Designing Circular Applications of Mycelium-Based Materials for Aircraft Cabins

This graduation project (Hyfen) elucidates opportunities for mycelium-based innovations in circular aircraft cabin design with a focus on material properties, applications and comparative environmental impacts.<br/>Aircraft cabin interior elements account for 10% of an aircraft’s empty weight, and are replaced 4-5 times during the lifetime of an...

Enhancing Team Effectiveness in Biodesign: The Role of a Dual Feedback System in Enhancing Team Effectiveness in Academic Teams

Biodesign plays a critical role in developing innovative solutions, such as carbon capturing with living materials that incorporate photosynthetic organisms. Team effectiveness is a crucial aspect of successful collaboration and has been extensively studied in various fields. However, research on team effectiveness in the emerging field of...

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

Living artefacts for regenerative ecologies

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...

Surfacing Livingness in Microbial Displays: A Design Taxonomy for HCI

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...

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,...

"Is this alive?": Towards a vocabulary for understanding and communicating living material experiences

Living materials are a nascent material class where living organisms are embedded and kept alive in the design outcome to achieve novel functionalities, expressions, and interactions. Experiential characterisation studies with potential endusers will provide insights for developing these novel materials for meaningful material<br/>applications....

Designing living artefacts: Opportunities and challenges for biodesign

Biodesign is an emerging form of design practice integrating biological materials and processes, and there is a growing interest in the field for structured conversations to generate insights on how it can be best taught, researched, and disseminated. In our conversations, we began exploring biodesign under the framework of Living Artefacts, in...

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...

New digital narratives for living textiles

Today, the foundation of the textile industry is built upon the possibility to purchase synthetic fibres as these allow people to have an extensive amount of choices. Unfortunately, they are as far away from nature as it can get. Over the last decade, the industry is increasingly trying to move towards a more bio-based future, often this can be...

Living light interfaces - an exploration of bioluminescence aesthetics

This paper aims to provide first insights into flash characteristics of bioluminescent microalgae as a potential media for future living light interfaces. A growing number of HCI and interaction design researchers show interest in living material interfaces, which incorporate living organisms for novel responsive behaviour and interaction...

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...