Living manufacture: Principles for a microbial 3D printer

This paper will introduce the Living Manufacturing Project to develop a novel digital manufacturing approach by integrating biological growth and digital fabrication to make 3D functionally graded materials and objects. The paper will introduce this concept and initial experiments which connect the design of bacteria at the genetic level with the development of a future digital infrastructure. We see this work as the basis of a new fabrication technique with potential applications in a wide range of areas, including biomedical applications, complex composites for high-performance manufacturing and novel consumer products and the potential to scale-up to create novel materials and structures for architecture