One day in the not-too-distant future, you will be able to buy a chair from Ikea, bring it home and watch it assemble itself in front of your eyes. In this same future world, if you are diagnosed with cancer, you might be injected with nano-robots that will track down and selectively kill the cancerous cells. You will feel nothing but mildly feverish in the process. Sentient chairs and cancer-fighting robots might sound like the stuff of science fiction, but these are two very real projects that Carlos Olguin is working on in his role as the director of the Bio/Nano/Programmable Matter Group at software giant Autodesk. Founded as a quirky Californian startup in the 1980s, the company has gone from producing AutoCAD design software for 8-bit PCs to speculating on the future of programmable lifeforms. "We are now looking at life as a design space," says Olguin when we meet in London, in between his hectic tour of synthetic biology research outfits.