Artist and designer Lizan Freijsen is fascinated by stains, fungi and mildew. By turning moisture stains into textiles, Lizan Freijsen focuses on these blind spots and visualizes their beauty. The Living Surface: an Alternative Biology Book on Stains by Lizan Freijsen gives an overview of her extensive photo-archive with a wide-range of categories of traces of decay, and a selection of her unique hand-made carpets, tapestries and blankets produced in the last eight years. The central themes in this publication are transformation and time, in the course of which the unwanted gains significance. Engineer and design critic Ed van Hinte, fluid physicist, scientist Hanneke Gelderblom and Lizan Freijsen herself reflect on the crossroads of art, design, and science. The time-consuming production of carpets by means of the hand tufting technique, combined with form and color studies, provide insight into the design process.