Elvin Karana

Research Group: Biobased Art and Design

‘The dynamic relationship between humans and living artefacts will continue to evolve reciprocally with mutual care.’

Elvin Karana is Research Professor of Biobased Art and Design at the Avans and Associate Professor at the Faculty of Industrial Design Engineering, leading the research group Materializing Futures at TU/Delft.

Materials express meanings, ideas and beliefs: they compel us to think, feel and act in certain ways. Giving emphasis to materials’ role in design as experiential and yet deeply rooted in their inherent properties, Elvin Karana explores the productive shifts and creative tensions between materials science and design for the development of new materials. Over the last years she developed theories, tools and methods to enable the understanding of materials experience actionable in material-driven design practice. In 2015, she founded the international research group Materials Experience Lab, which she leads jointly with Valentina Rognoli (Politecnico di Milano). Elvin has over 70 scientific publications in peer reviewed journals and conferences. She is the main editor of Materials Experience: Fundamentals of Materials and Design (Elsevier, 2014).

Presently, Elvin is Research Professor of Biobased Art and Design at the Centre of Applied Research for Art, Design and Technology (Caradt) in the Netherlands, bringing together researchers and practitioners from Avans University of Applied Sciences and Delft University of Technology. She received her PhD in 2009 from Delft University of Technology, where she is also currently Associate Professor at the Faculty of Industrial Design Engineering, leading the research group Materializing Futures.

Capitalising on the notion of materials experience, in 2019, she founded the creative biodesign research lab Material Incubator ([MI] Lab), that aims at designing materials that incorporate living organisms and exploring their potential in fostering an alternative notion of the everyday.

Publications

Kim, R., Risseeuw, C., Groutars, E., Karana, E. (2023) Surfacing Livingness in Microbial Displays: A Design Taxonomy for HCI, CHI ’23: Proceedings of the 2023 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems, April 2023, Article No.: 156.

McQuillan, H. and Karana, E. (2023) Conformal, Seamless, Sustainable: Multimorphic Textile-forms as a Material-Driven Design Approach for HCI, CHI ’23: Proceedings of the 2023 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems, April 2023, Article No.: 727.

Risseeuw, C., Martinez Castro, J. F., Barla, P., & Karana, E. (2023). FlavoMetrics: Towards a Digital Tool to Understand and Tune Living Aesthetics of Flavobacteria. In DIS ’23: Proceedings of the 2023 ACM Designing Interactive Systems Conference (pp. 2079–2092). Association for Computing Machinery (ACM). https://doi.org/10.1145/3563657.3596085

Zhou, J., Kim, R., Doubrovski, Z., Martins, J., Giaccardi, E., Karana, E. (accepted, 2023) Cyano-chromic Interface: Aligning Human-Microbe Temporalities Towards Noticing and Attending to Living Artefacts, DIS’23.

Buso, A., McQuillan, H., Voorwinden, M., Karana, E. (accepted, 2023) Weaving Textile-form Interfaces: A Material-Driven Design Journey, DIS’23.

Zhou, L., Barati, B., Wu, J., Scherer, D., Karana, E. (2020) Digital biofabrication to realize the potentials of plant roots for product design, Bio-design and Manufacturing, 4, pages 111–122 (2021).

Veelaert, L., Du Bois. E., Moons, I., Karana, E. (2020) Experiential characterization of materials in product design: A literature review, Materials and Design, 190: 108543.

Karana, E., Barati, B., & Giaccardi, E. (2020) Living artefacts: Conceptualizing livingness as a material quality in everyday artefacts, International Journal of Design, 14(3), 37-53.

Karana, E. (2020), Still Alive: Livingness as a Material Quality in Design, Breda Avans University of Applied Sciences, ISBN: 978-90-76861-61-6.

Karana, E., Rognoli, V., & Jacob-Dazarola, R. (2020) The Role of Design in the Development of New Materials: Interview with Elvin Karana, Diseña, (17), 46-55.

Barati, B., Karana, E., & Hekkert, P. (2020), Understanding Experiential Qualities of Light-Touch-Matters: Towards a Tool Kit, Journal of Design Thinking, Vol. 1, No. 1, 1-20.

Barati, B., Giaccardi, E., & Karana, E. (2018). The making of performativity in designing [with] smart material composites. In Proceedings of the 2018 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI’18) (pp.5:1–5:11). ACM.

All publications

Research Group: Biobased Art and Design

The research group Biobased Art and Design capitalises on the role of artistic practice in unlocking the unique potentials of living organisms for everyday materials and communicating these to a broader public. In doing so, the group aims to instigate and accelerate our widespread understanding, further development and usage of such materials. The group’s research approach encourages tangible interactions with the living organisms, such as algae, fungi, plants and bacteria, to explore and understand their unique qualities and constraints through diverse technical and creative methods taking artists, designers and scientists as equal and active partners in the material creation.

‘How can art and design cultivate critical expressions rooted in ethics of care and relationality to influence ecological, social, and economic structures?’