Designing with Alganyl: A Hands-on Exploration of Biodegradable Plastics

Abstract

Figure 1: Alganyl is an algae-based biodegradable plastic that can be cooked at home and customized for various colors, patterns, and thermo, photo and electrical sensing. Making with Alganyl includes subtracting techniques such as laser cutting, and additive techniques such as pasting through heat sealing.

Exploring Biofoam as a Material for Tangible Interaction

“…A 5-year CHI review [42] has shown that researchers still heavily rely on petroleum-based materials for prototyping physical objects. In response, and often under the banner of sustainable interaction design in HCI [8,12], researchers have created and prototyped with several bio-based materials, including agar-based or cellulosebased bioplastics [5], SCOBY leather [30], compost based clay [7], mycelium skin [41], and mycelium composites [6,40,43]. These bio-based materials, with their ability to fully biodegrade, are potential replacements for less-sustainable materials, such as bioplastics for petroleum-based plastics and SCOBY leather for animal leather.…”

“…Recent research, for instance, has characterized mycelium-composites as a functional, building material for architecture [23]. In HCI, Alganyl [5] has optimized an open-source bioplastics recipe, characterized it, and explored possible design applications.…”

“…Following previous work of coloring bioplastics [5], we frst colored the biofoam with a synthetic food-grade pigment to test its efectiveness in our material. Even though food-grade pigments worked well in the biofoam, we wanted to test other pigments that were not synthetic.…”

“…Bio-based materials are materials made from substances derived from living or once-living organisms. These materials are increasingly used in felds such as product design and industrial design, and likewise, HCI researchers have been incorporating bio-based materials into small-scale projects [5,40,41]. Although the defnition above could include many well-established materials such as wood and leather, researchers of bio-based materials have specifcally defned them as materials that biodegrade and are created from biomass [9].…”