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Organic architecture usually means buildings that blend into the natural environment, even if they're made of brick, stone, and concrete.

But what if these buildings were actually made of organic materials?

Architect and designer Neri Oxman believes that could revolutionize the structures we live and work in, and even repair our relationship with the natural world.

The dream, sort of looking into the future, is these materials that can change the properties on the fly and become from stiff to opaque, from opaque to transparent, from stiff to soft.

And I always, I like to think of reducing that dimensional mismatch between the built and the grown is one that extends or allows to increase the information dimension.

Oxman is the founder of the mediated matter group at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

She recently started her own design firm, where she's working on new materials and products that challenge traditional ideas of sustainability.

What we're really interested in doing is listening to nature and trying to understand what is the language of nature.

Do we know how to listen?

From the Wall Street Journal, this is the future of everything. I'm Danny Lewis.

During our future of everything festival in New York, WSJ Health and Science Bureau Chief Stephanie Oganfritz spoke with Oxman about how science, technology, and organic design are coming together to reshape the world.

Very materials we build with, from 3D printed glass to biodegradable concrete. That's after the break.

And now, here's the Wall Street Journal's Stephanie Oganfritz speaking with designer and architect, Neri Oxman. We've edited their conversation for time and clarity.

I wanted to start with something basic. You practice material ecology. What is material ecology?

Material ecology. Material ecology is simply stated, it is placing, taking materials, the materials which we design, our products, our buildings, our cities, and placing them in an ecological context.

So, as architects and designers, we usually design in 3 dimensions of space, x, y, and z.

And then the product we design, again, whether it's a product, a building, a city, a wearable, any kind of product that we create, the product is static, it's not responsive, it's not adaptive.

But when you look into nature, nature grows things. And those things we act and they adapt and they're flexible, and they change over time. They actually grow and they develop.

I call this a dimensional mismatch between what we build and how we grow. There are many, many more dimensions in the natural world.

Material ecology aims to reduce the dimensional mismatch by adding properties to materials to make them more responsive, more adaptive, more nature-like, more nature-friendly, and ultimately bring together the world of the maid and the world of the grown.

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