Living systems are not only characterised by the sum of individual organisms but also by the multispecies interactions that occur among them, which are crucial for self-regulation, versatility and the evolution of life. Within the fields of biodesign and biological HCI, designers and researchers have strived to facilitate and mimic the qualities that these multispecies interactions entail. However, designing in a way that can account for such intricate dynamic systems presents significant challenges, necessitating alternative approaches that offer greater nuance and sensitivity to natural ecosystems. By incorporating living organisms as interactive components within human-made systems, living artefacts provide an opportunity to explore and design with such sensitivity. Leveraging the inherent interactive potential of living organisms, we propose an ecologically oriented design approach in which living artefacts are recognised and supported within the context of an intricate web of life. To this end, we conducted an in-depth analysis of existing living artefacts, paying particular attention to the multiplicity, connectivity and reciprocity of interactions between humans, other living entities and computers. From this analysis, we identified three distinct types of multispecies interactions that help to articulate and leverage their unique features within, across and beyond living artefacts.@en

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.@en

Direct interaction with cultural heritage (CH) artefacts is frequently unavailable to visitors, offering an opportunity for HCI designers to explore integrating material aspects into digitally-mediated encounters with CH artefacts. We argue that a thorough understanding of the material experiences of CH artefacts can open a novel design space, enabling engaging and meaningful interactions with digital representations. Capitalising on this potential, we present a user study where we systematically explore the material experiences of historic pop-up and movable books. Our analysis identifies five key material qualities to inspire augmentation: fold-ability, slide-ability, tear-ability, age-ability, and print-ability. Highlighting how these material qualities can inspire novel interactions with their digital representations, we present two extended-reality (XR) prototypes of a CH book. With our work, we present HCI designers with a novel approach on designing CH experiences, firmly rooted in materiality, challenging the prevalent paradigms of 'technology-driven' or 'as-realistic-as-possible' sensory experiences often found in CH-HCI.

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Microbes assume an indispensable role in design, given their inherent adaptability, functional diversity, and abundance. Yet, designing with microbes presents notable challenges for biodesigners, stemming from, for example, the distinct temporalities and scales of microbes. Conversely, cultivating microbial sensibilities—reflecting human comprehension and alignment with the distinctive characteristics of microbes—stands out as a unique potential of biodesign for fostering a deep connection between humans and other living entities. In response, we present the concept of “becoming microbes”, a philosophically grounded approach advocating for a non-anthropocentric stance in biodesign, aiming at immersing biodesigners in the realms of microbes with a fresh perspective for imagining the world through the lens of a microbe. By harnessing diverse microbial qualities, including motility and communication, we present various design avenues to explore the notion of becoming microbes. We reflect on the role of merging the biological with the immersive digital systems in this context.@en

HCI designers increasingly engage in the integration of microbes into artefacts, leveraging their distinct biological affordances for novel interactions. While in many explorations the interaction between humans and microbes is mediated, scholars also highlight the potential of direct interactions, such as visualising mechanical distortions or fostering a sense of relationality with nonhumans through eliciting intimate encounters. Seizing upon this potential, our study delves into the realm of direct interactions involving Flavobacteria, recently introduced as a colour-changing interactive medium in HCI. We present a design space for direct interactions where humans can (re)activate, (re)direct, and (re)arrange Flavobacteria’s colourations, thereby fostering a personal and dynamic interplay between humans and microbes. With our work, we aspire to provide pathways and ignite inspiration among HCI designers to create living artefacts that cultivate active engagement and heightened attentiveness towards microbial worlds and beyond.@en

Multimorphic textile-forms, obtained through simultaneous thinking of material and form that change in design and/or use time, have the potential to elicit diverse performances in the use of textile artefacts, thereby extending their relevance in our everyday lives. We present AnimaTo, a multimorphic textile artefact designed for performativity that reacts to water exposure via the shrinking and dissolving of its fibres. Adopting a material-driven design approach, we engaged in material tinkering with these qualities to achieve changes in the texture, size, and shape of AnimaTo. Following this exploration, we conducted a pilot study to gain insights into AnimaTo's temporal behaviour and performativity in use. In the further development of the artefact, we highlight the challenges that arise in producing high-fidelity prototypes. This work grants insights into how designers can tune material, form, and temporal qualities of textile artefacts towards multiplicity of use and prolonged user-textile relationships.@en

Serenity plays a pivotal role in human well-being, as it fosters an enduring sense of peace and calmness. Everyday textile artifacts, with their qualities of softness, malleability, and flexibility, hold the capacity to greatly enhance serenity in user experiences. Drawing from the foundation of materials experience and material-driven design, this paper introduces a design toolkit aimed at harnessing the potential of textiles in creating serene experiences. The toolkit was refined through two exploratory workshops involving design professionals from both academic and industrial backgrounds. By emphasizing the interplay of form, material, and time in textile experiences, this toolkit offers a vocabulary and set of techniques for discussing and designing for serene textile experiences across different material and time scales. We further explore avenues for the toolkit's employment, expansion, and adaptation for use in a wide array of material-driven design projects.@en

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, but their applications are delimited by their material properties. To bridge the gap in the wider application of these materials, the role of plant root structure and an agar-agar matrix are explored in relation to the mechanical properties of the EPRMs. Tensile tests were performed on five root configurations, ranging from single roots to grids of varying sizes. Heterogeneities in each configuration suggest poor load distribution throughout the structure. Agar-agar was introduced as a biopolymer matrix to improve load distribution and tensile properties. Digital microscopy at the intersection of grid cells suggests a correlation between cell size, root tip density, and material strength. The largest cell size (2 cm) had the highest root tip density and yield strength (0.568 ± 0.181 roots/mm² and 0.234 ± 0.018 MPa, respectively), whereas the structure with the least root tips (1 cm) was 31 % weaker.

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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 sustainability discourse and more-than-human ontologies, illuminating the unprecedented opportunities that living artefacts present for regenerative ecologies. These ecologies are characterized by a fundamental inclination toward mutualism, creativity, and coevolution. In regenerative ecologies, the human-nature relationship transcends the binary distinction and it manifests as a single autopoietic system in which the constituent members collaboratively engage in the creation, transformation, and evolution of shared habitats. The paper outlines five pillars, supplemented by guiding questions and two illustrative cases, to aid designers in unlocking, articulating, and critically evaluating the potential of living artefacts for regenerative ecologies.@en

Engineered living materials (ELMs) are a novel class of functional materials that typically feature spatial confinement of living components within an inert polymer matrix to recreate biological functions. Understanding the growth and spatial configuration of cellular populations within a matrix is crucial to predicting and improving their responsive potential and functionality. Here, this work investigates the growth, spatial distribution, and photosynthetic productivity of eukaryotic microalga Chlamydomonas reinhardtii (C. reinhardtii) in three-dimensionally shaped hydrogels in dependence of geometry and size. The embedded C. reinhardtii cells photosynthesize and form confined cell clusters, which grow faster when located close to the ELM periphery due to favorable gas exchange and light conditions. Taking advantage of location-specific growth patterns, this work successfully designs and prints photosynthetic ELMs with increased CO₂ capturing rate, featuring high surface to volume ratio. This strategy to control cell growth for higher productivity of ELMs resembles the already established adaptations found in multicellular plant leaves.

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A woven textile-form is a form that is constructed simultaneously as the textile is woven. Interfaces designed with this approach hold undisclosed potential for rich interactions. However, the design of woven textile-form interfaces requires specialised tacit knowledge, which is limited even in craft and practice spaces; and it is therefore inaccessible to HCI designers. To bridge this gap, we present the material-driven journey of a multidisciplinary team to design a woven textile-form interface using various techniques such as paper models and diagrams to design for multi-layer weaving. Replacing traditional yarns with conductive yarn, we achieved woven textile-forms with electronic sensing capabilities. By outlining our process, the pictorial highlights the challenges and opportunities of textile-form thinking for HCI designers. Additionally, its printed version serves as a ‘paper prototyping tool’ for designers to gain hands-on experience developing textile-form interfaces.@en

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 material quality inherent in living artefacts with a potential to enrich user experiences and to initiate mutualistic care between humans and microorganisms. Through a systematic artefacts review and a case study on Flavobacteria, we have developed and instantiated a Taxonomy of Surfacing Livingness in Microbial Displays, consisting of six microbe-sensitive, tuneable mechanisms for human noticing of microorganisms: 1) Canvassing, 2) Marking, 3) Magnifying, 4) Translating, 5) Nudging, and 6) Molecular Programming. The taxonomy invites diverse and adaptable ways of generating and crafting microbial displays; towards overcoming microbe-specific surfacing constraints, integrating diverse stakeholders' values, and enabling nuanced address of microbial welfare.@en

Technology embeddedness in HCI textiles has great potential for enabling novel interactions and enriched experiences, but unless carefully designed, could inadvertently worsen HCI’s sustainability problem. In an attempt to bridge sustainable debates and practical material-driven scholarship in HCI, we propose Multimorphic Textile-forms (MMTF), as a design approach developed through a lens of multiplicity and extended life cycles, that facilitate change in both design/production and use-time via the simultaneous thinking of the qualities and behaviour of material and form. We provide a number of cases, textile-form methods and vocabulary to enable exploration in this emerging design space. MMTF grants insights into textiles as complex material systems whose behaviour can be tuned across material, interaction and ecological scales for conformal, seamless, and sustainable outcomes.@en

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.@en

In this paper, we explore how textile-form thinking, i.e., the simultaneous design and construction of the textile and form, can be leveraged as a strategy to embrace and unlock the performative potential of woven interactive textiles to building towards more intuitive interactions with woven interactive textiles in our everyday. First, we designed and wove five textile-form interfaces, working as contact switches and sensors, with sensing capabilities and diverse performative qualities. Then, we investigated the action possibilities of the interfaces in an exploratory study. Grounded on the study's outcomes, we identified three design themes relative to the performativity of our woven textile-form interfaces. Finally, we derived practical design tactics that designers can apply to design for the performativity of woven textile-form interfaces.@en

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.

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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 applications. Nevertheless, the current literature lacks a vocabulary to communicate and discuss living materials in user studies. To bridge this gap, our paper presents the development of a “Living Materials Vocabulary” consisting of 45 descriptive items. Through a term frequency analysis of relevant literature and in-depth interviews with eight biodesigners, we identified a set of descriptions which we clustered under five themes: origin, making, agency and autonomy, temporality, and impact of living materials. We selected representative items from these themes to compile our final vocabulary. We discuss how our vocabulary can be operationalised in living material characterisation studies and further inspire future biodesign practice@en

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 which livingness is prolonged to the use time of artefacts, and understood as a biological, ecological, and experiential phenomenon. Two researchers investigating Living Artefacts, through their short show-and-tell presentations, initiated threads of moderated open discussions. Using the Living Artefacts framework as a departure point, we collectively explored opportunities and challenges in biodesign, and possible ways in which they could be addressed.@en