Bio-digital systems that merge microbial life with technology promise new modes of computation, combining biological adaptability with digital precision. Yet realizing this potential symbiotically – where biological and digital agents co-adapt and co-process – remains elusive, largely due to the absence of a shared vocabulary bridging biology and computing. Consequently, microbes are often constrained to uni-directional roles, functioning as sensors or actuators rather than as active, computational partners in bio-digital systems. In response, we propose a taxonomy and pathways that articulate and expand the roles of biological and digital entities for synergetic bio-digital computation. Using this taxonomy, we analysed 70 systems across HCI, design, and engineering, identifying how biological mechanisms can be mapped onto computational abstractions. We argue that such mappings enable computationally actionable directions that foster richer and reciprocal relationships in bio-digital systems, supporting regenerative ecologies across time and scale while inspiring new paradigms for computation in HCI.

Bacterial cellulose (BC), also known as a Kombucha mat or SCOBY, is a grown material widely adopted in design and HCI communities due to its biodegradability, accessibility and mechanical versatility. Alongside these aspects, BC's qualities to become a habitat for other living organisms, i.e., its habitabilities, have been researched in biotechnological sciences but not fully explored in design. In response to the call for biobased material alternatives and the expanding design space for multispecies interactions in HCI, in this paper, we unpack this habitability potential of BC in the design of living artefacts. Through visual storytelling we unveil our hands-on biolab journey with Komagataeibacter, the bacteria that produce BC, and show how fungi, microalgae and cyanobacteria can inhabit this material. We outline diverse options for tuning the habitabilities of BC to incite HCI designers in the creation of living artefacts that are fully grown and compatible with regenerative ecologies.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Integrating microorganisms into artefacts is a growing area of interest for HCI designers. However, the time, resources, and knowledge required to understand complex microbial behaviour limits designers from creatively exploring temporal expressions in living artefacts, i.e., living aesthetics. Bridging biodesign and computer graphics, we developed FlavoMetrics, an interactive digital tool that supports biodesigners in exploring Flavobacteria's living aesthetics. This open-source tool enables designers to virtually inoculate bacteria and manipulate stimuli to tune Flavobacteria's living colour in a digital environment. Six biodesigners evaluated the tool and reflected on its implications for their practices, for example, in (1) understanding spatio-temporal qualities of microorganisms beyond 2D, (2) biodesign education, and (3) the experience prototyping of living artefacts. With FlavoMetrics, we hope to inspire novel HCI tools for accessible and time- and resource-efficient biodesign as well as for better alignment with divergent microbial temporalities in living with living artefacts.

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.

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.

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.

Shape-changing textile interfaces have the potential to create unique functions, expressions, and interactions in everyday artifacts. However, the technical expertise required to fabricate and interact with these interfaces limits designers from rapidly iterating through diverse textile expressions. This pictorial presents TEX(alive), a low-cost and open-source physical-digital toolkit to facilitate the creation of temporal expressions in textile interfaces. TEX(alive) comprises pneumatic actuators that can be interactively configured across a 3d printed grid structure on the textile. Creative sessions with seven designers show that TEX(alive) supports the exploration of temporality in textile interfaces, opening up a design space for unforeseen future application scenarios and alive-like expressions in material-driven design. Finally, we suggest coupling TEX(alive) with a computational simulation tool to allow designers to predict spatial shape change when the textile interface increases in size or complexity.

Flavobacteria, which can be found in marine environments, are able to grow in highly organized colonies producing vivid iridescent colorations. While much is known about the biology of these organisms, their design potential as responsive media in user interfaces has not been explored. Our paper aims at bridging this gap by providing insights into the type, degree, and duration of change in Flavobacteria’s expression, i.e., their living aesthetics. We present a tool to capture and characterize these changes concerning form, texture and iridescent color. To support the long-term study of their living aesthetics, we designed Flavorium. This bio-digital artifact provides the necessary habitat conditions for Flavobacteria to thrive for a month. Granting insights into the responsive behavior of this organism, this work presents a design space, vocabulary, and application concepts to inspire HCI and design scholars to investigate the complex temporal qualities of living media for future user interfaces.

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 ‘living 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.

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.

A growing number of scholars have started to look at materials as part of the unfolding of social and cultural practices. Yet, to date, relatively little is known about how to purposefully design for a particular practice in which materials, with their unique qualities, act as co-performers. This paper presents the journey of a designer who includes the explorations on the performative qualities of materials in design ideation. This journey aimed to explore how the material and the performance can "lead the way" in the potential unfolding of a social practice such as "tuning a radio".

The emergence of smart materials has urged design education to keep up and take part in introducing them to design students. There has been a great deal of work on teaching conventional materials like wood, metal and polymers in product design. Yet when it comes to learning smart materials, the sources are very limited. Our research group in Delft University of Technology has initiated a number of projects, particularly focusing on understanding technical and experiential characteristics of smart materials as materials of design. Our mission is to communicate smart material qualities through pre-design tinkering activities and functional demonstrators, which also serve as a source for inspiration. In this paper, we explain our approach through an example case on electroluminescent materials.

A growing number of HCI scholars have started to take materiality as an entry point for acquiring a deeper understanding of the possibilities and constraints of design. Steadily moving beyond a distinction between the physical and the digital, a few have also started to look at materials as part of the unfolding of social and cultural practices. Yet, to date, relatively little is known about how these practices develop within the situated experience of materials, and how this situational whole can be supported by design. By contributing to both growing materiality scholarship and emerging practice-oriented approaches in HCI, this paper articulates a framework of materials experience that discusses how materials shape ways of doing and ultimately, practice, and how this is rooted in the experience of those materials.

This paper offers a product design perspective to emerging material-oriented design methods in HCI. It outlines a research process for facilitating the design of interactive media products that enable a patina of deliberate material traces to grow on objects of daily use. In doing so, the paper reports on initial findings on how materials are perceived to "mature" with use, discusses a design concept related to such findings, and offers a new direction for rich communication and interaction through and with objects.