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FOOORM

DATE
02.2025 - 06.2025 
(5 months)

PROJECT  TYPE
/ Digital Fabrication
/ More-than-human design




/ Material Expression
/ Research through Design


Shaping through entanglement---negotiating with 
material vitality and machine parameter.








In the field of digital fabrication, growing attention has been given to the role of material properties and machine parameters in shaping design outcomes. Yet dominant approaches remain rooted in control and optimization, often treating materials as passive substrates. This limits engagement with material vitality, unpredictability, and emergent aesthetics. 

This project adopted a Research through Design(RtD) methodology to explore how unstable, fermentable substances—such as flour, yeast, and baking powder—can participate in the making process. Focusing on time-sensitive behaviours like foaming and collapse, this project examined how form arises through negotiation between material dynamics and machine parameters. Grounded in a more-than-human perspective, the project reframes design as a relational practice, where materials and machines act as co-creators. The outcomes contribute to a discourse of design as emergence—one co-constructed through responsiveness and entanglement.









{ Design as Dialogue }

In this project, RtD supports an exploratory, situated investigation into how material characteristics in 3D printing emerge through the interplay between material behavior and machine parameters. Instead of striving for perfection or predictability, the process embraces failure as a form of feedback. Continuously testing the tensions between mechanical precision and material unpredictability allows forms to surface through interaction rather than imposition. Here, design is not understood as mastery, but as dialogue—with the expression and vitality of living matter.
     







{  Co-shaping Through Machine and Material  }



Custom scripts were developed to accommodate the material’s foaming and expanding behavior, ensuring that machine movement allowed sufficient space for the living material to grow during printing. Rather than behaving as passive substrates, the materials expressed morphological and temporal agency, shaping both form and process. 





In contrast to conventional digital fabrication that treats materials as inert, this project proposes an alternative paradigm: one in which materials are active participants and machines are collaborators. By foregrounding foaming, collapse, and time-based transformations the project explores how design emerges through negotiation—where control is partial, outcomes are uncertain, and responsiveness is key.





























Post-print cracking caused by rapid moisture evaporation from the dough’s internal structure—leading to tensile stress and fissuring along weaker, drying areas.













































Form emerging through the     negotiation between material   behavior and machine parameters.


This project positions making as a co-creative act shaped by both human and non-human agencies. By centering emergence and more-than-human co-authorship, it offers a form of design that is messy, contingent, and alive—a situated practice that embraces uncertainty and interdependence as creative forces.

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