ABSTRACT
The persuasive claim of biodesign is that it integrates design with biological systems, enabling creative practices to achieve better ecological performance. This chapter adopts an applied theoretical position on biodesign, taking a new materialist perspective, with a focus on the bio-operations and more-than-human context that challenge the current curatorially-derived definition. For biodesign to enable radical change in our relationship to nature, it must embrace a complex ethics and alterbiopolitics that de-centre the human and inform alternative power structures and organisational relations, so that we can better relate to and appropriately deal with all kinds of lively matter. By acknowledging the role of experiment as a model of how we treat nonhuman entities, this chapter explores an ethical approach for the production and genesis of new concepts that inform scientific and design thinking at the point of first inquiry. Regarding the laboratory as a training ground for working along with an expanded community of biodesign subjects, a range of exemplar case studies are presented which radically alter how biodesign is imagined, executed, and sustained, with the potential to alter the impacts of human inhabitation.
