The current environmental crisis and the broken relationship we established with the planet prompts the question: what sort of future awaits us? Which materials, artifacts, resources and systems will populate the planet in fifty years? Biofabrication is offering us an opportunity to radically change the way we interact with the Earth ecosystem, and designers are urged to take action and play their part. The dynamic exchange between design and science has proved particularly fruitful, leading us to understand the functioning of Nature – of which we are an integral part and not something separated from it – and learn how to adapt to the cyclical nature of its metabolism rather than try to stand against it, by replacing the idea of progress with the one of evolution

The designer – which always acted as mediator between research and society – is now aware of playing a crucial role. The impact design has on everyday life behaviours, determines on the large scale our collective behaviour as society, and designers must exercise such ability consciously

We should grasp the technological opportunities provided by biofabrication, in order to re-think the world we inhabit starting from matter and processes through which we shape it. We should not just search for circular materials, nor focusing on individual and partial point of views. We need to shift our scope of "refl-action" from micro to macro, expanding such technological revolution to the cultural sphere and pushing our material culture towards radical and systemic changes

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The research project investigated how the biofabrication revolution is affecting the design culture and how, on the other hand, designers’ methodologies and approaches can affect the way biofabrication spreads and permeates our society. It questioned what happens to designers and which role they play within such a novel dimension of the project where disciplinary boundaries blur and skills intermingle, as well as which is their specific contribution in fostering the application, appreciation and consequent diffusion of biofabricated materials. The experimentation focused in particular on microbial fermentation and nanocellulose production, starting from the micro-scale of materials interacting with the production process in order to affect its perceptual features, passing through the meso-scale of products identifying application scenarios which could enhance the specificities of the material, up to the macro-scale of production systems, envisioning new forms of post-industrial production