In recent years, there has been a notable proliferation and diversification of works in HCI, that integrate living microorganisms; an imperative lifeform dominating ecosystems of our planet. Yet despite the growing interest, there is a lack of structured lenses with which designers can strategize their processes of surfacing livingness; a material quality inherent in living artefacts with a potential to enrich user experiences and to initiate mutualistic care between humans and microorganisms. Through a systematic artefacts review and a case study on Flavobacteria, we have developed and instantiated a Taxonomy of Surfacing Livingness in Microbial Displays, consisting of six microbe-sensitive, tuneable mechanisms for human noticing of microorganisms: 1) Canvassing, 2) Marking, 3) Magnifying, 4) Translating, 5) Nudging, and 6) Molecular Programming. The taxonomy invites diverse and adaptable ways of generating and crafting microbial displays; towards overcoming microbe-specific surfacing constraints, integrating diverse stakeholders’ values, and enabling nuanced address of microbial welfare.

Technological and economic opportunities, alongside the apparent ecological benefits, point to biodesign as a new industrial paradigm for the fabrication of products in the twenty-first century. The presented work studies plant roots as a biodesign material in the fabrication of self-supported 3D structures, where the biologically and digitally designed materials provide each other with structural stability. Taking a material-driven design approach, we present our systematic tinkering activities with plant roots to better understand and anticipate their responsive behaviour. These helped us to identify the key design parameters and advance the unique potential of plant roots to bind discrete porous structures. We illustrate this binding potential of plant roots with a hybrid 3D object, for which plant roots connect 600 computationally designed, optimized, and fabricated bioplastic beads into a low stool.

The use of materials derived from waste is one of the prominent ways to contribute to sustainable product design. However, there is a stark gap in literature concerning how people appraise such materials. In this paper, we present our initial attempts to understand the aesthetic appreciation of materials, in particular those derived from discarded raw materials, i.e., revived materials. Two studies were conducted for which we took the aesthetic principle unity-in-variety as the departure point. In the first study, we explored material appraisals by testing whether different visual and tactile qualities interrelate with each other in a similar or contradictory way. Based on these findings, two revived materials were modified and our main assumptions were further explored in Study 2. We outline our findings and show that the aesthetic appreciation of a material can be influenced by the (in)congruity between visual and tactile qualities of the material.

Introduced in 2020, the notion of living artefacts encompasses biodesign outcomes that maintain the vitality of organisms such as fungi, algae, bacteria, and plants in the use of everyday artefacts, enabling new functions, interactions, and expressions within our daily lives. This paper situates living artefacts at the intersection of the sustainability discourse and more-than-human ontologies, illuminating the unprecedented opportunities that living artefacts present for regenerative ecologies. These ecologies are characterized by a fundamental inclination toward mutualism, creativity, and coevolution. In regenerative ecologies, the human-nature relationship transcends the binary distinction and it manifests as a single autopoietic system in which the constituent members collaboratively engage in the creation, transformation, and evolution of shared habitats. The paper outlines five pillars, supplemented by guiding questions and two illustrative cases, to aid designers in unlocking, articulating, and critically evaluating the potential of living artefacts for regenerative ecologies.

Technology embeddedness in HCI textiles has great potential for enabling novel interactions and enriched experiences, but unless carefully designed, could inadvertently worsen HCI’s sustainability problem. In an attempt to bridge sustainable debates and practical material-driven scholarship in HCI, we propose Multimorphic Textile-forms (MMTF), as a design approach developed through a lens of multiplicity and extended life cycles, that facilitate change in both design/production and use-time via the simultaneous thinking of the qualities and behaviour of material and form. We provide a number of cases, textile-form methods and vocabulary to enable exploration in this emerging design space. MMTF grants insights into textiles as complex material systems whose behaviour can be tuned across material, interaction and ecological scales for conformal, seamless, and sustainable outcomes.