The Mycelium Engineer as Multidisciplinarian

You Will Likely Fail

When I was in art school one of my professors once said, without irony, that my job as an artist was to “do the most interesting thing you can at all times.” He didn’t mean this in a flippant or inspirational way, he was speaking to a notion of responsibility. The suggestion was that the odds of success were so vanishingly small that, unless I worked hard enough, learned and iterated enough, and took my practice seriously enough to do something genuinely interesting, I would fail. Even still I was likely to fail (and I did).

That framing has stayed with me. And it applies, with some uncomfortable precision, to mycelium R&D.

Because here too, the odds are steep. Developing stable, scalable, and capable processes with fungi is difficult in the very real sense that complexity, plasticity, and variability stack the deck against you. Morphology drifts. Scaling fails. Measurement misleads. Assumptions don’t hold.

So if failure is probable, the only viable response is as my art school professor suggested: to take the practice seriously enough, applying enough time and rigor, that you might produce something interesting enough to survive.

This is what you owe; a level of competence and commitment that matches the biological and engineering complexity you’ve chosen to engage.

The Limits of Specialization

In measured, modern critiques, hyperspecialization has become a paradox. Academic work is now both more interdisciplinary and more fragmented than ever; tasks once handled holistically are parceled out among specialists, creating both innovation opportunities and dangerous silos (Ghosh, 2023). The explosion of domain-specific expertise has created a condition in which we may know more about increasingly narrow slices of the world while becoming less able to integrate those slices into usable understanding. Yet, this is precisely where broad, integrative thinkers become valuable: the most interesting ideas often emerge at the intersections, where seemingly distant domains can be brought into productive contact (Arbesman, 2013).

Commentators on expertise and professional development have echoed this concern, arguing that specialists can struggle when facing complex, open-ended challenges that require synthesis across domains. In these contexts, the most resilient contributors are often generalists, or at least generalist-specialists, capable of integrating knowledge across boundaries while still acting with depth and rigor (Lovegrove, 2016). Studies of interdisciplinarity in modern science point in the same direction: while narrow specialization may produce short-term advantages, highly interdisciplinary researchers and collaborative networks are often better positioned to generate transformative work, particularly when they span multiple knowledge regimes and feedback systems (Bonaventura et al., 2017).

Why This Matters for Mycelium R&D

Fungal systems don’t lend themselves to narrow definitions of role or responsibility. The organism, and the processes necessary for cultivation, optimization, and exploitation of the organism (plastic and context-dependent) demands breadth. It is a structural reality of the work.

You cannot understand or stabilize fungal growth if you don’t grasp its physical and behavioral logic. You cannot optimize processes if you’re blind to dimensionality, experimental design error, or uncertainty. You cannot design functionally stable systems if you don’t viscerally appreciate how fungi allocate resources, reinforce architecture, and adapt to their context.

This is precisely why I believe in three interdependent arms of learning that every serious mycelium R&D practitioner would benefit from cultivating:

Mycological Learning

Competence in mycological learning means respecting plasticity as a native property. It means internalizing temporality, the fact that fungal decision-making and structural investment unfold over timeframes that resist standard R&D pacing. It means recognizing memory, in both the literal sense (epigenetic or morphological carryover) and in the structural logic that reflects past conditions and environmental signals. Mycological learning, then, is the practice of working with the fungus’s logic, not imposing your own in ignorance of it.

Experimental Learning

It is one thing to run a screening experiment, or to manually pick a series of treatments and test them. It is another to design an experiment that resolves uncertainty, improves signal, and informs the next decision in a clear, defensible, and structured way. Competence here means adopting adaptive experimental design strategies: embedding a clear line-of-sight on error, maximizing the information gained per trial, and resisting throughput for its own sake. It means embracing featurization, treating fungal morphology and behavior as a quantitative landscape to be described and modeled; model-centric learning frameworks that allow you to treat complexity as a structure that can be mapped, modeled, and learned from. And it means actively managing uncertainty; not pretending it doesn’t exist, but reducing it where possible, and using it as a tool where it can be informative.

Design Learning

Design learning means recognizing that fungal form is an ecological and historical record; the shape of the mycelium reflects the world it grew in. It carries decisions as embeddings in its physicality. Design learning is about shaping context so that fungal structure can express function; it means setting the stage, designing the growth context as a query to the fungus. It also means managing trade-offs: when to invest in density versus speed, when to accept irregularity in exchange for adaptability. These are system-level design decisions that link biology, mechanics, and outcome. To design in this space, then, is to engage with fractal translation, moving across scales of material, measurement, and morphology while maintaining fidelity to function.

These are embedded domains of responsibility. 

Multidisciplinarity Is Not a Perk. It’s a Responsibility.

There’s a persistent temptation to frame multidisciplinarity as an opportunity or bonus. A reward or a nice-to-have. It’s often described in terms of what a curious or ambitious person might get to do. But in the context of mycelium R&D this notion fails entirely. It mischaracterizes the work; if you are doing process or product development with fungi, then multidisciplinarity isn’t a perk. It’s a requirement to rise to a functional level of rigor.

And there is harm in unrigorous work.

When you don’t understand how fungi respond to context, you design in ways that collapse under real-world variability. When you don’t understand experimental design, you burn time and money chasing spurious conclusions or landing on local optima. When you don’t take the time to model the embedded high-dimensional relationships, you misinterpret signal as noise (or worse, noise as signal).

In real terms, unrigorous work risks the resources of your team. It undermines investor confidence. It costs jobs. It delays or kills viable technologies. It deprives consumers of better alternatives. And when those alternatives are aimed at displacing carbon-intensive, resource-extractive, or otherwise harmful technologies, failure carries a compounding weight. If you are trying to bring a disruptive fungal technology into the world and you do not actively push to grow across the critical domains of mycological learning, experimental learning, and design learning, you are not just moving slowly, you are doing harm.

To be multidisciplinary in this context is not strictly to be curious, it is to be accountable. It is to seriously pursue maximizing biological value, reducing uncertainty, managing risk, and producing tools and systems that are actually fit to scale. If you avoid that responsibility, you are more likely to fail.

A Practitioner’s Framework (A Philosophy of Practice)

This book is written from within that responsibility. It is a philosophy of practice; an interpretive synthesis shaped by years of applied work during the formative ramp-up of the mycelium materials and technology space. It draws on technical literature, mycology, process engineering, data science, and design, but it is not a textbook, review article, protocol manual, or academic monograph. Those forms matter, and this book depends on them, but it is trying to do something different.

The technical literature provides the ground beneath the book. It anchors the biological, engineering, and analytical realities that make mycelium R&D so difficult and so rich. When this book makes a technical claim, that claim should be accountable to the literature. But the book’s central purpose is not to summarize that literature comprehensively, nor to convert working experience into academic consensus. Its purpose is to organize a practitioner’s way of seeing: to ask what the available technical knowledge feels like, means, and demands when it has to be used inside real development systems, under uncertainty, with living organisms, limited time, imperfect measurements, evolving limitations, and consequential decisions.

In that sense, the essays that follow should be read as a form of practitioner criticism. They are closer in spirit to a philosophy of making and seeing than to a neutral technical survey. I am interested in the headspace of the mycelium engineer: how one learns to perceive fungal behavior, respect uncertainty, recognize failure, interpret physical form, and build systems capable of learning from an organism that does not behave like an inert material or a deterministic machine. The point is to build a usable frame, the way art criticism can build a frame around art without pretending to exhaust the artwork itself.

Its role is to act as an exoskeleton around the technical literature: a practitioner’s framework for making that knowledge more usable when the organism, the process, and the human system all become complex at once. Some of the concepts in this book are established technical ideas. Others are personal syntheses, working terms, or operational framings built from the collision between literature, observation, experimental practice, process development, and lived experience; as proposed lenses for making recurring practical realities easier to see.

The ambition is generalizability. This book is focused on the recurring fundamentals that make filamentous fungi both powerful and difficult to work independent of the specific idiosyncrasies of system and application: polarized growth, physical plasticity, distributed behavior, environmental responsiveness, scale sensitivity, propagation ecology, and the challenge of learning from complex living systems. The specific applications may differ but the underlying problem remains similar: how to design, measure, interpret, and develop technologies with organisms whose value emerges through mycelial growth. In that sense, the framework offered here is intended to be extendable across technology-development spaces involving filamentous fungi, even when the details of organism, substrate, process, product, and scale differ substantially.

Generalizable, however, does not mean universal. A working concept can travel across contexts without pretending to describe every fungal system, process, organism, or application with equal force. Its value is practical: it can gather existing ideas into a shape that helps a team notice a pattern, ask a sharper question, design a better experiment, or avoid a predictable failure. But it should remain accountable to evidence, open to revision, and clear about its status. That is the balance this book tries to maintain: technical references are used to support and clarify; personal synthesis is used to organize, interpret, and make the work more navigable.

The essays that follow, then, are organizing lenses built from lived encounters with fungal systems in applied contexts. They are offered as tools for thinking more clearly about plasticity, failure, measurement, scale, learning, design, and responsibility in mycelium R&D. They are not the final word on those subjects. They are a way of standing near the work with enough rigor, humility, and accumulated experience to see it more clearly.

Doing the Most Interesting Thing

So we return to the original framing: do the most interesting thing you can. Not because it’s fun, freeing, or a means of entertaining yourself. But because it’s your only real shot at doing something that matters enough to survive.

For the mycelium engineer that manifests as breadth, depth, and rigor. It means learning widely enough to see the system, practicing deliberately enough to find signals in its noise, and building with enough humility to let the fungus have its say. It means moving beyond process design as a technical problem to solve, and viewing it as a living conversation to sustain.

Doing the most interesting thing is about responding to complexity with competence, to uncertainty with structure, and to responsibility with commitment. It is about recognizing that rigor is not the opposite of creativity; it is its precondition.

So you are likely to fail. But in a field where failure is probable, the work is to make failure count. To learn from it. To build on it. To avoid the kind of failure that costs others their time, their trust, or their chance to do better. The work is to try your best to do something actually interesting not because you want to, but because it’s your job.

References

Arbesman, S. (2013, December 13). Let’s bring the polymath — and the dabblers — back. WIRED. https://www.wired.com/2013/12/165191/

Bonaventura, M., Latora, V., Nicosia, V., & Panzarasa, P. (2017). The advantages of interdisciplinarity in modern science. arXiv. https://doi.org/10.48550/arXiv.1712.07910

Ghosh, R. (2023, August 29). Guest post—The paradox of hyperspecialization and interdisciplinary research. The Scholarly Kitchen. https://scholarlykitchen.sspnet.org/2023/08/29/guest-post-the-paradox-of-hyperspecialization-and-interdisciplinary-research/

Lovegrove, N. (2016, October 27). The danger of having too many experts. TIME. https://time.com/4547320/the-danger-of-having-too-many-experts/