In this pictorial, we explore alternative ways of knowing urban trees through a more-than-human lens. Using a municipal tree dataset, we focus on “unknown” trees—entries unclassified due to error, decay, or absence—highlighting the limits of quantification and fixed knowledge systems. Urban trees, while critical for ecosystems, are often shaped by technological interventions (e.g., GIS, IoT sensors, AI diagnostics) that prioritize their utility over other expressions. We engage in knitting as a material inquiry to foreground nonhuman agencies and relational entanglements. Through reflective shifts and compromises, this project questions normative design practices, seeking to amplify nonhuman participation. We make two contributions. Firstly, we offer insights into fostering alternative, relational engagements with urban ecologies. Secondly, we reflect on our process of surfacing and working with agentic capacities, articulating guidance for other design researchers. Through this, we advocate for fragmented approaches that embrace complicity and complexity in more-than-human design.

Trends in designing with living organisms have focused mainly on leveraging the organisms qualities for interactivity and designing for care through a more-than-human design lens. As DIS gains interest in interactions with living organisms and more-than-human design goals, we reflect upon these trends and call for practices that surface nonhuman perspectives and critically draw out our own. We propose tracing as a material practice that surfaces insights on care and relation in the rich space between the human-designer and organism. Through reflective writings, we present a first-person account of tracing slime mold through visualizations, embodied experiences, and sonifying electrical resistance. These tracings capture both the slime mold’s ways and our own, inviting us to observe our actions to facilitate its life. By tracing experiences of growing and making with slime mold, we re-orient toward nonhuman perspectives and discuss how such practices might advance capacities of design research.

Designing with living organisms can offer new perspectives to design research and practices in HCI. In this work, we explore first-person perspectives through design research with Kombucha Scoby, a microbial biofilm. We began with a material design exploration, producing digitally fabricated and crafted samples with Scoby. As we noticed our felt experiences while growing and working with Kombucha Scoby, we shifted towards a reflective autoethnographic study. Through reflective writings, we followed sensory experiences such as hearing the Kombucha fermentation, touching the Scoby while harvesting it, and watching the slow growth of layers over time. Subsequently, we designed "sensory engagement probes”: designed experiments that bring forward new connections and communicate our process, motivations, and tensions that emerged while engaging with the organism. Lastly, we discuss how such design research can inform material design with living matter by creating space to contemplate "life as shared experience" and more-than-human design perspectives.

Each new material developed opens a broader pallet of aesthetic and functional possibilities for designers. This paper introduces DIS to biofoam, a material that is water-soluble, biodegradable, and can be made conductive. We describe the material in detail: the process of making the material from scratch, the material’s fabrication into forms with hand-craft techniques, and present two HCI specific applications of the biofoam. The biofoam can be cooked, molded, layered, extruded, dissolved or recooked opening up possibilities to consider the entire life cycle of the material in the design process. We contribute design considerations to allow designers to “tune” the biofoam to the desired quality, as well as a characterization of many aspects of the biofoam such as compression, spring back time, water permeability, and electrical conductivity. Finally, we discuss the unique opportunities this material and its life cycle bring to the design and HCI communities.

In this work, we use composted food waste to create ReClaym: a personal biomaterial, made at home, that reflects the makers’ relationship with food. We combine our personal compost with non-toxic binders to create a biomaterial that can completely biodegrade. We propose Intimate Making as an approach for working with ReClaym that leverages familiar, hands-on techniques to enhance maker-material communication, which in turn leads to a deeper material understanding. We explore methods to customize ReClaym via color, texture, sensing, and conductivity. We apply manual fabrication techniques (sculpting, molding, and hand-held extruding) and design explorations to create a collection of applications that include garden paraphernalia, games, and personal items found in the home. We then examine the entire life cycle of ReClaym, which both begins and ends with composting—giving food waste a second life and providing a sustainable end of life for ReClaym artifacts, thus making the process truly circular.

Living matter is an emerging topic of interest in HCI as researchers are recognizing the unique affordances of biological materials. We explore direct interactions with Dinoflagellates, bioluminescent algae that produce light when exposed to oxygen through physical stimulation. Leveraging Dinoflagellates’ natural feedback mechanism, we propose directly engaging the human user with the organism through physical kinetic interactions. We take an organism-centered design approach, considering the well-being of the organism by focusing first on designing appropriate environments for the organism, then proceeding to exploring the available interactions within these environments. Our framework consists of four components (form, reception, feedback, and control) and can be used to guide designers in their design process with living matter. We demonstrate the framework with environments for Dinoflagellates and three real-life examples: a checkers game, a ball game. and hopscotch. Last, we discuss the constraints and limitations of integrating Dinoflagellates and living matter in interactive systems.

Outdoor play is in decline, including its benefits to children's development. Coding, a typically indoor, screen-based activity, can potentially enrich outdoor play, serving as a rule-making medium. We present a coding platform that controls a programmable hardware device, enabling children to technologically-enhance their outdoor play experiences by inventing game ideas, coding them, and playing their games together with their friends. In the evaluation study, 24 children used the system to invent and play outdoor games. Results show children are able to bridge between the different domains of coding and outdoor play. They used the system to modify traditional games and invent new ones, enriching their outdoor experience. Children merged computational concepts with physical game elements, integrated physical outdoor properties as variables in their code, and were excited to see their code come to life. We conclude children can use coding to express their ideas by creating technologically-enhanced outdoor play experiences.

Outdoor play has known benefits for children's development, and studies show it is in decline. Heads-Up Games have been proposed as a possible solution, in some cases with an integrated coding platform to enrich play variety. In this pilot study we set out to evaluate a Scratch-based coding platform for outdoor play. The code primitives control digital features of a stick-like outdoor play object. We observed children's play patterns with the coding platform and with the play object, and report on three distinct patterns: "Basic Exploration", "Advanced Exploration", and "Game Invention". Our preliminary findings show that all children began with "Basic Exploration" and progressed either to "Advanced Exploration" or "Game Invention". With regards to outdoor play benefits, the "Game Invention" pattern was associated with more collaborative social interaction, physical activity, and "heads up" interaction. We discuss the implications for future coding platforms designed for outdoor play.

Outdoor play has been proven to be beneficial for children's development. HCI research on Heads-Up Games suggests that the well-known decline in outdoor play can be addressed by adding technology to such activities. However, outdoor play benefits such as social interaction, creative thinking, and physical activity may be compromised when digital features are added. We present the design & implementation of a novel digitally-enhanced outdoor-play prototype. Our evaluation with 48 children revealed that a non-digital version of the novel outdoor play object afforded social play and game invention. Evaluation of the digitally-enhanced version showed reduced collaborative social interaction and reduced creative thinking when compared with baseline. However, we showed that specific sensing and feedback features better supported outdoor play benefits. For example non-accumulated feedback was shown to increase collaborative play and creative thinking in comparison to accumulated feedback. We provide evidence-based recommendations for designers of outdoor play technologies.