Rootcraft: Tuning Encounters in Designing-With Grass Roots

Abstract

This pictorial presents Rootcraft, a practice-led research inquiry into designing-with grass roots. Situated at the intersection of growing design and more-than-human design, Rootcraft parts with one-point temporality in which agency is heavily scripted through mould geometry, stabilized growth and evaluated through a final artifact. Instead, it reorients root-crafting toward the grow phase as an unfolding site of negotiation, where form emerges through repeated encounters among roots, designer, tools, and environmental conditions.

Across four iterations, we answer: “How can intermediate artifacts enable distributed agencies between humans and grass roots in an act of designing-with”, in staging encounters and shifting away from assertive set-ups that prescribe root trajectories toward propositional infrastructures that invite deviation and response. Using vertically oriented moulds, porous scaffolds, and pliable textile guides, we intervened during the growth phase, allowing bodily engagement, tool-mediated actions, and roots to mutually redirect the making process. Rootcraft contributes situated exemplars of such encounter-driven growth set-ups and a vocabulary for redistributing agency in designing-with living materials, including set-up assertiveness, growth legibility, interaction repertoire, temporal alignment, and root–substrate coupling.