Bio-digital ‘Material Systems’: New Hybrid Ways for Material-Driven Design Innovation

New bio-digital potentials make it possible to analyse and reproduce the generative, chemical, physical and molecular processes underlying the living, leading designers to interpret them through design and envisioning skills to foster the sustainable and digital transition. In particular, the combination of advanced manufacturing with the transformative possibilities of matter leads to alternative ways of conceiving and producing artefacts inspired by the constructive strategies of nature, the materials it uses and how it manipulates them. The chapter aims to describe how this leads to an extension of computational and biological properties to matter itself, with the possibility of designing specific functional and expressive characteristics of materials for innovative and sustainable applications. Five experiments developed within Sapienza’s Saperi&Co research centre will be described which the goal was to produce bio-digital ‘material systems’ in which – just as in nature – material, product and performance are designed as a single entity through information, growth and adaptation to context.