MIT | Sturdy, wearable skins that transform hostile environments into
friendlier ones are among the projects developed by Media Lab’s Mediated
Matter group, headed by Associate Professor Neri Oxman PhD ’10.
Oxman, who earned her PhD in design computation, leads her Mediated Matter
group through explorations of “Nature-inspired Design and
Design-inspired Nature” using the tools of computational design, digital
fabrication, materials science, and synthetic biology. Many projects
rely on advanced 3D printing technologies.
Four artifacts that represent this intersection of 3D printing and
synthetic biology were unveiled in Germany last fall in an exhibit of Wanderers: An Astrobiological Exploration, a collaboration with German designers Christoph Bader and Dominik Kolb.
The wearables,
printed with Stratasys multi-material 3D printing technology, are
designed to create the necessities of human life in space environments.
Capillaries are expected to hold synthetically engineered microorganisms
that could produce oxygen, light, food, and biofuels. Mediated Matter
members led by Will Patrick and Sunanda Sharma are working on embedding living matter in the form of engineered bacteria inside the 3D structures.
“The future of wearables lies in designing augmented extensions to
our own bodies, that will blur the boundary between the environment and
ourselves,”
