Today, the challenges of climate change and environmental crises are widely acknowledged as urgent global concerns. Against this backdrop, and informed by the epistemological turns of posthumanism, design research seeks to challenge and expand conventional paradigms. For the shared goal of "living as well as possible" with other earthly beings, it is essential to understand the intricate and dynamic relations we share with the (living) entities we design and cohabit with. Grounded in posthumanist, feminist care, and new materialist theories, this dissertation investigates care in biodesign, focusing on cultivating care relations between humans and living organisms, particularly microbes. Through exploring materiality as a lens for designing more-than-human care, it offers theoretical, conceptual, empirical, and methodological contributions to the expanding discourse on care in designing with living systems.

This dissertation employs a programmatic Research-through-Design process. A multiplicity of methods such as theoretical analysis, auto-ethnography, imaginary artefacts, material-driven design and a longitudinal ethnographic study are deployed. Within the research program, I conducted two main design experiments, including the creation of cyanobacteria-based living artefacts and the characterization of their temporal patterns.....

Materiality of artefacts holds the potential to intricately and dynamically shape our daily practices. We posit this capacity can be harnessed in fostering creative unfolding of everyday care practices towards living artefacts. To explore this premise, we designed a cyanobacterial living artefact with air purifying capacity, and invited eight participants to live with and care for it for two weeks. The artefact can be situated in diverse locations within domestic spaces, wherever the participant would consider air purification necessary and certain lighting conditions beneficial for the artefact’s vitality. This versatility is supported by the artefact’s colour-changing, pliable, adhesive, and suspendable nature. We analysed visual documentation and semi-structured interviews of participants’ experiences of the artefact. Our findings suggest distinct roles of materiality for care regarding labour, knowledge, and exploration. We further highlight the intricate design space encompassing openness, temporalities and semantic fitness towards nurturing mutualistic care in human-microbe interactions.

Microbes offer designers opportunities to endow artefacts with environmental sensing and adapting abilities, and unique expressions. However, microbe-embedded artefacts present a challenge of temporal dissonance, reflected by a “time lag” typically experienced by humans in noticing the gradual and minute shifts in microbial metabolism. This could compromise fluency of interactions and may hinder timely noticing and attending to microbes in living artefacts. In addressing this challenge, we introduce Cyano-chromic Interface, in which photosynthetic activity of cyanobacteria (Synechocystis sp. PCC6803) is timely surfaced by an electrochromic (EC) material through its monochromatic display. Grounded through interface performance characterization and design primitives, we developed application concepts through which we instantiate how the interface can be tuned for diverse functional and experiential outcomes in living artefacts. We further discuss the potential of aligning human-microbe temporalities for enriched interactions and reciprocal relationships with microbes, and beyond.

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.

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.