We are excited to announce a new cohort of Design Researchers in Residence, who will spend the next developing innovative projects that respond to the climate emergency.
This year’s Design Researchers in Residence are Afshan Tanweer, Justina Alexandroff, Lars Dittrich and Peerasin Punxh Hutaphaet. The cohort come from a variety of design specialisms, working across graphic, fashion and material design. This breadth of approaches is reflected in the diversity of their responses to the brief, from developing microbes into inks for regenerative printing, harnessing mosses for urban cooling, designing construction materials from waste-derived material growth and creating tools to craft mycelium as it grows.
Each of the 2026/27 residents' projects respond to the theme of 'grown’, exploring the potential of renewable and biodegradable materials, whether they originated in the lab or cultivated on land. The UK's bioeconomy is a government growth priority: the 2025 Modern Industrial Strategy names engineering biology as one of six frontier industries, with an ambition for global leadership by 2030. This year, the Design Researchers in Residence ask: How can design research into grown materials help to increase the UK’s bioeconomy?
This residency creates space for the hugely necessary practices of mutual learning and knowledge sharing by deepening material literacy and collaboration. It will culminate in a free publication and display, opening at the Design Museum in June 2027, where visitors will be able to engage with impactful new thinking that centres design in the green transition.
Design researchers biographies:
Afshan Tanweer is an architect and design researcher, working across architecture and material science.
Working with silica-based scaffolds and controlled reactor systems, Afshan's residency will investigate how environmental and chemical conditions can be designed to encourage mineral deposition. The resulting materials will be assessed for their suitability for structural testing. She will examine how factors such as fluid flow, chemical composition and altering wetting and drying cycles influence mineral growth and its resulting material properties. By connecting resource recovery with construction, her research asks how waste-derived materials can contribute to circular thinking within architecture and the built environment.
Justina Alexandroff is a designer and researcher working at the intersection of biomimicry and computation.
Her practice explores biodiversity loss in the built environment, examining how pollution disrupts interspecies sensory communication by proposing multispecies design responses. Justina’s research will explore biomimicry and computation, and the potential of these processes to create hyper-local, regenerative urban design. Asphalt, concrete and brick intensify the urban heat island effect and strip away ecological factors that mitigate heat and pollution. Through site-specific fieldwork, material experimentation, prototyping and the use of native plant and climate datasets, Justina will investigate how nature's surface strategies can inform locally responsive, multispecies design.
Lars Dittrich is a designer, researcher and maker whose craft spans biotechnology and material research.
During his residency, Lars will ask how pure mycelium can be worked by hand while it is still growing. Through iterative material development, he will expand upon his practice of growing pure mycelium sheets in the lab, exploring new making techniques through the lens of craft. Using medical tools and materials that allow precise handwork, he will investigate how to work precisely with living mycelium without contaminating it. Drawing on the expertise of surgical instrument makers, he will develop tools and techniques that work with the organism’s capacity to fuse and self-heal.
Peerasin “Punxh” Hutaphaet is a visual ecologist exploring how graphic communication can emerge through living systems.
During his residency, he will investigate how graphic design might shift from producing fixed visual objects to cultivating communication that grows, transforms and returns to ecological systems. The research proposes three pathways beyond conventional print production: Return, where graphic materials decompose and re-enter ecological cycles; Transform, where biological activity changes colour, form and legibility over time; and Regenerate, where graphic materials become substrates, habitats or nutrients for further living processes. Treating printed matter as a living medium rather than a static object, he will investigate how graphic communication can become an evolving ecological relationship.
