The most celebrated and influential among all “culture” designers are Oron Catts and Ionat Zurr, who in 1996 founded the Tissue Culture & Art Project (TC&A) at the University of Western Australia in Perth. In 2000, they also established SymbioticA, a collaborative artistic laboratory dedicated to the study and critique of life sciences located within the School of Anatomy and Human Biology that has hosted more than 50 residents, including scientists and philosophers. To describe their tools of the trade—fragments of bodies that are partly grown and partly constructed, and are sustained by artificial means—Catts and Zurr coined the term “semi-living”. If the things we surround ourselves with every day can be both manufactured and living, growing entities, “we will begin to take a more responsible attitude towards our environment and curb our destructive consumerism.”
(via States of Design 07: Bio-design – Design – Domus)