Neri Oxman

NeriOxman “In nature, there is no separation between design, engineering, and fabrication; the bone does it all “

2022

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Mediated Matter

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Career

Early life and education

about Neri

Who Is Neri Oxman?

In the middle

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Silk II

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SYNTHETIC APIARY

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Data-Driven Material Modeling

AGUAHOJA

Organic and natural fabrication

PART 1

Neri Oxman

interview

“In nature, there is no separation between design, engineering, and fabrication; the bone does it all”

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Neri Oxman

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Who Is Neri Oxman?

By Penelope Green

Cambridge, Mass. — One hot day in early September, Neri Oxman, a tenured professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s Media Lab, was on her way to lunch when it hit her. “‘Form follows pheromones!’” she remembered exclaiming. “I was thinking, as I was devouring my meatball sandwich, about how we could use robotic arms to spit out pheromones guiding bees to template honeycombs

in the absence of queens.

The robots, you see, could master the hive.”

“We are sending bees to outer space,” she added, “we’ve got a little cell on Jeff Bezos’s Blue Origin mission.” (Mr. Bezos has his eye on a lunar landing.)

Bees, I learned later, use pheromones to communicate, a complex endocrine language through which the queen, for example, tells her subjects to step

up their work on the honeycomb. Hence Dr. Oxman’s aperçu.

Bees in outer space are just one of the many aspirations and provocations of Dr. Oxman, a 42-yearold Israeli-born architect, computational designer and artist who is the recipient of this year’s Cooper Hewitt Design award for interaction design. Though as Jenny Lam, a noted tech designer and one of the award’s jurors, said, Dr. Oxman could just as easily have been nominated for fashion or architecture or product design. (The award ceremony and gala will be held on Oct. 18 in New York City.)

dents are an eclectic bunch: a biomedical engineer, a glass blower, a material scientist, a computer scientist whose specialty is wet artificial intelligence (which has something to do with programming bacteria), an architect, a marine biologist and, yes, a beekeeper, among other specialists.

Dr. Oxman likes to play Noah with would-be applicants. “You have to have two of everything, so they can procreate intellectually if not biologically,” she said. (There have been material ecology love affairs, five marriages and three babies.) The team has been collaborating, as they say, with natural organisms like

Editors’ Picks A Saga Between Tries, Novak Djokovic Again Aims for His 21st Slam Alex Cooper Is Coming for Joe Rogan’s Spot ‘Secret City,’ an Epic Narrative History of the Closet in the Capital Glistening sheets of a honey-colored material were made from a paste of ground-up shrimp shells that varies from opaque to translucent and is embedded with bacteria that has been engineered to capture carbon and turn it into sugar. The stuff also biodegrades on command.

“We treat design more like a gardening practice,” Dr. Oxman said.

‘Aiming for Biological Goth’

Her team can do crazy things with moss, mushrooms and apple pectin.

They are outliers even for the Media Lab, a playground of cutting-edge technology with a social conscience.

Dr. Oxman and her stu-

slime molds, monarchs and silkworms, to make extraordinary objects and structures that do all sorts of extraordinary things.

Bubbling winged wearables, to use a material ecology term, look like muscle fibers or bacterial colonies. A fluffy Buckminster Fuller-ish dome was made by silkworms that spun their fibers over a carapace made by robots.

Ghostly masks shaped by the patterns of human breath were inspired by indigenous death masks and pigmented with bioengineered E. coli cells.

7 SFMOMA The Future of Man-Nahata

interview

Dr. Oxman is the founder of a discipline she calls material ecology, which marries the technological advances of computational design, synthetic biology and digital fabrication (otherwise known as 3-D printing) to produce compostable structures, glass objects that vary their optical and structural properties, and garments made from a single piece of silk fabric.

Preternaturally beautiful, these startling-looking objects have appeared on fashion runways and design fairs, and live in the permanent collections of museums of both art and science, including the Museum of Modern Art and the Smithsonian. And they have made Dr. Oxman, who is rather startling looking herself, a star.

Neri Oxman

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Ms. Lam, the software designer, described Dr. Oxman as a contemporary Leonardo da Vinci.

John Maeda, the head of computational design at Automattic, a web development company, who also was once an M.I.T. Media Lab darling, said, “If I was the Terminator, Neri is Terminator 2. I was crappy titanium parts, but she’s like liquid metal.”

What makes Dr. Oxman, the scientist, so unusual, said Paola Antonelli, the senior curator of architecture and design at MoMA, is her aesthetic sense.

“She’s not afraid of formal elegance,” Ms. Antonel-

“Maintaining Ideological Purity”

li said. “The reason why she is a gift to the field of architecture and design is that her science works, her aesthetics work, and her theory works. It’s been interesting to see scientists respond. They welcome the collaboration because they know the research they develop with her team is going to be accepted by their peers and it might even show up in a museum.

That it might be beautiful.

I’m not afraid to use that word, by the way.”

Dr. Oxman is on sabbatical this year, but she was in the lab this sweltering day to explain her practice, gulping green tea and gently chastising me for a Diet Coke habit. “I used to be a Coke enthusiast,” she said, “but now I’m addicted to E. coli.”

That bacteria, she said, is known as the workhorse of synthetic biology, which basically means you can make it do anything. Charismatic and epigrammatic, Dr. Oxman speaks as if in

Yes, it turns out, as Dr. Oxman explained with characteristic charm in her 2015 TED Talk, which now has over two million views.

The following year, Björk came calling. The two women discussed heartache and art, the Icelandic pop star recalled by email, after which Dr. Oxman’s team made the singer a mask to perform in that was based on Björk’s own

“I sang a song called ‘Quicksand,’ which is about a nihilist goth-like person,” Björk wrote in her email, “so we aimed for biological goth. I remember looking at Mexican death masks but mostly talking about love, to be honest.”

This past spring, Brad Pitt also reached out, in a visit to the Media Lab that inflamed the internet. They are not dating, Dr. Oxman said emphatically — her real-world boyfriend is William A. Ackman, the contrarian hedge funder who famously paid over $90 million for a penthouse in one of Manhattan’s supertall buildings — but she would love to do a project with Mr. Pitt in the future, she said.

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“What does it mean to design a living object?” she said. “How do we accommodate for dimensional mismatches between environmental constraints, light, load, da, da, da and the material? How can you have a single material system that is multifunctional, that is not made of parts and that can vary over space and time for different conditions? Can you make architecture that behaves like a tree.”

facial tissue. It looks like a snarl of hair and muscle, and it transformed her into a furry, scary post-nuclear human on stage.

AGUAHOJA project

capital letters and long, enticing, musical paragraphs.

From Water to Water AGUAHOJA

SYNTHETIC APIARY

Neri Oxman

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To remind, Mr. Pitt’s interests include architecture, furniture design and urban planning. Dr. Oxman described him “as the last of the Mohicans in post-Netflix Hollywood. He brings together the timely and the timeless,” she said, “which is what cinema is all about.” (Dr. Oxman is a Fellini and Ingmar Bergman fan.)

She also had some fun with the paparazzi staked out in front of the Media Lab. As she left work during that Pitt period, she made sure to brandish a copy of the Feynman Lectures (a famous physics textbook) and of the Golden Record, the audio time capsule (in the form of an LP, otherwise known as an album or record) that went to Mars in 1977, in a subversive plug for Team Science.

“The Golden Record beats the Caviar quilted flap bag on any given day,” she said. “Toting the ultimate message to moon was my message in a bottle to the paparazzi. The Feynman Lectures followed.”

A “coy” piano player who was a first lieutenant in the Israeli air force, Dr. Oxman dropped out of medical school to pursue architecture, and then earned her Ph.D. in design computation at M.I.T. Her heroes are Leonard Bernstein, Buckminster Fuller and her grandmother Miriam, a Sabra, an educator and a gardener.

Her parents, both professors, are architectural royalty in Israel. Her father, Robert Oxman, is a theory guy. Her mother, Rivka Oxman, was an early pioneer and booster of artificial intelligence in architectural design.

Dr. Oxman is spending part of her sabbatical working on a project for Ms. Antonelli, who is curating the XXII Triennale di Milano international exhibition next March. The theme is “Broken Nature,” an appropriately thorny topic for the times.

In response, Dr. Oxman and her group have been experimenting with melanin, the natural pigment found in all six of what biologists call “the kingdoms of life” (plants, minerals, animals, bacteria and fungi); melanin is also a biomarker of evolution because it has been around since the time of the dinosaurs.

Today, Dr. Oxman said, it is 10 times more valuable than gold, if you buy it for research purposes. “In this era of global warming,” she said, “melanin is the new gold.”

It is Dr. Oxman’s grand ambition, said Moshe Safdie, the Israeli-Canadian architect and urban planner who is a friend and mentor, “to transform the methodology of building. Today we have materials that are translucent and we have materials that are load bearing and she is hoping we would reach the day when we have materials that could behave in multiple ways.

Release light and store energy. “ “It is such a grand ambition, I don’t think it will be fulfilled in my life,” said Mr. Safdie, now 80. “I might be wrong.”

“Because she is a gifted artist,” he continued, “what comes out through whatever processes she

uses are beautiful objects.

People are fascinated by these lovely objects. From my perspective, from a wish that her grand ambitions are fulfilled, this is like a sideshow, but it’s a sideshow that gets a lot of attention.”

Dr. Oxman would adamantly agree.

“Look, we haven’t gone this far to sell glass-printed light fixtures on Amazon,” she said. “We are here and remain committed because we are able to design an architectural ‘skin’ as an optical lens, thereby opening up possibilities for harnessing solar energy on urban scales. These technologies should not be trivialized for entertainment purposes alone, though potentially profitable solutions such as a biodegradable Pellegrino bottle may well help us cut out plastic. One has to start somewhere without compromising soul.”

When the lab figured out how to 3-D-print glass, which has all sorts of applications for building facades, Dr. Oxman was wooed by a Chinese billionaire in the fragrance business.

“He said, I’ll give you this amount of millions of dollars if you can produce perfume diffusers by Christmas,” she recalled.

“I thought, I’ll take your money, but you won’t see any perfume diffusers.

To Bee or Not to Bee Synthetic Apiary

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The challenge for me is to scale while maintaining ideological purity. It would be to easy to start a line of melanin makeup. Easy! Vitamin-infused melanin for sun-protection-slash-makeup. Easy!

That’s a billion-dollar industry. But why not have an architect enter the race to cure cancer?”

interview

What does it mean to engineer melanin? There are obvious boons for tissue repair and sun protection, but what are the implications, she continued, “philosophically, practically, ethically, humanely, socially and anthropologically for doing such a thing?

Up until now, our work has been culturally agnostic. This project takes us further into charged territories.”

Practically speaking, she said, her group is imagining a “biological building,” for Ms. Antonelli’s show.

“Could it act as structure and skin, varying its concentration as a function of a site-specific sun path diagram?”

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biography

Neri Oxman

PART 2

about Neri

biography

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“If I was the Terminator, Neri is Terminator two. I was crappy titanium parts, but she’s like liquid metal” John Maeda

Neri Oxman

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about Neri Perhaps Neri Oxman has the energy and foresight of a demiurge of the third millennium, more than any other contemporary designer. The strength of the impact with which she started a revolution that involves architecture and microorganisms, in collaboration with her Mediated Matter research group within the MIT Media Lab in Boston, is based on a two-fold approach.

On the one hand, Oxman employs the cutting-edge instruments provided by technological innovation in order to promote a new

production era based on nature-inspired engineering. On the other hand, she combines these new opportunities for production with a radical methodological rethinking, which makes this interdisciplinary combination of science, biology, design and art capable of facilitating a more sustainable physiognomy of the world. These characteristics make her one of the most significant innovators of recent years, and her work has represented a benchmark for many architects and designers after her.

Ms. Oxman Cody O’Loughlin for The New York Times

“Think Centre Pompidou without the separate parts, but rather a single and continuous transparent building skin that can integrate multiple functions”

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It is impossible to grasp the scope and reach of her work without taking into account the four operational tools that still characterize her field of research today: the Mediated Matter group conducts research at the intersection of computational design, digital fabrication, materials science and synthetic biology, combining material engineering with the ability to achieve new biological functionalities through DNA modification. Thanks to large computing units, custom 3d printers that build themselves and laboratories where new living forms can be modeled, Oxman looks at biological matter as a new collaborative substrate with which to build, following a logic that is completely different from that of the twentieth century. Moving away from the assembly line model, but also from the idea that a product - no matter its dimensions - is the result of the assembly of its components, Oxman looks into the possibility of literally growing its materials in the laboratory and adapting their natural evolution according to designed methods. In this holistic, multi-species vision, organisms are shaped to take on specific forms, functions, and characteristics: it is a more advanced level of organic design that transcends the imitation of nature, and instead focuses on engineering it in order to obtain the desired results.

A 3D PRINTING PIONEER AND VISIONARY

Neri Oxman

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The organisms with which Neri Oxman experiments prove to be extraordinary allies in reshaping the world of the future. Silkworms, for example, are the material with which she created the “Silk Pavilion” of 2013, which was an installation made of silk threads that also shows a new way to produce the fabric without having to kill the silkworms. The silk dome was designed using an algorithm, and then printed by a robotic arm, with the contribution of 6,500 silkworms, which were weaving their thread around the structure outlined by the computer.

Thanks to specific light effects, the silkworms concentrated in some areas of the surface rather than others, helping to modify the thickness of the vault as well as the density and strength of the material.

The e.coli bacterium becomes, according to Oxman’s vision, a valuable ally in the design of what remains one of her most speculative works, Wanderers. Designed as food reserve for interplanetary voyages, these four wearable “skins” reproduce the shape and function of the human intestine: within it, genetically modified e.coli bacteria can be transformed into sugar reserves when exposed to sunlight. Pheromones, on the other hand, are the biochemical substances that Oxman used in order to realize Syntethic Apiary, a controlled environment which offers precise control of light, humidity and temperature to replicate the ideal environment for bees to survive and produce honey. Commissioned

by Triennale Milano, on the occasion of the Inter-

disciplinary model where science, engineering, design and art feed and inspire each other, creating a circle of mutual influence that turns information into knowledge, utility and ultimately behavior.

In February 2020, the MOMA in New York inaugurated the first monographic exhibition - “Neri Oxman - Material Ecology“ - dedicated to the work of the Israeli American designer; “a mid-career exhibition”, as defined by the curator Paola Antonelli, Senior Curator of the Museum’s Department of Architecture and Design. Antonelli was one of the very first to highlight Oxman’s talent, and this exhibition represents another opportunity to underline the double relevance of the designer’s work: first, the importance of experimenting with nature-based engineering by reshaping the production chains, but also the importance of being able to integrate a complete aesthetic profile, overcoming the formal approximation of the maker’s research thanks to a surprising formal synthesis, which is a true language in the making of the twenty-first century.

DETAIL. 3D - printed outfits.

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national Exhibition called Broken Nature, the Totems project exploits melanin as a building material on an architectural scale.

Again, with G3DP, Mediated Matter launched the first 3D printers capable of printing optically transparent glass. This additive glass production technology sees in the integration of light refraction mechanisms a potential for new applications, particularly in the solar field. The aesthetic sophistication of her science fiction-looking forms has allowed Oxman to work on many impactful projects and collaborations for the fashion world. For the Icelandic artist Björk, Mediated Group came up with a prosthetic mask, which mimics soft tissue, muscle and rigid bone structure of the face. For Iris Van Herpen, the Voltage fashion collection is made of 3d-printed outfits - once again, conceived as a single material, as opposed to the idea of an assembly of the components - and it stands out for the fabric’s capacity to vary in elasticity and softness, following the shapes and movements of the dress.

In 2016 Oxman wrote an essay for the Journal of Design, a joint venture of the MIT Media Lab and the MIT Press, destined to leave an indelible mark on the theoretical debate between science and human sciences. In “The Age of Entangelement”, Oxam talked about the “Krebs Cycle of Creativity”, a

Early life and education

Neri Oxman

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Oxman was born and raised in Haifa, Israel, to a Jewish family. Her parents, Robert and Rivka Oxman, are both architects.

Her younger sister, Keren Oxman, is an artist. Oxman graduated from the Hebrew Reali School in Haifa in 1994. Oxman grew up “between nature and culture”, spending time in her grandmother’s garden and her parent’s architectural studio.

As with most Israeli youth, Oxman served in the armed forces, enlisting in the Israeli Air Force, achieving the rank of first lieutenant. After her service, she moved to Jerusalem to enter Hebrew University’s Hadassah Medical School. After two years, she switched to studying architecture at the Technion – Israel Institute of Technology, and then at the London Architectural Association School of Architecture, graduating in 2004.

In 2005, she moved to Boston to join the architecture PhD program at MIT, under adviser William J. Mitchell.

Her thesis was on material-aware design.In 2010, she became an associate professor at MIT in the MIT Media Lab as the Sony Corporation Career Development Professor (so named as the position is funded with a grant from Sony).

Career Oxman’s work has been displayed around the world, with pieces in the permanent collections of the Museum of Modern Art, the Cooper Hewitt Design Museum, the Centre Georges Pompidou, Vienna’s Museum of Applied Arts, SFMOMA, and Boston’s Museum of Fine Arts and Museum of Science.Exhibits have also been shown at the Smithsonian, and the Beijing International Art Biennale and in 2020 a major retrospective of Oxman’s work opened at the Museum of Modern Art.

She published papers on parametric and contextual design, and developed specific engineering techniques to realize those designs in various materials.

In 2006, she launched an interdisciplinary research project at MIT called materialecology, to experiment with generative design.

This project and related collaborations informed her early art. She has promoted the idea of finding new ways to communicate about and collaborate on design. In 2016, she helped launch the open multidisciplinary Journal of Design Science.

She has appeared on the covers of Fast Company, Wired UK,ICON, and Surface magazine. Her work is mentioned as an inspiration for changing how ma-

On becoming a professor in 2010, Oxman founded the Mediated Matter research group at the MIT Media Lab. There she expanded her collaborations into biology, medicine and wearables.

In 2019, it was revealed that her lab received $125,000 from financier and convicted sex offender Jeffrey Epstein through the MIT Media Lab and its director Joi Ito. She directed her students in the lab to send Epstein a gift despite the concerns about Epstein they brought to her attention.

Mediated Matter The Mediated Matter group uses computational design, digital fabrication, materials science and synthetic biology to explore design possibilities in small and large structures.This sometimes involved taking images of a biological sample, developing algorithms to produce similar structures, and developing new manufacturing processes to realize the results. Projects have included wearables inspired by current and future environments,solar-powered and biodegradable designs,new artistic techniques, and experimental surfaces, walls, coverings and load-bearing elements.

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terials and structures are designed, and her artistic works were described by Andrew Bolton as “otherworldly—defined by neither time nor place”.

Design philosophy

Find the Neri Oxman Material Ecology Catalogue online at the MoMA Design Store

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Oxman writes about the world and environment as organisms, changing regularly and responding to use, full of gradients of color and physical properties rather than sharp boundaries. She proposed developing a material ecology with “holistic products, characterized by property gradients and multi-functionality” – in contrast to assembly lines and “a world made of parts”. On the interplay between design and fabrication methods, she said “the assumption that parts are made from single materials and fulfill predetermined functions is deeply rooted in design... [and] enforced by the way that industrial supply chains work.”

She describes her work as pursuing “a shift from consuming nature as a geological resource to editing it as a biological one.”This leads to using mutli-scale biological shapes and textures for inspiration, and including living elements in fabrication processes, such as the glowing bacteria in Mushtari and using silkworms to construct the

Silk Pavilion. She has written that science, engineering, design and art should be more actively connected – with the output of each discipline serving as input for another.

Oxman has given presentations on digital and cross-disciplinary design, and on moving beyond mass-produced design elements. These included a presentation on form generation and environmental design,cited by rapid prototypers in other fields, and a popular TED talk on designing “at the intersection of technology and biology”. Her 2016 keynote at the American Institute of Architects conference proposed “a more profound role for architecture in society”, by working handin-hand with science and engineering.

Oxman has used raycounting in her work, a technique that is the opposite of photo sculpting. In raycounting a flat surface is conversed into a highly curved one through a specific layout of light parameters. An algorithm calculates the intensity, position, and direction of one or multiple light sources placed in a given environment and assigns local curvature values to the relation between geometry and light performance.

Then produced by stereolithography, the three double layered, translucent objects show resin pockets wherever these surfaces intersected.

GROWING INSTEAD OF BLOCK BUILDING

biography

“She is a testament to the fact that buildings and products are not enough to describe how vast and exciting the world of architecture and design is today” Paola Antonelli 21

SFMOMA The Future of Man-Nahata OXMAN, 2021 New York, NY Neri Oxman

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Organic and natural fabrication The Silk Pavilion, an installation designed in 2013, was noted for its fabrication method as much as its final form. It was woven by 6,500 free-ranging silkworms on a nylon-frame dome. Experiments with the silkworms identified how they would respond to different surfaces, and what would encourage them to spin onto an existing structure rather than spinning a cocoon. The frame of a large polyhedral

dome was loosely woven by a robotic arm out of thin nylon threads, and suspended in an open room.The dome was designed with gaps where it would be warmest.

Silkworms were released onto the frame in waves, where they added layers of silk before being removed.

This involved engineering, sericulture, and modelling sun in the room. The resulting installation art was hung so that people could stand inside it.

The Synthetic Apiary, a room-sized installation built in 2015, studied the behavior of bees in an entirely indoor environment, including how they built hives in and around different structures. This was developed in collaboration with a beekeeping company, as a way of testing possible responses to colony loss, and exploring how biological niches could be explicitly integrated into buildings.

3D printing developments Mediated Matter worked extensively with various 3D printing techniques, developing their own methods and collaborating with printing companies such as Stratasys. Projects have ranged in scale from enclosures and large furniture, to artwork and clothes, to biocomposites, artificial valves, and DNA assembly.

The group designed a prototype printer with a robotic arm that could build 8-foot tall structures all around

itself in outdoor spaces, and a quick-curing printer that makes free-standing objects without support structures.

In 2012, Oxman printed her first set of body-sized wearables, a collection titled Imaginary Beings and inspired by legendary creatures. This was followed by Anthozoa, a dress developed in collaboration with fashion designer Iris van Herpen and materials engineer Craig Carter. These were some of the first examples of multi-color and multi-material 3D printing a human scale, using a bright palette with fine granular control of color and texture. In 2015, she designed the Wanderers collection with Christoph Bader and Dominik Kolb, inspired by ideas of interplanetary exploration. That earned Fast Company’s award for Design Innovation. The most influential of the Wanderers was the Living Mushtari chestpiece, a model digestive tract filled with liquid and a colony of photosynthetic bacteria and E. coli. Producing Mushtari required new modeling methods for printing long flexible tubes with varying thickness.

In 2016, she produced Rottlace, a set of 3D-printed feathered, filamented, and textured masks. These were made for the artist Björk, based on a 3D scan of her face. Björk wore these in the world’s first 360° VR performance.

Photo by Noah Kalina, courtesy of SFMOMA

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The Ocean Pavilion, an installation from 2014, included a water-based fabrication platform where structures were built out of chitosan, a water-soluble organic fiber similar to chitin. Structural pillars and long delicate leaves were made by varying how the fibers were deposited.

The result was a combination of hard and soft structures, changing from solid to willowy over the length of a branch or leaf, but all made from the same base material.

She also began designing Vespers, a collection of 15 death masks. Described as “like something out of Alien”, each mask is a curved translucent shell the size of a face, within which a detailed pattern is printed in clouds of color and shadow. This tested the limits of how small voxels of color could be inside a 3D printed solid.

PLATFORM: DATA-DRIVEN MATERIAL MODELING

Elevation map of the Brooks Range

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Oxman has also premiered new printing tools and processes. In 2015, she designed Gemini, a large chaise longue combining a milled wood shell with a 3D-printed surface. Both the outer shell and the texture of the inner surface were designed to produce a soothing acoustical environment for someone reclining in it. Gemini was later acquired by SF MoMA. The G3DP glass printing process In 2014, a Mediated Matter team developed G3DP, also known as Glass I, the first 3D printer for optically transparent glass. At the time, sintering 3D printers could print with glass powder, but the results were brittle and opaque. G3DP was designed in collaboration with MIT’s Glass Lab and the Wyss Institute, emulating traditional glass working processes. Molten glass was poured in fine streams and cooled in an annealing chamber, yielding precision suitable for art and consumer products, and glass strength suitable

for architectural elements.

The process allowed close control of color, transparency, thickness and texture.

Changing the height and speed of the nozzle produced uniform loops, turning the printer into a “molden glass sewing machine”.

A set of glass vessels made with this printer went on exhibit at the Cooper Hewitt and other museums, and a 10-foot tall sculpture of light and printed glass, YET, was designed for the 2017 Milan Design Week.

“We can now compute the chemical and physical properties of materials, in order to connect the periodic table to the genome. Molecular biologists can now share pieces of the DNA code with designers, for example. It creates a common language that is not only metaphoric but rather explicit. We never had this ability before.”

Neri Oxman

With this vision of getting inspiration from Nature and moving away from assembly and towards growth, Neri Oxman and her team are researching ways to (and have already accomplished a lot to) expand the range of possibilities of 3D printing. I’ll give just a few examples: A new, multi-function, bio-degradable 3D printing material based on shrimp shells Neri Oxman observed chitin, the material that composes the shells of crustaceans, which vary in density and strength according to where on the animal’s body it is. She wanted to create a sustainable 3D printing material, and to replicate this multi-function characteristic in 3D printing, so she used ground shrimp shells to produce chitin, and managed to 3D print, with it!

This is a bio-degradable, environment-friendly 3D printing material that, if it becomes broadly used, could eventually start to replace plastics.

Taking inspiration from the structure of a bone,

that adapts to the load it is enduring, Oxman’s team have coined the concept of functionally graded 3D printing: printing a material with different density and structure according to the pressure it will have to support. This idea is to, in the end, 3D print concrete that adapts to the building its a part of, making it more efficient, and using less material.

A wide-range Digital Construction Platform that can handle a 1,500 lb lift capacity and a 20 lb manipulation capacity They are also working on a digital construction platform, that is based on a fully mobile truck vehicle with a working reach diameter of over 80 feet, and can handle a 1,500 lb lift capacity and a 20 lb manipulation capacity. This would allow to additively manufacture buildings with complex shapes, that are adapted to their environment.

DATA-DRIVEN MATERIAL MODELING Apolipoprotein A-I structure

BIOPSY OF A MOUSE HIPPOCAMPUS

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Computational design allows to design complex shapes using simple code, and 3D printing allows to control material composition and therefore to compute various functions into the same material.

This makes 3D printing the ideal medium to achieve the new relation with materials and parts that Neri Oxman’s research aims.

Neri Oxman

PART 3

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P

27 projects

Projects

AGUAHOJA Position

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According to the United Nations Environmental Program (UNEP), over 300 million tons of plastic are produced globally each year, leaving harmful imprints on the environment. Less than 10% of this material is recycled, while the rest becomes waste, dumped into landfills and oceans; all the while, plastic-based materials utilize raw ingredients that are extracted from the earth faster than they can be replenished, and are processed through environmentally destructive means. There is another way. Organic structures embody more efficient and adaptable material properties compared with human-made ones, and leave no environmental marks.

From a limited palette of molecular components, including cellulose, chitin, and pectin the very same materials found in trees, crustaceans and apple skins natural systems construct an extensive array of functional materials with no synthetic parallels.

Chitin, for instance, manifests in the form of thin, transparent dragonfly wings, as well as in the soft tissue of fungi. Cellulose makes up more than half of plant matter plan-

et-wide. These materials, and the living systems they inhabit, outperform human engineering not only through their diversity of functions but also through their resilience, sustainability, and adaptability. The Aguahoja collection (pronounced: agua-hocha) offers a material alternative to plastic subverting the toxic waste cycle through the creation of biopolymer composites that exhibit tunable properties with varied mechanical, optical, olfactory and even gustatory properties. These renewable and biocompatible polymers leverage the power of natural resource cycles and can be materially ‘programed’ to decay as they return to the earth, for purposes of fueling new growth.

In contrast to most synthetic materials, structures included in this collection will react to their environment over their lifespan, adapting their geometry, mechanical behavior and color in response to fluctuations in heat, humidity, and sunlight. Such timebased ‘temporal’ behavior is utilized as a design feature, one that is able to sense, inform the user of, and adapt to changing environmental conditions.

The robotic fabrication platform is engineered to convert cellulose, chitosan, pectin, and other abundant biopolymers, into high-performance sustainable hydrogels that can be 3D printed into objects for applications spanning scales from millimeters to meters.

CHITOSAN-BASED TEXTILE-LIKE NETWORK. COLOR INDICATES PHYSICAL PROPERTY VARIATIONS

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In Aguahoja I we focused on the development of a robotic platform for 3D printing biomaterials.

We showed that shape and material composition can be directly informed by physical properties (stiffness and opacity), environmental conditions (load, temperature, and relative humidity), and fabrication constraints (degrees-of-freedom, arm speed, and nozzle pressure). Each structure in the collection contains a unique combination of organic materials whose allocation, texture and distribution within the final object are computationally driven and additively manufactured in high resolution. This enables control over specific physical properties and environmental adaptation to changing weather conditions.

“By enabling digital design and fabrication with biopolymers, we aim to devise systems that incentivize the protection and strengthening of ecosystems while also providing humans with a new frontier of design and production.”

Process

3D PRINTED CHITOSAN, A SHRIMPSHELL DERIVATIVE

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Product

Policy

Standing five meters tall, Aguahoja I is an architectural pavilion composed of the most abundant biopolymers on our planet. Its layered structure, known as a bio-composite, is designed as a hierarchical network of patterns optimized for structural stability, flexibility and visual connectivity.

Combining shell-like and skin-like elements, the pavilion’s overall stiffness and strength are designed to withstand changing environmental conditions such as heat and humidity while retaining its flexibility.

Derived from shrimp shells and fallen leaves, 3D printed by a robot, shaped by water and augmented with synthetically engineered organisms or natural pigments, Aguahoja’s biocompatible architectural skinand-shell composites point toward a possible future where the grown and the manufactured unite. Surface features, patterns and colors are computationally ‘grown’ and additively manufactured with varied mechanical, optical, olfactory and gustatory properties, utilizing organic waste streams while preserving ecological niches.

Over time, with the evaporation of water, the pavilion’s skin-and-shell composite transitions from a flexible and relatively weak system to a rigid one that can respond to heat and humidity. Upon exposure to rain water, the pavilion’s skin and shell will degrade programmatically, restoring their constituent building blocks to the existing ecosystem, augmenting the natural resource cycles that enabled their synthesis.

When the biopolymer skins are submerged in water, pectin-based elements rapidly dissolve, allowing cellulose- and chitosan-based elements to deform and degrade in a controlled ‘programmed’ fashion. The structure’s basic material components are readily decomposed and reused by living organisms in order to fuel new growth.

Through life and programmed decomposition, shelter-becomes-organism as it holds the potential to promote the health of natural resource cycles by such means as promoting soil microorganisms and providing nutrients for ‘growing’ buildings—a bona fide Material Ecology.

Through growth and programmed decomposition, organism-becomes-shelter and shelter-becomes-organism—a bona fide Material Ecology.

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Data-Driven Material Modeling with Functional Advection for 3D Printing of Materially Heterogeneous Objects

Position

Neri Oxman

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Neurovascular Structures in 3D Printed Orb

Current advancements in additive manufacturing enable the fabrication of geometrically complex and materially heterogeneous objects with high spatial resolution in manufacturing. Such advancements challenge designers, architects and engineers alike to move beyond shells designed with pre-determined shape, and material composition; and to consider an expanded design space encompassing internal material properties. Color and opacity, stiffness, softness, shape memory, swellability, expansion, wettability and refractive index can be seamlessly tuned, fabricated and leveraged in design applications.

We propose that the “anatomy” of objects can be designed through generative methods. However, current off-the-shelf software tools do not typically take these recent advancements into consideration, thereby missing out on significant design opportunities that lie at the intersection of digital modeling, analysis, and fabrication.

Process

Data-driven generative geometric modelling refers to the ability to describe the generation of a geometric object through a set of generators and operators, and the control of this generation through data-sets.

This is advantageous because a change in data results in re-evaluation of the generation description and a new geometric object according to its specification. Similarly, data-driven generative material modelling is the generation of a volumetric region and associated property fields in space through data-sets that describe material property variations.

The volumetric descriptions can be given in form of a voxel representation describing material distributions as a set of material vectors of mixing ratios and additional data organized in a spatial data structure. This material vector, associated additional data and the property-to-material lookup tables (described below) are then used to compute the final multi-material droplet deposition instruction at the resolution of the printer. Parametric geometric and paramet-

ric volumetric modelling methods are combined by using geometric properties as parameters in the volumetric modelling workflow and vice versa.

In computational fabrication, material distributions are mapped to experimentally characterized material properties such as opacity, stiffness, or others.

This mapping is enabled through two processes.

First, the characterization of material mixing ratios through which associated property-to-material map can be generated. Secondly, the continuous material tunability through high resolution material dithering which allows to use the property-to-material maps to translate a desired material behavior to volumetric descriptions of material mixing ratios. The material tunability and the volumetric material description allow to perform design evaluation of material behaviors by either rendering or simulation. This can be in the form of the simulation of the non-linear dynamics of an actuation system or the evaluation of optical properties through volumetric rendering.

Significantly, geometry and material representations are kept distinct and are only combined if necessary for example in the simulation or slicing process to achieve scalability. Geometry, volumetric

material descriptions, and property-to-material maps are then processed through a slicing process to generate the above described layer-based instructions for the multi-material fabrication system. This slicing process uses the given data-sets to perform additional computational processes during slice time to achieve high-resolution composite generation.

All of these contributing towards a holistic design approach for programmable materiality.

Simulated Turbulent Flow

33 projects

First, data-driven generative geometric and material modelling methods are implemented to model geometry in conjunction with material distributions.

Data-Driven Design

Neri Oxman

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VESPERS II, MASKS

To demonstrate the DdMM approach in a design setting, we present Lazarus, a wearable mask designed to contain the wearer’s last breath. The mask was designed as part of a collection whose design is ongoing, speculating on, and offering a new interpretation of the ancient death mask. Traditionally made of wax or plaster to represent a person’s face after death, Lazarus serves as an ‘‘air urn’’ memento that is 3D printed, carrying a loved one’s final exhale. As such, the mask offers a new form of portraiture, combining the wearer’s facial features while serving as a spatial enclosure for their last breath. The mask’s surface area is modeled after the face of the dying person, whereas its material composition is informed by the physical flow of air and its distribution across the surface. Unlike its traditional hand-made analog, the design of Lazarus is entirely data driven, digitally generated, and additively manufactured, approaching the resolution of the physical phenomenon that it is designed to capture. Data fetched to inform the distribution of airflow can be acquired from the wearer, or they can be digitally generated by a computational process incorporating the wearer’s data, thereby creating a unique

artifact that is perfectly customized to fit the wearer and his or her last breath. For this speculative design, and its related (and specific) application, our design approach is illustrated in Figure 5 and can be implemented as follows. First, the data designated to drive the material distribution are either acquired or generated. In this example, only generated data are used; whereas—as stated earlier—external data sources can also be employed and used with the described method. These data are then transferred from the domain of their origin (e.g., a human face) to a target domain (e.g., a mask designed around the human face).

As the data from the original domain are insufficient to compute material distributions in a volumetric domain, this step is necessary to render the provided data suitable for further computation and evaluation. The collected data sources are,subsequently, used to inform the generation of materialdistributions. The material-generation step is performed during slice generation, and, as such, allows for the controllable design of material distribution at the resolution of the printer, while optimizing the use of available computational resources.

Designed by Neri Oxman and the Mediated Matter Group

35 projects

The DdMM computational approach and its related case study presented here serve to demonstrate a DdMM workflow, combining slice processing and material distribution generation with high-resolution bitmap-based 3D printing. It provides a powerful tool for the generation of complex 3D objects with volumetric heterogeneous material distributions. In addition to capturing, processing, generating, and digitally fabricating complex volumetric material distributions shown here, the DdMM computational approach and its related methods can contribute to a wide array of applications, including the production of high-resolution lens arrays, detailed surface topographies and lattice structures, and protocols associated with the retrieval of material properties from geometric representations. Such applications and related protocols could be produced with on-slice-time methods at the native resolution of the printer, without the need to design or generate additional geometrical content, and as such with minimal memory overhead.

With the DDMM framework, a wide variety of hybrid systems found in nature can be directly fabricated to nature-mimetic entities.

Conclusion

COURTESY OF NERI OXMAN AND THE MEDIATED MATTER GROUP

Neri Oxman

SYNTHETIC APIARY

MIT MEDIA LAB, 2020 CAMBRIDGE, MA

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“Through research, we are learning what factors influence honey bee construction behaviors and comb forms”.

Position

Process

Policy

Massive decline in bees worldwide, due to various factors affecting bee health such as agricultural chemicals, disease, and habitat loss, has raised alarm. As such, the cultivation of bees, the education about their health, and the advancement of non-standard bee environments has become increasingly important for their survival, and for ours.

The Synthetic Apiary explores the possibility of a controlled space in which seasonal honeybees can thrive year-round. Light, humidity, and temperature are engineered to simulate a perpetual spring environment.

Our architectural experiment incorporates several technological and biological investigations, and provides a setup for behavioral experiments regarding both bee fabrication capabilities and health.

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Honeybees are ideal model organisms because of the historical interplay between their communities and humans. Bees, as agents of cross-pollination, are an essential part of our agricultural production; without them, we would not have the fruits and the vegetables that nourish our lives.

Bees are provided with synthetic pollen and sugared water, and evaluated regularly for health and well-being. In this initial experiment, humans and honeybees co-habitate, enabling natural cultivation in an artificial space across scales, from organism- to building-scale.

At the core of this project is the creation of an entirely synthetic environment enabling controlled, largescale investigations of hives.

HONEYBEE HIVE INSTALLATION AND MONITORING IN THE SYNTHETIC APIARY ENVIRONMENT

Silk II

Neri Oxman

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Position

Process

What are radically sustainable methods for spinning, weaving, making and building in the age of the Anthropocene? How can humankind and members of other species such as silkworms collaborate in the construction of objects, products, and buildings? Can we extract silk without boiling cocoons?

The Pavilion was constructed in horizontal orientation, with mechanical top-down kinetic manipulation enabling constant clockwise rotation of the mandrel that facilitates the silkworms’ upward spinning motion. Fiber density across the surface area of the structure varies as a function of local environmental factors such as the direction, duration and intensity of heat and light, as well as the topology of the kinetic hyperboloid that is designed to guide the movement of the silkworms. These factors can affect the silkworms’ movement and spinning, and thereby the resulting thickness of the silk layer produced.

Commissioned for the Material Ecology exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art, New York, Silk Pavilion II NEW YORK, 2020 stands six meters tall and Image courtesy of Neri Oxman five meters wide. Building and The Mediated Matter Group upon research developed for Silk Pavilion I, this successor project tackles challenges associated with scale and sericulture. The project utilizes an integrated kinetic mandrel designed to guide the natural spinning motion of the silkworms through clockwise rotation, fusing technology and biology to unite the woven and the spun.

The Pavilion’s primary structure and the soluble knit scaffold are stretched with a cable system; given its physical properties, the intermediate knit yarn

Sericulture has been criticized by animal welfare and animal rights activists due to the fact that the process of harvesting silk from the cocoon kills the larva. In the textile and silk industry today, silkworms are exterminated while in their cocoons, dissolving the adhesive that glues one strand of silk to the layers below. This process allows a single silk filament to be unrolled from the co-

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Fabrication Facility, Abano Terme Italy, 2019

projects

Policy

coon but disrupts the life cycle and development of the organism. As the Silk Pavilion demonstrates, structures can influence silkworms to spin in sheets instead of cocoons, thereby producing the same quantity of silk without boiling cocoons. The project illustrates how these compact and unique insects can act not only as living looms but as co-designers collaborating with humans to design and construct architectural-scale structures embodying co-fabrication for cohabitation. While it is a well-known fact that even the harvesting of Eri or Ahimsa silk (processed without killing silkworms through hand-spinning) is problematic due to the domestication, breeding, and exploitation of animals; our hope is that the research underlying this work will inspire many to question 7,000 years of sericulture policy at large.

How can we extract silk without boiling cocoons? What are the implications for sericulture, manufacturing and bio-digital design?

layer acts as support for the silkworms. The holes, which release some of the tensile stress in the structure, result from chemical reactions between the silkworms’ excretions and the underlying yarn.

These structural forces are influenced biochemically, expressing a ‘metabolic footprint’ of the silkworms’ fluxes and flows.

“Design at the intersection of technology and biology” “These fields are computational design, allowing us to design complex forms with simple code; additive manufacturing, letting us produce parts by adding material rather than carving it out; materials engineering, which lets us design the behavior of materials in high resolution; and synthetic biology, enabling us to design new biological functionality by editing DNA”.

Neri Oxman TEDTalks

Neri Oxman

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Dr. Oxman at her laboratory.

Cody O’Loughlin for The New York Times

Epilogue dominated by the rigors of manufacturing and mass production. Assembly lines have dictated a world made of parts, framing the imagination of designers and architects who have been trained to think about their objects as assemblies of discrete parts with distinct functions. But you don’t find homogenous material assemblies in nature. Take human skin, for example. Our facial skins are thin with large pores. Our back skins are thicker, with small pores.

One acts mainly as filter, the other mainly as barrier, and yet it’s the same skin: no parts, no assemblies.

It’s a system that gradually varies its functionality by varying elasticity. So here this is a split screen to represent my split world view, the split personality of every designer and

architect operating today between the chisel and the gene, between machine and organism, between assembly and growth, between Henry Ford and Charles Darwin. These two worldviews, my left brain and right brain, analysis and synthesis, will play out on the two screens behind me. My work, at its simplest level, is about uniting these two worldviews, moving away from assembly and closer into growth.

You’re probably asking yourselves: Why now? Why was this not possible 10 or even five years ago? We live in a very special time in history, a rare time, a time when the confluence of four fields is giving designers access to tools we’ve never had access to before”.

Neri Oxman

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“Two twin domes, two adically opposed design cultures. One is made of thousands of steel parts, the other of a single silk thread. One is synthetic, the other organic. One is imposed on the environment, the other creates it.

One is designed for nature, the other is designed by her.

Michelangelo said that when he looked at raw marble, he saw a figure struggling to be free. The chisel was Michelangelo’s only tool. But living things are not chiseled. They grow. And in our smallest units of life, our cells, we carry all the information that’s required for every other cell to function and to replicate.

Tools also have consequences. At least since the Industrial Revolution, the world of design has been

Project: AGUAHOJA II

Neri Oxman

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