Transcripts accompanying publication "Living with cyanobacteria: Exploring Materiality in Caring for Microbes in Everyday Life"

<em>Materiality of artefacts holds the potential to intricately and dynamically shape our daily practices. We posit this capacity can be harnessed in fostering creative unfolding of everyday care practices towards living artefacts. To explore this premise, we designed a cyanobacterial living artefact with air purifying capacity, and invited eight participants to live with and care for it for two weeks.The artefact can be situated in diverse locations within domestic spaces, wherever the participant would consider air purification necessary and certain lighting conditions beneficial for the artefact’s vitality. This versatility is supported by the artefact’s colour-changing, pliable, adhesive, and suspendable nature. We analysed visual documentation and semi-structured interviews of participants’ experiences of the artefact. Our findings suggest distinct roles of materiality for care regarding labour, knowledge, and exploration. We further highlight the intricate design space encompassing</em><em>openness, temporalities and semantic fitness towards nurturing mutualistic care in human-microbe interactions.</em>

人工制品（artefact）的物质性（materiality），具备复杂且动态地塑造我们日常实践的潜力。我们认为，可利用这一特性，推动日常关怀实践的创造性展开，以培育活人工制品（living artefact）。为验证这一前提，我们设计了一款具备空气净化能力的蓝细菌（cyanobacterial）活人工制品，并邀请8名参与者与其共同生活、照料该制品两周时间。该人工制品可安置于家庭空间的多种场景中，只要参与者认为该区域需要空气净化，且特定光照条件有助于维持该人工制品的活力即可。该人工制品具备变色、柔韧、可粘接与可悬挂的特性，使其具备多场景适配能力。我们对参与者关于该人工制品体验的视觉记录与半结构化访谈（semi-structured interviews）资料进行了分析。研究结果显示，物质性在关怀实践的劳动、知识生成与探索三个维度，发挥着差异化的作用。我们还进一步阐明了涵盖开放性（openness）、时间性（temporalities）与语义适配性（semantic fitness）的复杂设计空间，该空间旨在培育人类-微生物互作（human-microbe interactions）中的互惠式关怀（mutualistic care）。