Neri Oxman: Designing with Nature – From Material Ecology to Growing Products and Empowering Biological Systems

This episode features Neri Oxman, a pioneering engineer, scientist, designer, and artist, discussing her vision for a future where humans design and build *with* nature, not against it. Oxman introduces the concept of "material ecology," advocating for a world where all human-made materials are considered part of the ecological system and contribute positively to it. She highlights the critical moment in 2020 when "anthropomass" (all human-made products) exceeded "biomass" on the planet, underscoring the urgent need to course-correct our relationship with the natural world. Her ultimate goal, encapsulated by the slogan "grow everything," is to create a synergy where human-designed objects augment and heal nature, blurring the lines between grown and made.

Oxman distinguishes between human intelligence and nature's inherent wisdom, proposing that technology can be leveraged to tap into and augment this natural wisdom. She envisions "large molecule models" as a biological counterpart to large language models, aiming to quantify and understand the universal language across all five kingdoms of life. This understanding would enable computational tools to empower nature, allowing it to make decisions, build better crops, and increase biodiversity. A core principle guiding her work is that nature seeks to increase information while decreasing entropy, a goal that human design can align with by reducing the "dimensional mismatch" between things made and things grown.

Her new company, Oxman, focuses on three scales of work: the molecular scale, aiming to create an "iPhone for nature" – an interface that provides nature with computational bandwidth; the product scale, developing the world's first entirely biodegradable, biocompatible, biorenewable product that starts from CO2 and ends as an edible fruit plant; and co-fabrication, where humans digitally fabricate alongside organisms. She shares examples from her past work at MIT's Mediated Matter Group, such as guiding silkworms to build architectural pavilions and creating synthetic apiaries for bees, including a successful mission to outer space. These projects demonstrate how computational templating can facilitate a "duet" between nature and technology.

The broader implications of Oxman's work revolve around redefining agency and emergence in biological systems. She explores how technology can enable swarm-like behavior in creatures not naturally designed for it, moving beyond human control and templating towards a collaboration where natural organisms gain agency. This involves creating environments of "mutualism" and "shared connection" between humans and other species. The ethical considerations of providing such tools to nature are paramount, ensuring responsible deployment. Ultimately, Oxman's vision is a profound re-imagining of design, engineering, and our place within the natural world, fostering a future of symbiotic existence and regenerative creation.

"if you could today grow instead of build everything and anything if you could grow an iPhone if you could grow a car what would that world look like"

"is there a world in which driving a car is better for nature than a world in which there are no cars is there is it possible that a world in which you build buildings in cities that those buildings and cities actually augment and heal nature as opposed to their absence"

"what if all material all things materials would be considered part of the ecology and would have an impact a positive impact on the ecology"

"what does it mean for nature to have access to the cloud at the kind of bandwidth that we're talking about sort of think neuralink for nature"

"I think of it as large molecule models and those large molecule models of course large language models are based on the on Google and search engines and and so on and so forth and we don't have this data currently"

"we're constantly asking what does nature want like what what does nature want from a compute view if it knew it what what could Aid it and whatever the heck it's wanting to do"

"nature wants to increase information but decrease entropy"

"how can technology augment or enable a swarm-like behavior and creatures that have not been designed to work as swarms"

"if you can predict it it doesn't count as emergence"

"an agent is empowered if the entropy of the distribution of all of it states it's high while the entropy of the distribution of a single state given a choice given an action is low"

"before you template right before you can design with you have to design four right you have to create this space of mutualism space of sort of shared connection between you and the organism"

"the world's first entirely biodegradable bi-compatible by renewable product that's grown"