The Living Collage – a case study in facilitating conversations about biodesign through embodied practice

This pictorial presents an accessible workshop format titled “Living Collage”, which explores “livingness” in biodesign with non-specialists. As a research through design approach, grounded in embodied making, 8 participants collaboratively create living artefacts and discuss their implications for the field of biodesign, by using enlarged Petri dishes with an agar base, local natural materials, and printed images. Through the use of atmosphere and multi-sensory cues, a regular classroom is transformed to carry the feeling of working with something living, and a speculative narrative, along with related verbal semantic stimuli, guides the making process. The workshop was documented through photography and observation, which display curiosity, dialogical making, and reflection. The collective discussion was audio-recorded, transcribed, and manually coded by clustering emergent terms into a vocabulary map. Among others, the findings bring up themes around locality, crafts, and relation, but also show tension in themes of discomfort, control, and questions around safety.