ABSTRACT
Building upon the foundation laid over four years of collaborative teaching in the course entitled "Nonlinear Systems Biology and Design", a fifth iteration of the course was introduced in the Department of Architecture at Cornell University in 2012 entitled "BioInspired Materials and Design". The course draws heavily upon our collaborative research project entitled eSkin and the development of tools and methods for speculative bioinspired materials and adaptive building skins. Overall, the course investigates biologically informed design through the visualization of complex datasets, digital fabrication, and the production of experimental material systems for prototype speculations of adaptive building skins. In some of the featured projects, such as Structural Color at the Architectural Scale, material features and effects at the micron scale are studied, translated and applied at the architectural scale, while in other projects, such as Dynamic Degeneration and Reconstruction of the extracellular matrix (ECM), the work remains speculative and potentially multi-scalar.
