Case study — MDes thesis, UC Berkeley
Draft — your turn. This “My part” blurb is my placeholder. Replace it in your own words with the specifics of your role you want front and centre — then delete this note.
My MDes thesis — mine end to end, from the mycology research to the MycoCore geometry, the cooler body, the control software and the service around it.
FungalForm is an evaporative tower cooler with a living heart: the MycoCore, a 3D-printed core inoculated with mycelium that grows fresh oyster mushrooms while the device cools the room.
It cools both actively and passively, and intelligent control software self-modulates the evaporative stage to hold the exact humidity and temperature the mycelium needs — so the cooling and the growing feed one another.
The deeper aim is mycoremediation. Mycelium is remarkably good at breaking down petroleum hydrocarbons and absorbing heavy metals and other toxins; spent MycoCores are designed to be returned and put to work cleaning contaminated freshwater. A subscription swaps in a fresh core every couple of months, and an app tracks growth, orders and remediation data.
Designing around a living material meant designing for habitability, not just manufacturability — a more personal, ongoing relationship between the object, the grower and the environment.
The core’s Voronoi lattice came out of a generative design process — iterating the seed shape and input variables until the geometry maximised both mycelial growth surface and evaporative area. It is FFF-printed in algae-based PLA with a 0.8 mm nozzle: the algae filament means harvesting the very blooms that choke polluted water, and the coarse layer lines deliberately increase the cooling surface. Cores are filled with a coconut-husk, vermiculite and gypsum substrate inoculated with Italian Oyster (Pleurotus pulmonarius) and Pink Oyster (Pleurotus djamor) grain spawn I propagated myself.
The tower is cast in a custom terracotta formulation whose porosity is the control system: the top reservoir saturates, and wall thickness and internal form meter exactly how fast water permeates down to the filter and passive-cooling stages. The final geometry was 3D printed at 1:1, converted into silicone moulds, and cast segment by segment. A Raspberry Pi in the base runs the show — and because moisture permeates the whole first stage, the entire terracotta surface works as a capacitive touch switch.
Evaporative cooling runs both passively through the terracotta chambers and actively via an oscillating fan blowing across a cellulose filter — the same vapour stream that keeps the MycoCore at fruiting humidity. In-situ studies of evaporative systems have shown temperature drops of up to 16°C; the FLIR shots in the gallery show the stack pulling well below ambient.
FungalForm is one node in a circular service: a companion app modulates growing conditions, suggests recipes for each harvest, and prompts a bimonthly MycoCore swap — users pick the species and colour of the next core. Expended cores, dense with living mycelium, feed the mycoremediation supply the world is currently short of.
Read the full thesis ↗ PDF · 87 pp
