Neri Oxman: Biology, Art, and Science of Design & Engineering with Nature

Whenever we start a new project, it has to have these ingredients of simultaneous complexity. It has to be novel in terms of the synthetic biology, material science, robotics, engineering, all of these elements that are discipline based or rooted must be novel. If you can combine novelty in synthetic biology with a novelty in robotics, with a novelty in material science, with a novelty in computational design, you are bound to create something novel. The following is a conversation with Neri Oxman, an engineer, scientist, designer, architect, artist, and one of the kindest, most thoughtful and brilliant human beings I've ever gotten to know. For a long time, she led the mediated matter group at MIT that did research and built incredible stuff at the intersection of computational design, digital fabrication, material science, and synthetic biology, doing so at all scales from the microscale to the building scale. Now she's continuing this work at a very new company for now called Oxman, looking to revolutionize how humans design and build products working with nature, not against it.

I do. And I think of nature in that way in general. In the context of design, specifically, I think of nature as everything that isn't anthropomass, everything that is not produced by humankind, the birds and the rocks and everything in between, fungi, elephants, whales. Do you think there's an intricate ways in which there's a connection between humans and nature?

I'm there. I've already applied. I haven't heard back. I don't understand. Okay. Just before we get to number three, it'd be amazing to just talk about what it takes with robotic arms or in general, the whole process of how to build a life form stuff you've done in the past, maybe stuff you're doing now, how to use bacteria, this kind of synthetic biology, how to grow stuff by leveraging bacteria? Is there examples from the past and explain? Yes. And just take a step back over the 10 years, the mediated matter group, which was my group at MIT, has sort of dedicated itself to bio-based design would be a suitcase word, but thinking about that synergy between nature and culture, biology and technology. And we attempted to build a suite of embodiments, let's say that they ended up in amazing museums and amazing shows, and we wrote patents and papers on them, but they were still N of ones. Again, the challenge, as you say, was to grow them, and we classified them into fibers, cellular solids, biopolymers, pigments.

So as you're creating the art, you're going to learn something about these organisms or something about these materials. Is there something that stands out to you about these hero organisms like bees, silkworms? You mentioned E. coli has its pros and cons, this bacteria. What have you learned, small or big, that's interesting about these organisms? Yeah, that's a beautiful question. What have I learned? I've learned that... We also worked with shrimp shells with a glow. How we built this tower on the roof of SF MoMa, which by a couple of months ago until it was on the roof, we've shown this structure completely biodegrade into the... Well, not completely, but almost completely biodegrade to the soil. And this notion that a product or an organism or part of that organism can reincarnate is very, very moving thought to me, because I want to believe that I believe in reincarnation.

Let's give bacteria all the love they deserve. We wouldn't be here without them. They were here for, I don't know what it is, like a billion years before anything else showed up. But in a way, if you think about it, they create the matter that we consume and then reincarnate, or dissolved into the soil and then creates a tree, and then that tree creates more bacteria. And then that bacteria could... Again, again. That's why I like to think about not recycling, but reincarnating, because that assumes, imparting upon nature that dimension of agency and maybe awareness. But yeah, lots of really interesting work happening with bacteria. Directed evolution is one of them. We're looking at directed evolution. So high-throughput directed evolution of bacteria for the production of products. And again, those products can be a shoe, wearables, biomaterials, therapeutics.

If I can ask a pothead question for a second, you mentioned just like the silkworms, the individualist silkworms got to actually learn how to collaborate or actually to collaborate in a swarm like way. You're talking about getting plants to communicate in some interesting way based on an objective function. Is it possible to have some kind of interface between another kind of organisms, humans, and nature? So like a human to have a conversation with a plant? There already is. You know that when we cut freshly cut grass, I love the smell, but actually it's a smell of distress that the leaves of grass are communicating to each other. The grass, when it's cut emits green leaf volatiles, GLVs. And those GLVs are basically one leaf of grass communicating to another leaf of grass, "Be careful. Mind you, you're about to be cut." These incredible life forms are communicating using a different language than ours. We use language models, they use molecular models. At the moment where we can parse, we can decode these molecular moments is when we can start having a conversation with plants.

I think so. I think there is. And if I did not think so, oh my goodness, this would not be a nice world to live in. I think we all want love. I recently read this beautiful letter that was written by Einstein to his daughter. Einstein asked his daughter to wait 20 years until she reveals these letters, and so she did. It's just one of the most beautiful letters I've ever read from a father to his daughter. And the letter overall is imbued with a sense of remorse or maybe even feelings of sadness. And there is some kind of melancholy note in the letter where Einstein regrets not having spent enough time with his daughter, having focused on the theory of general relativity and changing the world. And then he goes on to talk about this beautiful and elegant equation of E=MC^2. And he tells his daughter that he believes that love is actually the force that shapes the universe because it is like- Is actually the force that shapes the universe because it is like gravity, right? It attracts people. It is like light. It brings people together and connects between people, and it's all empowering. And so if you multiply it by the speed of light, you could really change the world for the better. And call me a romanticist. I know you are too, which is why I so love being here. I believe in this. I totally and utterly believe in...

It might be the same thing, it might be a different thing, but let me ask you a ridiculously big philosophical question about beauty. Dostoevsky said Beauty will save the world in The Idiot, one of my favorite books of his. What is beauty to you? You've created through this intersection of engineering and nature, you have created some incredibly beautiful things. What do you think is beauty? That's a beautiful question.

She said this fate is the ratio of... Who you are and who you want to be.

What about human relations? You mentioned finding love. Are the flaws in humans, imperfection in humans, a component of love? What role do you think the flaws play? That's a really profound question. I think the flaws are there to present a vulnerability, and those flaws are a sign of those vulnerabilities. And I think love is very, very gentle, right? Love with Bill, we often talk about between the two of us, about what drives all human behavior. And for him it's incentive, as you might expect, and he will repeat this sentence to me, oh, incentive drives all human behavior. But I would say to me it's love, very much so. And I think flaws are part of that because flaws are a sign of that vulnerability, whether physical, whether emotional vulnerability, and these vulnerabilities, they either tear us apart or they bring us together.

I have to ask you, because you work at the interplay of the machine and the natural world, is there a good definition for you of what is life? What is a living organism? I think 440 million years ago, there were all these plants, the cyanobacteria I believe actually. That was the first extinction. There were five extinctions. We are apparently the sixth. We are in the eye of the storm. We are in the sixth extinction. We are going to be extinct as we speak. I mean, death is upon us whether we want to admit it or not.

Because when we start to think about timescales like this, just looking at earth, all the possible trajectories it might take of this living organism that is earth, do you think there's others like it? Do you think there's other planets with life forms on them that are just doing their thing in this kind of way? Planets.

Speaking of rock and roll, you've mentioned music and you mentioned Beethoven a bunch of times. You've also tweeted about you getting Kiss in performance and so on. What can you say about the role of music in your life? I love music. I always wondered why is it that plastic arts, meaning architecture and sculpture and painting, can't get us to cry and music gets us to cry so quickly and connect so quickly? And no wonder that plants also respond to music, but that is at the top of the creative pyramid in my opinion.

And you said that if you weren't doing what you were doing now, perhaps you would be a film director. I have to ask, what do you think is the best film of all time? Maybe top three? Maybe The Godfather.

You are an incredibly successful scientist, engineer, architect, artist, designer. You've mentored a lot of successful people. Can you give advice to young people listening to this of how to have a successful career and how to have a successful life? Look, I think there's this beautiful line in Sheltering Sky. How many times have you seen a full moon in your life and actually took the time to ingest and explore and reflect upon the full moon? Probably 20, I believe he says.