teresa van dongen on designing with living systems

The Invisible Systems Behind Every Object

In the past century, design significantly changed its relationship with the world. Once, objects – think of an oil lamp – had to work largely by themselves. But with the arrival of electricity, they became dependent on invisible networks that extend far beyond the physical boundaries of the object itself. A lamp is no longer just a lamp; it is connected to a power grid, power plants, cables, maintenance workers, politics, mining, and landscapes hundreds or thousands of kilometres away. 

For many of us, especially in societies where basic infrastructure is reliable, these systems have become so seamless that they disappear from view. We tend to experience electricity as something immediately available, as if it is generated by the act of switching it on. When I switch on the light in my studio, it feels as if I am producing light myself. But am I? Somewhere else coal is burned, wind is harvested, cables are maintained, markets fluctuate, and ecosystems are affected. Yet all I experience is the satisfying click of a switch. What appears to be a simple object is, in reality, part of a vast network of relationships; an intricate system of dependencies that quietly sustains our everyday life.

Mud Well – Art Installation for Oerol Festival, Terschelling | image © Alex Hamstra

Seeing the World as a Network of Relationships

Before studying at Design Academy Eindhoven, I spent two years studying biology at the University of Amsterdam. Ecology taught me to see the world as a network of relationships rather than as a collection of separate parts. It also taught me that growth is never a one-way trajectory. Natural ecosystems are grounded in balance and equilibrium. Periods of abundance lead to growth and are always followed by constraints like scarcity, competition and predation, that continually bring the system back into balance.

As a young designer, I wondered whether it would be possible to design objects that collaborate with biological processes instead of merely exploiting them. That question first appeared as a quiet desire to ‘unplug’. There was something intuitive, almost romantic in it. At the time, it felt like an attempt to step out of ever-expanding human-made infrastructures and move closer to the living processes already unfolding around me. Looking back, I still feel that early desire to step outside systems, but I have also come to understand that impulse as an early recognition that everything in life is deeply interconnected.

Teresa van Dongen plugged her Microbial Fuel Cell system directly into the anaerobic soil of a forest well | image © Nichon Glerum

Ambio and the desire to unplug

My first ‘unplugged design’ was Ambio (2014), a light installation that used bioluminescent – light emitting – bacteria, cultivated from the skin of an octopus. I made Ambio largely as a personal exploration, so it was a huge surprise to me at the time that the project began receiving international attention from museums, curators, and media. Looking back, I do think people were captivated because Ambio was a biological light source, but I also believe there was an appeal in the suggestion that a product could become a relationship. Unlike a regular lamp, this light installation could not simply be switched on and forgotten. The bacteria regularly need fresh nutrients, oxygen, and care. The object was alive, and its performance depended as much on the caregiver as on the organisms and design itself. Ambio invited the user to become an active participant instead of a passive consumer. Personally, I loved the rituals around Ambio. For two years I closely collaborated with two master students from Delft University of Technology. During exhibitions we grew about a litre of glowing seawater every day. I remember waking up at two in the morning to photographs of glowing bacteria samples. They had gone to the lab to check on the bacteria late at night, in an attempt to catch them at exactly the right moment in their natural cycle.

electro active organisms continuously produce electrons that are harvested to power the light installation | image © Alex Hamstra

Travelling through Europe meant carrying liters of seawater that we would inoculate – start growing – into a bright blue, bioluminescent liquid. Our accommodations were meticulously chosen, not for the perfect view, but for whether the kitchen had a gas stove so we could work sterilely. At night I would gently swirl the growing vessel, introducing oxygen into the culture. The bacteria responded instantly by producing swirling galaxies of blue light that lingered for several minutes before slowly fading away again. It remains one of the most magical living lights I have ever interacted with, but it also confronted me with a difficult question. While I enjoyed caring for the bacteria, the daily maintenance exceeded what I could reasonably ask from future users. I paused Ambio after two years of nurture and care. What I did not shelve was my question whether living systems should challenge the effortless convenience of electrical products. I continued to wonder if living systems could help us to reconsider what we expect from products altogether.

Rediscovering the rituals of light

This question resurfaced in a series of living light projects I developed between 2016 and 2019, including Spark of Life, Electric Life, and Biolume. Roughly a century ago, producing light was itself a ritual. Oil lamps needed to be cleaned, trimmed, and refilled. Light was precious precisely because it required attention. Electricity erased some a wide range of rituals almost overnight. We gained convenience, but we also lost a daily moment of awareness about where our light comes from.

Biolume revisited that forgotten relationship in both its material form and concept. Where an oil lamp traditionally held a reservoir of fuel, Biolume replaces this with a small biological reactor filled with liquid cultures. Instead of burning oil, the lamp is powered by electroactive bacteria like Geobacter and Shewanella. A class of bacteria that lives in the anaerobic soil of lakes and other natural bodies of water. These remarkable organisms ‘breathe out’ electrons in their metabolism. The redundant electrons are deposited to nearby conductive elements in the soil via hairlike filaments.

Ambio uses bioluminescent bacteria as a living source of light | image © Hans Boddeke

thinking in ecosystems instead of organisms

Biolume was developed for the restoration of Slot Schaesberg, a medieval castle ruin in the Netherlands. The bacteria originated from the mud of the moat surrounding the site, literally allowing the landscape itself to power the lamp. The armature was forged using traditional blacksmithing techniques, chosen because of the incredible, nearly lost craft and for the material language of wrought iron that values longevity over replacement. A key shift in Biolume was not that bacteria generated electricity, but that I stopped designing for a single species. In collaboration with the Center for Microbial Ecology and Technology (CMET) at Ghent University, we developed a microbial fuel cell that could sustain an entire ecosystem of microorganisms rather than a monoculture. An ecosystem behaves very differently from a single culture. Individual species support one another, creating a system that is more stable, resilient, and capable of adapting to changing conditions. The design no longer relies on keeping one organism alive, but on maintaining the balance between many. As a user, you become part of this equilibrium and ecosystem. With no more than a teaspoon of vinegar or acetate each week, the microbial community continues to generate electricity day and night. The continuous glow of the LED, is one of the clearest ways for me to read whether the ecosystem is doing well. In these systems, there is no switch to flick. The organisms do not wait to be activated; they are continuously metabolising, exchanging, and transforming energy.

detail of Ambio’s suspended light installation | image © Hans Boddeke

From shaping objects to cultivating relationships

As a design student, I was taught to master materials: to bend them, cut them, mould them, and ultimately persuade them into forms that did not previously exist. There is beauty in that process. But working with living systems gradually changed my role as a designer. I found myself controlling less and cultivating more. This shift became particularly tangible with Electric Life, a project I originally developed for Centre Pompidou as a continuation of my earlier work with electro active bacteria. For months, the museum’s conservation team became unexpected caretakers. Every Tuesday, during closing hours, they fed the microbial ecosystem that powered the installation.

The system was alive, and therefore never entirely predictable. Occasionally the bacteria consumed the nutrients faster than expected and the light faded before the next feeding. Whenever I happened to be at a museum during an exhibition, I preferred feeding the installation in public. Almost without exception, visitors gathered around. They would ask questions and seemed fascinated by the simple act of care. It made me wonder whether the relationship itself, the nurturing, had quietly become the real artwork.

detail of Ambio’s glass vessel containing bioluminescent bacteria | image © Hans Boddeke

Learning to work with uncertainty

These experiences also revealed the vulnerability of designing with life. There were nights when I lay awake wondering why the bacteria had stopped producing electricity. Initially I wanted to trouble shoot. But gradually I realised that another challenge was equally important: changing our expectations. We have become accustomed to technologies that promise consistency, predictability and control. Living systems rarely offer those guarantees. So I started to shift my own narrative and slowly learned to make room for uncertainty, for the possibility that a living system might die for unknown reasons. That, too, is part of life. Looking back, I feel so much gratitude for the different ecosystems that I nurtured. I somehow remember most of them almost as personalities.

Some preferred acetate, others thrived on vinegar. Some demanded constant attention, while others quietly carried on for weeks with barely any intervention. Certain liquid communities could be divided endlessly into new reactors, while others would lose their delicate balance after only a brief exposure to air. I genuinely miss some of the ecosystems I lost. A few disappeared during transport. Others faded away during a period when I was also caring for a very different kind of living being: my newborn son. During that time, some of the microbial systems simply received less attention than they needed. I’ve made peace with that. Working with microbial systems had already made it clear to me that care is rarely about control. It is about attention, patience, and adapting to what unfolds.

prototype model for between lights, a modular solar lighting system | image © Teresa van Dongen

Designing for connection

This whole journey has changed me as a designer. I no longer take energy for granted, nor will I ever see products as isolated objects. I continue to design for relationships, ecosystems, and exchanges between people, nature, and the objects we surround ourselves with. Whatever I design next, I see myself continuing to create products that invite people into personal relationships with their products rather than shielding them from them.

Today, that exploration continues in my project Between Lights, a modular solar lighting system that allows people to compose patterns in their windows. During the day, the modules harvest sunlight. At night they return this energy as a soft glow. Unlike my living installations, they do not ask for a weekly spoonful of nutrients. Yet they still embody the same ambition: to create objects that exist a little more independently from large, invisible infrastructures, while drawing directly from the oldest and most generous sources of energy available to us all — the sun.

In my attempt to ‘unplug’ I found connection. Whether an object draws from the sun or is fully dependent on the person caring for it, my projects remain part of an ecosystem and are, in that sense, never truly independent. Just differently connected.

Biolume uses electroactive bacteria to generate electricity from a microbial ecosystem | image © Blickfänger

Biolume was developed using bacteria collected from the moat surrounding Schaesberg Castle | image © Blickfänger

Biolume uses a microbial ecosystem to generate electricity through electroactive bacteria | image © Blickfänger

Electric Life | image © René Gerritsen

Electric Life explores electricity generated by living microbial ecosystems | image © René Gerritsen

Teresa van Dongen feeds the microbial ecosystem powering electric life during an exhibition | image © Teresa van Dongen

detail of Electric Life’s microbial fuel cell | image © René Gerritsen

prismatic lenses visualize the electricity generated by the microbial ecosystem | image © René Gerritsen

Teresa van Dongen feeds the microbial ecosystem during an exhibition at the Musée du Louvre | image © Teresa van Dongen

a culture of bioluminescent bacteria emits its characteristic blue glow | image © Teresa van Dongen

Ambio | image © Teresa van Dongen

Slot Schaesberg, where bacteria for biolume were collected from the surrounding moat | image courtesy of Slot Schaesberg

Teresa van Dongen collecting a mud sample from a harbor for microbial research | image © Teresa van Dongen

Teresa van Dongen is a Dutch bio-designer whose work explores how design can collaborate with living systems. After studying biology before graduating from Design Academy Eindhoven, she developed a practice that works with microbial life, alternative energy systems, and material innovation to rethink the relationship between people, technology, and nature. Through objects and immersive installations, her projects invite audiences to engage with the hidden processes that sustain everyday life.

This guest essay is part of designboom’s Crafting the Future chapter, exploring what it means to be a maker in today’s world and the future of craftsmanship. Discover more related stories here.

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