Bioprinting of Regenerative Photosynthetic Living Materials

Living materials, which are fabricated by encapsulating living biological cells within a non-living matrix, have gained increasing attention in recent years. Their fabrication in spatially defined patterns that are mechanically robust is essential for their optimal functional performance but is difficult to achieve. Here, a bioprinting technique employing environmentally friendly chemistry to encapsulate microalgae within an alginate hydrogel matrix is reported. The bioprinted photosynthetic structures adopt pre-designed geometries at millimeter-scale resolution. A bacterial cellulose substrate confers exceptional advantages to this living material, including strength, toughness, flexibility, robustness, and retention of physical integrity against extreme physical distortions. The bioprinted materials possess sufficient mechanical strength to be self-standing, and can be detached and reattached onto different surfaces. Bioprinted materials can survive stably for a period of at least 3 days without nutrients, and their life can be further extended by transferring them to a fresh source of nutrients within this timeframe. These bioprints are regenerative, that is, they can be reused and expanded to print additional living materials. The fabrication of the bioprinted living materials can be readily up-scaled (up to ≥70 cm × 20 cm), highlighting their potential product applications including artificial leaves, photosynthetic bio-garments, and adhesive labels.</p

Small-scale piped water supply: end-user inclusive water research in arsenic affected areas in India and Bangladesh (DELTAP)

DELTAP is s multi-disciplinary research project, where geologists, water treatment scientists and industrial design engineers join forces to develop an integrated approach towards small-scale piped water supply (SPWS) systems in the arsenic-affected Ganges-Brahmaputra-Meghna Delta. The project has started in 2016 with a field study in Bihar (India) with a focus on water quality mapping with mobile crowd participation. The coming years the research will continue with 3 PhD candidates, both in India and Bangladesh, with the ultimate aim to develop blueprints for end-user inclusive SPWS systems

Meanings of Materials

This book is about meanings we attribute to materials of the objects around us. Materials convey meanings: they look traditional, they express luxury, they are associated with factories, or they conjure up one’s childhood. How do materials obtain these meanings? How do they interact with other elements of product design in expressing certain meanings? How can designers systematically incorporate meaning considerations into their materials selection processes? This book presents the concept of meanings of materials and has made a start in making this concept more actionable in design thinking.Design EngineeringIndustrial Design Engineerin

Towards a New Materials Aesthetic Based on Imperfection and Graceful Ageing

Novel materials tend to prevent all forms of change in time and acquisition of signs of aging, which may affect their perfect aesthetic qualities. It would not be wrong to claim that technological developments, the predominance of automation processes and quality controls have led - and been driven by - a trend favouring the dominance of an aesthetic model tied to perfection in every sphere of human life: the body, the style of life, products, and their materials. Such an aesthetic model tied to perfection can only be obtained with brand-new products and it inevitably encourages the possession of a new one even if the old one is still fully functional. As stated earlier by the pioneers in the design for sustainability domains, following such an aesthetic model stimulating the possession of the new is a great threat to sustainable development. Founded in these discussions, in this chapter we address the implementation of a new approach to material aesthetics, based on imperfection and graceful aging. We discuss how both of these concepts can be used as a medium to express naturalness and uniqueness, and how they can create added values that can evoke longer-term attachment to products

The making of performativity in designing [with] smart material composites

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.</p

Conformal, Seamless, Sustainable: Multimorphic Textile-forms as a Material-Driven Design Approach for HCI

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

Expanding Territories of Materials and Design

People’s experience of materials, regarding their here-and-now and possible futures, is largely bound into complex accounts of how materials are mobilized in the design of artifacts. The first volume of Materials Experience, subtitled Fundamentals of Materials and Design (Karana et al., 2014), focused on describing people material relationships, with the central premise that materials experience can be viewed from the perspective of the designer who creates artifacts and from the perspective of people who own and interact with those artifacts. In this second volume, we have drawn upon our observations of how materials experience as a concept has evolved and been mobilized to incorporate new ways of thinking and doing in design. We have subtitled the book Expanding Territories of Materials and Design, encompassing a critical perspective on the changing role of design/designers, the increased prevalence of material-driven design (MDD) practices, and the increasing attention among design scholars to the role of materials themselves as active and influential agents within and outside design processes. Materials Experience 2 is therefore a companion to the first volume. In this introductory chapter, to benefit readers venturing into the field of materials experience, we first provide a concise account of where materials experience originated from, alongside its main concepts

Creating awareness on natural fibre composites in design

Design EngineeringIndustrial Design Engineerin

Materials Framing: A Case Study of Biodesign Companies’ Web Communications

Advances in biodesign offer opportunities for developing materials for everyday products from living organisms, such as fungi, algae, and bacteria. Gaining widespread acceptance of new materials from the general public can be a lengthy process, making biodesign a high-risk pursuit with potentially significant economic, ecological, and social impacts. In this article, we conceptualize the notion of materials framing—combining knowledge from materials science, product design, and innovation management to create a communications strategy that accelerates popular adoption of novel materials. Which of its qualities will help orient users’ understanding of the new material? What is the best way to present those qualities? An extensive analysis of nine biodesign companies’ text and visual web communications revealed three core materials framing categories: material origins, fabrication processes, and material outcomes. We argue that these three categories expand the audiences’ focus beyond mere outcomes to include an organism's design potential—a lens with which to gain a more comprehensive view of the possibilities the material from a living organism affords.Design AestheticsIndustrial Design EngineeringEmerging Material