Sustainable Prototyping Practices — Spotlight 2: Living Matter Lab (PART 2)
To build conversation around how HCI researchers can become more sustainable in their prototyping practices, the SIGCHI Sustainability Committee has started a blog post series that interviews various labs in the HCI community. Continuing my conversation with Fiona Bell, Netta Ofer, and Eldy Lázaro of the Living Matter Lab, a research group led by Mirela Alistar that explores novel biomaterials, living media interfaces, and more, we further discuss some of the constraints to sustainable practices that researchers encounter, the value of a slower approach in creating and what we need to do to make it easier for more researchers to learn from Living Matter Lab.
JL: Is there anything you would like to do to operate more sustainably but can’t do for whatever reason?
NO: Right off the bat, I can say that because I work with living things, things need to be sterile, new, and clean. These demands don’t really allow for recycling and reusing. For example, autoclaving things over and over again — the tools are great but I think we have a long way to go in terms of sustainability.
EL: Personally, in my previous research work [1] I have done with an emphasis on sustainability, I found that if we want to see sustainability more broadly, it has to happen systemically at different levels with actors at all different levels. For example, at an institutional level, it means asking: what sustainability support does the university provide? Do we have recycling sites? Are things getting recycled? When we recycle or compost things in our lab and the waste stream leaves us, are the materials really processed the way they should be? We have no control over that. Second, it’s also all about knowledge. There is not a lot of knowledge within makerspaces or research labs about what alternatives exist like more environmentally friendly materials or machines. I remember with people I interviewed, they said “So if we shouldn’t use PLA, what should we use?” and when I told them recycled PLA exists and is also commercially available, they didn’t know that. And last, many bio-based or eco-friendly materials or equipment cost a lot more. Many people were saying, in order for us to get those materials, I need to budget for them. More budget should be provided if we want to make these changes. These changes on a bigger scale won’t happen unless there is a more structured way of supporting sustainability systemically.
What we can do in the lab, I think the impact is small and very local, which is why I think this broader view can really support and help people within labs operate more sustainably.
FB: The only additional thing I want to add is that I think we come from a very privileged position. We work in a university lab and get money to work on these projects and have systems in place to support us. The second you leave a system of support like this, we might not have the same opportunities, materials, and structures in place. It also very much depends on where you are in the world. We live in Boulder, Colorado which is very sustainability-oriented. If you go to a local restaurant, to-go containers are all compostable and Boulder has a great composting and recycling center. We’re very privileged to have that and those things don’t exist everywhere.
EL: Just reflecting on that, I feel privileged that with my advisors, I don’t have to fight for or give reasons for why I make sustainable choices. And this is probably not the position of many researchers or designers who would really like to incorporate sustainability, but they will have to convince the people above them to make these choices. And many times, it’s knowledge — most PI’s probably don’t have a palette of options for the things they use in the lab, so when someone comes up and says, “Maybe let’s buy coffee ground PLA instead”, they might encourage it.
NO: It’s also understanding the impact long term or the whole concept on a higher level. One of the examples you gave in the question is research time and pressure. Sometimes things come down to: “Okay, let’s make this really quick now” and that kind of rapid prototyping, but when everyone involved understands and supports the planning to make these sustainable decisions, we can better incorporate them.
JL: To be very sustainable it requires a kind of slowing down of a lot of research to plan for making these tradeoffs. Do you try practice that in the lab?
FB: My most recent paper on building a SCOBY breastplate [2], was all about this idea of slowing down and creating intentionally. For the work, I was designing with a living organism that took weeks to grow and I had to care for it. I knew I wasn’t going to have a lot of time to go and make multiple prototypes with it. I knew that whatever I designed from it needed to be the final thing, grown in whatever form it is. It really challenged me because coming from a mechanical engineering background where the mentality is to fail fast and make tons of prototypes, it was really the opposite of what I was used to.
I love that you brought up slowness because I think that can really force people to design more intentionally and when you design more intentionally, then you are not being as wasteful on a material level, you’re not consuming the time of another organism, you’re not having pieces of that organism go to waste — and this can apply to any material not just a grown living organism.
NO: It’s not just with living organisms, like the work making biofoam [3] and bioplastics [4], these materials take hours to make and days to dry which is an awesome feature because when things take time, you can’t be rapid and wasteful because you have that time to think in between iterations, and you only made so much material, and to make it again takes more time and energy.
JL: What advice would you give to other researchers who want to be more sustainable in their research practice?
NO: I would start from thinking about what sustainability means to you — not that someone needs to come up with a whole new definition, but asking: what is important to you and your practice to be sustainable? Why are you bringing it in? Why is it important to you?
FB: Yeah, for example with me and my Alganyl project [4] — I wanted to make something that was a biodegradable version of a vinyl ziplock bag type plastic. So sustainability for me when making that project was about making something that had a more sustainable end of life where it could biodegrade. In that project, my view of sustainability was narrowed in on that aspect, but it has definitely grown and changed. For example, now I’m talking about intentionality and slowness as the most important thing. So researchers grow and each project is different, each material is different, each person is different and we will all think about it in different ways.
EL: Yeah I agree. Giving a meaning to what sustainability means for the lab or group of researchers is a kind of step one. For example, people working with software might think they couldn’t be sustainable in just writing code, but there could be approaches to simplify the lines of code. That could also be an approach to sustainability even if that’s not the main focus of their work. Another approach is like what Nivedita Arora’s work [5] focuses on which is about building self-sustaining devices, a great example of bringing sustainability into their own practice.
JL: Okay, last question: Do you have any hopes for how the HCI community as a whole can adopt more sustainable practices? And how do you envision that happening?
NO: First, I want to acknowledge that it is a very overwhelming thing and feeling the guilt of not being sustainable is a very commonly felt thing. So, people should find small things to start with rather than trying to change your lab from zero to one hundred in a week. Then, I think you’ll find yourself seeing more things that you can do and recognizing things and other practices. I guess the main thing is to try and not be overwhelmed by the whole thing which I know is easier said than done.
FB: Another thing is to know that you and your research or the research from your lab is not going to solve everything. You can hope to tackle a bit of it and try to be sustainable but you’re not going to solve climate change alone.
NO: I also really think challenging us to shift from human-centered design and thinking about our roles as the designer or researcher or whatever you define yourself and your orientation in your work — that’s a more abstract thing to do but it’s an important shift that needs to happen.
FB: It’s also about considering how everything is entangled and interconnected so our actions do have an impact whether that’s an impact on other things, on the environment, or on others.
EL: On my end, I’ve noticed that people really want practical things they can do to adopt more sustainable practices — they want to have guidelines. It’s less of embracing the topic and reflecting on what the lab wants to do and instead, some people need a to-do list to check boxes. Maybe developers could make software or plugins that could be for 3D printing that tells you the energy consumption in terms of CO2 emissions which could support designers during the fabrication process, showing data along the process to see if it is less or more sustainable. I think quantitative values make climate change and things like that more real and less abstract.
NO: I would love to see researchers or labs sharing what approaches they use. I would love to see more transparency and sharing.
FB: I love the idea of transparency and sharing resources and being generous with sustainable solutions whatever they may be because there are so many ways to be more sustainable and lots of little things you can do to tackle that and everybody has their own take on that. I think sharing all these resources might allow us to build an ecosystem of sustainable practices.
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This conversation is the first of many we hope to have with the broader HCI community on sustainable prototyping practices and how values of sustainability can be incorporated into research. 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 Committee’s work to further how our community addresses sustainability issues in our activities here.
WORKS CITED
