Lessons from the Woodshop: Cultivating Design with Living Materials

This paper describes an eighteen-month ethnography of timber framing at a tiny house construction program in Port Townsend, Washington. This case exposes the intricate, ongoing processes that define a project where people learn to imagine, create, and ultimately maintain living materials. This case sheds light on the nature and scope of interaction design with living materials, an area of growing significance to HCI scholarship on new materials, sustainable design, and digital fabrication. Drawing from this project, we distill five lessons for design with living, finite materials. We end by discussing three emerging areas for HCI: designing for material recuperation, collaborating with more-than-human actors, and approaching material properties as prototyping sites.