Recently, researchers have recognised the benefits of learning from biological development in order to engineer self-organizing solutions to problems. This paper explores the application of the developmental metaphor to the problem of controlling single and multicellular development. In this paper, a summary of experiments performed using a multicellular test-bed model of biological development, the Evolutionary Developmental System (EDS), is presented. The EDS is shown to successfully evolve genetic regulatory networks that specify and control the behaviour of single cells and the construction of 3D multicellular geometric morphologies to explore self-organization and analogues of phenomena akin to biological cell differentiation in multicellular development.