Neri Oxman is a designer, engineer, scientist, and artist working on computational design, synthetic biology and digital fabrication, previously at MIT, and now at OXMAN. Please support this podcast by checking out our sponsors:

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OUTLINE:

Here's the timestamps for the episode. On some podcast players you should be able to click the timestamp to jump to that time.

(00:00) - Introduction

(09:06) - Biomass vs anthropomass

(23:27) - Computational templates

(43:42) - Biological hero organisms

(54:42) - Engineering with bacteria

(1:02:59) - Plant communication

(1:16:22) - Albert Einstein letter

(1:19:44) - Beauty

(1:24:40) - Faith

(1:34:26) - Flaws

(1:54:15) - Extinction

(2:05:22) - Alien life

(2:09:12) - Music

(2:10:39) - Movies

(2:15:11) - Advice for young people

The following is a conversation with Neri Oxman, an engineer, scientist, designer, architect, artist, and 1 of the kindest, most thoughtful and brilliant human beings I've ever gotten to know.

For a long time, she led the Mediated Matter Group at MIT that did research and built incredible stuff at the intersection of computational design, digital fabrication, material science, and synthetic biology, doing so at all scales, from the micro scale to the building scale.

Now She's continuing this work at a very new company for now called Oxman, looking to revolutionize how humans design and build products, working with nature, not against it.

On a personal note, let me say that Neri has for a long time been a friend and someone who in my darker moments has always been there with a note of kindness and support.

She's a brilliant and a beautiful human being.

Oh, and she also brought me a present, War and Peace by Tolstoy and Meditations by Marcus Aurelius.

And now a quick few second mention of each sponsor.

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Language is a way to express the music that's in your heart, that's in your mind through compressing the incredibly complex and rich set of stuff that's going on inside your mind into a very thin stream of words.

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As I've talked to extensively, even recently, to Andrew Huberman and many others, talk therapy is a really, really powerful thing for exploring the depth of the human mind, the Jungian shadow, the good and the bad that lurks there in that shadow that you have not really shined a light on, that you've not brought to the surface, that not sat there face to face with the simplicity of trauma or just memories, experiences that you journeyed through earlier in life, and just sitting there and allowing yourself to face them, it's somehow a really powerful way to bring inner peace.

So I'm a big supporter of talk therapy, of talking, of deep conversation in general, and I think talk therapy's like 1 of the ways you can force yourself to have deep, personal, intimate conversation.

Podcasting, frankly, when done really well, is that also.

I do recommend that even if you don't have a podcast, you grab yourself a mic and you sit across the table from somebody who means a lot to you and you have that conversation, even if the mic is not recording.

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And I would actually say that John Mayer is a hell of a blues musician as well.

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And now, dear friends, here's Neri Oxman.

♪♪♪ ♪♪♪ ♪♪♪ Let's start with the universe.

You ever think of the universe as a kind of machine that designs beautiful things at multiple scales?

And I think of nature in that way in general.

In the context of design specifically, I think of nature as everything that isn't anthropomass, everything that is not produced by humankind.

The birds and the rocks and everything in between, fungi, elephants, whales.

Do you think there's an intricate ways in which there's a connection between humans and nature?

I think that from, let's say, from the beginning of mankind, going back 200, 000 years, the products that we have designed have separated us from nature.

And it's ironic that the things that we designed and produced as humankind, those are exactly the things that separated us.

Before that, we were totally and completely connected.

But bring the tools of engineering and computation to it.

I absolutely believe that there is so much to nature that we still have not leveraged and we still have not understood and we still haven't.

And so much of our work is design, but a lot of it is science, is unveiling and finding new truths about the natural world that we were not aware of before.

Everybody talks about intelligence these days, but I like to think that nature has a kind of wisdom that exists beyond intelligence or above intelligence.

And it's that wisdom that we're trying to tap into through technology.

If you think about humans versus nature, at least in the realm, at least in the context of definition of nature is everything but anthropomass.

And I'm using Ron Milo, who is an incredible professor from the Weizmann Institute who came up with this definition of anthropomass in 2020, when he identified that 2020 was the crossover year when anthropomass exceeded biomass on the planet.

So all of the design goods that we have created and brought into the world now outweigh all of the biomass, including of course all plastics and wearables, building cities, but also asphalt and concrete, all outweigh the scale of the biomass.

And actually that was a moment, you know how in life there are moments that, be a handful of moments that get you to course correct.

And it was a Zoom conversation with Ron, and that was a moment for me when I realized that imbalance, Now we've superseded the biomass on the planet.

Where do we go from here?" And you've heard the expression, more phones than bones, and the anthropomass, and the anthropocene, and the technosphere sort of outweighing the biosphere.

But now we are really trying to look at is there a way in which all things technosphere are designed as if they are part of the biosphere?

Meaning 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 where the Turing test for sort of this kind of, I call this material ecology approach, but this notion that everything material, everything that you design in the physical universe can be read and written to as or thought of or perceived of as nature grown.

That's sort of the Turing test for the company, or at least that's how I started.

And if we grow everything, is there a world in which driving a car is better for nature than a world in which there are no cars?

Is it possible that a world in which you build buildings and cities, that those buildings and cities actually augment and heal nature as opposed to their absence.

Is there a world in which we now go back to that kind of synergy between nature and humans where you cannot separate between grown and made?

Is there a good term for the intersection between biomass and entropomass, like things that are grown?

Yes, in 2005 I called this material ecology.

I thought, well, what if all things materials would be considered part of the ecology and would have a positive impact on the ecology, where we work together to help each other, all things nature, all things human.

And again, you can say that that wisdom in nature exists in fungi.

Many mushroom lovers always contest my thesis here saying, well, we have the mushroom network and we have the mother trees and they're all connected.

And why don't we just simply hack into mushrooms?

Well, first of all, Yes, they're connected, but that network stops when there is a physical gap.

That network does not necessarily enable the whales in the Dominican to connect with an olive tree in Israel, to connect with a weeping willow in Montana.

And that's sort of a world that I'm dreaming about.

What does it mean for nature to have access to the cloud?

The kind of bandwidth that we're talking about, sort of think Neuralink for nature, you know, since the first computer, and you know this by heart probably better than I do, but we're both MIT lifers.

We today have computational power that is 1 trillion times the power that we had in those times.

quintillion times the memory, which is incredible.

So humankind, since the first computer, has approached and accessed such incredible bandwidth.

And we're asking, well, what if nature had that bandwidth?

So beyond genes and evolution, if there was a way to augment nature and allow it access to the world of bits, what does nature look like now?

And can nature make decisions for herself as opposed to being guided and guarded and abused by humankind?

So nature has this inherent wisdom that you spoke to, but you're also referring to augmenting that inherent wisdom with something like a large language model.

So compress human knowledge, but also maintain whatever is that intricate wisdom that allows plants, bacteria, fungi to grow incredible things at arbitrary scales, adapting to whatever environment and just surviving and thriving no matter where, no matter how.

Exactly, so I think of it as large molecule models, and those large molecule models, of course, large language models are based on Google and search engines and so on and so forth, and we don't have this data currently, and part of our mission is to do just that.

Trying to quantify and understand the language that exists across all kingdoms of life, across all 5 kingdoms of life.

And if we can understand that language, is there a way for us to first make sense of it, find logic in it, and then generate certain computational tools that empower nature to build better crops, to increase the level of biodiversity.

In the company, we're constantly asking, what does nature want?

Like, what does nature want from a compute view?

If it knew it, what could aid it in whatever the heck it's wanting to do.

Yeah, so we keep coming back to this answer of nature wants to increase information, but decrease entropy, right?

So find order, but constantly increase the information scale.

And this is true for what our work also tries to do because we're constantly trying to fight against the dimensional mismatch between things made and things grown, right?

And as designers, we are educated to think in X, Y, and Z, and that's pretty much where architectural education ends and biological education begins.

So in reducing that dimensional mismatch, we're missing out on opportunities to create things made as if grown.

But in the natural environment, we're asking, can we provide nature with these extra dimensions?

And again, I'm not sure what nature wants, but I'm curious as to what happens when you provide these tools to the natural environments, obviously with responsibility, obviously with control, obviously with ethics and moral code.

But is there a world in which nature can help fix itself using those tools?

And by the way, we're talking about a company called Oxman.

Yeah, what kind of humans work at a place like this?

They're trying to figure out what nature wants.

You know, I think they're first like you.

They come from different disciplines and different disciplinary backgrounds.

And just as an example, we have a brilliant designer who is just a mathematical genius and a computer scientist and a mechanical engineer who is trained as a synthetic biologist and now we're hiring a microbiologist and a chemist, architects, of course, and designers, roboticist.

And always dancing between this line of the artificial, the synthetic and the real.

Yeah, the built and the grown, nature and culture, technology and biology, but we're constantly seeking to ask how can we build, design, and deploy products in 3 scales, the molecular scale, which I briefly hinted to, and there, in the molecular scale, we're really looking to understand whether there's a universal language to nature and what that language is, and then build a tool that I think and dream of it is the iPhone for nature.

If nature had an iPhone, what would that iPhone look like?

Does that mean creating an interface between nature and the computational tools we have?

Exactly, it goes back to that 11.5 quintillion times the bandwidth that humans have now arrived at and giving that to nature and seeing what happens there.

Can animals actually use this interface to know that they need to run away from fire?

Can plants use this interface to increase the rate of photosynthesis in the presence of a smoke cloud?

Can they do this quote unquote automatically without a kind of a top-down brute force policy-based method that's authored and deployed by humans?

And so this work really relates to that interface with the natural world.

And then there's a second area in the company which focuses on growing products.

And here we're focusing on a single product that starts from CO2.

It becomes a product, it's consumed, it's used, it's worn by a human and then it goes back to the soil and it grows an edible fruit plant.

So we're talking about from CO2 to fruit.

Yeah, it starts from CO2 and it ends with something that you can like literally eat.

So the world's first entirely biodegradable, biocompatible, biorenewable product.

Yes, either using plant matter or using bacteria.

But we are really looking at carbon recycling technologies that start with methane or wastewater and end with this wonderful reincarnation of a thing that doesn't need to end up in a composting site, but can just be thrown into the ground and grow olive and find peace.

And there's a lot of textile-based work out there that is focused on 1 single element in this long chain, like, oh, let's create, you know, leather out of mycelium or let's create textile out of cellulose.

But then it stops there, and you get to assembling the shoe or the wearable, and you need a little bit of glue, and you need a little bit of this material, and a little bit of that material to make it water-resistant, and then it's over.

So that's 1 thing that we're trying to solve for, is how to create a product that is materially, computationally, robotically novel, and goes through all of these phases from the creation, from this carbon recycling technology to the product, to literally how do you think about, you know, reinventing an industry that is focused on assembly and putting things together and using humans to do that.

Can that happen just using robots and microbes?

I would love to see what this factory looks like.

In October, We'll share first renditions of some of this work, and in February we'll invite you to the lab.

I've already applied, I can't even hurt back.

Okay, just Before we get to number 3, it'd be amazing to just talk about what it takes with robotic arms or in general the whole process of how to build a life form, stuff you've done in the past, maybe stuff you're doing now, how to use bacteria, it's kind of synthetic biology, how to grow stuff by leveraging bacteria.

Yes, and just take a step back over the 10 years of the Mediated Matter Group, which was my group at MIT, has sort of dedicated itself to, bio-based design would be a suitcase word, but sort of thinking about that synergy between nature and culture, biology and technology.

And we attempted to build a suite of embodiments, let's say, that they ended up in amazing museums and amazing shows, and we wrote patents and papers on them, but they were still N of ones.

Again, the challenge, as you say, was to grow them.

And we classified them into fibers, cellular solids, biopolymers, pigments, And in each of the examples, although the material was different, sometimes we used fibers, sometimes we used silk with silkworms and honey with bees or comb as the structural material.

With vespers, we used synthetically engineered bacteria to produce pigments.

Although the materials were different and the hero organisms were different, the philosophy was always the same.

The approach was really an approach of computational templating.

That templating allowed us to create templates for the natural environment, where nature and technology could duet, could dance together to create these products.

So just a few examples with a silk pavilion.

We've had a couple of pavilions made of silk and the second 1, which was the bigger 1, which ended up at the Museum of Modern Art with my friend and incredible mentor, Paolo Antonelli, that pavilion was 6 meter tall and it was produced by silkworms.

And there we had different types of templates.

There were physical templates that were basically just these water-soluble meshes upon which the silkworms were spinning.

And then there were environmental templates, which was a robot basically applying a variation of environmental conditions such as heat and light to guide the movement of the silkworm.

You're saying so many amazing things, and I'm trying not to interrupt you, but 1 of the things you've learned by observing, by doing science on these is that the environment defines the shape that they create, or contributes, or intricately plays with the shape they create.

And so like, and you get to, that's 1 of the ways you can get to guide their work is by defining the environment.

By the way, you said hero organism, which is an epic term.

That means like, it's whatever is the biological living system that's doing the creation.

And that's what's happening in pharma and biomaterials and by the way, precision ag and food, new food design technologies as people are betting on a hero organism is sort of how I think of it.

And the hero organism is sometimes it's the palm oil or it's the mycelium.

There's a lot of mushrooms around for good and bad and it's cellulose or it's fake bananas or the workhorse E.

But these hero organisms are being betted on as like the, what's the 1 answer that solves everything?

These are sort of the 42s of, you know, of the enchanted new universe.

And back at MIT, we said, instead of betting on all of these organisms, let's approach them as almost like movement in a symphony and let's kind of lean into what we can learn from each of these organisms in the context of building a project in an architectural scale.

And then the computational templating is the way you guide the work of this, how many did you say, 17, 000?

So each of these silkworms threads are about, you know, 1 mile in distance and they're beautiful.

And just thinking about the amount of material, you know, it's a bit like thinking about the length of capillary vessels that grow in your belly when you're pregnant to feed that incredible new life form.

But back to the silkworms, I think I had 3 months to build this incredible pavilion, but we couldn't figure out how, we were thinking of emulating the process of how a silkworm goes about building its incredible architecture, this cocoon over the period of 24 to 72 hours.

And it builds a cocoon basically to protect itself.

And it uses pretty much just 2 materials, 2 chemical compounds, sericin and fibrin.

The sericin is sort of the glue of the cocoon, the fibrin is the fiber-based material of the cocoon, and through fibers and glue, and that's true for so many systems in nature, lots of fiber and glue, and that architecture allows them to metamorphosize.

And in the process, they vary the properties of that silk thread.

So it's stiffer or softer depending on where it is in the section of the cocoon.

And so we were trying to emulate this robotically with a 3D printer that was a six-axis KUKA arm, 1 of these baby KUKAs.

And we're trying to emulate that process computationally and build something very large.

When 1 of my students now, a brilliant industrial engineer roboticist on my team, Marcus, said, well, you know, we were just playing with those silkworms and enjoying their presence when we realize that if they're placed on a desk or a horizontal surface, they will go about creating their cocoon.

Only the cocoon would be flat because they're constantly looking for a vertical post in order to use that post as an anchor to spin the cocoon.

But in the absence of that post, on surfaces that are less than 21 millimeters and flat, they will spin flat patches.

And we say, aha, let's work with them to produce this dome as a set of flat patches.

And a silkworm, mind you, is quite an egocentric creature.

And actually, the furthest you go, you move forward in evolution by natural selection, the more egoism you find in creatures.

So when you think about termites, their material sophistication is actually very primitive, but they have incredible ability to communicate and connect with each other.

So if you think about the entire, all of nature, let's say all of living systems as like a matrix that runs across 2 axes.

1 is material sophistication, which is terribly irrelevant for designers, and the other is communication.

The termites ace on communication, but their material sophistication is crap, right?

It's just saliva and feces and some soil particles that are built to create these incredible termite mounds at the scale that, when compared to human skyscrapers, transcend all of buildable scales at least in terms of what we have today in architectural practice, just relative to the size of the termite.

But when you look at the silkworm, the silkworm has 0 connection and communication across silkworms.

They were not designed to connect and communicate with each other.

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#394 – Neri Oxman: Biology, Art, and Science of Design & Engineering with Nature