In the field of digital fabrication, growing attention has been given to the expressive and performative qualities of materials. Yet, most implementations remain anchored in predictability and control, treating materials as programmable substrates optimized for performance. This perspective diminishes the role of material vitality and emergent aesthetics.
Recognizing this, Fooorm approaches design not as a singular human act, but as an assemblage of human and non-human elements: materials, tools, and environments. By foregrounding foaming, collapse, and time-based transformations, we investigated the aesthetics that emerge from the tension between material behaviour and machine logic. Rather than aiming for full control, Fooorm approaches design as a negotiation—where outcomes arise through responsiveness and shifting relationships.
Fooorm takes an exploratory, hands-on approach to understanding how material characteristics in 3D printing emerge through the dynamic interplay between material behaviour and machine parameters. It focuses on how unstable substances such as dough, yeast, and baking powder can actively participate in the making process, introducing variability, timing, and transformation. Rather than aiming for perfection or predictability, the process embraces failure as a form of feedback and learning. By working with materials that behave unpredictably, the project sheds light on the ongoing tension between mechanical precision and material responsiveness, allowing form to emerge through interaction rather than imposition. Here, design is not understood as mastery, but as a dialogue with the expression, instability, and vitality of living matter.
By centring emergence and more-than-human co-authorship, Fooorm contributes to a form of design that is not about control, but about participation; a place where materials, machines, and designer’s intentions shape outcomes together. It frames making as a situated and temporal process: messy, contingent, and alive.
In this light, livingness is not a property to be designed into objects, but something that arises through continuous negotiation between human intention, environmental conditions, and the active behaviour of materials.
