The Multidisciplinarian in Mycelium R&D (and the Responsibility to Do Interesting Things)

You Will Likely Fail

When I was in art school one of my professors once said, without irony or encouragement, that my job as an artist was to “do the most interesting thing you can at all times.” He didn’t mean it as inspiration. He meant it as 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 going to fail (and I did).

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

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

So if failure is probable, the only viable response is the same: to take the practice seriously enough, applying enough time and rigor, that you might produce something interesting enough, to survive. Not interesting as novelty, but interesting as a durable, informed, adaptive response to a problem space that does not reward unrigorous decision making.

This isn’t about what you get to do. It’s about what you owe. And in mycelium R&D, what you owe is 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. As one author notes in The Scholarly Kitchen, 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. The explosion of domain-specific expertise has fragmented knowledge so that we know more about less. Yet, the most radical innovations happen at the intersections where seemingly distant disciplines converge (Thompson 2025).

Organizational researchers have echoed this, arguing that specialists often underperform when facing complex, open-ended challenges. The most resilient contributors tend to be generalists, those capable of integrating knowledge across boundaries (Grant 2025). While narrowly focused researchers may see short-term citation gains, the most transformative work emerges from highly interdisciplinary teams. Particularly those that span multiple knowledge regimes and feedback systems (Bonaventura et al 2025).

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, recursive, and deeply contextual) 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 deeply in three interdependent arms of learning that every serious mycelium R&D practitioner would benefit from cultivating:

Mycological Learning

Competence in mycological learning means more than taxonomy or familiarity with a handful of strains. It 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 screen. It is another to design an experiment that resolves uncertainty, improves signal, and informs the next decision. 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 not as a wall but as a topography. 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

Competence in design learning means recognizing that fungal form is not just structure, but 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, not writing the script. 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 aren’t specializations. They 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.

Doing the Most Interesting Thing

So we return to the original framing: do the most interesting thing you can at all times. 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 treating process design not as a technical problem to solve, but 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

Thompson C. The curse of knowledge: When more data means less understanding. WIRED. 2013 Dec 30 [cited 2025 Sep 7]; Available from: https://www.wired.com/2013/12/165191/

Davidson LA. Guest Post — The Paradox of Hyperspecialization and Interdisciplinary Research. The Scholarly Kitchen. 2023 Aug 29 [cited 2025 Sep 7]; Available from: https://scholarlykitchen.sspnet.org/2023/08/29/guest-post-the-paradox-of-hyperspecialization-and-interdisciplinary-research/

Grant A. The danger of having too many experts. TIME. 2016 Oct 20 [cited 2025 Sep 7]; Available from: https://time.com/4547320/the-danger-of-having-too-many-experts/

Bonaventura M, Latora V, Nicosia V, Panzarasa P. The advantages of interdisciplinarity in modern science. arXiv [Preprint]. 2017 Dec 21 [cited 2025 Sep 7]; arXiv:1712.07910v1. Available from:https://arxiv.org/abs/1712.07910

The views expressed in this article are my own and do not represent those of any current or past employers. All content is written and published in a personal capacity and reflects independent perspectives based on professional experience. No confidential or proprietary information is shared.