Sustainable Prototyping Practices — Spotlight 1: Living Matter Lab (PART 1)
E-waste or electronic waste is the largest growing waste stream in the world [1]. And while Human-Computer Interaction (HCI) research is often concerned with creating newer, more efficient, and optimized versions of emerging technologies it is becoming increasingly difficult to ignore that our research prototypes envision potential products and devices that might, in time, also end up in landfills.
I have always had a hard time thinking about the waste generated by my prototyping practices and have felt stressed about managing various approaches to mitigate it (recycling/reusing as much as possible, sourcing locally, etc.). However, I know I’m not alone in my worries and that other HCI researchers are also actively exploring more sustainable prototyping practices in their work.
To build conversation around this topic in our community, the SIGCHI Sustainability Committee is starting a blog post series interviewing various labs in the global HCI community about how they approach prototyping with sustainability in mind. Our hope is to highlight and share specific practices others can adopt but also explore the various challenges and opportunities for sustainable prototyping in research.
We launch with the first half of my interview with the Living Matter Lab, a research group led by Mirela Alistar at the ATLAS Institute, University of Colorado Boulder that explores novel biomaterials, living media interfaces, and more. In this blog, we focus on the experiences of Fiona Bell (FB), Netta Ofer (NO), and Eldy Lázaro (EL) in doing research sustainably and the values that guide them.
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Jasmine Lu (JL): To kick things off I want to ask: What approaches does your lab take to try and operate as sustainably as possible?
FB: So we actually had a big discussion about this amongst ourselves to define what sustainability meant to our lab and we arrived at three core values. These values stemmed from the fact that we like taking inspiration from living matter and organisms, hence, the name of our lab; and, the overarching idea of shifting our perspective out of the box of materialism and a very human-centered approach towards a more-than-human approach. We have operated under the three values of accessibility (defined as open source or DIY), end-of-life considerations (a more technical take on sustainability), and a more-than-human design approach.
EL: From the accessibility side, we focus on making things open-source and DIY by using accessible ingredients or accessible fabrication tools when making a new material. For example, our projects like Alganyl [2] and Biofoam [3] are all made from bio-based ingredients you can find in a regular supermarket and use fabrication techniques that are very easy to follow like cooking.
FB: Another example is that we often host workshops in community centers and libraries where we can make all these materials just by bringing in hotplates, spoons, bowls, and grabbing ingredients from the grocery store. We can still teach people how to make this in a very comfortable environment and not rely on access to fancy, high-end equipment.
EL: The second value which was considering end-of-life or more broadly, considering the lifecycle of the many projects in the lab. Many of our projects focus on either end of life or material sourcing, but we also keep in mind the design or fabrication time.
FB: We like to consider energy consumption and transportation and other aspects of sustainability that relate to the sourcing of materials and fabrication. But as Eldy said, we really focus on end of life by designing materials we know are going to biodegrade and actually running biodegradability tests and exploring other end of life options like being able to recollect something to reuse or recycle it. That touches on our use of electronics because we have these biomaterials that usually house non-biodegradable materials so we find ways to harvest the electronics for reuse.
EL: For example, in my case when I work more with textiles or other crafts, we tend to design for disassembly, as in thinking of how the materials that aren’t bio-based like electronic pieces will be harvested at the end of life.
NO: For the value of more-than-human design, when we work with living things, we try to look past the humans and try to look at the living thing we are working with and really try to understand it and its environment and its needs. We have this organism-centered design approach [4] that we came up with a few years ago and since then, we’ve been moving a lot towards more-than-human centered design. A lot of the things we try to do really resonates with Ron Wakkary’s horizontality [5]. We try to reach a non-hierarchical way of working with organisms. So we might design with them and design objects made with the organism, but we use design research before and during that process by trying to get closer to the organism and develop a sense of intimacy and connection. We really leverage the agency of the organism; since it’s alive, it’s very hard to ignore it and we don’t want to ignore it, we want to hear its voice and its input in the design process.
JL: To push a little further, how does sustainability factor into your research and prototyping practice?
FB: This touches a bit on our life-cycle or end of life value. Before we even source materials, there’s ideation around the materials we use. For example, with living organisms we do background research on them and we take inspiration from looking at materials that we know will be accessible, like looking at materials from the grocery store. Further down the line, we also look at the end of life by looking for materials that will ultimately biodegrade.
EL: On my end, I work a bit more around fabrication and it’s important for us to also think about, for example, if something was 3D printed, how much energy it will take or if we are going to use a certain type of material, the energy considerations that come with it. Certain materials will require less energy because their extrusion temperature is lower. For example, the biofoam doesn’t require a lot of energy, it just needs to be warmed up and not even to a boiling point. So on my end, I think a lot about low energy fabrication techniques.
FB: Lastly, to touch on what happens to our prototypes when they’re no longer useful. We have this wall of drawers to save most of our prototypes to showcase them, but they are almost all biodegradable so if at any point we have to get rid of them, we are thinking about their biodegradability or if we can recook them. For electronic components, I don’t think I’ve bought a new microcontroller for years because I just reuse the same Arduino for each project. We definitely emphasize the reuse of materials that can’t biodegrade.
NO: I have a personal view on sustainability where I feel like just moving towards something that is bio-based or compostable is a wonderful gesture, but I feel like it applies to a broader set of actions or ecosystem. And that’s where I feel like the approach and mindset is really important. For example, I have a project that I’m presenting at CHI this year [6] where I’m 3D printing a lot and it probably isn’t the most intuitively sustainable thing but the overall approach was a very radical shift in the way I was thinking as a designer, so it served a purpose towards a larger shift. I don’t think we are really going to stop prototyping or 3D printing or using PLA, but being intentional and thinking what this is for and what the overarching goal or thought process is, is really important in my practice. It’s a little less practical than thinking about energy, though that should be applied too as it goes hand in hand.
EL: It’s broader. It’s more than just end-of-life. Most people will understand sustainability as recycling and composting but might not think outside those two things but there are many more actions that lead to sustainable design.
NO: We were just talking about how everything can eventually scale up to become this mass production or an industry which isn’t a sustainable thing inherently. Maybe taking a step back and looking at our actions as designers and the practices we have as designers and just the ways that we think can also eventually lead us to a more sustainable place.
FB: I think you brought up a key word for me which is intentionality. The way we think about our approach to design is all about intentionality. We use intentionality in fabrication methods, in material choices, in how it will be used or reused, or what happens when you no longer need it. So for me, it’s the intentionality that’s really key and connects all of these strings together.
NO: I think, as “aware” human beings, it is very easy to feel guilty about prototyping and waste but maybe we can reorient ourselves with our intention.
We will post the second part of my interview with Fiona Bell, Netta Ofer, and Eldy Lázaro in our next blog, which will consider how others can incorporate sustainability into their practice. Meanwhile, If you or someone you know would like to be featured in this series, please contact jasminelu@uchicago.edu. We would love to hear about your approaches and provide a platform to share your methods! Additionally, you can learn more about the SIGCHI Sustainability’s work to further how our community addresses sustainability issues in our activities here.
WORKS CITED
[1] Forti, V. et al. The Global E-waste Monitor 2020: Quantities, flows and the circular economy potential.
[2] Bell, F. et al. 2022. Designing with Alganyl. Sixteenth International Conference on Tangible, Embedded, and Embodied Interaction (Daejeon Republic of Korea, Feb. 2022), 1–14.
[3] Lazaro Vasquez, E.S. et al. 2022. Exploring Biofoam as a Material for Tangible Interaction. Designing Interactive Systems Conference (Virtual Event Australia, Jun. 2022), 1525–1539.
[4] Ofer, N. et al. 2021. Designing Direct Interactions with Bioluminescent Algae. Designing Interactive Systems Conference 2021 (Virtual Event USA, Jun. 2021), 1230–1241.
[5] Wakkary, R. 2021. Things we could design: for more than human-centered worlds. The MIT Press.
[6] Ofer, N. and Alistar, M. 2023. Felt Experiences with Kombucha Scoby: Exploring First-person Perspectives with Living Matter. Proceedings of the 2023 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (Hamburg Germany, Apr. 2023), 1–18.
