Oxman, Neri

designer, architect, engineer, artist; founder of Oxman, formerly led the Mediated Matter group at MIT

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

Lex Fridman Podcast · Sep 1, 2023

• Neri Oxman
• material ecology
• biomass and anthropomass
• synthetic biology and hero organisms
• computational templating
• silk pavilion and synthetic apiary
• plant communication
• beauty and imperfection
• AGI and nature
• biodiversity chambers

Core ideas

Oxman frames her entire body of work around reversing the separation between humans and nature that she says began the moment humans started designing and manufacturing things. She cites biologist Ron Milo's 2020 finding that human-made "anthropomass" surpassed all living "biomass" on Earth that year as a personal turning point, and describes her new company's guiding aspiration — "grow everything" — as a kind of Turing test for design: could a car, a phone, or a building be grown rather than built, such that human civilization augments rather than depletes the natural world? Her proposed mechanism is what she calls "material ecology": treating all designed material objects as potential members of the ecology itself, benefiting nature as much as humans. She extends this to an ambitious infrastructural idea — giving nature access to something like the computational "bandwidth" humans have built since the first computer (she cites concrete multipliers: roughly a trillion times the compute, 26.5 trillion times the bandwidth, 11.5 quintillion times the memory) so that organisms could, in principle, make better real-time decisions for themselves (a plant increasing photosynthesis in response to smoke, an animal fleeing a wildfire) without top-down human intervention — describing this aspiration as "Neuralink for nature" and the eventual product as a hypothetical "iPhone for nature."

She details a decade of work from her MIT lab built around "computational templating" — creating physical, environmental, or chemical scaffolds that guide (without fully controlling) a "hero organism" as it builds something. Examples include the Silk Pavilion at MoMA, where 17,000 silkworms (which have no natural swarm behavior, unlike termites or bees) were guided by robotically varied heat/light templates and physical anchoring surfaces to spin a six-meter dome collectively, in effect being "given" a form of swarm intelligence via technology rather than evolution; a "synthetic apiary" providing bees a perpetual-spring environment through winter, proven to keep them reproductive and healthy; and a follow-up project sending a self-contained bee "life support system" (using synthesized queen pheromones in place of a living queen) to space on a Blue Origin New Shepard flight, resulting in bees that survived, remained reproductive, and — via a gold/silver nanoparticle tracer experiment — helped prove for the first time that bees recycle wax. She distinguishes this templating approach from true "emergence," proposing (via a colleague's formalization) that an agent is "empowered" when it has high entropy (many possible states) but any single choice collapses that entropy — meaning empowerment is a directional force that enables, but is distinct from, multi-directional emergence; she frames emergence as something you can't predict and still call emergence, and argues design's future lies in building "highly controlled systems that enable the loss of control."

On ethics, Oxman draws a hard line specific to silkworms: she refuses genetic modification of the species (rejecting an offer to make transgenic glow-in-the-dark silk by inserting spider genes), arguing that having already domesticated silk moths 4,000 years ago into flightless creatures solely for human textile use, it would be wrong to modify them further — while explicitly not applying the same constraint to bacteria like E. coli, which she uses extensively (e.g., engineering pigment-producing E. coli into "Vespers," a series of 15 algorithmically-patterned "death masks" exploring surface/volume, memory, and legacy, which seeded a new material class she and a student called "hybrid living materials"). Her design principle throughout is to create products as a "byproduct of the organism flourishing" rather than at its expense — a win-win synergy rather than pure extraction. She also describes ongoing work in plant communication (citing green leaf volatiles released by cut grass as a genuine distress signal between blades, and circadian differences in a rose's molecular "scent" output between day and night) as a nascent molecular language that, if decoded, could transform precision agriculture by detecting crop distress before visible damage occurs, and describes a planned "fragrance" product designed not merely to smell good to humans but to actively communicate with (and potentially be answered by) a garden.

Zooming out, Oxman discusses her company's "biodiversity chambers" — sealed, fully instrumented grow-room capsules (in design since 2019) capable of precisely controlling temperature, humidity, light, and genetic conditions to recreate historical or future environments (she gives the example of testing what a tomato tasted like in Ohio on a specific date decades ago), framed as a way to "stress" ecosystems computationally, observe emergent behavior (e.g., simulating plant "competition" for a carbon-sequestration reward function via a gaming-engine-style objective), and eventually deploy successful configurations back into the real world. She connects this to broader reflections on time: nature operates on radically different, often much slower timescales than human industry and capitalism demand (contrasting a redwood's centuries-long growth or an old-growth Christmas tree's brief single-night human use), and argues genuinely reconciling human production systems with natural ones requires cultivating patience and humility on nature's own temporal terms rather than human ones.

On broader philosophical themes, Oxman repeatedly returns to love, vulnerability, and imperfection as unifying threads across biology, design, and human relationships — citing a (previously private) letter from Einstein to his daughter proposing love as the unifying force of the universe, alongside her own view that beauty is inseparable from "agency" (citing Buckminster Fuller's remark that if a solved problem isn't beautiful, he knows it's wrong) and that flaws function as "increased surface area" that enables connection, comparing this to how mortar needs a rough brick surface to bind. She discusses mass extinction (framing humanity as living through the sixth of Earth's major extinction events, and describing how earlier plant die-offs enriched soil chemistry to enable later, more complex plant life) as evidence that death is structurally part of life's long-run creativity rather than opposed to it, and — prompted by a reference to Lex's conversation with Eliezer Yudkowsky — offers a qualified, dual reaction to AGI: genuine fear alongside genuine hope that if AGI's compressed synthesis of human civilization's knowledge could be "uploaded" into nature's much slower, wisdom-oriented systems, the resulting synthesis (bridging AGI's intelligence with what she calls nature's deeper "wisdom") might represent a more optimistic outcome than human extinction. She closes with life and career advice emphasizing presence, gratitude, and noticing simple things (citing her grandmother's garden as her formative "Garden of Eden"), the value of seeking discomfort and surrounding herself with people more intelligent than her as a growth mechanism, and framing "calling" as preferable to "career" — work that is intrinsically, directionally motivated rather than externally imposed.

Excerpts