Bahar Barati

• PhD in Industrial Design Engineering
• Professor (Assistant) at Eindhoven University of Technology

Given the growing interest in “upstream” collaborative projects between designers and materials scientists, it is crucial to scrutinize designers’ creative contribution to materials development beyond “coming up with” application ideas. Overcoming this outdated preconception requires a shift away from the dominant perspective of cognitive psycholog...

Materials research constantly offers novel materials as better alternatives to convention. Functional aptness is taken for granted at the first commercial launch of a new material. Nevertheless, this alone may not be enough for its commercial success and widespread use. The ‘material’ should also elicit meaningful user experiences in and beyond its...

As the material becomes active in disclosing the fullness of its capabilities, the boundaries between human and nonhuman performances are destabilized in productive practices that take their departure from materials. This paper illuminates the embodied crafting of action possibilities in material-driven de- sign (MDD) practices with electroluminesc...

New digital tools offer biodesign with unprecedented opportunities for monitoring, fabricating, iterating, and scaling designs. Serving aligned purposes and beyond, the Digital Twin (DT) is an emerging concept in bioindustries including bioprocessing and agri-food. In these fields, DTs enable comprehensive digital representations of a living system...

The traditional way of considering time as a linear trajectory toward infinite human progress limits how our relationship with more-than-human entities such as animals, plants, land and waters provides alternative perceptions of time, which can help tackle environmental injustices and climate change. We provide a concept of temporalities of care to...

Care is a political and ethical everyday practice with nested processes and relationships. In more-than-human design, care is a practice that allows a deep engagement with time and temporality. Existing terms such as caring for and about fall short in accounting for this engagement by not bringing to the fore the diverse temporal frames embedded in...

Incorporating living microorganisms in artifacts offers opportunities for novel modes of expression and interaction. Bioluminescent algae are unicellular microorganisms that produce light in response to kinetic stimuli and have been a focus of design and HCI research when exploring expressivity of living media. This study advances prior work using...

With the gradual transition towards assisted and automated driving, the car will transform into a more social environment where passengers and drivers engage in Non-Driving-Related Activities (NDRA). To support collaboration among occupants in future vehicles, research suggests interactive systems controlled by several users at once. In this paper,...

Consuming media together is enjoyable and lets people connect with one another. However, the control of a TV, for instance, is still restricted to one user. This limits individual participation in group decision-making, particularly in the home context which can cause frustration and impact social interaction negatively. In this paper, we explore h...

The current ecological crisis highlights a need for an alternative design approach to counteract the mainstream human-centered design methodologies. This pictorial aims to bridge this gap by introducing a novel design approach, Life Centered Design, and its design process. The findings from a biodesign project on bioluminescent microalgae are prese...

Fungi is a highly attractive organism for biodesign with the potential of converting agro-industrial waste into novel materials, suitable for diverse applications from acoustic panels to packaging, from textiles to building material. This paper presents an explorative study that taps into a relatively unexplored potential of fungi in biodesign, nam...

This paper offers a taxonomy of digital tools for crafting habitabilities in biodesign practices. Over the past decade, interest has grown among design and Human-Computer Interaction (HCI) scholars to explore the potentials of living organisms for novel responsive behavior and interaction possibilities. Yet, to date, it remains unexplored how digit...

Biodesign suggests the integration of living organisms, such as bacteria, algae, fungi, and plants, into design, prevalently as material sources. Designers mobilize livingness of organisms at the design time (e.g., their grow-ability into predefined forms, their ability to release colour in growth, etc.), for achieving a minimal ecological footprin...

Technological and economic opportunities, alongside the apparent ecological benefits, point to biodesign as a new industrial paradigm for the fabrication of products in the twenty-first century. The presented work studies plant roots as a biodesign material in the fabrication of self-supported 3D structures, where the biologically and digitally des...

This paper presents the concept and development of a real-time hybrid tool to support the designers in experience prototyping of an underdeveloped smart material composite. In a EU project, Light-Touch-Matters, designers have been asked to explore the potential of composites of OLED technology and Piezoelectric polymer, that are assumed to revoluti...

The emergence of smart materials has urged design education to keep up and take part in introducing them to design students. There has been a great deal of work on teaching conventional materials like wood, metal and polymers in product design. Yet when it comes to learning smart materials, the sources are very limited. Our research group in Delft...

This paper investigates the interaction between retail lighting and textiles to provide retailers and lighting designers with a set of physical textile objects that can be used to test the visual effect of a lighting setting. Since the relationships between optical aspects of lighting–textiles interactions and subjective qualities associated with t...

This paper investigates the interaction between retail lighting and textiles to provide retailers and lighting designers with a set of physical textile objects that can be put in the light to test the visual effect of a lighting setting. Since the relationships between optical aspects of lighting-textiles interactions and subjective qualities assoc...

This paper probes into the ongoing situation of designing with under-developed materials, in particular a computational composite. In response to the urge for more integral material-product development, we see that designers are increasingly asked to valorize new technology-push materials in the early stages of their development. In this paper, we...