Editorial: Other Biological Futures

Medical devices embedded deep in human flesh. Mushrooms growing designer chairs. Engineered probiotic bacteria colonising the guts of soldiers. Implants; fungal factories; bacteria. All three are “biodesigns”, yet each is a product of a very different discipline: biomedical engineering, design, and synthetic biology. Over the last twenty years, each field has in turn claimed the fusing of biology and design as their own. If design is humanity’s process for changing present conditions to other, preferred ones (to paraphrase political scientist Herbert Simon), then biodesign—which we broadly define here as the design of, with, or from biology—offers novel perspectives on what change could look like, for ourselves and other living things. Altered or designed by humans, these organisms could populate “other biological futures”; possible futures different to those dictated by our planet’s naturally evolved present. (...)