This talk will present new results on the optimal control of self-organization, motivated by a growing body of empirical work on biological pattern formation in dynamic environments. We pose a boundary control problem for the classic supercritical Turing pattern, asking the best way to reach a non-trivial steady state by controlling the boundary flux of a reactant species. Via the Pontryagin approach, first-order optimality conditions for a generic reaction-diffusion system with a suitable bifurcation structure are derived. Using formal asymptotics, we construct approximate closed-form optimal solutions in feedback law form that are valid for any Turing-unstable system near criticality, which are verified against numerical solutions for a representative reaction-diffusion model.