51ÁÔÆæÈë¿Ú

Gizem Oktay is a PhD candidate at the Industrial Design department of Eindhoven University of Technology in the Netherlands. Her research focuses on designing care practices towards living beings to build affective and companion-like relations with the more-than-human world. This research spans disciplinary boundaries of biology, more-than-human design, and multispecies geography. She resides with Happy, her canine companion, in the Netherlands, and is originally from Türkiye.

During the residency, Gizem aims to explore the bioelectricity potential of fungi as a potential way of surfacing metabolic processes of fungi, whose intricacies remain imperceptible to unmediated human senses. Akin to microbial fuel cell (MFC) structures, commonly known as mud batteries, Gizem will build fungi fuel cell structures by stacking mycelium composites with electrodes and current collectors made from biodegradable materials. The structure will make the bioelectricity activity of fungi observable, and I will explore whether this activity can become a basis for a more nuanced understanding of the rhythms with which fungi operate. An aspirational aspect of the project is to explore whether these structures can sense and be sensed by their environment.

Fiona Bell is an Assistant Professor of Human-Centered Computing at the University of Maryland, Baltimore County. She is the founding director of the Entangled Ecologies Lab, a research group that designs, develops, and deploys biomaterials that integrate with digital technologies to create radically sustainable and interactive systems for regenerative futures.

In this residency, Fiona will explore the more-than-human entanglements that emerge between data, material, and site across processes of sourcing, fabrication, and decay. By translating site-specific ecological data into physical objects made from the very biomaterials the data describes, she will give form to relationships that are otherwise invisible. Each object returns to the ground it came from, to live briefly, then dissolve back into the ecosystem it once described.

Sam Edens is a lecturer-researcher at the Amsterdam University of Applied Sciences, where she coordinates the Biomaterials Studio, a community biolab exploring biodesign, digital fabrication, and biobased materials at the intersection of design, technology, and microbiology. Her work grounds embodied ideation and hands-on material experimentation in circular, biobased design education and research, spanning the built environment (Circular Architecture research group) and regenerative fashion textiles (Fashion Research and Technology group). Recognized with the Outstanding Instructor award at the Biodesign Challenge Summit (2022), she combines academic research with studio practice to advance biodesign education.

For the Sensing Matters Lab residency, she proposes Bramble Leather: processing invasive Himalayan blackberry cane into a biomaterial filler to test what happens when a recipe built for standardized industrial cellulose is pushed instead toward a local, foraged, more-than-human material.