Open design is a catchall term for various on- and offline design and making activities. It can be used to describe a type of design process that allows for (is open to) the participation of anybody (novice or professional) in the collaborative development of something. As well as this, it can mean the distribution and unrestricted use of design blueprints and documentation for the use by others.In this paper, the authors highlight various aspects of open and collaborative design and argue for the use of new terms that address what is open and when. A range of design projects and online platforms that have open attributes are then explored, whereby these terms are applied. In terms of design, the focus is specifically on the design of physical things rather than graphical, software or system design.

The need for circular textiles has led to an interest in the production of biologically derived materials, generating new research into the bioproduction of textiles through design and interdisciplinary approaches. Bacterial cellulose has been produced directly from fermentation into sheets but not yet investigated in terms of producing filaments directly from fermentation. This leaves a wealth of material qualities unexplored. Further, by growing the material directly into filaments, production such as wet spinning are made redundant, thus reducing textile manufacturing steps. The aim of this study was to grow the bio-material, namely bacterial cellulose directly into a filament. This was achieved using a method of co-designing with the characteristics of biological materials. The method combines approaches of material-driven textile design and human-centred co-design to investigate co-designing with the characteristics of living materials for biological material production. The project is part of a wider exploration of bio-manufacturing textiles from waste. The practice-based approach brought together biological sciences and material design through a series of iterative experiments. This, in turn, resulted in designing with the inherent characteristics of bacterial cellulose, and by doing so filaments were designed to be fabricated directly from fermentation. In this investigation, creative exploration was encouraged within a biological laboratory space, showing how interdisciplinary collaboration can offer innovative alternative bioproduction routes for textile filament production.

Over the last 15 years, HCI and Interaction Design have experienced a “material turn” characterized by a growing interest in the materiality of technology and computation, and in methods that support exploring, envisioning, and crafting with and through materials. The community has experienced a similar turn focused on the body, on how to best design for and from a first-person, lived experience, and the moving and sensual body. In this workshop, we focus on the intersection of these two turns. The emerging developments in multimodal interfaces open opportunities to bring in materiality to the digital world as well as to transform the materiality of objects and bodies in the real-world, including the materiality of our own bodies. The different sensory qualities of (touchable and untouchable, physical and digital) objects and bodies, including our own, can be brought into the design of digital technologies to enrich, augment, and transform embodied experiences. In this “materials revolution” [15], what are the current theories, approaches, methods, and tools that emphasize the critical role of materiality to body-based interactions with technology? To explore this, in this workshop we will focus on five related themes: material enabling expression, material as a catalyst for human action, material enabling reflection and awareness, material enabling transformation and material supporting the design process for the re-creation of the existing and the yet-to-exist. This workshop with technology presentations, panel sessions with experts, and multidisciplinary discussions will: (i) bring together researchers who work on (re)creating sensory properties of materials through technology with those who investigate experiential effects of materials and material-enabled interactions, (ii) discuss methods, opportunities, difficulties in designing materiality and material-enabled interactions, and (iii) form a multidisciplinary community to build synergies and collaborations.

Humanity is living through a crisis that sees our way of life exhausting the resources of the earth and ourselves. The fashion sector shows the negative impacts of conspicuous consumption on our socioenvironmental wellbeing. Despite citizens’ growing awareness of their responsibility within consumption cycles, they reveal concerns about their lack of understanding and the support required for them to become agents of responsible consumption. The Circular Economy flourishes as a conceptual approach to help society transition to a more sustainable existence. This paper explores how emerging creative technology and interaction design might support a shift in the role of citizens in the Circular Economy. We performed a design inquiry that investigated the moment of acquisition via configuration of products, storytelling, and multimodal interaction techniques for the creation of experiences that could catalyse citizen-consumers to become custodians of materials. We developed a retail-based concept tool—The Compositor Tool—with which we ran a user study to investigate new experiential ways that consumers can participate in materials’ circularity. The study highlighted how experience design and new interaction techniques can introduce circularity as part of consumer experience by forging deeper connections between people and products/materials and enabling consumers to have more creative and informative material engagement.