As the founder and director of MIT’s Mediated Matter group, the Israeli-American designer and futurist Neri Oxman is pioneering the way forward for “material ecology,” renegotiating the relationship between nature and the man-made with otherworldly creations that seem straight out of a sci-fi movie, pushing the boundaries of biology, engineering, and design. Whereas past eras—the Stone Age, the Iron Age, and the Bronze Age—were defined by materials, and our current one by digital technology, in Oxman’s mind, we’ve already entered the dawn of the next era: the Biological Age. As she put it last year on Ep. 16 of our Time Sensitive podcast, “The Biological Age is an age where we have disassociated ourselves from physical materials as the single defining element of our existence in the universe.”