Multi-cellular organisms have exploited a simple but powerful design concept: the regular tiling of a relatively small number of individual cell types yields assemblies with spectacular functional capacity. This capability comes at the cost of substantial complexity in design synthesis and assembly, which nature has addressed via developmental processes and evolutionary search. I will describe my application of these ideas to electromechanical systems, which has led to the development of various electromechanical cell types, assembly strategies, and design synthesis tools inspired by lessons from Ecology and Evolutionary Biology.