Growing Mycelium Made Us Grow: a collaborative research on mycelium as a growing material and its speculative interactions with the public spaces
#research #material #mycelium #urban #growing #bio #homeLab #TULab #Futurium #pedagogies #exhibition #HUForum #collaborative #interdisciplinary #intercultural
What happens when a pedagogue, an architect, an industrial designer, and a storyteller grow fungi together?
This project began as an interdisciplinary investigation into fungal materials and collective design. We worked with Agaricus bisporus, Pleurotus ostreatus, and Pleurotus eryngii, testing their growth on cotton and hemp across three contexts:
a professional lab (TU Berlin)
a community workshop (Futurium)
and domestic kitchens
Our aim:
Experiment with living matter as curious non-experts
Question the inaccessibility of scientific knowledge
Create public entry points into lab-based research
We saw this as both a biological process and a metaphor for interdisciplinary collaboration: messy, slow, and full of unexpected growth.
From fiber to form: designing with a living system
We developed a spatial structure, a mycelium-infused matrix, emerging from our multi-scalar lab tests. The matrix had to:
Adapt to urban constraints (like courtyard drainage pipes)
Be reproducible with repeatable fiber patterns
Allow complexity to emerge from simplicity
The geometry looped across four vertices, forming an asymmetrical web of braided hemp. Growth added a second layer of form, organic, unpredictable, and active. The project combined digital spatial logic with biological agency, turning design into a co-performance between humans and fungi.
Prototyping, contamination, and patience
We built two ≈1:100 scale prototypes using different hemp fibers:
Coarse fiber: fast growth, visible mycelium, but contaminated due to exposure during agar insertion.
Fine braided fiber: clean process using syringes, delayed or minimal growth, possibly due to temperature shock.
These differences highlighted a key insight: working with living systems requires designing conditions, not just forms.
Growth became an outcome of timing, touch, materiality, and control, or the lack of it.
From the different instances of the process, we went through in the various types of laboratories and through different scalar, material, procedural, and design tests, as well as changing interpersonal and intergroup moods and relationships, the design of the spatial matrix or internal design emerged from positioning ourselves as enablers of a process that exceeds our prefigurative capacity. Thus, the design had to meet the requirements of being reproducible in the future urban space, as well as replicable in the various multi-scale trials.
The first requirement defined the gripping elements of the matrix, these being the four storm drainage pipes in the courtyard in question, forming vertices on each side of the asymmetrical polygon, while the second requirement defined the systemic character of the matrix and the simplicity of its execution using a repeatable pattern that can be carried out by any individual. This does not mean that it is a simple design, but rather that the complexity is acquired by repetition of the pattern in an asymmetrical spatial structure, which confers the first degree of complexity, added to the second degree of complexity resulting from the growth of the mycelium on the linearity of the fibers. It is from the conjunction of these two degrees of complexity that the project makes sense, by transforming the active matter the linear dimension of the fibers into a superficial and volumetric dimension through the different levels of proximity and interweaving of the matrix generated within the urban space.
We studied the growth of three mycelium species (Agaricus bisporus, Pleurotus ostreatus, Pleurotus eryngii) on cotton and hemp substrates across three contexts: a professional lab (TU Berlin), a community workshop (Futurium), and domestic setups. Our findings—biological, spatial, and social—revealed the rich complexity of mycelial systems, not just as biological phenomena but as metaphors for interconnection, patience, and shared growth.
From underground to public: bringing the invisible to life
Our process was presented as a walk-through installation:
A scaled model of our university courtyard
Inoculated samples embedded into the structure
An interactive sculpture using the same fiber matrix as our tests
Visitors explored three content lines:
Our interdisciplinary diary
Lab notes from Vera Meyer’s group and Futurium workshops
Material experiments across scales and settings
At the end, they were invited to place cotton into the matrix and imagine how fungi might grow. A printed playbook was offered for those who wanted to reflect or experiment further at home.
The exhibition consisted of exposure to all the research and experimental processes that the group, as an interdisciplinary research collective, went through, and the project’s evolution. The setup was a structure made of cardboard and wood. It represented the courtyard of the university to scale. The same model was used for the inoculated samples. The connections between the panels were designed to accommodate the experimental samples. Inside the structure, an interactive sculpture consisting of the same fabric pattern used in the experiments was presented, to be intervened by the visitors playing at exploring the possibilities of expansion and movement of the mycelium as an active material.
The exhibition was a walk-through. A member of the group guided the visitor through the tour, which was designed to be an open and honest learning journey. The starting point was understanding what mycelium is and knowing our research questions and objectives. After that, going through the group’s learning process and experiences, and then the results we obtained and possible next steps. To finish, the interaction activity was introduced with a warm invitation to dive into it.The content of the panels was distributed in a timeline that showed three lines of content. The first one, with information about our journey as a group in the shape of a lab diary. The second one, with the learning process of growing the mycelium with Vera Meyer’s group in their Lab and in a workshop in Futurium coordinated by Alessandro Volpato. The third line of content was about the experiments we performed, in the Cluster and in our homes, to learn about the techniques, conditions, materials needed, and the results.
When the panels meet at the starting point, participants could interact with the installation inside by placing cotton on top and in between the hemp fibers, imagining how mycelium could grow with the spatial structure. Before leaving, a playbook was handed to inspire participants to continue reflecting on this topic in a ludic way.
