Soils have the richest biodiversity on Earth. They drive Earth’s ecosystem, providing nourishment and supporting life (Blum 2005). However, soils are degrading, threatened by floods, erosion, and pollution (Banwart 2020). The loss of soil is one of the greater threats to humanity. As the story of Skywoman Falling accounts, without cross-species generosity there would be no soil and no life for humans on Earth (Wall Kimmerer 2013).
In this session, we share interaction design efforts to enable interaction with soils and their microbial species in situ. Our aim is also to develop human-microbe interfaces that revitalize soil as living matter to enable long-term correspondences between humans and microbes (Ingold 2020) for citizens, farmers, policymakers, and researchers.
Human-microbe interactions in the field have been difficult due to the lack of tools and methods. 99% of microbes do not survive lab conditions, yet scientists still perform most of their research in such controlled contexts. Meanwhile, agricultural technologies enforce a disconnection from the complexity of soils, reducing them to resources to be managed (Bui and Franinovic, 2022). This results in the objectification of soils as resources providing for humans and to their anthropomorphization as things to be healed.
Besides scientific, industrial, and agricultural applications, we aim to provide our human-microbial interfaces to designers and artists. Design and art practices can mediate scientific and cultural values of soil (Solomon 2021, Bui 2021), foster another understanding of soil as a living being (Toland et al 2018), and can link the microbial to social equity (Ishaq et al 2022). We are dealing with scientific as much as a societal challenge to transform practices of soil management into soil care (Puig de la Bellacasa 2017).
Together with soil scientists from WSL (Institute for forest, snow, and landscape research) and ETHZ, we are developing two field tools: the iChip (Berdy et al 2017) and the soil technology from Digit Soil AG (www.digit-soil.com). While the former enables soil microbes that cannot live in the lab to prosper in the field, the latter enables a direct understanding of soil metabolisms by the means of a material membrane reacting to enzyme activity. We further developed these two concepts, by applying field design ethnography and by transferring our active materials approach (Franinovic and Franzke 2019) to microbial contexts.
Key questions that have driven our work are: How can we co-work with microbes beyond their exploitation as materials to build with? What new formats of interaction with microbial worlds can be developed beyond observing them through a loupe? What human and microbial responses can our interfaces trigger?
We are sharing for the first time the public findings from this recently concluded field research, experiments, and initial design prototypes, bringing more light into these soil-human-microbe interactions.
Acknowledgments: Digit Soil, WSL, Innosuisse, Laurin Schaffner, MA IAD Students
Duy Bui
Duy Bui is an interaction designer and artistic researcher from Switzerland. He examines soil and landscapes as fabrics and witnesses of the human condition. His research is informed by Asian realities, unearthing heritage, future, and resistance. Seeking the in-between and far beyond, he continues to learn from landscapes, learning what we have inherited and learning about where we are heading. Currently, this led him to his current MA thesis project about landscaping Vietnam. His works have been shown at HART House Hong Kong, Ming Contemporary Art Museum Shanghai, Lausanne Underground Film & Music Festival, and Ars Electronica.
Laurin Schaffner
I’m an Industrial Designer and currently work as a research associate at Zurich University of the Arts. My passion is to dive into new fields, collaborate with experts and create something meaningful and long-lasting.