Netta Ofer
I am a design researcher exploring more-than-human design perspectives, mostly through the material and ethical qualities of living organisms. Through autobiographic design methods, bodily and movement practices, microscopy, digital fabrication, and digital art, I aim to expose entangled relations with nonhumans, human-centered assumptions, and fabulate and enact different ones. My background is in media studies, human-computer interaction (HCI), and interaction design from the Media Innovation Lab (milab) at Reichman University. I have published and demoed my research at ACM CHI, ACM DIS, and ACM IDC; and exhibited work at The Museum of Boulder and The Arvada Center.
I am a PhD candidate at The ATLAS Institute at University of Colorado Boulder, co-advised by Joel Swanson and Laura Devendorf.
Email: netta.ofer [at] colorado.edu
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Artist Statement
I investigate the hierarchical nature of human-nonhuman relationships, specifically living organisms. I use design research, embodied practices, and visual art for exposing anthropocentric contact zones and challenging narrow perspectives. From examining the surveillance in microscopic observation to designing embodied interactions with nonhuman organisms, I explore how human exceptionalism shapes the links between bodies and how we perceive them. My practice often relies on growing and tending to nonhuman organisms for surfacing points of connection and tension between our humanism, ourselves, and other agentic forces. These practices reveal what is in-becoming, overlooked, and uncertain in a world that is polarized and forced into categories.
Felt Experiences
Sensory engagement probes are objects designed to viscerally emphasize the organism’s livingness and agency, call attention to the human-organism relationship, and reveal our human-centered leanings and biases. This work sets out to explore what might a more-than-human design practice with living organisms look like. Countering the human-centered design practice of utilizing living organisms, in this project kombucha scoby, as a material (e.g., “vegan” leather), this work contributes a making practice of designerly objects that invite experiencing the kombucha scoby as a living organism.
These felt experiences include:
*listening to the kombucha fermentation bubbles
*touching the biofilm layer to examine its texture and thickness
*watching the slow growth of scoby layers over weeks
This work began as a material exploration in the Fall 2020 Soft Object class taught by Laura Devendorf and Sasha De Koninck.
I was interested in exploring textile fabrication with kombucha scoby and experimented with craft and digital fabrication methods.
manifest the latent dialogue between the human and the organism.
We followed our felt experiences through an autoethnographic account of reflective writings and creating "sensory engagement probes", a making practice of designerly objects that manifest the inner dialogueoftheautoethnographicaccount.Thefirstauthor(FA throughout thepaper)conductedtheautoethnographybyfollowing specific sensory experiences with the Kombucha Scoby (such as listening, watching, and touching), documenting events, thoughts, and emotional insights that arose, and further echoed and engaged with such tensions and points of connection in the design of the sensory engagement probes. In this autoethnograpic study, we take a designer-researcher stance [89], and investigate our felt experiences with the organism during the design process. We contribute a novel perspective and account in the context of BioHCI, introducing a case study of decentering the narrow human-centered goals that exist in design processes, and incorporating the organism’s livingness as valuable input and direction. We present our design journey including an initial material exploration of Kombucha Scoby, and the shift from "designing with living matter" to a "design-with" [111] inquiry. In this inquiry, we center our subjective, felt experiences, in order to elicit emotional responses and critical reflection on the process of designing with Kombucha Scoby. Finally, we draw from this felt, reflective practice or repertoire [111] and propose designing sensory engagement probes: a practice of designing objects for being present with nonhuman counterparts (in our case Kombucha Scoby) through sensory experiences that might surface during growing, caring for, and designing with organisms. The sensory engagement probes reveal the interconnectedness [91, 101, 111] present between us, the human-designer and the nonhuman, the organism-designer. We demonstrate this with three sensory engagement probes: a listening probe, watching probe, and touching probe; all which emerged from reflecting on our sensory experiences with Kombucha Scoby, and prompt us to further engage with unique felt sensations.
Published as a full paper in CHI 2023.