Multimorphic Material Thinking for Sustainable HCI

Whether relating to aesthetics, cost, ease of production, the scale of the material, or the body and the time frame contained in interaction design, conventional design’s critical zone [1] has been stubbornly human centered. While our desire for technological novelty has been challenged and the adoption of dynamic notions of material, time, and scale encouraged in HCI design, a gap between practices and theories of sustainability persists. Since all physical outcomes embody our engagement with these ideas and their application, if we can’t expand HCI’s critical zone and do sustainability when designing, prototyping, and materializing, the gap will persist. In truth, design and HCI’s critical zone already encompass ecological time and scale; it is just often easier to pretend that they don’t. How can we ensure our work celebrates materiality, innovation, and creativity, while nurturing and respecting wider systems that support us all? In response, we introduce multimorphic material thinking as a strong concept grounded in materiality that frames temporality across design, use, and ecological scales. We discuss the broader implications of this approach in the context of HCI textiles and textile-forms.