as food. In

Embracing Interdependencies — Amy Youngs Biologically Motivated

this case, he was eating food, pooping, and participating in providing food—as well as some entertainment—all at the same time. I felt this was a way to re-engineer, or at least re-envision, relationships.

Another re-engineering of relationships I was engaged in involved the type of crickets that live in our homes. House crickets have found uses for us. They can’t survive outside because the wild crickets will eat them, so these crickets live with us. They are commonly considered pests, as they look a little like cockroaches and people don’t like insects in their homes.

But we found uses for them and they are now a large part of our pet food industry.

We buy them at pet stores to feed to our lizards and snakes, and there is a whole industry around that. But, I wondered: what if we changed that relationship and instead thought about

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Bottom right: Machine for Living Interdependently— detail, Amy Youngs Top right: Machine for Living Interdependently, Amy Youngs

what these insects would want? I thought they would want movies, so I made a nature movie for them. I wanted to focus on a way to think about our responsibility to these living things with which we are intimately tied. These are domestic creatures that co-evolved with us. I created a kind of bubble they could live in, a safe bubble like the safe bubbles in which we live. The movie projects on the back of their bubble but is only activated when they chirp. Only the crickets can operate this movie, and we humans can only participate as images in their world. When we look into the bubble, we are green-screened into their movie as very tiny video images. The scale-shift allows us to become a part of their world. We can’t do anything to the movie other than appear in it because we can’t make the chirping sounds that control it. The other part of the project is a re-broadcasting of the overall scene in the bubble at a large scale so that the images of us and the crickets appear together, at similar scales in the room.

Playing with scale-shifts is one of the ways I try to think about how we interact with other creatures. Reframing existing relationships makes it possible for us to see the creatures differently.

The crickets in this piece, called Encounters of a Domestic Nature, live in their plastic world built of 3d models—very much like our world. They are in their own special domestic space. So we encounter these creatures at a different scale and also with a different level of respect. Many of my projects try to remind us of this: if we meet nature with a sense of respect, we might be able to learn something from it rather than just exploit it.

This isn’t a new idea. There are Tang Dynasty Chinese objects designed for crickets. Some are singing gourds designed so that cricket sounds are amplified based on the shape of the delicately carved container. Some are intended to be worn against your body so you can keep the cricket warm. They like to sing at the temperature of your body, a display of this intimate connection.

The next project I will share is the Machine for Living Interdependently. In a video that documents the piece I introduce it as a mechanical device. Composting worms are incredible waste-processors. They turn food waste into beautiful fertilizer for your plants. It is such an elegantly simple system. This machine is an interface that helps you live interdependently with

Embracing Interdependencies — Amy Youngs Biologically Motivated

worms. If you don’t like seeing the worms, that’s okay; they don’t like seeing you either. They are hidden inside this machine in a dark, wet space. They move throughout stainless steel cones, transporting nutrients through the plant roots, and never emerge outside where it’s too dry and bright. This is also a vermiponic system, but this one is powered by a human in a rocking chair.

You rock in the chair, read your newspaper, eat your carrot, put your waste into the worm bin, and you don’t even need to

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38 Top: WormSelfie Photobooth, Amy Youngs

Bottom: Machine for Living Interdependently—detail, Amy Youngs

Embracing Interdependencies — Amy Youngs Biologically Motivated

know about the worms—they do the rest of the business, turning the waste into fertilizer for the plants. I don’t know why everyone doesn’t have this. It is the perfect machine for living interdependently.

I have shown this piece a few times and in different places, but mostly it is on display in my office at the Ohio State University, where I work. I felt that it would be important for me to cohabitate with it and keep it alive over an extended period. I had to set up a small pump on a timer because I don’t rock in the chair every day.

But I did want to present worms in an approachable way. This highlights the giant problem of greenhouse gasses, with methane being the worst of them. It turns out that landfills are one of the largest producers of methane gas and that most of the materials within landfills are food, paper wastes, and yard clippings. All of those are things that worms can eat. Worms embedded in homes are the simplest solution. Somebody needs to monetize this now. No one has yet because it is still too weird.

I recently did an exhibition that was completely dedicated to worms. One of the projects was a webcam that made worms visible. Worms hate light, which is why you can only really work with certain frequencies of red light or infrared light to make them visible. This webcam was online 24/7. You could watch them eat the food waste over time, or you could watch a time-lapse, which is what most have people wanted to do. The webcam was part of an exhibition that I did to try to normalize worms. This is what artists can do; we can begin to normalize things. It’s not so scary having worms in your home, I promise. But if you’re still not convinced, consider the exhibition I did called the Vermiculture Makers Club. I was trying to encourage other people to make projects around worms that would help us integrate them into our lives, and to feel interdependent with them.

I made a worm selfie booth. That was a success because everybody loves to see themselves. People don’t always like to see worms, but they were stomaching that. They would enter the worm selfie booth, illuminated with a red light so that the worms weren’t afraid. You could not use flash photography here.

You would just press the button for the camera to take a picture

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40 Top and bottom: Worm Cozy, Amy Youngs

Embracing Interdependencies — Amy Youngs Biologically Motivated

that would automatically upload to Flickr. It was automatically publicized with the hashtag #wormselfie. You could then go find yourself there. You were in the network with the worms. You were socially networking with worms and showing them as not so scary. They’re not. They are happy, you are happy, worms are okay, we are going to love them. There is a great future with worms, I promise.

If you are still not convinced, I made another project called Worm Cozies. These are designed to hide worms in your domestic spaces while also being very functional worm bins. I do take function seriously because I am currently living with each one of these things.

I made cook pot systems out of stainless steel with colander bottoms that allow the worms to circulate. You feed the system at the top, and the worms migrate up to the food. You can add new levels as the system gets full. This arrangement makes it easy to take the fertilizer out of the bottom levels, separating the worms from their completed fertilizer. All these components are things that come from Goodwill and Home Depot. They are meant to be every day, but also intended to hide the fact that you have worms in your home. Nobody will ever know, even your grandma. You could have worms in a little flowerpot with a little hat on top.

Everyone’s happy; nobody knows. I’m thinking about those toasters that were so scary to people in the 1950s that people, like my grandma, hid them with a toaster cozy. We are at that point with worms. We are about to be okay with them soon.

But if you are still not convinced, you can hide worms in teddy bears. I pretty much did the whole show with things I could find in thrift stores. There are a lot of teddy bears at the thrift store, and they are one of those things that made us okay with wild nature. Bears were no longer scary. They became cute, cuddly, fluffy things that you give your kids. So with worms hiding inside teddy bears, I think it completes the circle.

Part of that project was to make a blog called worm culture to invite other people and their projects to be collected. I am blogging about other interesting projects happening in other parts the world. I also gave out a worm prize. Last year, one thousand dollars was split between four different people who

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received Vermiculture Makers Club prizes for their interesting projects, like the Street Corner Composter in Amsterdam. Making these things important and, as an artist, evaluating other artists, designers, and creative thinkers working in this realm is something that interests me.

A project I did at the Ohio State University recently involved noticing animals on the campus. It began as a hashtagging project that grew into something more. The grant that my team received focused on placemaking. The call for projects was something like “Our campus is growing, there are all of these new buildings, it’s 24/7 campus, and all of the students have to live in the dorms for the first two years. We need a sense of place with reconstruction going on everywhere. Artists/creative people, please help us out.”

So the project that my team came up with was to have people notice animals on campus, to feel that they are a valued part of the campus, and to think about how we are building and designing our buildings and spaces in relation to animals.

The first part of it was just noticing. We used the hashtag #animalsosu and people would take pictures and video of whatever animals they saw: dead, alive, animal traces, bird nests— a little of everything was coming across the social media. We also hosted interesting events like bat-detecting. We used ultrasonic receivers so that we could hear bat sounds. Bats make ultrasonic calls that we can’t hear, but these devices can translate the sounds into clicking noises that you can also feel when you’re holding this thing pulsing “da-da-da-da.” It is like a super power feeling connected to these bats. They are no longer weird, scary, or other. They become something we look forward to seeing and experiencing.

We also wanted to use technology. We wanted to place wildlife webcams around campus to find out which animals were there when we weren’t watching. It turns out there are already thousands of cameras on campus for security purposes. They’re all very top-secret so we couldn’t visit them, but we talked to entire teams of people who watch them. One watcher is a mapmaker who helped me make a map based on the animal-sighting reports of all those who watch the cameras. This was all part of

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Embracing Interdependencies — Amy Youngs Biologically Motivated

how we thought about where we would place our webcams. We considered what was already out there, what was already known—like the fact that foxes travel on the train tracks. We did not know that.

After placing webcams in various locations, we saw humans, dogs, babies, ducks, raccoons, and possums in and out of the same space. The sense of shared space between all these kinds of animals was exciting to me. I worked with my students to take some of the recorded video clips from the cameras and turn them into animations that we rotoscoped into frame-by-frame captures based on the movement of the animals.

One of the other projects we did with the hashtag images was put them into an online Instagram map so that you can see these animals and their locations based on the hashtag.

We also did the same thing with the dead birds found all across campus. We worked with Angelica Nelson from the Museum of Biological Diversity, who constantly collects dead birds that hit the windows of campus buildings. Clear windows look like openings to birds, and any dead bird that was found ended up in her museum, stuffed with a tag. She records where these are found to see which buildings kill the most birds, which is pretty interesting. Based on that kind of interaction with her, I created a project entirely out of dead birds for the Biopresence exhibition.

The museum has drawers full of thousands of dead birds, mostly killed by our buildings. That got me thinking: What if we thought about our architecture from the perspective of the birds, what would the birds say? I thought they would go on strike in protest. So I used 116 of these dead bird bodies to spell out the word “strike” and then placed them into one of these very glassy window spaces in the art building. We had them up for just one day because they are so fragile. In the exhibition, we worked with animation, video, 3D rapid prototyping, installations, digital imaging, moving image art, and robotics. Students were thinking about Biopresence, and we gave them assignments related to the topic. Then we curated a show of the best works. We had hundreds of pieces. Students are still making Biopresence artworks today.

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44 Top: STRIKE, Amy Youngs

Bottom: STRIKE—detail, Amy Youngs

Embracing Interdependencies — Amy Youngs Biologically Motivated

This semester I did a very crazy project with a collaborator I have worked with before, Iris Meier, who works in the Department of Molecular Genetics. We decided to teach a class called Underground Symbiosis. I am very interested in networks, worms, and underground things. She is starting her research into mycorrhizal networks and thinking about their cellular mechanics. How do these symbiotic relationships get started? Apparently, the symbiotic relationship between fungi and plants is 400 million years old. 80% of all the plants that we know have fungi inhabiting their cells. The plants invite these fungi into their cells so they can benefit from the nutrients and communication they provide. To me, this is just mind blowing. I can’t even imagine it.

We decided to do a class where art and science students work together on one big art project related to mycorrhizal fungi. It is challenging to study because it is all underground, so we thought we would investigate it with students and create a project in which we are also a part. We did a lot of experiments with soybean nodulation and rhizobia: staining, microscopy, going to the greenhouse, growing things, and learning the science behind it.

We got pretty good at doing this microscopy as we tried to understand the organisms. Just trying to dig in and get at it, asking what is going on here and how can we understand and talk about it. Ultimately my goal was to understand how we could experience this in an embodied way. Do we just experience it through beautiful images or can we experience it sensually with smell, texture, movement, and the movement of bodies in space?

We worked in a conference room and transformed it into a cell. The room is now a plant cell, and we’ve created a fungal tunnel inside it. We used video projection to indicate the nucleus of the cell. We used wire, different kinds of fabric, and a lot of projections and light because we wanted the experience to be inviting for humans. We wanted something that people could enter and have the sense of being part of a system—or imagine what it might be like to be a fungal particle traveling through a tunnel that is part of this plant cell. We used little bracelets made out of laser cut paper that represented minerals. Fungi actively mine minerals, dissolving rocks and getting things like phosphates out of them. Apparently, they are the most

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46 Top and bottom: Where Rocks Are Fed to Trees, Amy Youngs

Embracing Interdependencies — Amy Youngs Biologically Motivated

effective miners in the world. They pull these minerals through their networks and then deliver them to the plants, into their root cells. Our bracelets represented the minerals. The microtubules of the cells were these strings that you attached the bracelets to, so you exit the tunnel walls with your hands to attach the minerals to the cellular structure. Once you place your mineral—you are attracted to do this by a flashing nucleus that has images of microscopy on it—then you can take a sweet. We had rock candy pops resting on these vesicle-like shapes. People could grab the candy once they hung their mineral bracelet. We modeled that exchange where fungi, in return for the mineral, receive nutrients required for survival.

It’s not just a happy, peaceful symbiotic thing; it’s a life or death connection for the fungi, and potentially for the plants. The fungi would die if not for this relationship in which they are fed by the plant cells. We also taught in a symbiotic way, as people who are vulnerable. As instructors, we each understand our field.

But I didn’t understand much about the biology and my collaborator didn’t understand much about art. And our students were also learning. So we were all learning together, and we had a sense that whether or not the project failed or succeeded was on all of us—we were all in the same boat. I think that made me a far better teacher, frankly, to those students. I needed them to succeed because their success was a part of my success.

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Living Systems — David Benjamin Biologically Motivated

I am particularly happy to be here at an event called “Biologically Motivated,” in part because our work at The Living has focused on the idea that buildings and cities are living, breathing organisms. They have metabolisms. They live in complex ecosystems, with interconnected loops of ideas, technologies, culture, politics, humans, nonhumans, and the natural environment. Each loop relates to and relies on the others.

Technology without culture doesn’t make sense. An environment without justice doesn’t make sense. Humans without nonhumans don’t make sense. The individual loops gain their strength and traction through their interconnections. In that way, we believe that each of our projects—and our collective projects within architecture, other disciplines, and in society—make sense when they come together and make connections.

And it is within this context that we’ve been exploring what I call prototypes for the buildings and cities of the future. For example, we created glass that breathes in response to people— combining sensors and information. We created a pavilion that glows and blinks in response to air quality—combining the environment and public space. We designed a wall that displays real-time social media graffiti—combining robotics and public debate. And for a project called “Street Life” in Shenzhen and Hong Kong, we created soup bowls that reveal hidden messages in street food stalls—combining street culture and critical discourse.

More recently we’ve been designing using actual living systems. We’re starting to combine biology with digital technologies and create an ecosystem that includes living organisms as well as physical sensors and electronics. For example, we recently created a prototype building envelope for the Chicago Architecture Biennial that combines frogs, snails, ultrasonic sensors, and microcontrollers to filter air and create a new architectural aesthetic. Much of our recent work has involved expanding our original ecosystem and combining biology, computation, and design.

Of course, it’s important to note that architects and designers have been inspired by biology for hundreds of years. But I think that biology today is very different than 100 years ago. You

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Right: Bio-Computaion, The Living Left: Street Life, The Living

now have the ability to do things like grow cells on a glass chip isolated from other cells instead of inside a living organism.

You can create incredible visualizations such as a video of neurons firing inside of a living tadpole in real-time. You can even visualize the molecular signaling of stem cells as they communicate with one another and decide whether to grow into bone, heart, or skin tissue. And you can apply the latest techniques of computation to biology to better understand these amazing properties. As we know, biology is very complex. But if you can encapsulate it in something like a computer model, then it can become a more actionable part of the design ecosystem. This idea has sparked our recent work, which has centered on three different approaches to biology, computation, and design that we believe are very promising.

The first approach is biocomputation, which means using living organisms as tiny computers to solve problems at a human scale. One of our biocomputation projects involved a collaboration with plant biologist Fernan Federici. Together with Fernan, we wanted to look at biological cells and see if we could understand what is going on when they grow. We started with xylem cells—cells in the stems of plants that grow in incredibly interesting and complex geometrical configurations called exoskeletons. We worked with Fernan and his cutting-edge tools of microscope imaging to take photographs of xylem cells.

Then we took a series of different xylem cells and analyzed them

Living Systems  —  David Benjamin Biologically Motivated

to determine information like the length of each exoskeleton bar and the angle of each bar. We put this data into a massive spreadsheet and then used a computer program to derive an equation that explains the data. We did this because we could then generate a low-resolution computer model of what an exoskeleton of a xylem cell might be. We could use this model to recreate xylem cells like the ones in nature, but we could also use the computer model to generate xylem cells that never existed in nature in the first place. We could compute what a xylem cell would be like if it was an L-shape or a bracket shape or a skyscraper shape.

We were interested in whether we could apply this biocomputing and this biological algorithm of how xylem cells grow to solve some example of a human scale problem, and we started by thinking about a chair. What we were thinking was that with these new technologies and experimentation, we could not only redesign the chair but redesign the way we design chairs. In the traditional process of designing a chair, you might start with a sketch of the rough idea of a chair and then gradually develop it and make design decisions based on known materials and available stock dimensions. But what if in this new way of thinking

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52 Top: Evolving Chair— matrix of options, The Living

Bottom: Evolving Chair, The Living

Living Systems — David Benjamin Biologically Motivated

about design we could define some things that we know for sure, and then define a zone where we’re willing to be more experimental? We could start thinking about design in a way that would take advantage of things like biological logics, biological algorithms, and then design in a new way without complete control.

We could acknowledge uncertainty and discover new possibilities that aren’t completely from our own minds.

The way we played this out was to apply the xylem cell algorithm to the design of possible supports for a chair. We could take that algorithm and tune it one way to get pretty typical legs of a chair, but we could also adjust a few parameters and then get a much more unusual chair structure. By using the biological algorithm as fuel, we could use other techniques of computation in a kind of artificial evolution process to simulate every possible design, to automate the process of generating designs, and then create a field of a thousand or 10,000 different chair designs.

These are then represented as data points, and each point has a physical form and is either better or worse at achieving our goals of using a low amount of material and having a low amount of structural displacement. We then began to think about manufacturing technologies that would make this kind of thing possible.

We could go all the way from an idea to a physical construction in this ecosystem of the computer. And this approach took an interesting twist when we started working with a real-life company to complete a real-life project based on biocomputation.

We created a partnership with Airbus to redesign an airplane component with the same general approach—more specifically, a partition wall, a thin wall that separates the seating area from the galley of an airplane. This is a surprisingly big challenge for airplane design due a few different reasons. First of all, the specific component can only be anchored to the fuselage at four points. Then, it has to hold a fold-down cabin attendant seat hanging off of it, and finally, it has to withstand incredible structural forces. On top of all that, the partition, as of recently, has to have a cutout which is called a “stretcher flap.” This means that the center of the panel has to be removable due to new safety regulations. With these conditions in mind, we turned to a very interesting and inspiring example of the growth of slime

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Bionic Partition, The Living

mold as the basis of our design. The fascinating thing about slime mold when it grows is that it starts with a very dense network of thin bars that connect to food sources. The organism as a whole can compute the most efficient and robust way to connect these sources of food. The way it does this is to send out tiny filaments and then decide which connections are the most important. It then removes the filaments that are not necessary and reinforces or thickens those filaments that are more necessary. As a result, slime mold grows in adaptive networks that are incredibly efficient and robust. What we did in this project was create a biological algorithm modeled on this slime mold growth. That is to say that the algorithm uses those same properties of creating a 2-D network that is efficient and robust to create a completely new design for the airplane partition. Just like the chair project with a xylem algorithm, we set up an artificial evolution process in the computer and explored 10,000 designs. We used data visualization and other number-crunching techniques to make sense of all possible design options. In the end, we were able to create a design that was both lower weight than the traditional component and even a little bit better at performing structurally.

This project seems pretty far out, but for us and Airbus, it was also very real, and we wanted to test it out in real life. So we ended up manufacturing the component through 3-D printing, and we used a custom alloy that was invented by Airbus and their parent company. We were combining traditional aerospace

Living Systems — David Benjamin Biologically Motivated

design and requirements with the design of new materials and molecular structures, new kinds of manufacturing processes through advanced 3-D printing in metals, and the new biological design approach, to come together and create designs and design possibilities that are beyond typical rules of thumb. In fact, this is so far beyond typical rules of thumb that this project has created a bit of controversy within Airbus. Some engineers, although they’ve seen the validation and although they believe that this is probably going to work, are nervous about it because they can’t quite understand the process. That to me is a really interesting key to our future of design with biology: we may not be able to understand it and if so, how can we get more comfortable with the process? Finally, this project is the largest metal 3-D printed airplane component ever. It’s not just a demonstration; it’s undergoing the certification process to fly in airplanes in the existing fleet of A320 planes. And this is not just engineering for efficiency’s sake; it’s about sustainability in the end, since the new lighter component will save fuel and reduce a huge amount of carbon emissions over the life of the plane.

The next approach is biosensing. This approach shares some properties with each of the previous presentations, but biosensing means using living organisms to detect conditions of their environment and respond accordingly. In one project, we are prototyping an installation for the city of New York and creating a floating network of lights in the East River between Manhattan and Brooklyn. These lights have sensors below water that detect things like water quality and the presence of fish, and there are lights above water that blink and change colors according to this information. We did an initial version of this project several years ago, but recently we’ve added to the equation biological sensors in addition to digital sensors. The way this works is through utilizing living mussels. Mussels pulse as they are opening and closing their shells, and the rate and the amount at which they do this is an incredibly sophisticated and sensitive detector of water pollution. In fact, a mussel is better at detecting water pollution than our best digital sensor. This has allowed us to build off some scientific research papers and find that it’s possible to glue a Hall Effect sensor to one side of a mussel shell

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Right: Mycelium Left: Pier 35 EcoPark, The Living

and a cheap magnet to the other side, and then harness the natural ability of a mussel to detect water quality. This points to a really interesting potential for design and architecture to combine artificial intelligence with natural intelligence. In other words, to combine the best that computing has to offer—artificial intelligence— with the best that biology has to offer— biological intelligence—that has evolved over millions of years to do incredibly complex things. The combination of natural intelligence plus artificial intelligence offers an incredible hybrid design palette.

This approach gives us the ability to create things like the project in New York. In this project, we are making a prototype in the context of city lights. Our lights are dynamic in a different way than typical city lights; our lights change more than once a second, they show things like water quality and the presence of fish, and they blink when you send in text messages with information. Therefore, you get a collective register of environmental quality. Part of the project is a provocation: as these new hybrid design tools get implemented in the built environment, how should they be used? Perhaps they should be used for important information about public space, environment, and the life of

Living Systems — David Benjamin Biologically Motivated

the city. Based on our test installation we’ve now been commissioned to create a 200-foot-long floating pier in the East River that is scheduled for construction late this fall.

The third and final method is biomanufacturing, which means using living biological organisms as tiny factories to generate material that can be used for the built environment. We used this approach on a project for a yearly competition by the Museum of Modern Art to create a structure for their courtyard.

Our project is called “Hy-Fi” and the idea was to create a new approach to design and manufacturing that would allow us to create a building with almost no waste, embodied energy, or carbon emissions. In other words, we were interested in seeing if we could create a building that would grow from nothing but earth and then return to nothing but earth. Our thinking was informed by the diagram of the Carbon Cycle, which is an endless healthy loop of growth, decay, and regrowth. Based on the diagram we asked ourselves, could we make a building by temporarily borrowing from the Carbon Cycle and then returning to the Carbon Cycle? More specifically, we were interested in seeing if we could start with a low-value raw material, spend almost no energy converting the material into building blocks, then make a useful structure. Then, at the end of the useful life of that structure, we could return all the physical matter back to

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58 Top: Hy-Fi mycelium building blocks, The Living

Bottom: Hy-Fi, The Living

Living Systems — David Benjamin Biologically Motivated

the Carbon Cycle instead of putting it in a landfill. To do this, our secret weapon was the branching, root-like part of mushrooms and fungi called mycelium. You can combine mycelium with agricultural waste to form a solid object of any shape.

Our idea was to use this process to create a new kind of brick.

This brick would combine the ancient technology of the forest and newer high-tech engineering and computation to create a viable building material. But since no one had ever made a largescale outdoor structure out of this material, we had to do a lot of testing. We conducted physical tests of both single bricks and assemblies of bricks to see how they would perform under load.

And we conducted digital tests with structural analysis software.

We had to make sure our building could withstand hurricane force winds of 75 miles per hour. This phase of the project involved an interesting feedback loop. We were simultaneously designing at the scale of the material, changing growing times and ratios of ingredients; designing at the scale of the building block, changing the size and shape of the brick; and designing at the scale of the building, changing the form and orientation of the overall structure.

We then faced another problem, which was that the bricks are different on the inside than the outside. They have a protective skin on the outside that’s more or less waterproof, but the inside is more porous. This meant that unlike some traditional brick architecture, we couldn’t make a complex geometry of the structure by cutting bricks on site to make them fit. Again, we turned to computation to help solve our problems. We used the computer to solve two issues. One is a fitting problem: each course of bricks is a slightly different length, and we had to be able to fit bricks of standard size into each different course. The other is a stacking problem: every brick has to rest properly on two bricks below it with at least two inches of overlap. These issues were impossible to solve by a rule of thumb, and we needed a computer to figure out how to stack 10,000 bricks in a way that met both the stacking and fitting criteria.

Once on site at MoMA, we took all the ingredients and combined them with an ecosystem of knowledge and expertise in labor. During construction we had two very different groups of

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people: we had Columbia University graduate architecture students who knew about computation and form, and we had New York City brick masons who knew a lot about stacking things.

When these two groups worked together to solve problems in real time, it demonstrated the ecosystem and interconnected loops ideas. We were not only engaging how we could make this as a physical construct; we were engaging how we could create an ecosystem of creativity, labor, and collaboration.

The completed structure is about 40 feet tall with about 10,000 bricks. The structure is at once familiar and completely new. It has an unusual appearance in the context of the glass and steel skyscrapers of Manhattan and the traditional clay brick architecture of MoMA PS1. The project was not only about exploring the technical performance of this new material. It was also about exploring the atmospheric performance. We wanted to know what the material would be like to design with, what it would be like to stand inside the atmosphere of this structure, what the qualities of pattern, light, and shadow would be like. But the ultimate test of one of the project, as anyone who has been to MoMA PS1 in the summer knows, is its ability to host a party. Because every Saturday, 5,000 people come to the courtyard to hear experimental electronic music, and they interact with the architecture and respond to it. This was thrilling, terrifying, and entirely fitting for us in our thinking about architectural prototyping and an ecosystem of design. In other words, it was appropriate for us to test the project out in culture, out in society—to not only test it on a lab bench or in the roped-off corner of a construction site—but to test it out in public.

Perhaps the most important test of the project was at the end. After the three-month summer installation, we disassembled the structure, crumbed the bricks into smaller pieces, combined them with food scraps and bacteria and worms, and took all of the physical matter of the structure and returned it to high-quality soil in 60 days. We then gave the soil to the city for tree planting, and to local community gardens. If nothing else, this project started to make us realize that as architects and

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Living Systems — David Benjamin Biologically Motivated

designers we should be thinking about designing to disappear as much as we think about designing to appear. This approach to an ecosystem, this expanding of the boundaries of an architecture project over space and time, is something that will have legs in the future.

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Panel Discussion Biologically Motivated

Audience: David talked a lot about using evolutionary algorithms to figure out optimal design strategies, and I’m surprised this is not a more widespread practice. So what is limiting this practice?

Is it about us wanting to be in charge of the whole creative process, or is it about a lack of knowledge?

Benjamin: That’s a good question and it’s something I’ve thought a lot about. I’ve been working on genetic algorithms and evolutionary computation for a while now, including teaching studios at Columbia GSAPP using this approach. My first studio was almost ten years ago, and when I invited in a jury of practicing architects, academic architects, and some engineers to the final reviews, it took a long time to describe to them what was going on. I would tell them the computer is generating options, but it’s not doing it on its own because you have to tell it the possible geometries and goals. Then I would tell them the computer can score each option by using simulation tools for structure and energy use, etc. Then I would address whether the designer has any control of the process. I would say, yes the designer has control because there’s a whole data set and even if you wanted the computer to tell you one right answer, as soon as there are two objectives or two goals, it’s mathematically impossible to have one single answer—instead you get a set of best answers.

So there was all of this discussion about the approach.

Now when I teach studios that use that same approach and invite the same kind of people, they immediately know exactly what I’m talking about and what our studio is talking about. So the thinking has caught up, and it’s my intuition that this is because previously people didn’t know what we were talking about when we were designing with objectives or goals rather than designing single forms. But now every architecture project is using structural simulation software, energy analysis software, environmental performance software, and people are getting more familiar with wind flow analysis, calculating things like public space and leasable area, and having these metrics be part of the automatic output of a computer model. As soon as you have all of that complexity and all of that data, I think it’s natural to say, “I need to manage this and I need to balance the trade-offs

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Audience: You all discussed the usefulness of evolution, but what I find most interesting about biology are the places where adaptations haven’t happened—or systems aren’t robust— because organisms are constrained by their existing genetic variation and their evolutionary histories. I’m curious how you see that imperfect aspect of evolution fitting into your design, art, and architecture.

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David Benjamin

between structure and public space, between environmental performance and wind flow, between good views at the top area of the building and good street access at the bottom of the building.”

So I think more widespread use of this approach is coming, and I already see it a little bit in the software available to architects and designers. This is going to open up some other questions and what I hope is that this approach doesn’t get fully hijacked for efficiency because you could easily use the software to make the fastest, lowest-cost building that’s just about leasable area and profit. But what I think is so interesting is that the same software could be used to enhance our creativity and have a debate about our values—like whether it’s more important to favor public space or leasable area—and this exposes everyone’s position and gets us talking about what is most important in architecture. So I’m hopeful that somehow our software will allow for this, and that our culture will engage in this, and that we as thoughtful designers will push for this and not allow the approach to be used only to justify the efficiency model.

Panel Discussion

Youngs: Maybe I need an example?

Audience: With genetic disorders, if you have a point mutation in your genome that’s inherited, you are dead at birth. Or a giraffe that has a very long neck, but which evolved from organisms that didn’t have long necks, and now the giraffe’s neck has certain blood vessels that travel very long distances around the bones.

Essentially, we could design a better giraffe.

Biologically Motivated

Youngs: That’s interesting, and maybe efficiency isn’t always the thing we are after. I love this idea that efficiency is just one of the possible goals. Maybe it speaks to the messiness of biology and reminds us that what we think of as natural—”nature is always right”—isn’t quite what we imagine. Maybe nature is always right, maybe we’re not always right, and maybe things are messier— which opens up the possibility for the unexpected to happen. I celebrate things like the mutant cacti. They are funny, so let’s celebrate them and enjoy them and think about what they might signify for other possible interactions.

Benjamin: As I understand the question, it relates to something I hear a lot from some of my biology collaborators, which is that our natural world could have been different. Our natural world and its living organisms have been optimized for certain things, but at the same time, they could have been different. They developed based on random mutation as well as natural selection.

And the random mutation means there’s a chance to how things worked out. But with new technologies, the exciting—but also weird and sometimes scary—part of it is that biology is getting to where we could change it. We could make a giraffe with the shorter neck or longer neck or we could make other animals with a long neck. I know that seems like a funny example, but it’s relevant and very real when we think about something like the Zika virus and the possibility that we could genetically engineer out the part of the mosquito population that carries the virus. This immediately brings up questions about trade-offs and risk, and I totally agree with what you’re saying, that there’s no sense of pure nature anyway. We’ve been messing with nature for a long

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Olszewski: I think there is an argument for drawing inspiration from, and riffing on, biology while forgetting about perfection, because that gives you the agency and freedom to take it where you want.

Willow: I’m wondering how we became more interested in flowing across disciplines and being informed by things that people see as external to our main concerns.

Audience: Today we’ve heard about projects that span very different disciplines ranging from biology to architecture, art, and medical devices. How do you communicate the complexity of these projects to coworkers and the public—a kind of universal translation?

Willow: I think about Amy’s discussion of the Exploratorium as an environment where she had direct access to observing how people read exhibitions, and how their reading was quite different than that of the exhibition designers. I also think the work

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Amy Youngs

time, but I do think it’s important for us as a society to get a little bit more “bio-literate and know that these new technologies are different than what we have had before. This whole CRISPR thing is quite different than breeding apples, for example.

My last thought is that designers should be more aware of this, and they should be part of the debate. It shouldn’t just be the public health people and the politicians and the molecular biologists talking about it.

Panel Discussion

is naturally participatory. It is meant to engage people in their daily living environments, as well as in exhibitions.

Then I think about how David’s PS1 material is so intriguing that it can’t be left untouched. I also think of the way Jeff describes all the interactions between people who are trying to solve very particular things, but then having an empathetic relationship to the people served by these medical interventions. The translation is present in each speaker’s way of understanding how they approach their work.

Biologically Motivated

Swackhamer: For me, an interesting question about all three presentations is the role of research in the work and how there are different modalities for conducting it. Amy, I loved how you built a hydroponic system in your house and tested it over time, learning a lot through direct interaction. Similarly, Jeff, the picture of you with porcupine quills in your chin is direct and funny, but you must have known more about those quills after doing that than just by reading about quills. I’m wondering about the relationship between this kind of direct research and relying on others’ knowledge, and when you might focus on one modality versus another in your work.

Karp: I always feel that a project is this incredible journey, and there’s a significant degree of excitement in not knowing everything and taking these leaps of faith. A lot of people who are deep within the discipline of medicine end up being much more narrowly focused, and it’s hard to be creative. Bob Langer, my mentor, says that for certain projects he’s glad he didn’t look at the literature because it would have told him one hundred reasons why what he was doing wouldn’t work.

Olszewski: Concerning research modalities: David, in your project with the xylem informing shapes and forms, did you think about pushing the biology further? Xylem cells must resist collapsing because they are often under tension in a tree. When you do your structural test, do you look at how they perform based on the function in the plant, or just subject them to every stress you can think of?

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Benjamin: That’s a great observation and question. I wouldn’t have known that, but my collaborator did because he’s an expert in xylem cells. Another part of your question is about translation.

It took each of us a while just to understand what the other one was talking about because we had different motivations as well as different audiences. For example, he knew that a xylem cell responds to water pressure, and this is a very specific kind of force. Also, they are a specific size and made of specific materials. So his question to me—he said it more politely—was why in the world would we think that the xylem cell is a good structure for designing something at a different scale, made out of a different material, with simplified geometry that does not have curves or filets? That wasn’t even the biggest challenge. The biggest challenge was that what I showed here was the furthest limit of what he would even want to show his colleagues because it was just a loose idea of the xylem cell translated into a computer model that was found very opportunistically, and the structure might or might not work. But I don’t care if it’s true to the real thing. As long as it works and expands my design palette, it could be good enough for me.

We did have a couple of other versions of the xylem project that I didn’t show. One was based on some transgenic tricks, where Fernan made a cell in the leaf of a plant grow in the exoskeleton configuration of a xylem cell. Leaf cells have these very amoeba-like convoluted shapes that are very different from typical xylem cells. This discovery led to a common ground in the project that we are still researching. You can grow cells using microfluidics in a little glass chip instead of the stem of the plant.

Panel Discussion

And we realized that there’s no constraint on the shape of the tube of the microfluidic chip. It could be U-shaped, a cylinder, L-shaped, tennis shoe-shaped, or skyscraper- or stadiumshaped, and if you grow a xylem cell in these different shapes, you would be using the genetic program for the growth pattern of a xylem cell to form a shape that it never encountered before.

Fernan thinks this would be interesting and publishable in the scientific community, and I believe it would be interesting and useful to me for design, and that’s the common ground it took us a year to develop; a project that he thought was research for him and that I thought was research for me.

Audience: Jeff, I’m curious to know how you to talk within your lab. What is your internal dialogue and how do you talk to your team?

Karp: Are you referring to an internal discussion that happens that’s potentially filtered from the outside world?

Biologically Motivated

Audience: Yes. What is the internal conversation you have concerning your research challenges?

Karp: I believe that when you have people at the table who are bringing different expertise and different experiences, there will be new ideas that are more exciting than the initial idea. So I have populated my lab with people from many different disciplines like biology, immunology, material science, multiple forms engineering, as well as clinicians. By being able to put together teams that can brainstorm and then bring in others with fieldspecific expertise, I think we can get to solutions that are even better than originally anticipated. With this composition, I am confident we can figure things out even if we know very little in the beginning.

I was recently talking with somebody about the multidisciplinary nature of my lab, which has had employees from around 30 different countries. In certain places, people innovate out of necessity as part of their natural existence. So, people are contributing to solutions not only from the expertise they have

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learned through the formal education process but also from how they’ve been brought up in their communities. I’m confident that having a diverse team means we can figure things out even if we know almost nothing when we start.

Swackhamer: That’s really good advice for our architecture students in the audience. When you begin an independent project, you don’t have to have it all figured out. It’s great to hear this advice coming from a scientist.

Karp: I can give a quick example of this. One of the first people in my lab was a high school student named Maeve. She had no experience whatsoever working in the lab, and she came to me on her first day and asked, “What should I do?” and I said, “Why don’t you design an experiment.” She replied, “I’ve never designed an experiment,” and I said, “It doesn’t matter whether you design an experiment that’s going to work; just write down what you’re thinking and how you would go about it. We will make it into an iterative process, and I guarantee that you will eventually get it to work.” Within two or three months, she was designing her own experiments, collecting data, and communicating the data in a graph format.

I always tell students that the greatest thing that they can achieve is scientific confidence, which is confidence in their ability to design something, fail, and then step back and go at it again knowing the second time will have a better result. To me, the greatest thing students can gain by conducting research is confidence in their ability, because then they take leaps of faith. The greater the leap of faith you take, the greater the potential outcome.

Youngs: My internal dialogue is something like “perfection is the enemy of the good,” which also gets at “you’re not gonna get it perfect.” But you have to get it out, and that “getting out” process of making or researching means you have something to work from and something to play with. This also gets to some of the questions around how do you research, and I think play is a big part of it. You have the thing out there; it’s not perfect but it’s

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Panel Discussion

something that can be played with, and that other people can play with.

Audience: I’m wondering whether your work is an example of a new relationship between man and nature, or is it the same relationship with new technology? Do you think we need a new relationship between man and nature?

Karp: I think it would be brilliant if there were a way to communicate with nature such that nature could share solutions a little more easily with us. Now we go out and look at nature with specific types of spectroscopy, microscopes, and other instruments, but I wonder if there is a better way that we can interact with nature and learn about potential solutions?

Biologically Motivated

Snell-Rood: In genomics, some people think that one day we will be able to read off the DNA sequences of an organism and they will tell us all of its adaptations and secrets, but I’m not sure that will ever happen simply because development is not that deterministic.

Benjamin: I’m not sure it’s entirely relevant to your question, but I have been thinking about blind spots. Humans always have blind spots—some of them are based on a discipline and some are based on personality. Throughout history, with different technologies and different understandings of nature, design, and science, we have had blind spots. And when we get to another point in time, we recognize some of the blind spots, either personally or in terms of society’s new understanding of the world.

There are some incredible new biological technologies that change parts of the discussion, but I don’t think anything is absolute or final. My understanding of humans and knowledge is that in 100 years everything is going to be different. We may look back on this moment in biotechnology and even genomics and say, “Oh, that was just really naïve.” I think that gets me back to the concept we were talking about a little bit earlier, about designing without complete control, and recognizing that even though we want to know everything, we may never know it. I

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do think that one response to the situation — if you follow my logic about the kind of blind spots in knowledge — is getting more comfortable with both keeping your eyes open to reduce the blind spots, and acknowledging that a lot of our understanding is contingentand will change in the future.

Youngs: We are nature, so we don’t have a real change in our relationship with it. But through technology, we learn things about ourselves, like the fact that we are mostly made of other kinds of non-human cells. It’s that kind of knowledge that makes it impossible to think of ourselves not as nature, but we are still grappling with it. We still think we are really different and special, but technology has shown us that we are not. We are recalibrating all the time to try to understand who we are in relation to nature.

Willow: One of the things I think about a lot is childhood and children’s relationship to what we think of as nature, and how restricted that contact has become for the majority of children. In the U.S. this is based on concepts of safety, access, and distance from home, as well as the diversity of life surrounding children. For me, this question exists within a larger question, because I imagine that each of us has a particularly deep relationship to whatever we refer to as the natural world.

What happens when that isn’t a kind of common knowledge or common wealth of society?

Benjamin: I love that point. I think part of what you’re describing is a kind of understanding through immersion—through things that make us human. I think the human element is important in the context of biological technologies and also computer technologies. There is an interesting essay I recently read that says, “Look, artificial intelligence is going to happen, but the great mistake is thinking that it’s the same species of intelligence as human intelligence. We should think of it as a separate species of intelligence because it’s never going to be able to do some of the important things we do—including judgment, values, and maybe creativity—but it is going to replace a lot of other things.”

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Panel Discussion

Here’s the most striking thing the writer said: “So if that is the case, then maybe we’re going about things all wrong. Because we shouldn’t be investing so much in creating artificial intelligence, and our education system shouldn’t be training us to be more computer literate. In fact, the reverse is true. We should be investing in what makes us human.” By extension, the writer said we should be investing in the humanities and the literary novel—the two things that are declining and at the risk of extinction in the University. This made me think of the humanness of our experience of nature and the uniqueness of both Jeff and Amy’s projects. You have the porcupine quill, and working at the Exploratorium, and thinking about how people understand things; not just what things are. Amy told the story about being in the Exploratorium and watching people interact with an exhibit, and how they might get something different than what the exhibit designers intended,. That humanness of the experience makes me think that—in the face of our biotechnologies—it will be important to reinvest in what makes us human.

Biologically Motivated

Swackhamer: Jeff, I want to ask about the role of serendipity in your work. You talked about the design brief and the identification of certain criteria that guide a project. When you identify biologies that address a problem, do you inevitably make discoveries that address problems outside the design brief? Do you leave room in your design process for moments of serendipity?

Karp: Absolutely. Those end up being the most exciting projects. I will give an example. I started this project maybe six or seven years ago, and it was about tissue-engineered intestine. There’s a huge need to improve ways of generating intestine tissue. Some people are born with what’s called short bowel syndrome, a terrible disease, and they don’t have sufficient digestion and absorption of nutrients. Many different surgical techniques have been developed to try to solve this problem. We submitted a grant to manufacturer tissue-engineered intestine using 3D printing. When we got the project, we discussed the fact that there’s the epithelium, which is the mucosal layer of the intestine, and there’s a muscle layer underneath, and we wondered how

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This has led to tons of projects in my lab. The stem cell has this receptor on its surface called LGR5 that’s critical to its function. The intestinal epithelium turns over every five days or so.

Your life depends on the stem cells dividing like crazy throughout your entire life. The LGR5 literature reveals progenitor cells in the inner ear that make hair cells. The hair cells transduce sound

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Symposium Panel Discussion

we would print both—realizing it was just way too complicated.

So we said we are just going to focus on the epithelium. We then realized that there is a problem because the stem cell in the epithelium connects to and sits right beside a second type of cell—a mature cell that signals it to grow or not grow. However, we wanted to grow lots of the tissue, so we needed to figure a way to unlock this stem cell. We hadn’t thought of writing this in our grant proposal, but we started screening molecules that could activate the stem cell to form huge populations of pure cells that wouldn’t rely on the second cell type. We figured out the key pathways and found molecules that allowed us to do away with the second cell type, and we could grow these stem cells in unlimited quantities.

Panel Discussion Biologically Motivated

into neural signals that get to the brain. You are only born with about 15,000 hair cells per ear, and unlike birds and fish which regenerate these hair cells, humans don’t. So we took these molecules and added them to cultures of these LGR5 stem cells in the inner ear, and we were able to activate the stem cells and produce vast quantities of hair cells. We now have data suggesting that we are getting functional recovery of hearing in some hearing loss models. Our goal is to try to get this to the clinic by 2017.

So that project took on multiple different paths that we would never have predicted at the beginning, but I think it’s also just being open that allowed this to happen. Funding is tough these days, yet funding is important for doing anything novel. Plus, funding agencies are rigid and focus more on incremental work, so you have to be super creative and try to get overlapping funding so that you can take 10% of your grant and do things you never even proposed. Sometimes these side projects are even more important for society than the original project. Part of me feels we should just divert the funds to those efforts and forget about what we initially proposed because we can do a lot more.

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Conversation with Students

Could you each informally discuss your background as well as your interest in interdisciplinary work?

Biologically Motivated

Karp: I’m trained as a chemical engineer and I’m from Canada originally, so I did my undergrad at McGill University, and the University of Toronto is where I did my Ph.D. I pursued a post-doc for about three years at MIT, and I started my lab in July 2007. I have tried to create a certain paradigm in my lab where we focus on translation. I’m based in a hospital, so I have multiple affiliations, and in Boston, you need to have many for people to take you seriously [laughter]. There’s some truth to that, which is another topic, but I’ve wanted to focus on three main goals. One is to make

Benjamin: I’m trained as an architect, and I’ve been interested in what we could probably call experimental architecture. For my firm, we’ve been interested in future possibilities for buildings and cities. Our work is often about new materials or technologies, combined with culture and public space. That’s a kind of framework we were working in for a few years when I started to believe in the possibilities offered by combining biology, computation, and architecture. These things came together for me partly because of new things occurring in biology, and partly because architecture seemed ready to adopt a more dynamic outlook. A lot of my work—both in teaching and research at Columbia University and also with my small architecture firm—has involved exploring that in different ways.

One other thing to note is that it’s often a difficult process to start doing something interdisciplinary if there’s not a good framework. In my case, I was very much helped by a strange anomaly of a grant from NSF and the equivalent in the UK called EPSRC. This grant was in the lineage of art/science programs and was an invitation to combine synthetic biologists with designers. I applied for the grant and was part of that program, representing one of six art/science pairs, and that gave me and my collaborator, who was a plant biologist, a framework to think together about what could be possible. Without that grant, it would have taken more time and been a more speculative operation, so this helped me gain some traction in interdisciplinary work.

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sure what we do can impact society in a short period of time. Instead of just working on projects that end up in academic journals, we want to work on projects that, if successful, would form the foundation for a new technology that could turn into products and help patients as soon as possible. Second is professional development, to maximize the potential for people who work in my laboratory to go on to bigger and better things, and to give them as many opportunities as possible to help them realize their potential. The third is to try to look at problemsolving from a different angle, which is where a lot of the bio-inspired work comes from—turning to nature for inspiration.

We don’t have any specific disease focus, and there’s no specific technology focus either. So it’s a paradigm of being very adaptable and getting into new areas all the time. These are things we might be unqualified to do, but we try to learn quickly what the most important thing is in that area and surround ourselves with people who have deep expertise who then complement our passion for moving into that space.

So my lab is a very multidisciplinary environment. We have biologists, immunologists, material scientists, chemical engineers, mechanical engineers, electrical engineers, a gastrointestinal surgeon, a cardiac fellow, and multiple NDs in training. It’s very diverse, and I’ve tried to structure it in a way where there’s minimal overlap between the people in the lab. So when people come together around the table, everyone offers something unique, and everyone feels validated. That helps contribute to a conducive environment for people to do well, be productive, and come up with new ideas across boundaries.

We do a lot of work with STEM cells where we’re trying to control what happens to the cells after you transplant them into the body. We’ve developed a number of technologies to do that.

We also have tissue adhesives to improve upon sutures and staples, which have a lot of limitations in the clinic. We do a lot of work with medical devices. We’ve developed new needles that automatically stop when they get to the right location in the body.

We’re developing devices that can house cells so that we can control them following transplantation—like pancreatic islets for the treatment of Type I diabetes. We work on prostate cancer, dia-

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betes, arthritis, ulcerative colitis, Crohn’s disease — all over the place. To maximize translation, we also spend a lot of time interacting not just with clinicians, but also people in the industry. In Boston, there are a lot of investors, entrepreneurs, and patent lawyers. I’ve tried to immerse myself in that environment because I feel that the only way to impact society is if you can eventually get somebody to dedicate their life to the idea and then have the funding come in. So I’ve tried to develop these relationships as being a high priority thing for what I do.

Youngs: I’m an individual artist, and I sometimes collaborate, and it’s interesting to think about my practice in relation to these other more professional practices that get work out into the world. I’m also interested in how the work translates and how the work starts from myself and gets generated elsewhere.

Things that I’m very interested in have to do with ecosystems and how I can feel very connected with them, and how I can interact with them and have a part in them—rather than directing them or controlling them. So that sense of being a person in the ecosystem or collection of cells in the ecosystem is something I think about in my practice.

And then I try to think about how that translates for other people. How can I create those sorts of experiences for others with this idea that, as an artist, I’m going to change the world? If everyone could feel like they’re part of the ecosystem, maybe we would care about the world a little bit more. There’s this sense of wanting to have a level of respect and interesting ways to interact with the ecosystem that maybe we haven’t thought about. Or maybe there are ways that we think about other living things that are preventing us from interacting with them in more productive, playful, or creative ways than we do now. So a lot of the work that I’m doing is just coming from my personal interests and then sharing those with other people.

I’m also teaching at Ohio State, so lately I’ve been thinking about how to teach in that way as well. I try to bring my students into a systems-based practice, and I try to help them to think very clearly about the audience. It’s not so much about how am I going to sell this thing I’ve made because that’s not ever a

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question that’s interesting to me as an artist—and that may be what makes me and maybe a small cohort of people I know very different from other artists. We’re not asking questions about how we can make things that go out into the world and have a life that is in the marketplace. I’m very interested in how something has a life that is not necessarily in the marketplace, but could be. Like maybe someone will take and patent something, and I’ll probably know nothing about it, which is great because I’m not that person that wants to dedicate my life to the paperwork [laughter]. But I do feel a real responsibility to putting things and systems out into the world that could ; they into society in ways that aren’t there right now. That’s my mission as an artist.

I’m curious to know more about how each of you got on this track. Did you go to school knowing you were going to become an inventor-creator? How did that happen?

Benjamin: I didn’t major in architecture as an undergrad. My major was called social studies, believe it or not, which sounds like I majored in eighth grade [laughter]. But it was interdisciplinary. It was kind of like liberal arts—a foundation in classic social theory with some economics, history, philosophy, and sociology. Then I worked in two start-up environments. One was at a community service startup called City Year, which began in Boston. I was part of the third year of core members, and it was called an “urban Peace Corps” at the time. The reason I’m mentioning it is that I was part of this thing that was just trying to figure itself out at the time. The organization had a vision for how it might change the world if every young person spent a year in national service—doing community service instead of military service. So it was an exciting environment of starting something up. No one had done it before, and the relevant thing that I think does make the term startup accurate is there were a lot of interesting people from different backgrounds, and everyone was doing something they hadn’t quite done before, and that was exciting to me. I did that in the middle of college, and after graduating from college I worked in an internet startup—a total stereotype for my generation [laughter]. The job was there and

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seemed interesting—but again, nobody had been a web designer when I started teaching myself web design, and I found that interesting and exciting too.

So when I decided to go back to school for architecture, which is a kind of combination of art and science, it was natural for me to look for other connections, and seek this environment where people were thinking about new things. Columbia, where I went to graduate school and also where I teach, is known for being experimental. It was one of the first schools to use the computer in new ways. So it felt like a natural progression for me when I wanted to start my own kind of career in architecture to be looking for these new opportunities—doing something new, being in an environment where everyone was exploring a new way to do things. Some of the things Jeff said sounded very familiar to me: surrounding myself with experts in other things that I don’t know about, and not being afraid to put myself in a position where there’s no solid ground like “this is the way we always do things,” or “this is my technology,” or whatever. So I’ve felt perfectly at home trying to reinvent things or just explore new ground and bring my own admittedly outsider/naive approach to something.

Karp: For a good part of my life, I wanted to design medical devices. I liked physics in high school, but I found it one of the most challenging courses. I loved the problem-solving aspect, but I wasn’t that good at it and had to spend a lot more time than most people in the class to try to get things. I registered in biology when I went to McGill because I thought I wanted to go the doctor route. And I applied to medicine and didn’t get in.

At the end of my first year realized I didn’t want to do biology anymore, and I looked around all these different programs. I met with all these administrators and course directors, and then I switched into chemical engineering for my second year. And when I got towards the end of my undergrad, I was at this coffee shop. I overheard people talking about tissue engineering and artificial organs, and I asked them what they were talking about [laughter].

They told me about these upper-level courses, and I went to the course director and he said you have to take three physiology

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prerequisites. So I thought, ok, I’m going to take an extra year, so I extended my undergrad by a year so I could take these other courses.

I encountered walls and failures in the plans I had, but I feel that it was important to get involved in many things. I worked in a research lab for a couple of summers, got involved in a bunch of extracurricular things, and just tried to maximize the number and diversity of experiences to figure out what I liked and what I didn’t like. When you’re younger, you always feel this pressure that you should know what you want to do, and then this other pressure that you have to make that decision quickly and you have to connect the dots fast. And I feel that in many ways that is a negative thing. You want to think about it, but you don’t want that to be the driver. The driver you really want is to figure out your passions, and once you have enough data points of what you like and don’t like, you connect them. There are many opportunities out there.

Be willing to get into new fields and try new things, but also be willing to fail and feel terrible for a short period of time [laughter].

But then use that to know better what you like and don’t like. I would look at it more as a process than as a straight line.

Youngs: I totally agree. I also really like this theme that I’m hearing about feeling uncomfortable, and like you’re not very good at what you’re doing [laughter]. As an artist, that’s something I do a lot. I got into art because I think through making. Verbally I’m not as good: I understand words through things somehow, and making things and touching things—and materiality, the way materials come together and the way things are in the world. The way machines work, the way biology works— these things are ways that I can start to talk to people too.

Thinking through making is something I started to doing in 4-H, working with rabbit-breeding, raising pigs and plants, and participating with other living things in the world. Being able to talk about it with other people—that’s where my interest in systemsthinking and materiality originates.

When I was a college student at San Francisco State, I worked at a museum called the Exploratorium. That’s a hands-on place for science, art, and human perception, and it very much shaped

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the way I think about how I make things that other people interact with. I worked there both as an informal educator and also as somebody who would fix exhibits, and I loved fixing exhibits and watching other people interact with stuff. What do people do and what do they get out of it? A lot of times things are completely interesting failures. Visitors completely misunderstand everything the exhibit was supposed to teach them, but they learn something else really cool, or they had a great conversation with their girlfriend or whatever. There’s something about interacting with things in the world that this museum helped me articulate as an artist. The ways I wanted to make things in the world, in some secret way to prototype futures—which is what Jeff’s talking about too, that you make these things, and you hope somebody else turns them into something useful. Maybe I’m not the expert at turning that thing into the useful thing, but I’m the expert at putting things together in ways that other people could interact with.

Biologically Motivated

You have all discussed failures in your processes. Could you talk more about how you face these challenges as they come up? What do you do, and how do you overcome or learn from failure?

Benjamin: Amy mentioned prototypes: creating something that deliberately tests out this future, or this way of dealing with a kind of technical thing, or a creative, cultural, or atmospheric thing. But if it’s a prototype, then the failure is the learning.

So there is no failure. Everything teaches you something. At least that’s my framework, so maybe it makes it easier, because if something doesn’t work, then I’m learning from it. The method I use to deal with this is iteration. A lot of short-cycle iterations means that failure doesn’t matter that much, so it doesn’t mean a setback or rethinking everything—it’s just “let’s go in this other direction.” In our experiments, we have hundreds of small failures, and that’s totally fine because we’re continually trying to course-correct.

I know you might want to hear about a failure, so I can think about one more specifically [laughter]. One of my very early

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Kinetic Glass, The Living

projects was to try to make architecture move. We started experimenting with this thin wire called shape memory alloy (SMA), also known as nitinol or muscle wire. It’s a frustrating material because it seems like it’s going to be magic, but it only contracts a small amount. So if you want to move architecture, it’s a perverse idea to use this material because it only contracts about five to eight percent [laughter]. It’s not that strong, but architecture is very heavy. But we were using this, and Blaine was generous enough to give it one of its first audiences after we had done probably forty prototypes trying to make architecture move with this wimpy little wire. After a lot of different attempts to use it as a lever arm or connect it to other kinds of surfaces, we hit on this idea of casting the wire inside a thin transparent membrane. In the end, as we started to see what it was doing, we allowed that to help define what we were after—as opposed to saying we need to get to a specific finish point. In the end, we created a thin transparent surface with this nitinol wire cast inside and slits cut in it so that we could trigger the surface to open and close gills, and it would move in the third dimension and create this opening. But we didn’t set out knowing that we wanted to do that; we set out with a much more open-ended experiment, and then the casting seemed to work. So we went in that direction, and once we were dealing with a thin surface we decided it would be great to be transparent, and so we made our decisions along the way—also balancing it not just by what worked but by what would be interesting architecturally. What if a window could breathe? And so everything was all developing and changing at the same time, and a lot of the failed experiments added up to that direction. Blaine put it in one of the first Transmaterial books, and that was the first kind of life that project had in the world.

Conversation with Students Biologically Motivated

Brownell: I had a chance to demonstrate it in front of an audience, and you shipped a sample, and I breathed on this little sensor to increase the CO2, and then it started to move. I missed the whole build-up to that—I just thought “Oh, it’s a great product.” [laughter] Benjamin: You probably thought it was more robust and serious than it was [laughter].

Karp: I’d say I think of failure a lot. In many ways, the most successful people on the planet are the ones who had the biggest failures yet were able to use failure as a stepping stone to get somewhere they would otherwise never have been able to get. In the education system, we’re taught failure is something to avoid.

But through experience, you realize it’s different than that. It’s almost like you want to fail and then use the failure to succeed, so it’s almost like the failure has to come first. Trying to achieve something always requires a certain leap of faith, and if you’re not making the leap of faith, then you’re not growing; you’re static.

Over time, you gain more confidence because you’ve taken so many leaps of faith in the past, and while you may fail, it’s how you use the failure to get to the next step that matters. So as things have progressed, I’m more comfortable taking bigger leaps of faith and failing more spectacularly [laughter]. I look at failure as an opportunity to be creative.

There are many examples. There are a lot of challenges in medicine with overreactive bladders and bladder cancer, and the treatments are terrible. This bioengineer wanted to develop a device that would go into the bladder and stay there and release drugs for a long period of time. This was like a control-release system. His assistants tried a bunch of things in animal models, and they kept falling out, so they went to the professor and said: “This project’s a complete failure.” He said actually, this is the best thing that could have ever happened because it tells us this is not something that others would be able to solve quickly, and we need to have some novel insight. So they got creative and figured out some shape memory type system they could insert that would naturally fold into a pretzel shape and wouldn’t easily

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Right: Farm Fountain (home version), Amy Youngs

come out of the bladder. And they could change the shape so they could remove it. This ended up being the key innovation, and they were able to bring it forward—it may even be on the market now.

The same thing has happened to me many times. One of the biggest problems in neonatal units is these tapes that go on their skin to attach monitoring devices yet when you pull the tape off it tears the skin. Adhesives designed for adult skin to ask immediately on these babies that have immature epidermis. So we decided to create this next-generation adhesive that would have a middle layer. Most adhesives have glue and a backing, which is paper or plastic—so only two layers. So when you put it on our skin and pull it off, it just breaks within the glue, so you have glue sometimes that remains on your skin, or breaks between the glue and the skin. But for kids, it will break the skin because the weakest link is the skin. We made a middle layer so you could peel the backing away from the glue. You leave 100 percent of the glue behind, and then you can de-tackify it with talc or other powder, and it can just fall off over time, or you can put another adhesive on top. So this solved the a problem. We approached it thinking we would design this middle layer with chemistry in mind. We spent a year trying to make it, and it just ended up being way too complicated. We were synthesizing materials and then someone on the team asked why we couldn’t just do this mechanically?

Could we create this anisotropic surface and then control the interaction of the adhesive with this backing? So we etched it in a certain way and were able to make it work.

So we hit this wall with our initial plan, but what I try to do in my lab is always think: “Is there a better way?” So when you take these leaps of faith, and you advance on a project, I feel like there’s always a better way to do it. It’s easy to get married to the approach you’ve selected and then you put on these blinders.

But I feel like there’s always going to be a way to disrupt what you’re currently working on that’s going to be a better approach— cheaper, more scalable, most cost-effective, or more effective overall. So we hit a wall, and then we brainstormed and figured out how to do it. And we were able to develop another prototype quickly that we’re bringing forward now.

Conversation with Students Biologically Motivated

Youngs: I also think about failure as an interesting design opportunity. I’m like David in that it’s hard for me to think of failure because I don’t think about it like that. Part of the process is that things are more complex than you think they are, and that’s a good thing. That shape memory alloy story is so great. I can’t tell you how many students of mine think: “I’m going to make this robot, and I’m going to use that cool nitinol wire!” Do I tell them, or do I let them go through the experience? [laughter] Because there’s something about going through the experience of thinking something is one thing and then actually trying to work with it.

Materials, people, and environments are very complex, and that’s just interesting. That just deepens the interest in a project, and provides new opportunities for thinking about design or making or systems that we never thought about before, so it is part of the process.

I was thinking about working with this system of aquaponics, which circulates nutrients between fish and plants so you can feed your fish waste to the plants in a circulating system, and then grow lovely fish and plants to eat. When you’re trying to do this sustainably, one of the real problems is how you feed the fish—which is pretty unsustainable. I thought: “I already have composting worms, so maybe I could figure out a system to feed composting worms to the fish, or maybe I could grow duckweed.”

I tried all these crazy things in the studio try to feed these fish sustainably. Then through that process realized I could just get rid of the fish and use worms as part of the nutrient cycle, and everything was way simpler after that [laughter]. So I don’t know if it was a failure as much as just thinking about problems as interesting ways to make new kinds of solutions.

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How do you provide flexibility to take these risks within your responsibilities? You can fail, but how do you still make money?

How do you still make sure your company is going to survive?

Will your students fail their lesson if they can’t get the robot to work? How many times can you test something and it not work, and people will still support you?

Karp: It’s a very challenging question to answer, because it’s not something you can write down and have a strategic plan for; it’s more of an interactive experience that changes over time. A big piece of it is funding. We apply for grants in lots of different areas, so we’re not limited. There are some downsides to that diversification, because the expertise we have in any particular area may not be as deep as that of someone in the field. But at the same time, if we’re efficient with what we do, we can make advances, and then secure funding in multiple avenues.

During my first two-and-a-half years as a faculty member, I applied for literally a hundred grants—most of them failures— but then I had all these written grants I could modify and use and get feedback. You need funding for flexibility. Then you can take more risks if you have more resources. If you invest in something that doesn’t work, you have another pot of money you can use.

One of the responsibilities I see in my lab is to make sure that even when things are really good, we’re constantly looking for more funds.

The other part of it is letting people fail on their own, but having the oversight not to allow someone to go too far. I ensure people have a number of side projects as well. When we publish papers, there are like 15 or 20 authors. It’s not like anyone who wants to be involved can be involved. However, people easily work with each other and when they encounter challenges they grow accustomed to asking others for help—or set up their own kind of brainstorming sessions. We also collaborate with maybe 20 or 25 other groups outside of my lab.

So I feel there are ways to manage the risk by having an environment where people don’t feel alone. In Boston, and in particular in the life sciences, we have state-of-the-art tools and top people, but the activation energy is significant to access

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these things. So I’ve made it a big part of my responsibility to make it as easy as possible for people to access any resource they need. Whenever we need an additional expert we just bring one in. All of these things help manage that risk.

Benjamin: I wonder if there’s something about the field of architecture that’s a little different. Part of my world is clients, and I don’t have complete freedom. I can’t be as interesting or as radical as I would like. Like many architecture firms, we have a variety of projects, and some bring in more money, and some lose a lot of money. But that ecosystem is ok overall. That’s a similar diversification idea, but it’s not pure diversification because there are very different projects. It’s not like all of them have the same amount of great potential. Some of them don’t have a lot of great potential but they have a lot of money potential, so it’s a kind of curated, deliberate diversification.

Another thing your question made me think of is that in my work—somewhere on a spectrum between delivering good, reliable work to clients and much more speculative and experimental work that is provocative in the field—I’m deliberately in the middle. Hopefully not in the boring middle, but in a sense that I’m interested in being as far out as possible, while also being able to build it today.

So back to the idea of a prototype. One tangible example of a project we did recently—which was about biology, computation, and manufacturing—involved making a medium-sized structure out of biodegradable bricks. To make the bricks, you take this mushroom root called mycelium and combine it with agricultural waste, and you can create solid objects in almost any shape. The material is incredibly sustainable, and after you’re done using it, it can decay and compost in 60 days. When we were thinking about it in the studio—it was part of a competition entry originally—we had all these great ideas because this living substance is not only able to grow but also dematerialize and decompose. So the creative possibilities seemed incredibly rich and exciting, and we thought we would bring all the materials on-site in the museum courtyard and grow everything in the museum. Some would be growing and others decaying, and we would put seeds in

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the bricks and as decay happened new things would grow, and the public could get involved and help pack brick molds. The ideas went on and on, and at a certain point, we said: “Wait, we have to make something. We have to convince the jury that we’re going to be able to make it, and that it’s going to be safe, and that it makes sense, and we know what we’re talking about when we say it’s going to grow or decay.” And so we deliberately tried to ascertain the right amount to push; the way to increase our chances of being successful and also make a plausible case to the jury. We thought to ourselves: they’re going to ask, “How are you going to do that? Have you tested it?” And we’re going to say, “No.” [laughter] So we thought this was a really interesting process, and it was viable because there are other people who have experimented with it, and we made some prototypes for the competition. In the end, if you dry the bricks out and kill the living material it becomes a more predictable, inert, and normal material like wood. So we decided to dry out and kill the living material to have the best chance of testing the idea out in the world. But I continue to be fascinated by the possibility that if we didn’t dry it out, this new kind of brick could do some amazing things that living systems do. It could be self-healing: if you cut one of these bricks, it can heal itself in five days. You could have the same object be brick and mortar, because if you stack two bricks, then over a few days they fuse together. Also, you would not be limited to bricks, but could make an entire huge structure at one time if you didn’t need to dry it out. But we scaled back, and we chose a brick and chose to kill the material. We thought it was just interesting and relevant enough as an experiment to push us all forward a little bit.

To summarize, I like that friction of having to convince the jury of the competition, being able to make 10,000 units, and getting someone to sign off that this will be safe in a hurricane. In a hundred years, those challenges will seem simple, but I think the friction and messiness of the now are relevant and interesting.

Youngs: I want to do that mushroom project [laughter]. Being an individual artist means you have tons of freedom. You do have to get the thing ready for the show, and you’ve got the deadline.

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Conversation with Students

Usually, I work cheaply, so I don’t necessarily have funders looking at me, but I do have exhibition deadlines or personal goals. So there’s a lot of flexibility in that.

In terms of working with students, I sometimes let them fail for a while [laughter]. But some of these wisdoms we’ve heard about—such as making sure people have fallback plans, plan Bs, and side projects—means that those things sometimes come together in interesting ways. So failures and side projects sometimes join into something really interesting, or students realize what their actual interest is in the making: like shape memory alloy was really boring to them, and it was actually just about making a very small thing move.

The other thing I’m doing in the curriculum at Ohio State is forcing students to do that iterative process. So they have to take the class, and take the class again, and take the class again.

So the first time they try to make their shape memory alloy robot work, and it is only kind of successful, they take the class again.

The smart ones do the same project again, and it comes out really great the second time. And we all know that’s pretty much how our work flows. You’ve got to keep making it again, and it gets better and more interesting each time. But you trick the students into doing that because it’s hard [laughter].

On the opposite side, when do you deem a project you’re working on to be successful? How do you deem it to be successful?

Biologically Motivated

Youngs: That’s the hardest one for me [laughter].

Benjamin: I liked hearing Amy and Jeff talk about getting the work out in the world in some way. And just so I’m clear, when you say translation, do you mean translation out into the world?

Karp: Into the world, yes.

Benjamin: That’s something that resonates with me a lot. From my perspective in architecture, I’m a bit concerned for the field that we talk too much to ourselves. I know that some of my

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friends and colleagues might disagree with me, but I like when an architecture project can be discussed outside the architecture circle. So I don’t really have any strict measures of success, but I’ve found it very interesting doing the project I discussed earlier.

Since it was for the Museum of Modern Art, there was a lot of attention to that project. I was fascinated when The Huffington Post wrote about it, or when The Weather Channel wrote about it [laughter]. I’m not going to say this alone made it successful, but the fact that it got picked up was interesting to me. Sometimes reporters would get the whole premise wrong or the facts wrong, but I was interested in that aspect of getting it out in the world and having this kind of public discussion about it. Because it was a pretty high profile project, there were a lot of comments on any of the news articles and a lot of social media. Someone forwarded me one, which was pretty good. It was a popular media description of the project as a “mushroom house”—like “some crazy people are building a mushroom house at MoMA PS1.” And one of the comments said: “Not impressed. The Smurfs did it first,” and had a picture of the Smurfs living in a mushroom [laughter]. But to have that idea register out in the world and to be argued about (if you can call that an argument), was interesting [laughter].

Karp: In the work we do, there are so many failures we encounter that we try to celebrate the little successes. When we conduct an experiment and eventually get a result or get something up and running, I look at that as a success. Even if there’s nothing that anyone outside the lab could judge a success, it’s a success to us because it’s something we’ve put a lot of effort into doing.

You’ve got to celebrate the fact you’re still moving forward.

Then there are other ways we look at it. One would be a publication, and that’s by no means the end of a project. Sometimes it is, but often it’s not because there’s always something to do next. In our work, bringing new technologies forward in the health care system requires a lot of money. So it’s very important to get a lot of exposure when we publish a paper. If we have succeeded in hitting the design criteria for the solution we envisioned, it’s important for us to get the word out because investors and

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companies start to look at it and start to contact us, and we can use those opportunities to help us get it out into the world.

Other kinds of measures of success include when people in the lab go on to something they really want to do next. They’ve used the opportunity as a stepping stone, whether it be to obtain a faculty position or start a non-profit organization. To see others be successful and getting products to the market and helping people is a success.

So I think there are lots of different measures and lots of things to celebrate. Most importantly, it’s the small things along the way—to not just look at the end goal as the place to get excited but to be open to getting excited and feeling like you are on a successful path even if it’s early.

Youngs: In my field, having the exhibition is supposedly the success. “Oh, the thing is working. It’s there in the show. People have come, and are celebrating.” But I think for me it’s not the be-allend-all. I totally agree that it is more important to celebrate the small steps along the way. The conversations I have with students, collaborators, and colleagues along the way are a lot more interesting than the conversations I have with people at the exhibition—drinking more wine, eating cheese, it’s not as interesting.

It always feels like a bit of a let down for me.

I am also really interested in how the work translates into popular culture. I love the story of the Smurf House and putting things out on the internet and seeing where they go, and how they get used by other people. I made this weird table on which you could eat with composting worms, and I thought everyone would want to make one. I put out open-source instructions to make your own composting worm table, and it turned out that nobody wanted to make their own. They all wanted me to make it for them [laughter]. A company wanted to sell it, but I never replied to them; I’m so uninterested in selling things. But they put it on their website for sale for $999 with my pictures and my text. I thought, “This is hysterical. What are they going to do? Contact me if someone buys one? What’s going to happen?” And it was up there for years. So that to me was a success.

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Youngs: I think someone was using it as click bait, so when you landed on their worm composting site, you would buy a much more practical plastic bin [laughter].

I have a question about biology: how do you study it to find things that inspire you or to solve problems? Several of us took a course called Hypernatural in which we had to find biological models to solve problems, but that method of looking for solutions is limitless in a way. So I was just wondering how you clarify that in your process?

Benjamin: For me, I’m often most interested in hybrid approaches.

That’s why I gravitated toward biology and computation: the kind of multiplication effect is really interesting. I’ve also been interested in any scenario where we can push an existing way of doing things much further or reframe things in a certain way. That can come in either direction. Let’s say we normally make objects or structural things with one set of materials and one set of processes, and what if we reinvented that? It could also come in the reverse direction, like look at this natural process or an unnatural process such as an algorithm, chemical reaction, or crystal formation. Could that also be the catalyst for a new process that can help us make things? So for me, I like the freedom of going both ways, such as: “Let’s reinvent something we’re already doing through a more interesting or sustainable or biological process,” or “Let’s look at these weird things that are already happening,

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Bio-inspired Porcupine Quill Synthetic Patch, The Karp Lab

You mean someone wanted to imitate it?

Conversation with Students Biologically Motivated

and maybe we can hybridize them, convert them, or amplify them to make something interesting.”

Karp: I look at it from three different angles. One is looking at nature for mechanisms that could inspire us in some way. We’re just wowed by something in nature, and then we attempt to connect it to a problem we’re trying to solve. That’s more like blue sky: “Let’s see what is out there in nature.”

A second way we use quite a lot is if we make a commitment to, let’s say, work on tissue adhesives in medicine, we might just ask: “How do creatures in nature do it?” And for tissue adhesives, there are a lot of different uses in the body. What are the mechanisms that are out there, and which ones could we potentially borrow to solve this broader problem?

And the third way is more of a specific approach where we are trying to solve a very particular problem, sucah as trying to patch a hole in the heart, or trying to seal a certain type of tissue.

For example, the environment of the heart is extremely dynamic, with the blood flowing and the heart expanding and contracting. If we want to seal a hole there, we might ask how creatures in nature do it, specifically in a dynamic wet environment. And so we hone in on what creatures exist within that environment, what mechanisms they use, and we try to borrow some of those ideas.

There’s biomimicry, and there’s bioinspiration. I think a lot of what we do is more on the bioinspiration side. It’s about being inspired by nature, which leads us to something new. We’re not necessarily copying all the details; whereas biomimicry is about looking at nature and trying to copy things in almost every detail. So most of what we do is just look to nature for inspiration.

Youngs: I like to take notice of natural things and systems—to go hiking and sniff the dirt and be very much in the mud of it. But then I’m also totally into the internet and social media and technology, and at a certain point, I’m not separating those two things.

I’m thinking about them all as part of the ecosystem that I’m inspired by, so I turn to both places for inspiration.

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Participatns Biologically Motivated

Jeff Karp Associate Professor, Brigham and Women’s Hospital, Harvard University Medical School Principal Faculty at the Harvard Stem Cell Institute Dr. Jeff Karp is an Associate Professor at Brigham and Women’s Hospital, Harvard Medical School, and is Principal Faculty at the Harvard Stem Cell Institute and affiliate faculty at MIT through the Harvard-MIT Division of Health Sciences and Technology. Karp’s research harnesses materials science and stem cell biology to solve medical problems with emphasis on nanoscale/microscale materials and bio-inspired approaches.

Several technologies that Dr. Karp has developed have formed the foundation for multiple products on the market and currently under development and for the launch of two companies, Gecko Biomedical and Skintifique. In 2011 the Boston Business Journal recognized Dr. Karp as a Champion in Healthcare Innovation.

Two years later the Institute for Chemical Engineers (IChemE) honored one of his technologies as the Most Innovative Product of the Year. In 2008 MIT’s Technology Review Magazine (TR35) also recognized Dr. Karp as being one of the top innovators in the world under the age of 35. He has received the Society for Biomaterials Young Investigator Award and his work has been selected as one of Popular Mechanic’s “Top 20 New Biotech Breakthroughs that Will Change Medicine.” Dr. Karp was also elected in 2013 to the American Institute for Medical and Biological Engineering’s College of Fellows and as a Kavli Fellow.

Amy Youngs Associate Professor of Art, The Ohio State University Amy M. Youngs creates biological art, interactive sculptures and digital media works that explore relationships between technology and animals-human and non-human. Her research interests include interactions with plants and animals, technological nature follies, constructed ecosystems and seeing through the eyes of machines. She has created installations that amplify the sounds and movements of living worms, indoor ecosystems that grow edible plants, a multi-channel interactive video sculpture for a science museum, as well as videos and

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community media projects. Youngs has exhibited her works nationally and internationally at venues such as the Te Papa Museum in New Zealand, the Trondheim Electronic Arts Centre in Norway, the Biennale of Electronic Arts in Australia, Centro Andaluz de Arte Contemporรกneo in Spain and the Peabody Essex Museum in Salem, MA. She was awarded an Ohio Arts Council grant for her work and has published articles in Leonardo and Antennae. Her work has been profiled in the books such as Art in Action, Nature, Creativity & our Collective Future. She received her MFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. She is an Associate Professor of Art at the Ohio State University, where she teaches new media and eco art courses.

David Benjamin Assistant Professor, Columbia University Graduate School of Architecture, Planning and Preservation Principal, The Living David Benjamin is Principal of The Living and Assistant Professor at Columbia University Graduate School of Architecture, Planning and Preservation. The Living explores the architecture of the future, bringing new technologies to life in the built environment.

The experimental practice approaches cities and buildings as living, breathing organisms, and proposes that design be a living, breathing ecosystem. Within this design ecosystem, Benjamin works on multiple scales simultaneously and embraces design with uncertainty, design with rules rather than fixed forms, and design with shifting and unknowable forces. The Living clients include the City of New York, Airbus, 3M, Quantified Self, and Miami Science Museum. Recent projects include the Princeton Architecture Laboratory (a new building for research on robotics and next-generation design and construction technologies), Hy-Fi (a branching tower in the courtyard of MoMA PS1 created with almost no waste, no energy, and no carbon emissions), Pier 35 EcoPark (a 200-foot floating pier in the East River that changes color according to water quality), and Architecture Bio-synthesis (a new process of biocomputation and biomanufacturing to produce high-performance, sustainable materials through synthetic biology).

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Participatns

Biologically Motivated Interdisciplinary Graduate Group Biologically Motivated seeks to pose new questions and solve problems by looking to the myriad ways in which organisms adapt and survive. This interdisciplinary graduate group brings together students from the College of Biological Sciences with students from the School of Architecture in the College of Design and the Department of Art within the College of Liberal Arts. We anticipate that this initial group will expand to engage with engineering and computer science students and faculty, as well as other groups interested in using bio-inspired approaches. In bringing together these diverse fields, this group hopes to provide an opportunity for students of biology, design, and art to learn from and engage with potential peer collaborators from diverse disciplinary backgrounds.

Faculty Leaders: Blaine Brownell Associate Professor and Director of Graduate Studies, School of Architecture, College of Design Neil Olszewski Professor, Department of Plant Biology, College of Biological Sciences

Biologically Motivated

Emilie Snell-Rood Assistant Professor, Department of Ecology, Evolution, and Behavior, College of Biological Sciences Marc Swackhamer Associate Professor and Head, School of Architecture, College of Design Diane Willow Associate Professor, Department of Art, College of Liberal Arts For more information, see: z.umn.edu/biom IDGG support provided by The University of Minnesota Graduate School

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Biologically Motivated Exploring future connections between biology, art, and architecture Design: Camille Sacha Salvador at Luke Bulman—Office Printing and binding: Blurb This publication is made possible in part by a grant from The University of Minnesota Graduate School. Š 2017, the authors No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any form or manner whatsoever without prior written permission except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles and reviews.