Designing with Living Things looks at what it means to live and design for a world where things have a life of their own, and where these lives become integrated with human practices, constructing new rituals. To explore these ideas, Anaïs Moisy, Shi Hui Tan and I designed three concepts:
a) a fabric that evolves according to seasons and human care,
b) a knife that is augmented with biological material to support consumption of specific foods and
c) a sink that, as a clock, signalises when a particular action is needed.
The three concepts reflect on the role of living things as a) actively integrated in human routines, b) passive producers of contents for consumption and finally c) as commensal co-habitants of the human environment.
This work had great amount of generous help from synthetic biologist Jamie Auxillos. The design process has been documented in the proceedings of RTD2017