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 technologies can support the design of living artefacts, that is, artefacts in which the organism is alive at the time of use. Our taxonomy bridges this gap by examining and reinterpreting the roles existing digital tools can play in the exploration of the abilities of things to provide a habitat for living artefacts both at design time and use time, i.e., crafting habitabilities in biodesign. The taxonomy is grounded in a systematic analysis of ten cases of living artefacts from art, design, and HCI, and it identifies three roles for digital tools: understanding, embodying, and perpetuating the habitat. Forwarding a relational perspective through the lens of habitability, this work promotes the mutual wellbeing of both humans and non-humans in biodesign.

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 possibilities in digital and biological hybrids. While much is known about the science of these organisms, their gliving aesthetics', i.e., how humans experience the unique temporal changes in a living media, have hardly been explored. To bridge this gap in designing living light interfaces, this paper presents a study of bioluminescent flash characterisation. A DIY shaking device was designed to interact with the liquid living media, providing a range of stimuli including orbital rotation, pulsation and vibration. The living light aesthetics is presented with rich visuals illustrating the intensity variations over time, textural qualities and spatial distribution.

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 footprint and novel material expressions. The design outcome is a non-living artefact with material qualities comparable to the convention (e.g., leather-like, foam-like). Livingness, however, can be prolonged to the use time of artefacts so that the design outcomes go beyond being a mere sustainable material alternative or a unique material expression. Instead, within their unusual ways, such artefacts offer novel responsive behaviour and interaction possibilities, and new ways of doing and living, while raising critical questions about care, symbiosis, cohabitation, and adaptation. In this article, we propose the concept of living artefacts, where livingness is understood as a biological, ecological, and experiential phenomenon. To support this understanding, we propose three principles—Living Aesthetics, Mutualistic Care, and Habitabilities—as fundamental loci of designing for livingness. We illustrate the three principles with a number of cases that help articulate a finer-grained understanding of their applicability in biodesign practice.

Over the past years, product designers have been involved in collaborative developments of smart material composites early on in the development process, to showcase creative applications of them. In these projects, the way the material is presented to the development team and the extent to which its properties are defined affect how designers understand the potentials and boundaries of the material and envision product applications. In the context of a European project, Light.Touch.Matters, we studied the attempt of designers to understand and prototype underdeveloped composites of thin-film organic light emitting diodes and piezoelectric polymer. Arguing for a collaborative exploration of the unique experiences that such underdeveloped composites unfold, we elaborate on a challenge designers face in understanding and prototyping the experiential qualities, specifically, the dynamic and performative qualities. The paper presents our design approach and complementary tools to overcome this challenge. It further discusses the applicability and limitations of the proposed design supports in the context of collaborative materials development and outlines future research directions.

Given the growing interest in “upstream” collaborative projects between designers and materials scientists, it is crucial to scrutinize designers’ creative contribution to materials development beyond “coming up with” application ideas. Overcoming this outdated preconception requires a shift away from the dominant perspective of cognitive psychology that understands creativity as being in the designer’s mind, to an understanding of it as being distributed between the designer and the material world. Creativity as such requires designers’ active participation in “discovering” the novel potentials of materials rather than merely translating the “given” materials information to product applications. In this paper we propose the Materials Potential Framework to liberate materials from the stigma of a purely solutionist approach (e.g., materials selection and application potential), and open up the possibility to approach materials generatively, for all they have to offer (i.e., materials potential). To that aim, our paper explores existing notions in the discussions of materials potential, namely form, function, and experience as materials potential, and provides a conceptualization beyond the evident merits of product applications. The conceptualization of “affordances as material potentials” shifts the focus to designers’ skillful acts of making and fabricating as ways of unlocking novel affordances of conventional and emerging materials.

As the material becomes active in disclosing the fullness of its capabilities, the boundaries between human and nonhuman performances are destabilized in productive practices that take their departure from materials. This paper illuminates the embodied crafting of action possibilities in material-driven design (MDD) practices with electroluminescent materials. The paper describes and discusses aspects of the making process of electroluminescent materials in which matter, structure, form, and computation are manipulated to deliberately disrupt the affordance of the material, with the goal to explore unanticipated action possibilities and materialize the performative qualities of the sample. In light of this account, the paper concludes by urging the HCI community to performatively rupture the material, so to be able to act upon it as if it was always unfinished or underdeveloped. This, it is shown, can help open up the design space of smart material composites and reveal their latent affordances.