Biodesign is emerging as a radical design approach with great potential for the ecological turn, finally endorsed by some first academic courses providing designers with hybrid skills to embrace scientific disciplines. However, the resulting professional figure, the biodesigner, still needs to be better defined in the academic and grey literature, also considering the different and multiple facets that working between design and science may entail. This study presents four case studies of research through design (RTD), addressed by the author as an autoethnographic form of inquiry to clarify the roles a biodesigner could assume, emphasising the differences in methods, tools and workplaces, which inevitably affect the Biodesign outcomes. The author analyses her role as a biodesigner and designer in lab, working in teams and environments requiring different degrees of interdisciplinarity. Far from adopting a speculative approach, the RTDs focus on sustainable Material Design and Biodesign solutions that might be feasible in the short run, aiming to test the designer’s abilities in enriching scientific research and investigating the role and contribution designers can play in scientific contexts of different intensities. The study demonstrates the possibility of a reciprocal knowledge transfer between design and science, highlighting the potential of the designerly way of knowing in bringing innovation to the scientific field.

Materials with systematic absence of X-ray diffraction (XRD) peaks are desirable for conducting some special researches using X-ray diffraction or time-resolved X-ray scattering. This paper proposes a method for designing this kind of materials. It utilizes solid solution to reduce the structure factor of a selected reflection to zero by choosing proper components and their contents to let the reflection amplitudes from different atomic layers in a unit cell of the solid solution cancel each other completely. This method on how to select a solid solvent and how to calculate its content was illustrated using SrTiO3 as an example. A solid solution Sr1−xCaxTiO3 with a systematic absence of the (001) diffraction can be designed, and the value of x can be determined to be x=0.54 using an iteration calculation process. This result was verified by the experimental XRD pattern of a Sr0.46Ca0.54TiO3 sample.

We examine the composition of the L∞ norm with weaklyconvergent sequences of gradient fields associated with the homogenization of second orderdivergence form partial differential equations with measurable coefficients. Here thesequences of coefficients are chosen to model heterogeneous media and are piecewiseconstant and highly oscillatory. We identify local representation formulas that in thefine phase limit provide upper bounds on the limit superior of theL∞ norms of gradient fields. The local representationformulas are expressed in terms of the weak limit of the gradient fields and localcorrector problems. The upper bounds may diverge according to the presence of roughinterfaces. We also consider the fine phase limits for layered microstructures and forsufficiently smooth periodic microstructures. For these cases we are able to provideexplicit local formulas for the limit of the L∞ norms of theassociated sequence of gradient fields. Local representation formulas for lower bounds areobtained for fields corresponding to continuously graded periodic microstructures as wellas for general sequences of oscillatory coefficients. The representation formulas areapplied to problems of optimal material design.