There is increasing interest within the HCI community about working with living organisms in the design of interactive systems.Bioartists and community lab participants have worked with living organisms for decades. Their motivations for doing so include artistic expression, design innovation, and activism. We interviewed 12 artists, community lab organizers, and researchers who work with or facilitate work with living organisms. Participants expressed perspectives on working with living orga nisms and described bioart as an effective practice for engaging and informing the public, fostering transdisciplinary collaborations, and for facilitating inspiration and learning from organic processes. They also discussed questions of agency and consent, among othe r ethical issues in this context. Based on our findings, we present future directions to investigate the potential of hybrid living media interfaces to engage and educate human users, open up possibilities for transdisciplinary collaborations, and participate in ethical dialogues on emerging technologies in a new way.

Hybrid interactive systems that combine living and digital components can engage, educate, and inform users, and are of growing interest in the HCI community. Advances in synthetic biology are transforming what is possible to do with these living media interfaces (LMIs). Bioart is a practice in which artists, often using synthetic biology methods, work with living organisms to creatively explore the human relationship with nonhuman organisms. We present results from an interview study with expert bioartists as well as our hands-on experience in a bioart project where we created poetry-infused wine by encoding and inserting a Persian Sufi poem into the DNA sequence of living yeast cells. We find that engaging in bioart practice generates transdisc iplinary fluency with implications for access and activism and our understanding of the qualities of living media. We further explore the qualitative aspects of interacting directly with DNA and implications for sustainable futures.

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Donald Stokes developed a paradigm that categorizes research into three quadrants based on two dimensions: the pursuit of basic understanding and consideration of utility. His ultimate goal was to create synergy between science and technology for economic advancement. Academics working on basic research fall into the Bohr quadrant; engineers fall into Edison’s quadrant of applied research. Pasteur’s quadrant, use-inspired basic research, is largely occupied by government agencies and societal input into setting their research priorities is indirect. Community labs are organizations that enable community members to perform research. Yet their utility as scientific organizations is unclear; understanding where they fall within the quadrant paradigm may enable their role to be better defined and may help their contributions to the scientific endeavor to be more fully realized. We use interviews with participants, review of literature, and review of lab and project websites to understand the nature of community lab projects and participants’ motivations. We show that the role of community labs falls most frequently into Pasteur’s quadrant. Community labs’ ability to integrate diverse expertise, pivot between basic and applied work quickly, support collaboration, and focus on local priorities makes them valuable additions to this quadrant and to the scientific research community.

Living organisms and their biological properties, including the capacity for transformation and representation of information, offer exciting and inspiring opportunities for transdisciplinary art and design explorations. While an emerging body of work is increasingly investigating the possibilities at the intersection of interactive computing, biology, and art, more work is needed to investigate the potential of these approaches for supporting community and public engagement and participation in art, science, and technology. In this project, we describe a multimedia transdisciplinary bioart installation and hands-on agar art activity that we presented to members of the public in a community biology lab setting. Using short interviews, observations, and questionaries, we investigated attendees' reactions and impressions of the experience and found that the event generated transdisciplinary reflections, invited participants to bring their previous knowledge and experience to bear in engaging with different aspects of the work, and that the audience benefited from contextualization by artists.