Directions for Degradation: Multispecies Entanglements with 3D Printed Biomaterials

Fiona Bell and Leah Buechley
ACM Halfway to the Future Symposium 2024
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As design practitioners begin to consider methods for sustainably disposing of what is made, we explore potential directions for designing with the multispecies-driven degradation of 3D printed biomaterial objects. We present three past encounters with multispecies agents—plants, insects, fungi—that degraded biomaterial samples in our lab. Based on these encounters, we speculate on near-future engagements that such organisms might have with our printed biomaterial objects, where an object is transformed through degradation over time. In these scenarios, we pose multispecies agents as co-designers and co-fabricators of objects, exemplifying how we might reconfigure entangled relationships between human and more-than-human agents in the making-with process and how we might leverage our situated position as human makers to enable planetary flourishing.