<<Bacterial Cellulose Bio-polymer Composites Research>>
Year: 2014
Location: Cambridge, MA
Critic: John Fernandez
Collaboration with Katia Zolotovsky
This project aims to design a process in which design product is grown by a living agent instead of being fabricated. Working with living design agent forces us to rethink the definition of agency in design, since the producing organism becomes an active participant in the design process.
We utilize the ability of Glucanobacter Xylinus, the most abundant bacteria on earth, to produce cellulose as its basic living function. In this bottom-up biofabrication process, the bacteria assemble glucose molecules from sugar solution to create a thick membrane of cellulose. This membrane, when dried, becomes a sheet of material similar in properties to a paper only 8-10times stronger. Here we show experiments with manipulating bacterial growth toward desired outcome and a proposal for a computationally-controlled material growth process for fabrication of cellular structures and surfaces from bacterial cellulose. In our proposal, cellulose sheets are deposited into a mold and by locally introducing air pressure and inducing between-sheet growth, cellular morphologies are created. Material thickness, cells size, and density are controlled computationally through local air pressure and sensory feedback. This proposal presents steps toward growing larger scale architectural surfaces and structures from bacterial cellulose and further developing the methodology of working with living matter in architectural scale. In the future, we believe the design of the growth environment will be combined and extended to the design of the organism itself through micro-technology of synthetic biology. Rewriting and rebuilding the natural systems is already possible through DNA sequencing, fabrication ofgenes, and modeling and measuring synthetic genes behavior [ref]. We believe it will be possible to program the living agent itself to direct the fabrication process through growth rate, spatial organization of the material and its properties, and hierarchical material assembly into 3D structures. The below proposal is taking the first steps toward this vision.
