The Materiality of Well-Being:

Designing living textiles as interfaces to enhance well-being in the built environment.

This research investigates how textiles and microbiology can be merged to create scent-emitting, living textiles to improve human well-being within architectural spaces. A multi-species centred approach utilises design methods to develop textiles that host selected microbes and emit a forest-related scent triggered by human-microbe interactions. The outcomes of this Creative Practice PhD include a portfolio of living textiles and a site-specific interior architecture.

An exhibition of outcomes will evaluate the public response to the use of living textiles as a sensory response system that 1) creates olfactory and physical space to support stress-relief and 2) acts as activator for new forms of architecture of co-habitating and interacting with the non-human.