Living Material Archives. Epistemic Infrastructures under Conditions of Transformation, Decay and Finitude

Biodesign education increasingly engages with living and bio-based materials whose temporal, relational, and ecological properties challenge established modes of material archiving and teaching. Conventional material libraries, oriented toward stabilisation and preservation, are poorly equipped to address growth, contamination, and decay as constitutive material processes. This paper proposes a reconceptualisation of material libraries as living material archives: dynamic epistemic infrastructures that foreground transformation, care, and finitude rather than control. Drawing on feminist technoscience and material culture studies, the paper develops three conceptual lenses – cross-contamination, sympoiesis, and the website as garden – to examine how material and digital archives can support situated knowledge production in biodesign education. These perspectives are grounded in a detailed case study of the Living Library , a hybrid analogue–digital teaching project developed at the Karlsruhe University of Arts and Design. The paper demonstrates how temporary, process-oriented archives can operationalise ecological responsibility, disciplinary openness, and regenerative learning practices.