Living technologies are "characterized by robustness, autonomy, energy efficiency, sustainability, local intelligence, self-repair, adaptation, self-replication and evolution, all properties current technology lack, but living systems possess.
Based on the living technology ideas a number of projects were initiated, including the European Commission sponsored project, Programmable Artificial Cell Evolution (PACE),[6] that in part co-sponsored the European Centre for Living Technology (ECLT) in Venice, Italy in 2004.
Also the Protocell Assembly project at Los Alamos National Laboratory, USA, was based on these ideas and also sponsored in 2004.
In 2007 the Center for Fundamental Living Technology (FLinT) [1] was established at the University of Southern Denmark co-sponsored by the Danish National Science Foundation (Grundforskningsfonden).
This is enabling technology to both become more powerful and to meet societal challenges of being less disruptive to the environment, more sustainable, less subject to failure and more akin to human needs and accepted modes of interaction.
Thus, there is focus on engineering design without an explicit blueprint, which means the desired system properties emerge from the subsystem interactions.