NEO-MORPHIC

[Type]
Speculative Design
Biodesign
Creative Concept [Year]
2026 [Course]
MA Material Futures
Unit 1: Material Exploration
[Description] NEO‑MORPHIC investigates how bacterial growth behaviours can become a form‑finding engine for surfaces, objects and landscapes in a post‑digital future.

NEO-MORPHIC imagines a future world where only mute materials remain: exposed building cores, infrastructural skeletons, anonymous objects. Within that landscape, bacteria – primitive ancestors of all complex life – are cast as a living structural system and co‑designers of that afterlife. Throughout the research and development process, biological experiments with living cultures run alongside computational growth simulations, treating microbial behaviour as a driver for new geometry and material distribution.

The project investigates how microbial growth logics can be translated into form‑finding processes for multiple design approaches, from surface design to typography, from small artefacts to large‑scale structures. This brings humans closer to how bacteria organise and respond to their environment, and how such organic growths might be integrated into future design practice.

In its speculative future, NEO‑MORPHIC proposes these structures as channels for data traces, nutrients and other life‑supporting resources, encoded into living materials and microbial DNA, turning architecture itself into a distributed museum of human archives.



Form-Finding Organic Growth

 Setting up the system based on the logics of recursive and differential growth, any input geometry becomes a seed, growing and expanding into abstract sculpture, patterns or surface.

Bacterial Typography



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