Research on engineered living materials advanced this year, developing biology itself into a fabrication method. Instead of cutting, printing, or molding inert matter, this approach grows objects — using mycelium (fungal root networks), bacterial cellulose, and programmed microbes cultivated into designed shapes and given useful properties. Increasingly, AI and computational design help decide what to grow and how, predicting how a living system will develop into a target form. The result points toward a genuinely different relationship with our objects: materials and things that are cultivated from life rather than manufactured from the dead, self-assembling and, in some cases, able to grow, heal, or respond.
Watch: The Living Material That Will Build Our Future — The Mycelium Revolution (YouTube)
A different logic of making
Conventional fabrication is subtractive or additive on inert material — you impose a shape on stuff that has none. Living materials invert that: you set up conditions and let an organism build the structure, harnessing biology’s own capacity to grow complex, functional form far more efficiently than machines can. Mycelium grown into molds yields lightweight, compostable structural material; bacterial cellulose forms tough, flexible sheets; engineered microbes can be coaxed to produce pigments, patterns, or responsive behaviors. The frontier is control and predictability — biology is variable and alive — which is exactly where computational design and AI come in, modeling and steering growth toward a reliable, intended result.
Why artists and designers are early adopters
Bio-fabrication has obvious sustainability appeal — materials that grow from waste and compost back into the earth — but artists and designers are among its most active explorers for a deeper reason: growing an object rather than building it changes what the object means. A cultivated form carries the marks of a living process, blurs the line between made and grown, and raises questions about collaboration with non-human life that resonate far beyond function. It connects this site’s research coverage to a broader current of bio-art and living design, and to the sustainability pressures reshaping how creative work gets made. As lab research, the caveats are real — consistency, durability, scale, and the sheer time growth takes remain hard — but a future where some things are farmed rather than fabricated is genuinely taking shape.