Last year, when Samuel Ross was announced as the artistic director of the London Design Biennale 2025, he declared that ‘London’s consistent spirit of experimentation and palpable artistic culture remain a fresh forum for global thinking.’ An overachieving design polymath at just 33 – he was 20 when he worked as Virgil Abloh’s first intern – Ross embodies the capital’s design spirit and ambition. The fifth edition of the LDB will once again take over Somerset House, with this year’s theme chosen by Ross: “surface reflections” is the starting point and is deliberately open to interpretation, since designers from across the world are invited to partake. 

The Global Design Forum includes talks by Ross and leading Japanese architect Kengo Kuma, while the pavilions explore everything from urban living to data security. Some of the most intriguing include Turkey’s Emotional Reflections: The Soul of Seven Horizons which promises a perception-bending experience and Chile’s Minerasophia, which takes a deep dive into the legacy of minerals. Victoria Broackes, director of the Biennale, says that ‘at its heart, this exhibition explores how the surfaces we craft – objects, materials and ideas – can reveal something deeper about our cultures, our values, who we are and, crucially, the future we want to create.’

The Eureka strand of LDB illuminates design-led innovation and the kind of groundbreaking creative thinking in universities that might just create a better future. This year, two academic research groups – one from the Beckett Lab at the Bartlett School of Architecture at UCL, the other from the Living Construction group at Northumbria University – have teamed up to create a pavilion that explores an emerging design field operating at the intersection of biology and architecture. Their biodesign pavilion engages cutting-edge biological construction technologies, including wall tiles made from soil microbes, biocellulose material produced by bacteria and mycelium materials made from fungi (it might be an idea to stop reading now if The Last of Us and its zombies, created by a parasitic fungus, keep you awake at night). They also combine the microbes with simple, cheap and widely available raw materials such clay, sawdust, hay and sand. 

Northumbria’s Professor Martyn Dade-Robertson and UCL’s Richard Beckett, an Associate Professor, say that “building with biology” is, for the lay person, all about using materials that are “grown” in laboratories and ‘manipulated at the level of cells and, in some cases, fabricated with robots.’ They envisage future cities that no longer rely on destructive material practices – for example, concrete is the most widely used substance on earth after water, and responsible for up to eight per cent of global carbon dioxide emissions – but that instead depend on material production that comes from biological intelligence. 

While a key building material like steel is made from ore which is mined then combined with carbon, resulting in high energy consumption and the release of pollutants, a sustainable biodesign future involves using materials that are grown rather than extracted from the ground. By using biomaterials, less energy is used and no harmful or toxic byproducts created. ‘They also offer the prospect of more resilient and healthy buildings. This includes materials that contain probiotic microbes that are healthy for buildings occupants and can protect against future pandemics. It might mean new kinds of living surfaces that can absorb pollutants, and facades made from living materials that can dynamically respond to climatic and environmental changes, without the need for mechanical systems.’

Dade-Robertson and Beckett point out that disseminating ideas and research outside universities is fundamental to academic research – hence their unbridled enthusiasm for LDB. ‘If we are to realise future biobuildings, it will require the understanding of these materials and systems across a broad range of backgrounds. On the one hand, this involves architects and engineers who must understand how to design with these materials and systems – as well as planning officers and policy makers who shape our cities. But it will also need homeowners, construction workers and the trades to be aware of and understand them in order to build a basis for how we can change from our established processes to engage these biological futures.’ 

London Design Biennale might provide the opportunity to learn about how we could live in less toxic environments while protecting the planet, but it is not just about bringing together the creative community with academics and policy makers in the hope of effecting real change – it is also about exhibitors communicating directly with the public in a series of sessions and workshops. However, for those who want to enjoy the LDB more passively, there is still plenty of design to relish at this forum of global thinking. As Ross himself concludes, the Biennale is at its best when ‘fuelling a spirit of experimentation, blurring the edges of where design meets art’. 

London Design Biennale runs 5-29 June at Somerset House; londondesignbiennale.com