Designing-With and Situating Biomaterials

In this paper, we present an ongoing design research project and material speculation using situated biomaterials. The project, called Turner Boxes designs-with pollinating ecologies, aiming to reveal relationalities between human designers, more-than-human participants, and built-in sensing technologies. As part of this project, we crafted hood structures designed for covering electrical components connected to wild bee nests. The hoods are made from a gelatin-based bio-resin, which we define as a situated material due to its use of locally collected pinecones as a substrate and its contingencies to the site it was designed in, for and with. An aim of this project is to design relationally in a situated manner. Here, we report on our efforts to design-with biomaterials that were largely sourced, designed, and decomposed in a situated manner. The contribution of this work is an account of the affordances and challenges of situated making in practice.