Neri Oxman: Can culture inspire nature?

Neri Oxman is at once an architect, an inventor, an engineer and a scientist.

The American-Israeli designer and the founding director of The Mediated Matter Group creates unique designs that live somewhere between environmental design and high-tech morphogenesis (the way organisms develop their shapes).

While it's hard to place her in a single category, Oxman and her team’s work can be pared down to her passion for design in the bio-digital age. Her outlook as a designer and architect can perhaps be summarised by a phrase she coined herself: material ecology.

Oxman and her team create structures and spaces across scales, from architectural pavilions to wearable garments, that question the conventions of the built world. Oxman received her PhD in Design Computation as a Presidential Fellow at MIT after attending Medical School at the Hebrew University in Jerusalem.

Along with her diverse team, this designer chips away at the fringes of synthetic biology. Their creations have led to over 100 scientific papers and engineering patents. They create novel design technologies, most of which are fabricated using 3D-printing, to test the bounds of the materials we know today. In this line of work, scale is no issue – Oxman has synthesised objects from micro to building-size, all of which derived from what she and her team see in nature.

For example, in 2015 Oxman and her team unveiled a “wearable skin” design called Mushtari. It allows living organisms to inhabit it and grow within a layer of synthetic skin. The 3D-printed design allows liquid, which houses light-generating photosynthetic organisms, to flow throughout the structure of the garment. Organisms can then grow within the skin and pass the energy from the sunlight to the wearer.

In 2016 Oxman and her team launched the second iteration of their optically transparent glass 3D printer, demonstrating its capabilities by designing, manufacturing and installing three 3-meter tall light fixtures at Milan Design Week.

Where designers of the previous Industrial Revolutions created new machines that propelled our societies forward with indifference to their environmental impact, Oxman makes ecology a central part of her approach. Most of her results are meant to be worn or touched, clearly inspired by the solutions already seized by evolution in nature.