Biology-Inspired Technology

When you looked at the image above, what did you see—a vase or two faces? Both possibilities arise from exactly the same elements, contained within the same boundary. What becomes apparent depends on how those elements are organized and interpreted within that contextual constraint. At Placeboes, we have been exploring possibilities that may emerge when biology-mimicking and biology-reflecting constraints and contexts are deliberately embedded into technology? Our technology programs explore this question across four complementary frontiers: Cybernetic Systems, Viability-Conditioned Artificial Systems (VCAS), Context-Sensitive Innovations, and Novel Information Systems, which together aim for context-aware, and viability-constrained artificial systems.

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Technology Ecosystem at Placeboes

Our technology program begins with a simple question: what happens when constraints and contexts are deliberately built into artificial systems? Constraints can define the boundaries within which a system remains viable, safe, and functionally coherent, while contexts can shape how it adapts to changing biological, clinical, environmental, and social conditions. Across four complementary programs, Cybernetic Systems, Viability-Conditioned Artificial Systems (VCAS), Context-Sensitive Innovations, and Novel Information Systems, we explore how constraints can be engineered, contexts represented, and both incorporated into sensing, information processing, decision-making, feedback, and control. The aim is to investigate artificial systems whose behaviour is not merely intelligent, but appropriately constrained and contextually adaptive.

Embedding Constraints & Contexts

Building Human-Gated Artificial Systems

Cybernetic Systems

Our Cybernetic Systems program explores how human-gated, AI-facilitated feedback systems can translate the scientific frameworks of CIBEM and COBRA into practical applications. Within CIBEM, the Ease-of-Health and Knowledge-of-Health systems examine complementary dimensions of attaining and sustaining health within an individual’s biopsychosocial context. Within COBRA, cybernetic systems support the mapping and investigation of conscious states and their transitions through the COBRA Quadrant. MAAVIR (Medical Applications for Virtual Reality) extends this architecture into controlled virtual environments for investigating and influencing human responses. Across these systems, AI facilitates sensing, integration, inference and feedback, while consequential decisions and interventions remain human-gated.

Explore Cybernetics   

VICAS

The Viability-Conditioned Artificial Systems (VICAS) program explores what happens when constraints associated with biological viability are translated into artificial systems. Rather than treating finite resources as external limitations, VICAS investigates architectures in which resource availability, integrative capacity, system history, and action selection become dynamically coupled. Artificial analogues of biological resource support and perturbation-responsive integration define a joint viability space within which system behavior can adapt as internal conditions change. The aim is to investigate whether such architectures can produce artificial systems whose behaviour is conditioned by continued viability rather than task performance alone, while making no assumption of biological, mechanistic, or phenomenological equivalence.

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Context-Sensitive Innovations

The Context-Sensitive Innovations Program (CSIP) develops technologies around two realities that shape health and healthcare: biopsychosocial context and economic context. Health and disease emerge within differing biological, psychological, and social circumstances, while access to healthcare technologies is constrained by affordability, infrastructure, and resources. The program seeks to incorporate these contexts directly into technological design, developing solutions that respond to the lived realities of individuals and communities while remaining accessible across diverse economic settings. The aim is to create technologies that are not only scientifically and clinically relevant, but also contextually appropriate and economically equitable, particularly for populations and healthcare systems where technological advances remain difficult to access.

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Novel Information Systems

Moving beyond conventional electronic computation, the Novel Information Systems Program (NISP) explores how information may be encoded, stored, transformed, and transmitted through unconventional physical, biological, and ecological substrates. We investigate phenomena including fluorescence, phosphorescence, biological signalling, and environmentally coupled processes as potential foundations for alternative information architectures. Rather than assuming that computation must take familiar electronic forms, NISP asks what kinds of information systems become possible when the properties and constraints of different substrates themselves participate in information processing. The program explores these possibilities experimentally, seeking new principles for sensing, communication, computation, and adaptive artificial systems.

Explore NISP