As a faculty member in the Media Lab, I will animate a new research vision and process for designing the living world: biotic design. I view design as a process that concerns not only material objects and artifacts, but also of social systems and relational values. While the still young field of biodesign has primarily concerned using biological and living organisms and materials (e.g., bacteria, yeast, mycelium, etc.) in the design of objects and artifacts, I believe the social systems in which the design occurs, and the relational values and worldviews associated with the design process, are also of incredible importance. Thus, biotic design considers design in its fullest context to include:

• The purpose of the object, artifact, interface, or system being designed;

• The tools, technologies, materials, and methods utilized for design;

• The communities, movements, and social context of the designers; whom has agency and is empowered to design?

• The underlying values and relationships with the living world embodied within the design process; is there a master-slave relationship? Or one that is mutualistic or reciprocal?

Biotic Design is also a process that involves carefully and intentionally considering each of these elements to first establish the design context, followed by a prototyping, or ‘creative manifestation’ phase, and then a period of reflection—how does the prototype align with the established context? What could be adjusted in a subsequent prototype?

I believe that, as humanity confronts challenges that threaten the future of our civilization, we must make explicit our implicit relationships with the living world, and move from an extractive, dominion worldview toward design practices that are not only inspired by nature, but fundamentally benefit the living world. I will pursue goals of transformative societal impact and further articulate and activate this biotic design vision through the described research aims.

Biotic Design | Theories of Change

“When I look out at you all, I don’t just see scientists—I see activists trying to make a difference in the world. I see ‘Science Activists.’ ” - LaDonna Bravebull, Lakota Tribe, at Bio Summit 2.0, MIT Media Lab

I view design through a lens of activism, guided by a purpose to create a more just, creative, and flourishing world for both humanity and all life on Earth. In my life and career, I have explored three hypotheses, or ‘theories of change,’ on how such activism could be manifested:

• firstly, technical—building transformative tools and technologies that empower and enable;

• secondly, social—organizing communities and movements with global reach and impact;

• thirdly, relational—fostering values and worldviews that engender and deepen mutualistic, reciprocal, and meaningful relationships with the living world.

The biotic design research aims described below employ at least one of these theories of change.

Research aim: design enabling and accessible synthetic biology technologies

The process of biotic design is both enabled and constrained by the available tools and technologies. Such tools empower biotic design at varying scales of complexity: molecular (e.g., DNA and proteins), cellular (e.g., bacteria and yeast), multi-cellular (e.g., tissues and organs), or organismal and bio-material (e.g., mycelium and algae). In my faculty role, I will continue my research thrust of designing and developing radically accessible, but powerful, biotechnologies that enable biotic design across scales of complexity.

The first chapters of my career focused heavily upon a technical theory of change. During my graduate and postdoctoral studies at the Media Lab and while serving as Technical Staff at MIT Lincoln Laboratory, I developed tools and technologies at the forefront of synthetic biology (synbio) and biological engineering: high-throughput, programmable devices for DNA assembly, gene and protein synthesis1,2, and ‘organs on a chip’—artificial noses for olfactory sensing and artificial guts for prototyping microbial communities3. While at Lincoln, I played a pivotal role in raising nearly $5M in funding for our nascent synbio program.

With deeper reflection, I realized that while the design of the technology itself was important, even more so to me was the story of the designer themselves; whom was empowered to design? Whom was excluded from design? These questions of design justice4 led me to shift my technical focus to research how to make previously inaccessible technologies radically accessible: pioneering the use of low-cost 3D-printing for microfluidic, ‘lab-on-a-chip’ systems that normally required expensive clean rooms to fabricate5-7; developing platforms to enable the global sharing and remixing of microfluidic designs via the Metafluidics platform2,8; and the development of accessible, low-cost, open-source tools like the DNA electroporation system, zap-pore9. I will continue this research thrust of designing and developing radically accessible, but powerful, biotechnologies in my faculty role.

In conjunction with my evolving perspective on technology design justice, I began to intentionally incorporate my years of experience as a community organizer and social justice activist into my synbio practice by organizing creative design communities, and ultimately the grassroots ‘Community Biology’ movement, as part of activating a social theory of change.

Cultivating a Global Movement of Creativity | “Everyone is a creator.” - Rick Rubin

The Media Lab has a rich history of developing tools, technologies, and organizing communities and movements around the world to cultivate creativity. From Professor Mitchel Resnick’s ‘Scratch’ programming language and network of Computer Clubhouses10 to Professor Neil Gershenfeld’s Media Arts & Sciences (MAS) course ‘How to Make (Almost) Anything’ and digital fabrication ‘Fab Lab Network’11, the lab has long been at the forefront of empowering others to create through both technical and social methods. This tradition of democratizing technology and creative design practice embodies a belief that is very important to me—the notion that everyone is a creator. I believe the learning experiences I have designed through the synbio course ‘How To Grow (Almost) Anything (HTGAA)’12 and my leadership and grassroots movement building work with the Community Biology lab network13 are a continuation of that tradition, mirroring these global technological movements in software and coding, digital fabrication, and now the life sciences, synbio, and biotic design. In my faculty role, I will continue expanding this work of democratizing biotechnology and biotic design to diverse communities around the world.

Research aim: ‘grow’ biotic design communities globally through cloud learning laboratories

During the pandemic, our instructor team confronted a significant challenge: how would we run a hands-on synbio course when students were unable to access a wet lab? Forced to innovate, we addressed this challenge by establishing a small ‘farm’ of low-cost liquid handling robots and taught our students, both at MIT, Harvard, and also to a global cohort of listeners, how to operate them and design and execute their experiments remotely14. This vision of synbio ‘cloud’ learning also addressed a long-standing challenge in open- and distance-learning, enabling learners to engage in ‘robotic hands-on’ synbio and life sciences experimentation with only a computer and an internet connection—or, ‘How to grow (almost) anything (almost) anywhere’. Now, learners from parts of the world disconnected to the global bio economy and supply chain could finally engage in ‘robotic hands-on’ synbio learning experiences—an accomplishment I am extremely excited to build upon.

In addition to the usual cohort of MIT and Harvard students, the 2023 edition of HTGAA features more than 450 accepted global listeners, many of whom are working on homework and final projects alongside their in-person peers, mediated in part via robotics. We have expanded our global robot farm network to include New York, Vancouver, Taiwan, and London, with more sites coming online. In my faculty role, I will continue to expand this robotic cloud learning network and further translate and develop hands-on synbio learning experiences into a robotic format. This goal particularly excites me, as developed robotic biological protocols can be instantly shared and executed by any other robots in our network, enabling both research into biological reproducibility and a dramatic increase in access to learning.

Finally, I am excited to continue work with Media Lab colleagues Professors Resnick, Machover, Wood, Ijeoma, and Lieberman, to cultivate a global movement of creativity. I believe the collection of our creative design practices at the Media Lab is extraordinary and unique in its variety—coding, music, space exploration, public art installations, and more. I hope to distill creative learning principles from each of their creative domains and intentionally explore multidisciplinary collaborations. For example, I have employed with great success Professor Resnick’s ‘four P’s’ of creative learning in designing my own synbio learning experiences. I am also eager to explore the interfaces of our creative domains—how might generative AI impact biotic design? Or space exploration combined with music and biotic design?

Research aim: design methods for organizing effective and purposeful biotic design communities

Effectively organizing communities and movements requires thoughtful design practice. I have been engaged in ‘community design,’ locally and globally, for nearly twenty years, exploring numerous methods for structuring and galvanizing communities through co-design principles, with values centered on participation, kindness and care, vulnerability, respect, and creativity. I aim to build upon my research in collective intelligence and movement building practice to develop design practices for effectively organizing communities and movements. Furthermore, I aim to apply these processes to organize biotic design communities at MIT and globally.

For example, since joining the Media Lab to direct the Community Biotechnology Initiative, I have collaborated with Professor Thomas Malone (MIT Sloan School) and movement builder Marshall Ganz (Harvard Kennedy School) to explore how their work in collective intelligence and movement building could be further developed and applied to the grassroots movement around community biology, or ‘Community Bio.’ In 2017, I organized and founded the first annual Global Community Bio Summit13, bringing together, for the first time, the global network of grassroots community biology labs. We have since organized 6 Bio Summits, featuring thousands of global participants from nearly 100 countries around the world.

At each Bio Summit, expanding upon the work and research of Ganz and Malone, we have designed a large-scale, participatory co-design exercise aimed to further advance our movement: the articulation of our ‘Statement of Shared Purpose15’; measurement of our community’s values16; the establishment of 12 Community Ethics principles17; and processes for determining community self-governance18. Each yearly exercise involved participation from hundreds of global community members.

Additionally, I have worked with Professor Malone and the Center for Collective Intelligence (CCI) on developing the ‘Supermind Design’ methodology, which is a process for designing Superminds—or, “groups of individuals acting together in ways that seem intelligent”19. In particular, I applied Supermind Design to the large-scale governance exercises conducted at Bio Summit 4.0 and 5.0. During the pandemic, Professor Malone and I also taught the MIT Sloan School and MAS graduate course ‘Supermind Design for Responding to Covid-19’20, and, together with member company Millipore Sigma, organized a ‘Pandemic Response CoLab’ and ran two ‘Expert Supermind’ exercises featuring more than 300 global experts in public health, scientific research, policy, and other domains. Collectively, we envisioned rapid responses to the pandemic (2020)21 and re-imagined the future of the Life Sciences (2021)22.

I have also applied these methods in designing a new research field. Together with Rear Admiral Dr. Susan Blumenthal, we are working towards establishing a new multidisciplinary academic field of ‘Public Health Technology’. As articulated in our Op-Ed in the Boston Globe23, this field of public health technology aims to “integrate diverse expertise in public health, technology, engineering, data analytics, and design to help build the products, programs, and systems necessary to modernize the nation’s public health infrastructure and ready it for 21st-century challenges and opportunities.” In July 2022, we organized the first Public Health Technology Summit, bringing together key leaders in government and industry like Dr. Rochelle Walensky (Director, Center of Disease Control), National Science Foundation (NSF) Director Sethuraman Panchanathan, and others to envision and chart a path forward.

I will build upon these experiences to advance research in community, movement, and Supermind Design and apply these insights to the creative design communities I organize.

Activating ‘Biotic Design’ and a relational theory of change

Through biotic design, designers can deeply interrogate and make explicit the implicit relational values and worldviews embodied in their designs. As an innovator in the field of synbio since its inception in the 2000s, I have helped to shape a process of engineering the living world that relies heavily upon engineering metaphors: DNA as code, genes composed as circuits, cells operating as computers or factories. Yet, these metaphors are laden with implicit utilitarian values. If a cell is merely a computer or factory, what of its animacy or value as a living being? What about considering a cell as an ancestor, which is also a scientifically rigorous observation?

Design with biological, living systems is distinct from design with human-made materials. Botanist and indigenous citizen of the Potawatomi Nation, Robin Wall Kimmerer, writes of a ‘grammar of animacy’:

“In English, we never refer to a member of our family, or indeed to any person, as it. That would be a profound act of disrespect. It robs a person of selfhood and kinship, reducing a person to a mere thing. So it is that in Potawatomi and most other Indigenous languages, we use the same words to address the living world as we use for our family. Because they are our family.”

I believe that synbio and utilitarian engagement with the living world can be enabling and empowering in certain contexts, but if taken to extremes only serves to strengthen a worldview of dominion, with the living world relegated to objects, resources, and machinery for human use. What if we were to design with values and worldview where the living world was treated with sacredness, awe, or wonder? How might we use cutting edge technologies like synbio or artificial intelligence in such a design context?

For example, I currently collaborate with the non-profit organization Revive & Restore, whom uses synbio for conservation applications; so, synbio used in service to natural ecosystems. We are currently working on a project involving coral conservation that is a wonderful embodiment of biotic design. From a technical perspective, the goal is to deploy probiotics to corals that would enhance their resilience to rising temperatures in the ocean. The social dimension is complex—a series of stakeholders from conservation scientists to various Caribbean governments control the fate of whether this project can be deployed. From a relational perspective, there is mutualism present at the level of corals and probiotics, and also at the ecosystem level, where though humanity receives a tremendous benefit to such design, is not its focus.

Another project I am working on is ‘Living Artifacts,’ where we are designing artifacts to enable humanity to explore its relationship with the living world through different levels of ‘conscious engagement’ with a life form: first through Awareness, an acknowledgement of beingness; then Communion, a collective experience of presence; and finally Collaboration, an act of co-creation.

An exemplar of Living Artifacts is the Bio Cement project I am working on with Architecture Teaching Fellow, Laura Gonzalez. From a technical perspective, the goal is to produce a bio cement by combining bio cementing microorganisms with soils, calcium, and urea. From a social perspective, we aim to enable communities to work with their indigenous soils to produce local bio cements, thus reducing carbon emissions from both transportation and also from the concrete production itself, which accounts for a whopping 8% of total global emissions. From a relational perspective, bio cement integrates living organisms into the built environment, transforming how we interact with buildings over their lifespan. A mutual collaboration and relationship of care with these bacteria can enable their communication with colors in response to environmental factors such as pollutants.

I believe that through biotic design and the technical, social, and relational research aims described, my group will advance not only innovative cutting-edge research, but also help make transformative impact to society and the living world.

References

1. Kong DS, Carr PA, Chen L, Zhang S, Jacobson JM. “Parallel gene synthesis in a microfluidic device.” Nucleic Acids Research. 35(8): e61 (2007).

2. Kong DS, Thorsen TA, Babb J, Wick ST, Gam JJ, Weiss R, Carr PA. “Open-Source, Community-Drive Microfluidics with Metafluidics” Nature Biotechnology, 35: 523–529 (2017).

3. Walsh DI, Dydek VE, Lock JY, Carlson TL, Carrier RL, Kong DS, Cabrera CR, Thorsen T. "Emulation of Colonic Oxygen Gradients in a Microdevice." SLAS Technology (2017).

4. Design Justice book

5. Walsh M, Wick S, Kong DS**, Carr PA. "3D-Printable Materials for Microbial Liquid Culture." 3D Printing and Additive Manufacturing. 3(2): 113-118 (2016).

6. Keating S., Gariboldi MI, Patrick WG, Sharma S, Kong DS**, Oxman N. "3D Printed Multimaterial Microfluidic Valve." PLOS One (2016).

7. Patrick WG, Keating S, Nielsen A, Mondragón-Palomino O, Rivera, JJ, Levy T, Wang CC, Voigt CA, Carr PA, Oxman, N, Kong DS*. “DNA Assembly in 3D Printed Fluidics.” PLOS One.(2015).

8. Walsh, DI, Kong DS, Murthy, SK, Carr PA. "Enabling Microfluidics: From Clean Rooms to Makerspaces." Trends in Biotechnology (2017).

9. Zap-pore

10. Resnick M. “Lifelong Kindergarten: Cultivating Creativity through Projects, Passion, Peers, and Play.” The MIT Press (2017).

11. Gershenfeld N, Gershenfeld A, Gershenfeld J. “Designing Reality: How to Survive and Thrive in the Third Digital Revolution.” Basic Books (2017).

12. Perry E, Weber J, Pataranutaporn P, Volf V, Gonzalez LM, Nejad S, Angleton C, Chen JE, Gabo A, Jammalamadaka MS, Kuru E, Fortuna P, Rico A, Sulich K, Wawrzyniak D, Jacobson J, Church G, Kong DS*. “How to grow (almost) anything: a hybrid distance learning model for global laboratory-based synthetic biology education,” Nature Biotechnology, 40: 1874-1879 (2022).

13. www.biosummit.org

14. Ham B. “A global lab for teaching and practicing synthetic biology,” MIT News, January 28, 2023

15. https://www.biosummit.org/statement-of-shared-purpose

16. Gunther Weil, Value Mentors. “2018 Global Community Bio Summit Values.” Bio Summit 2.0 (2018).

17. https://www.biosummit.org/ethics

18. https://www.biosummit.org/governance

19. Malone TW, “Superminds.” Little, Brown Spark (2018).

20. Koppineni A, Kong DS, Malone TW, “Supermind Design for Responding to Covid-19: A case study of university students generating innovative ideas for a societal problem,” MIT Sloan Working Paper No. 6569-22 (2022)

21. “Comprehensive report on pandemic response solutions developed by 180 leading experts,” MIT News, March 30, 2021

22. “Life Sciences Supermind Report outlines proposed solutions to re-imagine the global health ecosystem,” MIT News, January 24, 2022

23. Blumenthal, SJ, Kong, DS, "Reimagining public health infrastructure in the 21st century: A new field multidisciplinary field of public health technology should be established to modernize the nation's health system," Op-Ed, Boston Globe (2021)