What if we play shadow guessing games with the light cast from bacteria and yeast growing in a bedside lamp? Or can we play a game where we try to avoid stepping on vibrating mushroom floor panels? Can we invent a Twister matte with wood whose veins change color? Would playing with these biomaterials (i.e., bacteria, yeast, mushrooms and plants) make them our social companions that we care for, and enjoy with, rather than solely seeing them as products that we consume?
In a world where biomaterials—like bacteria, yeast, mushrooms, and plants—are often treated simply as “resources,” PLAY‑BIO invites us to imagine different relationships with them. Instead of seeing these materials as things we extract and use, the project looks at them through more‑than‑human (MtH) perspectives, which encourage us to view nonhuman life as active participants in our world that we are inter-connected to. Although designers and researchers have already explored biomaterials in many ways, we still get to understand more about how everyday engagements with them might support relations of care, and kinship.
PLAY‑BIO is funded by the Research Council of Finland and explores how play can help us build such relationships. By focusing on joy and open-ended exploration, the project investigates how play can help us notice, care, and relate to living materials, differently.
To do this, PLAY‑BIO uses a design‑led (or, in other words, research-through-design) approach that focuses on hands-on engagement with materials such as mushrooms, SCOBY (a culture of bacteria and yeast), and plant‑based biomaterials such as cellulose. Through this approach, it aims to develop playful artefacts and games with biomaterials and to evaluate, together with others, how play could help develop caring relationships between humans and non-human others. Ultimately, by surfacing insights from humans designing, playing and living with biomaterials, the project will formulate practical guidelines and conceptual frameworks that will help designers and researchers explore how to design play that supports caring, joyful and respectful ways of living within more‑than‑human worlds.
