Published: June 21, 2022

The different lifecycles of biofoam

Living Matter Lab/Unstable Design Lab

Exploring biofoam as a Material for Tangible Interaction, authored by Eldy S. Lazaro Vasquez, Netta Ofer, Shanel Wu, Mary Etta West, Mirela Alistar and Laura Devendorf introducedthe DIS audience to biofoam, a water soluble and biodegradable material thatcan be made conductive.

During the DIS‘22 Multisensory Design session, lead author, Lazaro, an ATLAS PhD student, presented the team's biofoam research and demonstratedthe unique opportunities the material brings to HCI communities. Vasquez described the material in detail, including the process of making biofoam from scratch and fabricating the materialinto forms with handcraft techniques. She also presented two HCI-specific applications of biofoam and demonstratedthe different life cycles of the material, all of which can be considered in the design process;biofoam can be cooked, molded, layered, extruded, dissolved andrecooked.

Publication

Eldy S. Lazaro Vasquez, Netta Ofer, Shanel Wu, Mary Etta West, Mirela Alistar and Laura Devendorf. 2022. Exploring Biofoam as a Material for Tangible Interaction. In Designing Interactive Systems Conference (DIS ’22), Association for Computing Machinery, New York, NY, USA, 1525-1529. (June 13-17, 2022—Virtual Event, Australia).