What’s Interspecies Design?

We are designers and work with material. As humans, with our heterotrophic metabolism, we are not capable of producing vital organic substances ourselves and so the things we design can only be produced in dependence on and with the help of other organisms. Be it the wood for a table, the energy for a computer, or even the food that allows our brains to ideate designs. A fundamental reason why we need to feel responsible for what we design, from which materials and for what systems. After all, we don't want to be the designers that Victor Papanek, the proponent of social and ecological design, would describe as the enablers and enforcers of accelerated capitalism. Enforcers of accelerated capitalism in the sense that designers accelerate and drive capitalism with their designs and products. In short, we want to embrace the responsibility inherent in design.

But let's take a step back. Why are we talking about design and responsibility at all?

In response to the growing problems of this world, design and its interpretation has continued to change. The boundaries of design are becoming increasingly blurred with other disciplines such as natural sciences and social sciences and "material research" has become an integral part of design. This happens in various forms and ranges from developing biochemical processes by learning biofabrication processes, to making one's own normally completely industrialised material processes, to combining biological residues and natural binders with classic craft processes such as pressing, moulding or weaving.

One of these fields in particular, or a vision for future materials, has been getting special attention lately: the idea that in the future products will no longer have to be extracted from the material by additive or subtractive processes that require high energy input and/or high material waste/wear, but will be grown directly into shape with the help of living organisms. The dream is to join forces with the other living beings that surround us and in contrast to us are capable of creating matter. and to use their fantastic capabilities for our designs in order to create something together in a kind of collaboration.

Examples of this feature designers growing bacteria to dye textiles with their metabolic products, cultivating fungi to produce building blocks, insulation materials or leather alternatives or poruing symbiotically living cultures of bacteria and yeasts into patterns to produce the next garment. All of this happens seemingly detached from the natural environment in sterile laboratories or in huge cauldrons. And while it is exciting and definitely steps in the right direction if we want to create materials that are less harmful to all living beings on this planet, this development also raises another question: what does it look like, this collaboration or cooperation? 

Can the moulding of symbiotic cultures or the squeezing of bacteria really be collaboration, or is there still a deeply anthropocentric perspective at work here?

Investigating and reflecting on this was crucial to the Founding of our Interspecies Design Studio and the design of the interspecies workstation it includes. The experimental investigations and reflections on the process are the basis of our work, from which we want to derive design approaches for possible interspecies collaborations and new interspecies relationship structures in the future.