Interactions with Living Leather

Call for Participation

We invite you to participate in our workshop on "Interactions with Living Leather" at FEMeeting 2023 in Taos. The goal of this studio is to facilitate a space in which creative practitioners can collaborate, explore, make, and discuss SCOBY (Symbiotic Culture of Bacteria and Yeast) – a sustainable biofilm, grown in kombucha tea, that acts similarly to traditional leathers when harvested and dried. Together we will explore how SCOBY can be customized through various fabrication techniques, and how to create interactive SCOBY interfaces. Through hands-on group activities with SCOBY, we will teach participants about sustainability, slowness, and biomaterials in the context of technology, design, and art. 

Workshop Agenda

This workshop will approximately take 3 hours and will generally follow this agenda:

• 9:00 - 9:30 Introduction and Overview: We will begin the workshop with a short ice-breaker activity for the participants to introduce themselves. We will then cover how the workshop will be run and to SCOBY. We will present how to grow SCOBY from scratch using store-bought ingredients, followed by methods for drying SCOBY into a leather-like material. We will also showcase some of our personal material explorations with SCOBY and some example applications. 

• 9:30 - 10:15 Open design explorations with SCOBY: We will facilitate a hands-on material exploration of SCOBY, in which participants will directly engage with SCOBY samples to get a feel for how it acts and to experiment with different fabrication methods for controlling form (cutting, sewing, and layering), aesthetics (transfer printing and painting), and function (embedding electronics and adding electrical conductivity). 

• 10:15 - 10:30 Break

• 10:30 - 11:15 Making SCOBY Applications: Once participants have gained more confidence working with SCOBY we will lead a brainstorming activity for participants to ideate on potential SCOBY applications. Following the brainstorming session, participants will have the opportunity to create one of their envisioned SCOBY applications. 

• 11:15 - 12:00 Discussion and Closing: To close the workshop, participants will give a short demonstration of the SCOBY application they made and then we will facilitate an open discussion regarding the participants’ experiences designing with SCOBY. Example questions that will be posed: Did SCOBY act in expected ways? What were some limitations/challenges you faced when working with SCOBY? Would you make with SCOBY again? What future SCOBY experiments/applications do you want to try? What are the implications of making with a material that is grown and biodegradable?

Read More

Published Pictorial: Fiona Bell, Derrek Chow, Hyelin Choi, and Mirela Alistar. 2023. SCOBY Breastplate: Slowly Growing a Microbial Interface. In Proceedings of the Seventeenth International Conference on Tangible, Embedded, and Embodied Interaction (TEI '23). Association for Computing Machinery, New York, NY, USA, 1-15. DOI:  https://doi.org/10.1145/3569009.3572805  (Warsaw, Poland Feb. 26-March 1, 2023).

Studio at TEI'23: Fiona Bell, Derrek Chow, Eldy Lazaro Vasquez, Laura Devendorf, and Mirela Alistar. 2023. Designing Interactions with Kombucha SCOBY. In Proceedings of the Seventeenth International Conference on Tangible, Embedded, and Embodied Interaction (TEI '23). Association for Computing Machinery, New York, NY, USA, 1-5. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1145/3569009.3571841  (Warsaw, Poland Feb. 26-March 1, 2023).

Organizers

Fiona Bell: Computer Science, University of New Mexico

Fiona is a postdoctoral researcher in the Hand and Machine Lab at the University of New Mexico, designing, developing, and studying bio-based technologies that promote ecological sustainability and more-than-human care. She has organized several biomaterial workshops at the University of Colorado Boulder, her local public library, and at ACM conferences (CHI & TEI). Fiona is also an active alumnus of the Biodesign Challenge, mentoring current Biodesign Challenge teams and co-organizing various alumni events.

Mirela Alistar:  ATLAS Institute and Computer Science, University of Colorado Boulder

Mirela is a bioartist, HCI researcher, and an Assistant Professor in Soft Materials at ATLAS Institute, University of Colorado Boulder leading the Living Matter Lab. Intersecting microbiology and HCI, her work extends the human to include interactions with their own microbiome and other living organisms. She has developed tangible living-media interfaces, and biochip-based systems for personalized healthcare. She has extensive experience organizing workshops in the context of DYIBio labs that she led or co-founded as well as in the academic context of HCI research.