Biodesiderata
Drawing inspiration from Robert Boyle’s 17th century “wish list”, Biodesiderata is a curated constellation of wishes from leading thinkers in biodesign, biomaterials, and biotechnology. It echoes Boyle’s quiet, yet radical act. Rather than forecasting technological triumphs, the contributors express longings for regenerative systems, ecological attunement, and deeper kinship with the more‑than‑human world.
Their various visions emphasise repair, relationality, and ethical imagination over conquest or acceleration. The list is presented as a living, evolving archive - an open invitation for others to add their own aspirations. In doing so, it suggests that wishing is not idle fantasy but a deliberate intellectual practice, shaping the futures that science, design, and society may yet choose to pursue.
Extract:
“In the 1660s, at a moment when the contours of modern science were fast taking shape, a natural philosopher undertook a quietly radical act. While documenting experiments and codifying laws, Robert Boyle also chose to articulate his hopes. He composed a list of wishes: speculative, aspirational, and unapologetically imaginative. This document, now commonly known as Boyle’s List, contained 24 desires for what science might one day enable, from the prolongation of life and the healing of disease, to underwater travel, flight, and the creation of perpetual light. Written centuries before the technological infrastructures required to realise such ambitions existed, Boyle’s list nonetheless reads today as uncannily prescient. It reveals a mind attuned not only to what was, but to what might yet be.
Boyle’s list did not function as a roadmap or a manifesto. It was, instead, an act of intellectual projection - a means of orienting scientific enquiry towards human and planetary betterment. Many of the items he recorded have since materialised, albeit in forms he could scarcely have anticipated. Others remain tantalisingly incomplete, deferred to futures still unfolding. What gives Boyle’s list its enduring resonance is not simply its accuracy, but its spirit: a conviction that science, guided by curiosity and care, could expand the horizons of human possibility. It is within this lineage of speculative aspiration that the present list takes shape.
Compiled during BIOfutures Series I and II, this collection brings together the wishes of contemporary leaders working across biodesign, biomaterials, biotechnology, biofashion and allied fields. Over the course of these conversations, which took place between 2022 and 2023, participants were invited to step beyond project briefs, funding cycles and near-term deliverables, and instead articulate the futures they long for. Not forecasts, not promises, but wishes: expressions of value, imagination and ethical intent.
What emerged was not a singular vision of the future, but a polyphony of hopes. These wishes speak of agency and interdependence; of repair rather than extraction; of technologies that are not merely efficient but humane; of cultures that value critique, care and ecological literacy. Together, they sketch a landscape of concern and possibility shaped by those working at the thresholds where biology, design and society converge.”