FlavoMetrics: Towards a Digital Tool to Understand and Tune Living Aesthetics of Flavobacteria

Understanding the effects of root structure on the mechanical behaviour of engineered plant root materials

Plant root growth can be altered by introducing obstacles in the path of growth. This principle is used in design to produce planar grid structures composed of interweaving roots. The Engineered Plant Root Materials (EPRMs) grown with this method have the potential to serve as environmentally sensitive alternatives for conventional materials,...

Habitabilities of Living Artefacts: A Taxonomy of Digital Tools for Biodesign

This paper offers a taxonomy of digital tools for crafting habitabilities in biodesign practices. Over the past decade, interest has grown among design and Human-Computer Interaction (HCI) scholars to explore the potentials of living organisms for novel responsive behavior and interaction possibilities. Yet, to date, it remains unexplored how...

Digital biofabrication to realize the potentials of plant roots for product design

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...

Materials Framing: A Case Study of Biodesign Companies’ Web Communications

Advances in biodesign offer opportunities for developing materials for everyday products from living organisms, such as fungi, algae, and bacteria. Gaining widespread acceptance of new materials from the general public can be a lengthy process, making biodesign a high-risk pursuit with potentially significant economic, ecological, and social...

Living artefacts: Conceptualizing livingness as a material quality in everyday artefacts

Biodesign suggests the integration of living organisms, such as bacteria, algae, fungi, and plants, into design, prevalently as material sources. Designers mobilize livingness of organisms at the design time (e.g., their grow-ability into predefined forms, their ability to release colour in growth, etc.), for achieving a minimal ecological...