Evolving matter. The future of materials and design in the biofabrication era

Human evolution - from Stone Age to Silicon Age - has always been connected to the prevailing material of each era. With biofabrication the matter of the project becomes alive changing our material world, the role of designers - who learn to interact with nature as co-workers - and their relationship with processes and industry. By analysing emergent phenomena, we can outline a projection of how a possible future could be if we are able to grasp and amplify them, as well as of what could happen if we keep on ignoring them. The volume aims to provide an insight into how design should approach the transdisciplinary field of biofabrication in order to play an active part in such material revolution, acting on multiple scales and shifting from micro to macro to connect the dots. It can act on material properties as vehicle for sensations, emotions and meanings, develop application scenarios able to valorise and communicate them, but also envision new production systems that take into account the systemic interconnection each product has with environment and society. Biofabrication is giving us the chance to act a radical change of frame and rethink the way we produce and consume, and more generally the way we live and relate to the Earth habitat through our behaviours - strongly entangled with and influenced by materials, resources and processes we use. We have the opportunity, and responsibility, to shift from a parasitic to a mutualistic attitude as a species, move from the linear mechanistic idea of progress and incremental growth - based on consumption and dominion - to the rhizomatic organicist idea of evolution - based on use and collaboration -, discarding the twentiethcentury anthropocentric mindset and establishing a symbiotic co-existence among all planetary systems.