Orkan Telhan is an artist, designer, and researcher—but most importantly, he is a biodesigner. The ambiguous term may seem to refer to many things at first sight, since many industries and creative projects often add the “bio-“ prefix into their field of expertise, vaguely referring to sustainability efforts. So it’s not easy to immediately grasp what would be biological about design or what “designing biology” looks like.
At its core, biodesign is an emerging field that seeks to work with living organisms in design for a variety of applications. Biodesigners fuse knowledge in design practices and domains within life sciences
and engineering to not only to find solutions to social, cultural, and environmental concerns, but also question responsibility and accountability when it comes to our ambitions of “human interest”.
Aside from all the fun, small-scale projects including lab-grown meat, bioplastics, or biosomething made out of something, biodesign has the power to change large-scale production practices when it comes to food, agriculture, medicine, apparel, architecture, energy, and more.
As biodesign is taught and applied at larger scales, the stakes rise higher and definitions become trickier, as questions of ethics and sustainability carry more weight. We interviewed the great magician of biodesign, Penn’s own Orkan Telhan, Associate Professor of Fine Arts – Emerging Design Practices at the Weitzman School of Design and is a co-founder of Biorealize, to hear his attempts at defining biodesign and to discuss the present and the future of biodesign as well as his journey of learning, practicing, and teaching biodesign as an world-renowned artist, researcher, entrepreneur, and teacher.
As of now, Mr. Telhan is on leave from his position at Weitzman, but a lab-grown birdie told me that he might be back to teaching in 2024.
This interview has been condensed and edited for clarity.
EG: It’s probably a good idea to understand the term “biodesign” thoroughly before discussing its past, present and future. How do you define “biodesign”?
OT: For a definition of biodesign, I can give you both an academic answer and a simpler answer that you can use if your parents ask you about it. The academic answer is using living organisms to make new kinds of products that we normally make with petrochemicals or unsustainable materials.
But this academic way of describing biodesign can become very vague as people start asking questions like “Well, what about making wooden furniture? We cut down trees to make furniture, and humans have been doing this for a long time. How is biodesign special?” The easiest answer is that people have indeed been doing biodesign for thousands of years. So, biodesign is not a brand-new discipline. But what we are working on in the last ten to fifteen years under “biodesign” is working with microorganisms: yeast, algae, bacteria, single- and multi-cell organisms to make new kinds of products or applications in the space of biomaterials, food,
and all sorts of industry. So, if I attempt to define biodesign a third time, it is designing new materials and products using microorganisms—and not every living organism.
So if your mom asks, you can say that you grow biomaterials using mushrooms or make bioplastics using algae or bacteria to replace petrochemicals with a sustainable type of plastic.
EG: With this new definition of biodesign, “sustainability” and making something that’s “sustainable” seems to play an important role to this new approach of biodesign that designers, engineers, and artists like you follow. Can you extend on this?
OT: I’m not a big fan of the word “sustainability”, although I use it in conversations. But there is a new way to rethink raw ingredients and where they come from. If you’re a designer, product designer, fashion designer, architect, graphic designer, you usually don’t have a one-on-one relationship with raw materials. You design something and somebody else produces it for you. With architecture, for example, someone will pour the concrete but the architect won’t ask where the concrete comes from, or how the wood is sourced. A fashion designer who designs cotton sweaters and other cotton products might not know where that cotton, the other textiles, or the dyes used for coloring the garments come from. And they don’t have to know.
So, biodesign is the ability for designers to grow their raw ingredients, so that the design can be fully renewable, environmentally friendly, and also ethically sourced–ethically meaning labor-wise or without using animal cruelty.
Following this, if I try to define “biodesign” one more time, it is using microorganisms to grow raw ingredients so that you can have ethical design practices.
EG: So those raw materials, or organisms, would be directly used by the designer themselves and not some middle person, which might be different from a traditionally defined design process. Your examples with concrete and cotton are not used under a unified understanding of designing and producing.
OT: You’re touching upon an interesting point because a lot of people don’t pay attention to that. If biodesign gives you the ability to grow your raw ingredients, this means that you’re closer to the fabrication process. So biodesign is also the ability to rethink not just the raw ingredients and where they come from but also how you turn the raw ingredients into new material or new applications.
Therefore, what happens normally is that you make a design document, send it somewhere, people with access to cheap labor assemble things through assembly lines, sweatshops, or different places, and the product comes into place. Biodesign replaces those people with microorganisms. It also removes the whole assembly process, meaning that you just make the whole thing at once instead of making it part by part. This gives you a lot of ability to customize, fine-tune and also reduce all the labor needs.
EG: As you’ve mentioned, the applications of biodesign span from apparel to packaging, food production, biomedicine, agriculture. And these applications are not just just for a cool demo or a prototype. Mass production is the next step of the pipeline. And the company Biorealize, which you co-founded, is all about making biodesign accessible to more people while fixing the “innovation pipeline” that’s broken or ineffective. How does Biorealize want to change that? And what’s next for Biorealize?
OT: Good question. First of all, I did my Ph.D. in MIT’s Department of Architecture under the Design and
Computation program with a focus on synthetic biology as there was no biodesign option at that time. The Design and Computation program allows you to bring any other field into the design space and
explore it there.
So during my Ph.D., I came to Penn and I realized that you either need to go to the Biology Department or the Bioengineering Department to work with biology and biodesign. There’s nowhere for designers to work with biology themselves except if they collaborate with a scientist. However, collaborating with a scientist is not necessarily learning how to work with biology.
For example, if you want to send an email, do you need to collaborate with a computer scientist? No! Today we have tools that allow you to compose and send emails professionally, as well as word processors and operating systems–all the technology you need to focus on your application is built for you; there are tools and infrastructures ready for your use.
Biology doesn’t have that yet. Instead, it has tools that are only geared towards experts in fields of biology,
bioengineering, or medicine. So if you’re not part of those fields, you don’t have access to all kinds of things people do on the lab bench like working with organisms.
Hence, we started teaching biodesign with my cofounders in Biorealize. My desire to teach biodesign came before Biorealize. When I wanted to teach biodesign, they sent me to the Biology Department and told me to work there, teaching with them. Then I realized that it’s not the same thing. With biodesign, you want to bring the Biology Department into your design studio; you need to have the tools. If you’re a 3D designer, for example, you want to have your 3D printer next to the biology tools. If you’re an electronics person, you need to grow organisms next to electronics.
And so my inability to bring a whole biology lab into the design space gave birth to the idea of designing new tools that would allow non-experts to work with biology in their own creative spaces, without even having to work with scientists. That, consequently, is the pipeline.
Here’s a bit more about that pipeline. In any design process, there is an idea and a prototyping part—we call this the design, build, test, deploy cycle. The process is broken into parts because you might have the ideas but not the tools to prototype, test, or deploy them. Ultimately, you will have no idea of how someone can produce your biological idea on a mass scale.
This is different for a designer with a 3D printer. If you have a 3D printer, you can model your idea with computer software, test it out, do the user tests and evaluate it. Ultimately, you can give your plans to somebody else who can make it on a bigger scale, such as a professional engineering firm that can
build a sculpture that you designed. You cannot use this design process in biology.
With Biorealize, we make our versions of 3D printers. They do not look like 3D printers; we call them “incubators” but they are a version of 3D tools in the biodesign space and anyone can prototype their ideas in the simplest way possible without having to have a Ph.D. in biology. The process is very similar to cooking. When you cook, you either take somebody else’s recipe or you can organize a meal and feed hundreds of people. But everything starts with your ability to be able to have the recipe of how to make the dish and test it out by yourself before you serve it to others.
EG: That is a good analogy, especially given that biodesign is important for the food industry. You have to tinke —or experiment—in the lab and have your “recipe” before actually preparing it for others, and with the “others” coming in, the concept of ethics (or “bioethics”) also seems to be an important part of the conversation. As you mentioned with your education, there doesn’t seem to be a clear, obvious path of pursuing an education in the biodesign field. Do you think the next generation of biodesigners will be prepared for teaching about and answering questions on the roles of ethics and responsibility with biodesign applications?
OT: That’s a good question because around 10-15 years ago, me and the people in my community were thinking that we had two options going forward: either focusing on turning biodesign into a new field on its own or integrating it into other fields.
Then, what does it mean for architects to learn ways to work with microorganisms so that they can change their practice? We can embed the ideas of biodesign into other fields since they already have their notion of ethics and professionalism. The people in these fields know how to make money and build buildings with great security. All these fields have different concepts that biodesign can adapt to.
15 years later, we realized that both approaches work. There are advantages and disadvantages to both but this never decreases the importance of teaching about ethics, safety, and responsibilities, which I think is more important than ethics in certain cases as it’s about a designer’s accountability to society.
You can be a designer and spend your entire life working for the military or you can build ventilators for patients in need, right? Therefore, if you’re going to engage with biodesign, it’s critical to know that what you’re working with is a highly potent technology that can be used for both good and bad purposes. This is why we need to make sure that you learn the ethical implications and your responsibilities about biodesign in the Biology or the Architecture Department.
But how can we teach this? There’s also another side to it as people often think about ethics in different ways. I’m going to give you my view and we can go on from there if you want to dive more into the ethics: Killing animals for eating food or using them for dairy on an industrial scale is already an ethical question, right? Some people are vegetarian and vegans, some people are animal eaters or dairy consumers. But when it comes to microorganisms, using microorganisms to make new kinds of products is ethically less challenging.
When you kill a cow, it has a lifespan individuality and a very different subjectivity. On the contrary, when you kill a single microorganism, or ten thousand, or a million, say when you are brushing your teeth, it is not the same as killing a cow. These numbers are irrelevant in terms of their individuality, because every 20 minutes, there’s more. So if you compare, making meat out of cells in the lab versus making meat from an animal are ethically very different. That’s the first part: instead of killing something, you are growing something else in a modern way on the microorganism scale.
The second part is a bit more complicated. I am very much against the idea of humans feeling that they’re exceptional in this world and think that they have the right to use everything at their disposal. Many religions and societies are organized around that idea. I don’t believe that humans have any exceptional or privileged position in nature.
But what does this mean? Even when I say “I should make bioplastics, so that I don’t make bad, polluting plastics in the world,” I am instrumentalizing certain microorganisms for human interests. I am conflicted with that too. It’s very important to understand that when I grow microorganisms for human interests, I always have to double-check: what are the consequences and who’s benefiting from this in the end. If what I’m doing is only going to benefit humans in the end, I have issues with that.
I think about things more holistically. I want to make sure that when I teach biodesign, I don’t teach students how to make bioplastics but instead teach them how to build relationships with microorganisms, which in return can produce ingredients that can be used for bioplastics. It’s a very different perspective.
Once you learn how to grow an organism, you build a relationship with it. It’s almost like growing a plant,
with which you have many different relationships. Ultimately, you grow an apple tree, and you eat the apples. But nothing happens to the apple tree. In contrast, if you kill a cow, you kill the whole thing. So the analogy breaks down when you talk about the dairy industry while you can use some of the cells that are grown from microorganisms or keep their other cultures.’
EG: The accountability part is also conflicting in some way. So, it’s just like, you’ve mentioned how the process also includes making use of biology and nature for our advantage as humans, and I guess, design is a good way of finding new ways to do that.
OT: Yeah, biodesign can be used in exploitation, right? Humans love to exploit, humans want to make things cheaper, faster, better. And then, of course, you must have seen that there are now people talking about making octopus farms. Instead of animal farms, they want to grow octopuses. It’s so ethically wrong but they argue that instead of killing octopuses in the ocean, why don’t we just grow them in bulk and then kill them? Octopuses are very smart animals. And, to me, it’s a crime, but it’s also biodesign.
EG: So maybe biodesign is about minimizing harm and impact on the environment.
OT: Yeah, mitigating humans’ impact on the environment is a very impossible task. And I’m a very optimistic person. You will never hear me saying anything like, “oh, this is horrible!” There’s always a solution. It’s never going to be the best solution but it is going to be good enough for today.
For example, the people who invented nylon at Dupont never saw its application as a plastic bag. Can you imagine that? You invent nylon, thinking that you make this amazing material that could be used in all kinds of things. And then people decided to use it as single-use plastic bags, and this eventually caused tremendous pollution for the planet. That’s why designers need to be very careful in inventing something that may have added implications for the environment in the future.
EG: This is indeed an exciting way of looking at ordinary things like apparel, packaging, food production, biomedicine. And I guess some questions and controversy also come around. With the octopus farm you mentioned, for example. Looking at examples of accountability and responsibility when working with microorganisms, I remember looking into this one artwork you conceived—and a discussion that I was very fascinated by. It was in 2019. It was being exhibited in the Philadelphia Museum of Art; an artwork named Ouroboros Steak, which I am fascinated with, because I always love art that provokes and inspires conversations about bigger, more important things. This piece included vitamin-like sample discs of meat produced from human cells, presumably to show that you can get a sample from your own body and grow them with serums, lessening your harm on the environment along the way. This rather uncomfortable example of working with human cells had some people drawing comparisons to cannibalism, and I feel like those discussions showed interesting applications of biodesign that can be questionable. Can you extend on your thinking process behind this artwork and the idea?
OT: Yeah, we can talk about the piece very extensively. There are a lot of different layers in that project, and some of these layers are continuing. When I discussed that piece with my collaborators, Grace Knight and Andrew Pelling, in 2019, we assumed that it was going to provoke people, but we didn’t expect it to become such a sensation. Our position was mainly to critique the lab-grown meat industry.
Like I was describing to you, instead of killing the animal, why aren’t you growing the cells on the petri dish? Growing the animal is much cheaper. And then a lot of people ask who is going to afford the expensive, lab-grown meat version. Is it going to be the privileged environmentalists because making that one little piece of meat may cost $10,000?
And then the other option is killing the animal. The animal will have so little impact in this world in terms of their carbon footprint or because of their social cost, the number of things that they consume is tiny compared to an average American citizen. So are you going to punish these people for eating meat?
I am not trying to tell people that they should not eat meat. I’m just saying that what you eat has consequences. And decisions are tied to a lot of privilege. The most ethical way to deal with this is eating yourself. Since now you can grow yourself, you can decide when to kill your body. You can have a little blob and grow it in like six to nine months. We usually grow them in at least five months. Ultimately you decide when to kill and then just eat them.
But feeding that blob of cells with your blood might be more sustainable than how some startups are doing this in the lab and calling it “lab-grown meat” because what they do is take the cells from the animals and put them in a petri dish. But of course, they need to feed them with some blood because every cell needs blood. They buy very expensive media, which is called Fetal Bovine Serum (FBS)– three times more expensive than human blood. More importantly, the way you extract this is by killing an unborn cow in its mom’s body while the mom is pregnant. So you draw the blood out of that animal, bottle, and sell it. It’s ethically a very cruel process.
But why don’t you just take your cells and use your blood? It’s more sustainable! Even if you use expired blood from hospitals, it’s better than that other option because expired blood can be used for this application. If blood expires, the hospitals with blood banks cannot use blood that’s more than a couple of months old for their patients. So it’s waste material, which means that if you want to re-upcycle human blood into protein, that’s one way to go.
EG: Finally, I want to ask what’s next for biodesign? What’s next for the fields associated with practices of biodesign? And what would you like to see in the people teaching biodesign and industries adapting to it?
OT: I have high expectations from biodesign. It is not realistic to expect everyone to become a biodesigner. There is also a lot of hype around biodesign, causing a lot of unrealistic expectations. And you know, we need diversity: We need scientists, we need architects, we need fashion designers. Not everyone has to become a biodesigner.
Biodesign is a field that should be disseminated in a lot of different areas where it can. Maybe in the middle school or high school level, so that people understand how things are made, where things come from. To me, this is very important for future generations. I think one of the only things we can do right now is to be responsible for our actions in this world, by understanding how we consume things, where things come from, and how they are made.
Same thing with questions about pollution and climate change. What is the source of climate change? Everyone talks about this yet they delegate someone else to find the solution. But even if you look at your generation, how much do you feel like you can have a say in this conversation? How much do you think that you’re equipped to do something concerning climate change or environmental pollution? Biodesign, on the other hand, should give you and other people tools, skills, methodologies, events, depending on what level they want to engage with, so that they can become better citizens. That’s my hope.
So there are people dealing with different parts of biodesign and some of it is going to be useful, some of it is going to be bad. But it’s the same thing with every technology like computers: you can use it for hacking or writing emails. We need to be disciplined in terms of understanding the power of our technology and how we can work with it.
Ultimately, this may be a bold statement but I think that biodesign is one of the most relevant design fields to study as it can change the way we produce and consume things. I’m not saying that everyone has to come and take my biodesign course. But there are lots of bio labs out there that you can communicate with, communities to talk to, and free events to attend. Studying biodesign should not be a privilege. We are working towards making it accessible beyond well-resourced institutions like Penn.
