The Thematic Workshops is a week-long event taking place from February 23rd to 27th, where Master 2 AIRE M2 and PhD FIRE D2 students organize a scientific conference by inviting speakers on a specific topic.
Living Materials, Living Worlds is a biodesign conference for those who work with life, and
anyone curious about how. Bringing together biodesigners, researchers & artists to explore practices that collaborate with living systems rather than control them.
We invite you to come engage in these key questions with us:
What happens when materials breathe, grow, decay, heal, and remember?
When design becomes a conversation between species, time, and care?
On February 23rd from 14h00-18h00.
At 8 bis Rue Charles V, Paris 75004 (The Learning Planet Institute).
Our speakers include:
✺ Chris Bellamy: Cambridge-trained engineer turned biodesigner, now working with living systems to build regenerative solutions.
✩ Lucia Giron: Multidisciplinary designer exploring biodesign and biomaterials through the lens of ecology and environmental ethics.
✺ Corentin Bisot: Researcher at EMBL in the Van Gestel group studying the life cycles of soil microbes and previously researched about mycorrhizal networks.
✩ Michael Sedbon: Cyber Synthetic Biologist at OXMAN, working on bio-hybrid machines and cryptographic storage in living vegetal media.
✺ Iri Berkleid: Artist who works with microbial processes, shaping growing cellulose through symbiotic cultures to rethink painting and sculpture.
Following the speaker talks, we will host two hands-on workshops: a kombucha leather biomaterials workshop and a living soils workshop. Spaces for shared questions, slimy materials, and strange new worlds. For more information check out our website here.
We’re inviting you into questions like:
How do you design for growth and circularity rather than extraction?
What does being a designer or artist mean when your material is alive?
How does working with other species reshape your ethics and aesthetics?
Together, we’ll explore what it means to design with living worlds and the responsibilities and possibilities that emerge when life itself becomes a material.
We invite you to come grow, question, regenerate, and imagine with us.
Register here.