I really like Hydra's tagline: "Living" Building Blocks for Self-designing Artefacts"

The HYDRA project works towards the design of building blocks for self-reconfigurable artefacts. The building blocks shall allow robust and efficient morphological development of artefacts. In order to allow end-users of our approach to design new artefacts in an easy manner, we will provide an architecture (the HYDRA architecture) made up of simple building blocks, simple connections, and simple interactions. Inspired by biological principles, the HYDRA project realises engineering structures with the properties of differentiation and self-reconfiguration.

Also there are plenty of interesting related projects here.