ALL ABOUT DIC

BIO-DESIGN INNOVATION CENTRE

Bio-Design is the integration of design with biological systems, often to achieve

achieve better ecological performance. In contrast to a design that mimics nature or draws on biology for inspiration, Bio-Design incorporates living organisms into design as building blocks, material sources, energy generators, digital storage systems and air purifiers, just to name a few possibilities. Bio-Design is both opportunistic and logical in recognizing the tremendous power and potential utility of organisms and their natural interaction with larger and ever changing ecosystems around them. Bio-Design can also be a means of communication and discovery, a way to provoke debate and explore the potential opportunities and dangers of manipulating life, particularly through synthetic biology, for human purposes.

This new approach is often a response to the growing urgency to build and manufacture more sustainably in light of the climate crisis. This, in turn, leads to unprecedented collaborations between designers and life scientists, such as biologists who increasingly understand how organisms function to the molecular level. The recent proliferation of such cross-disciplinary activity is occurring in schools, labs and even in garage work benches around the world. One important outcome of this new approach to design has been the development of critical and narrative objects that blur the border between art and design and which envision the effects of new technologies and scientific research on human behavior and culture.

Objectives

1. Preparation of a platform for creative design development, design promotion and partnerships across many sectors, states, and regions for integrating design with traditional and technological resources.
2. Raising Indian design education to global standards of excellence.
3. Conduct programs for continuous evaluation and development of new design strategies.
4. Involving Industry and professional designers in the collaborative development of the design profession.
5. To facilitate interdisciplinary design- focused education, research, and entrepreneurial activities in order to create commercial opportunities and build partnerships between academics and industry.
6. Assist industries to engage the services of designers for their existing and new products.
7. To create an ecosystem facilitating students and faculty to take their innovative ideas from classrooms/labs to market/people.
8. Encourage and facilitating a culture for creating and protecting intellectual property in the area of designs.

Why Bio-Design?

1. There is an urgency to develop and implement cleaner technologies.
2. For example, Microbes have been found within nuclear reactors that have developed the ability to continually protect and repair their own DNA. Harnessing such a mechanism might inform a future cancer treatment to retard growth.
3. The potential for designers and scientists to develop new and useful applications with this previously unknown form of life is significant.
4. This convergence of fields is ultimately necessary to alleviate the negative impacts of the legacies of the Industrial Revolution.
5. And it will lead to the preconceptions of the primary design principles of value generation, growth and sustainability.