While automation is standard in most industrial and research fields, cell cultivation is still dominated “handling”, manual processes. To improve the situation, our group focusses on the development of a bio-centred, automated cell cultivation tool. Modular design may help to realize a variety of experiments. Cultivation processes are observed and controlled via a graphical user interface. This article describes the systematic approach, the overall speci-fication (with process analyses) and the preliminary results for the prototype of a graphical user interface.