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.

We present Speed-Modulated Ironing, a new fabrication method for programming visual and tactile properties in single-material 3D printing. We use one nozzle to 3D print and a second nozzle to reheat printed areas at varying speeds, controlling the material’s temperature-response. The rapid adjustments of speed allow for fine-grained reheating, enabling high-resolution color and texture variations. We implemented our method in a tool that allows users to assign desired properties to 3D models and creates corresponding 3D printing instructions. We demonstrate our method with three temperature-responsive materials: a foaming filament, a filament with wood fibers, and a filament with cork particles. These filaments respond to temperature by changing color, roughness, transparency, and gloss. Our technical evaluation reveals the capabilities of our method in achieving sufficient resolution and color shade range that allows surface details such as small text, photos, and QR codes on 3D-printed objects. Finally, we provide application examples demonstrating the new design capabilities enabled by Speed-Modulated Ironing.

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.