Articulating Biomaterial Affordances: A Relational Framework from Situated Biodesign Practice

This paper contributes a framework for articulating biomaterial affordances as situated, temporal, and relational. These affordances are often difficult to articulate because they are not fixed properties of materials, but shifting possibilities that become perceptible through making, handling, environmental exposure, and time. Grounded in research-through-design and a retrospective synthesis of first-person material-led biodesign practice, the framework proposes six analytical dimensions—tactile, visual, auditory, olfactory, kinesthetic, and responsive—as relational lenses for attending to, articulating, and designing with biomaterial affordances. Through examples from gelatin biofoam tangible interaction, dissolving wearables, and comparative analysis of published biomaterial systems, the paper shows how biomaterial affordances may emerge through both immediate qualities such as softness, compressibility, and tactile feedback, and slower transformations such as swelling, dissolution, aging, and environmental responsiveness. The framework supports biodesigners and researchers in making tacit material knowledge more legible and tracing how biomaterial affordances surface, overlap, and chain together in ways that reshape subsequent design decisions, while foregrounding transformation as a design resource.