NYC-Based Industrial Design Class Introduces RISD Students to Biodesign Pioneers

“As an Industrial Design student, I’ve been exposed to sustainable industry trends like material circularity and designing for disassembly,” says junior Elaine Zhang 26 ID. “That’s part of the curriculum. But I signed up for the Biodesign NYC Wintersession course because I’m interested in pushing beyond traditional approaches and considering the larger, more systemic changes that need to happen.”

Zhang is one of 12 students who recently returned from an intensive, three-week experience organized and led by Industrial Design Professor Peter Yeadon. Introduced in 2023, Yeadon’s course focuses on real-world biodesign applications and allows students to network with New York City-based professionals who are pushing the boundaries of the growing field.

“We explored biodesign at multiple scales,” Yeadon explains, “from CRISPR-Cas9 genetic editing tools to the urban-scale Living Breakwaters Project off Staten Island. NYC is a leader in the future bioeconomy, and many of the companies we first met with two years ago have expanded dramatically and are producing exciting new materials.”

Yeadon defines biodesign as products and outcomes featuring ways of making that parallel nature’s strategies and promote conditions that are conducive to life on this diverse planet. His hope is that students in the course will not only learn about biodesign, but make their own meaningful contributions by directly engaging with some of the field’s pioneers and influencers.

Course objectives include learning to think of design as part of a system, contemplating new design applications for biological materials and processes and taking inspiration from the site visits to develop innovative works that elegantly integrate biological functionality. “Practitioners are shifting from human-centered design practices to a more interspecies approach to designing for the future,” Yeadon adds. “They’re thinking about ecosystems humans are part of versus ecosystems that we dominate.”

That concept resonated with grad student Jeremy Grail MID 26, who has been making work that considers interspecies relationships and the possibility for humans to coexist with nonhumans in healthier ways. “The opportunity to meet with so many people in biodesign-related fields was an incredible experience,” he says. “This is crucial work, and I’m so glad I took the course before starting my thesis. It really got the wheels spinning.”

Speaking of spinning wheels, Grail’s project for the course, Rat Race, proposes a series of installations built within existing NYC transit infrastructure connecting a network of protected rodent passages and controlled feeding stations. This visual confrontation with their rat neighbors, he argues, would encourage commuters to recognize the brown rat as a valuable participant in our shared ecological narrative and spur dialogue about public health, climate change and environmental degradation.

Although the project was inspired by a close encounter with rats in the streets of NYC, Grail notes that he was also inspired by visits to TerreForm ONE—a nonprofit art, architecture and urban design research group working to illuminate the environmental possibilities of habitats, cities and landscapes—and Brooklyn’s Genspace, which prides itself on being the world’s first community biology lab.

“NYC is a leader in the future bioeconomy, and many of the companies we first met with two years ago have expanded dramatically and are producing exciting new materials.”

Industrial Design Professor Peter Yeadon

Among the many additional sites the class visited were BioBAT, whose mission is to promote innovative bio-art programming; SCAPE, a landscape architecture firm that creates positive change by combining regenerative living infrastructure and new forms of public space; Newlab, home to more than 250 deep tech startups and over 1,000 entrepreneurs, inventors, investors and optimists working together to address critical challenges in energy, mobility and materials; and the Healthy Materials Lab at Parsons School of Design, where RISD alum Jonsara Ruth 92 ID and her colleagues address toxics and climate by charting pathways to designing and constructing healthy homes.

Zhang found the Healthy Materials Lab to be especially inspiring and built on their ideas about recycling architectural building waste when she developed her project proposal, Waste Management to Urban Biomining. “Biomining,” she explains, “the practice of using bacteria and fungi to extract valuable metals from waste, has been used by industrial mining companies for decades. My project takes it to a more speculative level by extending the idea to urban systems, envisioning a future where cities can harness biological processes to improve waste recovery and circular material flow.”

Top image: sophomore Tanvi Mittal holds up a bioplastic bead she created at Genspace.

Simone Solondz / photos by Sheetal Agrawal and Upasana Pandey
February 27, 2025