Issue 4 of the Journal of Design and Science, “Other Biological Futures,” looks at biodesign, the design of, with, or from biology. Biodesign is being promoted by scientists and designers as an ecological remedy, a technological challenge, an economic opportunity, and a manufacturing and industrial revolution. In this issue, we ask whether biodesign in practice really can make things better, and what that might look like.
Over the last decade, artist Dr. Alexandra Daisy Ginsberg, and designer Natsai Audrey Chieza have been exploring the design of living matter and its potential implications. As editors of this issue, they identify difficulties they see emerging in the evolving practice of biodesign, and open up new directions for investigation. Initiating conversations between scientists, designers, curators, artists, bioengineers, activists, historians, and more, all who are somehow “other” to each other, the issue reveals complex issues in biodesign around the world. The conversations will be released serially as we consider different kinds of colonisation in biodesign, raise ethical issues in designing living matter and, hopefully, reach beyond our networks and cultures to encourage the imagination of “other biological futures”.
