Making Seafoam: An Autobiographical Design Journey Engaging Local Ecologies Through Making

Sustainable HCI (SHCI) Researchers are increasingly attuned to environmental issues in material creation, guided by a posthumanist framework that decentres the human-maker, accounting for nonhuman agencies. Applying ‘noticing’ as a method, we sourced sea-derived matter—often dismissed as waste—to make a tangible material we call SeaFoam; to achieve this, we gathered seaweeds and oyster shells and developed methods and tools in a kitchen-laboratory makerspace. This pictorial documents a design journey that includes a Do-it-Yourself (DIY) process of agar extraction (SeaFoam’s key ingredient) and explorations with oyster powder to enrich SeaFoam’s texture. Through the first author's autobiographical Research through Design journalling, we reflect on the evolving relationship between human-makers and the ecologies of once-living matter and discuss their potential application in interactive artefacts. This work offers the DIS community an account of first-person methods combined with material-driven methodologies to enrich the possibilities of biomaterial creations for interactive applications.