Computational Designer — Hybrid Textiles

OXMAN

OXMAN is a hybrid Design and R&D company that fuses design, technology, and biology to invent multi-scale products and environments. We reject the human-centric design paradigms that have divorced us from Nature, and instead pursue a Nature-centric approach—delivering solutions by, for, and with the natural world. We design across scales for systems-level impact, treating every construct as a whole system of complex interrelations rather than an isolated object.

OXMAN seeks a Computational Designer to advance our work around Textile Design and Hybrid Living Materials. This person sits at the intersection of computational design, textile engineering, and synthetic biology, developing the algorithmic processes, predictive models, and automated fabrication systems through which living and engineered matter are woven together. They are fluent in code and at home in at least one of textile craft or biological reasoning—and curious enough to work across all both, treating computation as a language for mediating between digital design intent, material behavior, and biological agency.

The role spans three integrated levels: the computational design of textiles themselves; the modeling of biological behavior that plays on across those textiles; and the engineering and automation of the fabrication processes that produce them. We're looking for genuine depth in one or two, an appetite for the rest, and the instinct to translate between them.

• Build pipelines that translate computational designs into machine instructions.

• Model and predict complex behavior—deformation, drape, stability, and structural response—for simulation and design optimization.

• Develop mechanistic, dynamical, or data-driven models of biological processes (pattern formation, growth, multicellular signaling, genetic circuits).

• Use computation to narrow large combinatorial possibility spaces.

• Collaborate with a multidisciplinary team of engineers, biologists, and designers, translating ideas and methods across domains.

• Communicate work clearly through meetings, presentations, and creative outlets, and maintain a shared library of processes, models, and tools.

These are the three areas the role works across. Strong candidates will bring depth in one or more and the curiosity to engage with the others.

• Develop computational processes for knit and weave design, including parametric and generative methods for structure, pattern, and form.

• Build pipelines for the translation of computational designs into machine instructions (knit programming, jacquard instruction sets), closing the gap between geometry and fabrication.

• Develop inverse-design methods that derive machine instructions from target geometries or performance specifications

• Model and predict textile behavior—deformation, drape, stability, and structural response—to enable forward simulation and design optimization.

• Build mechanistic and data-driven models of the biological processes that play out on and through textile substrates—genetic-circuit and gene-regulatory dynamics, and spatial pattern formation, growth, and multicellular signaling—moving fluently between deterministic (ODE) and stochastic formulations, and between first-principles models and ML as each problem warrants.

• Calibrate and constrain these models against experimental data: parameter inference, sensitivity and identifiability analysis, and model-guided design of experiments.

• Use computation to narrow large combinatorial possibility spaces—screening which biological and material configurations are worth realizing in vivo rather than over-specifying systems in silico.

• Characterize and improve the stability and repeatability of living-material outcomes, building predictive models robust to biological and process variation

• Maintain a critical, empirically grounded stance on where modeling adds value and where physical experimentation leads.

• Augment living-textile fabrication through design engineering and automation—programming robots, and knitting/weaving platforms

• Design and…