Abstract
ßoihisʂa-ata, meaning “Earth cloak – one” in the Muisca language, is an interactive, connected, and smart composite material that detects electrogenic bacteria living in the soil. It is a do-it-yourself (DIY) material (Rognoli et al., 2015; Rognoli & Ayala-Garcia, 2021) developed through a material tinkering approach (Parisi et al., 2017) by an interdisciplinary team of designers, engineers, and biologists. ßoihisʂa-ata’s design was guided by principles of The Blue Economy (Pauli, 2010) and linking the project’s cultural value to the local Colombian context. These goals led the team to reimagine and democratize the technology of microbial fuel cells (Logan et al., 2006) from a material perspective to spark social innovation. ßoihisʂa-ata is valuable because it transforms the relationship between humans and soil by revealing the microbiome, an invisible dimension of soil health (Dunaj et al., 2012). Typically, to be able to “see” the microbiome, one needs to physically take soil samples to a laboratory, culture the bacteria living inside, genetically sequence the bacterial genomes, and compare them to a database (Nielsen et al., 2002). This gives a very precise, momentary vision of microbial life in the soil, but it needs laboratory equipment in a sterile environment and trained microbiologists to perform the assays, and is costly. In contrast, ßoihisʂa-ata gives a general picture of what is happening in the soil by estimating a subset (electrogenic bacteria) of the bacterial population based on the electrical power the soil is producing (Keego Technologies LLC, 2016). Basic tools such as a sewing needle and wire cutter are needed to make ßoihisʂa-ata. It is created by burying one half of the fabric flat in the soil, folding the other half over it, and pressing it into the ground. ßoihisʂa-ata can have a societal impact by providing agency to those who want to measure the health of the soil without complex technologies. Stakeholders can build and use ßoihisʂa-ata themselves to achieve greater insight without relying on third-party technology. The proposed form factor is constructed from easily accessible raw materials and manufacturing processes which facilitates ßoihisʂa-ata’s scalability and advances academic design principles by merging the DIY materials and interactive, connected, and smart (ICS) materials approaches.