“At the close of the Digital Age,” she writes, “design remains constrained by the canon of manufacturing and mass production – she goes on. Assembly lines still dictate a world made of parts, limiting the imagination of designers and builders who are indoctrinated to think and make in terms of discrete elements with distinct functions. Even the assumption that parts are made from single materials goes unchallenged. The legacies of Joseph Marie Jacquard and Henry Ford persist: homogeneous materials are formed into predefined shapes at the service of predetermined functions.”

Through her work, Professor Oxman has been exploring how the Digital Age is enabling engineering and production at Mother Nature’s quantum scale, ushering in the Fourth Industrial Revolution: the Biological Age. She has done this through several projects which pushed the boundaries of manufacturing through multiple material 3D printing (in particular, through a collaboration with Stratasys).

 

The idea of growing objects is clear in the work of several designers experimenting with 3D printing such as studios Nervous Systems, Growth Objects, and Emerging Objects. For Oxman “top-down form generation (additively manufactured) combined with bottom-up growth of biological systems (biologically synthesized) opens previously impossible opportunities: photosynthetic building façades that convert carbon into biofuel; wearable micro-biomes that nourish our skin through selective filtration; 3D printed matter that repairs damaged tissue.”

Although this may seem like a foreign and mysterious concept it is a lot simpler than it sounds.  The products of tomorrow are going to be built in a way that makes us blend in with nature and live symbiotically with the World Organism, instead of parasitically. The only issue remaining is to push the 7+ billion people that inhabit the Earth to make that shift. I’d suggest the 62 people that own half the world’s wealth should probably focus on that.