Summary

We need to build a bridge and increase the speed limit we are traveling from the way we design and manufacture the physical world today to a world with a thriving regenerative bio-economy.

Often the first step in designing a product or place for the physical world today is defining the design and prototyping early iterations to learn about how it will reach design goals, fit within manufacturing constraints, and cope with obstacles/challenges to its construction, use, maintenance, and second/third/x-life cycle.

The rise of desktop cobots and end-user scriptable robotics and assembly platforms provides fertile ground for early steps on that bridge. If we can get current and future product designers and architects to learn now how to incorporate bio-based materials and methods within their design we can spin up a virtuous feedback loop to drive towards a world that is grown not made in the classic industrial revolution sense (and begin to reverse the ravages of the past era).

For this project our ultimate objective is build a viable frugal bio-based prototyping capability that can be used by makers that are curious or driven to embrace a bio future, but don’t have a way to start. Our initiative is focused on accelerating the replacement of carbon fiber and petroleum based composite structures with spider silk fiber and biopolymer composite structures.

Our hypotheses include:

1. that synthetic biology and automation/AI have advanced to the point that an open source hardware/software accessory can be prototyped to address this challenge in a way that is frugal and extensible.
2. that the current state of the art for photosynthetic e-coli based spider silk production via micro-bioreactors and the downstream spinning/fusing processes are mature enough to be factored into a V1.0 end-to-end desktop prototyping tool that can mimic some of the strength and resilience properties of carbon fiber but without the environmental costs associated with its production and recycling.
3. that the first version may follow some of the existing early advances in 3d printing where combinations of carbon fiber and plastics and/or multimaterial end-effectors can deliver early bio advantages and be done in a way that opens up the experimentation of composites and bio-physical parameters to non-biologists who are adept at product design and architecture.

Aims

1. Our hypothesis is that there has been little to no work done in pulling all the pieces from hardware to software to bioware into an end-to-end demonstration prototyping system. We believe that a significant opportunity for novel innovation exists where the science of biology meets the art and science of system design. We believe that it is now possible to design and build such a system as a provocation and seed for what might be possible. To forward this aim we intend to design, construct and demonstrate a V1.0 Spiderbot physical robotic accessory and related control software for a desktop manufacturing system/3d printer like Rotric’s system.
2. We’ll focus on demonstrating some spinning/electrodeposition or other form of assembly of the spider silk proteins into viable/strong materials, composites, and production methods suitable for additive manufacturing. While there have been a few different approaches to synthesis and produce spidersilk fiber for fabrics or biomedical solutions there has been less work on using this for a production/construction method for the sorts of products and architectures that currently fill the world with products and places.
3. There is currently no way for product designers or architects to experiment with novel composite biomaterials and methods in a desktop prototyping setting. While the synthesis of spidersilk has been demonstrated in the lab and in for-profit settings, we would like to test this hypothesis that providing the “raw materials” to designers could accelerate the transition. We’ll focus on using the newest research to synthesize phytobacteria (purple non-sulfur photosynthetic) that expresses spidroin protein 1 and 2 (spider drop silk) in sufficient quantities for a low enough cost to characterize its properties and discover if it would be possible to embed this approach into a desktop factory.
4. We believe that we can accelerate the uptake, education, and expressive use of biomaterials, methods, and exploration by focusing on key leverage points, in this case the materials of design, prototyping, and production. Ultimately the transition from the past industrial revolution which has turned out to be significantly extractive and has carried with it extreme externalities that are now causing tragic and existential risks—driven by mechanical and later classic computational approaches with motors, chips, wires, and networks—needs to be supplanted by a hybrid post-industrial bio-economy revolution. Today we will largely base our prototype and first run of a solution on the classic industrial revolution approach. We don’t expect that all industrial methods will ever disappear, technology tends to be built on past technologies in an ever expanding pool of possible approaches that tends to wake up “sleeping beauties” from the past and use them where the goals, constraints and obstacles require. We imagine a substitution and co-evolution approach that slowly and then occasionally rapidly (via punctuated evolution) migrates materiality, power storage, sensing, motion, computation, design, testing, and ultimately learning from industrial to post-industrial bio-economical regenerative systems. For instance today we get our energy from solar panels and store it in batteries. Tomorrow a member of the community might focus on productizing an entirely bio-based solution for energy transport rather than electricity using possible formate salts in aqueous solutions as energy carriers. Someone else may swap out the assembly steps of the system with 4D printing approaches inspired by the work of Skylar Tibbits and other origami based assembly research. We don’t believe we have the time to wait for the natural course of technological evolution and hence believe that this project and vision is a necessary approach to keep the focus on the ultimate aim. To take the best of the past industrial and IT revolution and synthesize it with the best learnings from synthetic biology and how Nature solves complex challenges to reduce the negative externalities and accelerate the positive potentials. Growing things takes time, some of our manufacturing methods from today can make things with incredible speed and efficiency. Shifting to an entirely “grown” world with the ways that evolution and the “blind watchmaker” of Nature have solved problems would throw away all that we’ve learned. Some hybrid approach with key interstitial technologies will be required.

Michael Levin and Josh Bongard have given us a path forward in their seminal paper “Living Things Are Not (20th Century) Machines.”

Approach