Welcome! The Biodesign Symposium: How to Grow a Biodesigner is an annual, free conference-style event where educators, researchers, and practitioners of Biodesign will discuss how they've worked across art, design, and biotechnology. Presenters at the Symposium share ways of formalizing Biodesign education and aligning Biodesign learning outcomes with workplace needs. In June 2024, Biodesign Challenge hosted the first Biodesign Symposium, an international educational conference in New York City convened to address pedagogical issues in the emerging field of biodesign. As a nascent interdisciplinary framework, biodesign attracts researchers from across disciplinary divides and educational frameworks. This diversity of professional perspectives lends an undeniable strength to the discipline, but it also presents ongoing challenges for those who wish to integrate its methods into conventional academic coursework and curricula.
The difficulty introduced by biodesign’s interdisciplinarity is compounded by the fact that the term is a contested with several possible referents. Biodesign can equally describe medically oriented design or humanistic design that utilizes biotechnology, biomaterials, or living systems. Educators seeking pedagogical guides on the latter definition often find insufficient published guidance on how best to teach biodesign topics to undergraduates—a situation that hampers both learning outcomes and the promotion of the discipline.
The inaugural Biodesign Symposium sought to address this issue through its focus on pedagogy. As an offshoot of the Biodesign Challenge, it thematically concerned itself with humanistic design that features biological materials, subject matter, or qualities, a definition which has seen increased adoption around the world in recent years.
Academics and practitioners in the field recognize that this understanding of biodesign holds significant promise and should receive additional support in classrooms. Specifically, humanistic biodesign offers invaluable benefit for communities adhering to the United Nation’s Sustainable Development Goals and for efforts to broaden access to STEM education among underserved populations. Increasingly, global universities are building arts facilities with BSL1 wet labs, a prerequisite for many biodesign activities, and design students are experimenting with living and sustainable materials under the auspices of non-biodesign coursework.
Identifying this trend highlights the desperate need for new instructional resources in the field of biodesign. To ensure that the next generation of biodesigners receives adequate preparation for the demands of the workforce, the current generation of biodesign educators must systematize their observations from the classroom and share effective pedagogical strategies. Developing coherent guidelines on interdisciplinarity between the arts and biology will clarify how best to proceed with biodesign research in the classroom and encourage more individuals to utilize its tools. Failure to do this discursive work, however, will only exacerbate the unequal competencies already witnessed in recent graduates who have demonstrated an interest in biodesign and thus delay the maturation of the field.
The Call for Papers for the inaugural Biodesign Symposium received seventy-seven submissions, fourteen of which were chosen to present at the conference. These selections were divided into five major themes: places, people, practices, pedagogy, and perspectives. By adopting a thematic categorization of submissions, the selection committee sought to ensure that the diversity of biodesign would be reflected in the Symposium’s programming. Each category revealed structural, social, and programmatic hurdles that the biodesign community needs to overcome in order to increase its positive impact on the educational landscape.
Call for Submissions
To respond to this Call for Papers and apply for the 2nd annual Biodesign Symposium, please send abstracts of no more than 250 to 350 words to info@biodesignchallenge.org. Applications will be considered on a rolling basis, and letters of support can be written for accepted applicants seeking supplemental funding from their institutions. Deadline for submission is May 10. All other inquiries related to Cambridge University Press, Biotechnology Design, and the peer-review process should be directed to Monica Moniz at CUP at monica.moniz@cambridge.org.
For 2025, the Biodesign Symposium aims to build on the insights of the previous conference and highlight those research papers, instructional paradigms, and activities that advance biodesign as a constructive method between biotechnology, the arts and design. In doing so, the conference will retain its guiding question “How to Grow a Biodesigner?” but shift focus away from investigations into the current state of the discipline and toward proven educational strategies for developing professional biodesigners. These strategies will reflect biodesign’s intrinsic interdisciplinarity, forwarding tested approaches to integrative research and pedagogy through the field’s constituent disciplines. As such, the conference committee encourages submissions that have resulted in real-world interventions, materials, or speculative designs that advance biodesign as a whole. Preference for inclusion in the Biodesign Symposium will be given to abstracts and submissions that are aligned with the following themes:
Evaluative criteria for assessing the merits of biodesign projects produced in a classroom setting.
Classroom biodesign projects co-designed with local communities to support critical infrastructure or wellbeing.
Methodological differences between the life sciences and design disciplines with an emphasis on cultivating skill transfer and innovation.
Designing biodesign syllabi around regional challenges and natural resources.
Developing institutional spaces for biodesign instruction in colleges, universities and secondary schools.
Techniques for introducing ethical concepts in life sciences coursework through in-class biodesign modules or projects.
Biodesign as a communicative strategy between scientific stakeholders and the general public.
Biodesign projects and perspectives that achieve learning goals through nonstandard educational vehicles (video games, etc.) and expand access to the field.
Biodesign Challenge and Biotechnology Design (Cambridge University Press) invite abstracts for both the Biodesign Symposium conference and consideration for peer-review publication. In submitting an abstract, we request that you indicate the intended audience for your proposal: for instance, submission for the Biodesign Symposium conference, for peer-review publication at Biotechnology Design, or for both. Authors submitting abstracts intended only for the Biodesign Symposium are not obligated to publish their research in Biotechnology Design and will strictly be evaluated according to the needs of the conference.
Location
June 11, 9:00am – 6:00pm | The New School, Johnson Hall
66 W 12th Street, New York, NY 10011
Schedule
Schedule to be announced.
Symposium Speakers
Speakers to be announced.
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