Mediated Matter (Design and Invention in the New Biological Age)

A richly illustrated overview of the work of Neri Oxman, whose design approach embodies the union of technology and biology, as well as a future where we build with nature.

Mediated Matter is the first comprehensive overview of Neri Oxman’s groundbreaking design work. Oxman has forged a singular career across design, science, and engineering over the past twenty years that includes founding the field of material ecology. Trained as a medical doctor and an architect, she brings to design a spirit of inquiry and experimentation that includes a future-forward approach to materials—from silkworm thread to automated microrobots to a water-based robotic platform that 3D-prints structures made from biopolymers. In her work at the MIT Media Lab, she and her team designed products, structures, and environments as interactive entities that are environmentally informed, biologically augmented, computationally grown, and digitally manufactured.

Through richly detailed diagrams, explanatory texts, process documents, and breathtaking photographs, the book examines the six primary topics—biopolymers, cellular solids, fibers, functional pigments, organic comb, and symbiotic microbes—at the heart of Oxman’s key projects as well as their potential for use in the built environment. Scientifically rigorous and abundantly imagined, this novel publication, like its author, is a future-facing manifesto for a true symbiosis of nature, humans, and design.