BioLIG: Designing Biologically Derived Electronics and Their Speculative Lives

Abstract

Imagination is the origin of reality. Cultivating new infrastructural and ecological imaginaries is crucial to addressing the climate crisis. Where is the space to prototype new social and technological relations? Transient electronics is an emerging field in advanced materials focused on making electronics that don’t last. Devices are designed to be transient for biomedical, environmental monitoring, or energy storage applications. It is a fascinating and unconventional direction that advances the area of biocompatibility, redefining waste and time-programmable decay {Making electronics that, 2022}. However, in a manufacturing system that fundamentally favors the inert and invariant, transient properties can be precisely the qualities that make adaptation most challenging, often failing at the very stage of imagination. Taking inspiration from transient electronics, this thesis consists of a set of novel biomaterials, a workflow, and three fictional stories to enrich our imagination and instill agency amidst entangled humanitarian, ecological, and technological crises. BioLIG is a material for prototyping accessible and compostable electronics. It uses laser-induced graphene as an organic, bio-derived conductor and affordable biomaterials as the substrate. Three sheets and two inks make up a toolkit to create biocomposites with different properties, colors, and textures specifically designed for prototyping sensors and circuits with transient behaviours. Through a series of characterisations, BioLIG is evaluated and demonstrates that with one material, its electrical performance is on par with synthetic substrates. However, the goal is not to create a replacement material but to prototype new social and technological relations to transient materials. Through a questionnaire, I collected stories, ideas, and questions from makers, designers, and artists for BioLIG and used those as the basis for imagination. In a speculative house, on three floors, three stories unfold of a hoarder, a city forester, and a family living in a time with a leap in our relationship to fabrication, to electronics, and to decay.