While effective, this approach limits the consideration of materials whose properties evolve over time, react to the environment, or actively participate in artifact formation. Biomaterials, ranging from processed biopolymers to living systems, offer an alternative material logic based on growth, transformation, and degradation. Yet, their integration into interactive systems is hindered by fabrication logics, methodologies, and evaluation frameworks, ill-suited to dynamic, transient, or agentic materials.

To address these challenges, this research proposes translating biomaterial properties and biological processes into design and fabrication frameworks for HCI. This work moves beyond the role of a substitute to demonstrate how the specific properties of biomaterials and the activity of biological systems condition the design process. These dimensions redefine design temporality: the process no longer aims for a fixed result. It shifts toward process-oriented practices, where material transformation becomes a design resource.

This dissertation broadens the integration levels of biomaterials and living systems in interactive device fabrication through several fabrication frameworks. « Interactive Bioplastics » demonstrates the viability of processed biomaterials to support essential electronic functions. « SoftBioMorph » mobilizes intrinsic biopolymer behaviors as design resources, articulating material sensitivity and reactivity as continuous interaction modalities. « Biohybrid Devices » deepens this logic by integrating biological activity as a design parameter: a lifecycle-based approach where growth, stabilization, and post-processing co-determine form and interaction. Complementarily, « RG-Joint » explores how growth can modulate and transform the mechanical properties of hybrid structures, paving the way for fabrication logics where the living material continues to evolve well beyond the initial production phase. These frameworks and the resulting artifacts act as epistemic devices, revealing challenges and opportunities inherent to designing with biomaterials.

Finally, adopting a reflexive posture, this manuscript examines the systemic implications of biofabrication in HCI. By crossing retrospective reflections with expert interviews, it identifies major tensions related to evaluation, infrastructures, and disciplinary values. These frictions are not isolated technical limitations, but symptoms of a deeper mismatch between the realities of the living and HCI’s inherited paradigms of stability and control. By articulating these divergences, this work proposes a forward-looking research agenda in which biofabrication emerges as a transformative fabrication paradigm that invites the field to rethink how interactive systems are made, evaluated, maintained, and allowed to change over time.