Towards Sustainable Interactive Devices: A Literature Review of Biomaterials in HCI Fabrication

Biomaterials are increasingly used in HCI fabrication as alternatives to petroleum-derived substrates, offering new possibilities for low-temperature making, embodied material experiences, and end-of-life pathways that differ from conventional materials. While recent reviews have begun to map adjacent subareas (e.g., biomaterials for eTextiles and critical perspectives on living systems), the field still lacks an integrated account of biomaterials as fabrication practices across interactive systems. In this review, we synthesize prior work to connect four elements that are typically treated in isolation: the biomaterial palette used in HCI, the fabrication techniques that make these materials practicable, the ways biomaterials contribute to interactive functionality (including sensing, actuation, and degradation-mediated unmaking), and the application contexts that shape acceptable lifetimes, care demands, and end-of-life handling. By organizing the literature through these linked lenses, we provide a consolidated map of the design space, surface cross-cutting patterns, and trade-offs that recur across material families and techniques, and articulate implications for more reproducible, comparable, and operational sustainability claims in future biofabrication research.