ICS Materials. Towards a re-Interpretation of material qualities through interactive, connected, and smart materials.

The domain of materials for design is changing under the influence of an increased technological advancement, miniaturization and democratization. Materials are becoming connected, augmented, computational, interactive, active, responsive, and dynamic. These are ICS Materials, an acronym that stands for Interactive, Connected and Smart. While labs around the world are experimenting with these new materials, there is the need to reflect on their potentials and impact on design. This paper is a first step in this direction: to interpret and describe the qualities of ICS materials, considering their experiential pattern, their expressive sensorial dimension, and their aesthetic of interaction. Through case studies, we analyse and classify these emerging ICS Materials and identified common characteristics, and challenges, e.g. the ability to change over time or their programmability by the designers and users. On that basis, we argue there is the need to reframe and redesign existing models to describe ICS materials, making their qualities emerge

ICS Materials

This present book covers a series of outstanding reputation researchers’ contributions on the topic of ICS Materials: a new class of emerging materials with properties and qualities concerning interactivity, connectivity and intelligence. In the general framework of ICS Materials’ domain, each chapter deals with a specific aspect following the characteristic perspective of each researcher. As result, methods, tools, guidelines emerged that are relevant and applicable to several contexts such as product, interaction design, materials science and many more

Digital touch: towards a novel user-experience design pedagogy

HCI and Industrial Design are both disciplines that are currently experiencing radical transformation in terms of their identity and scope. HCI has moved beyond its origins in human factors and cognitive psychology towards the proactive and generative design of experience. Industrial Design has similarly evolved from a concern with physical form and function-giving solutions to the holistic design considerations of the user’s experience. Given the complexity and scale of this shifting design landscape, the response of design education must shift in methods and learning and teaching objectives. This paper provides the Design and Technology Education community with a research case study of innovation within HCI education, here situated within the broader context of Industrial Design education. We present a novel pedagogy for designing digital touch communications, developed through an interdisciplinary collaboration of HCI, Industrial Design, and Social Science academics, and advanced through a coursework assignment for 64 undergraduate Industrial Design and Technology students undertaking a User-Experience Design module at the [AUTHOR] (UK). We discuss the role of low-fidelity experience prototyping of digital touch interactions beyond screens, and the limitations of such an approach when engaged with by novice designers with entrenched material science understanding. We conclude the paper with a call for new educational ‘tools’ to support and scaffold both the learning and teaching of design for digital touch experiences within a User-Experience Design context, and we offer our development of a Designing Digital Touch Toolkit as one such tool

ICS Materials

This present book covers a series of outstanding reputation researchers’ contributions on the topic of ICS Materials: a new class of emerging materials with properties and qualities concerning interactivity, connectivity and intelligence. In the general framework of ICS Materials’ domain, each chapter deals with a specific aspect following the characteristic perspective of each researcher. As result, methods, tools, guidelines emerged that are relevant and applicable to several contexts such as product, interaction design, materials science and many more

Supporting collaborative biodesign ideation with contextualised knowledge from bioscience

The objective of this work is to support co-creation of novel ideas in biodesign during fast-paced and facilitated workshops. We created a card-based tool which simultaneously provides knowledge on both ‘science’ and ‘context’. The tool was used to trigger and inspire collaborative ideation in two biodesign workshops in which participants from scientific and design backgrounds produced ideas for healthcare-related innovations. To understand the perception of the tool and the mechanism of scientific knowledge integration in ideation, we conducted post-workshop interviews with 10 participants. Our qualitative analysis shows that the exposure to contextualised scientific knowledge provided by the tool enabled participants to generate ideas that cover a wide spectrum from the micro-scale of bioscience to the macro-scale of socio-political contexts, and thus supported the acceleration of ideation in biodesign workshops

Material driven design (MDD): A method to design for material experiences

Materials research constantly offers novel materials as better alternatives to convention. Functional aptness is taken for granted at the first commercial launch of a new material. Nevertheless, this alone may not be enough for its commercial success and widespread use. The 'material' should also elicit meaningful user experiences in and beyond its utilitarian assessment. This requires qualifying the material not only for what it is, but also for what it does, what it expresses to us, what it elicits from us, and what it makes us do. In search of a proper application through such an understanding, material scientists and industries have reached out to designers to guide the development of materials by experiential goals. However, how to design for experiences with and for a material at hand has been poorly addressed to date. In this article, we propose a method, Material Driven Design (MDD), to facilitate designing for material experiences. After explaining the theoretical foundation of the method, an illustrative case is presented-where 'coffee waste' is the subject of a design effort to conceive a new product concept. Finally, possible research directions are addressed to bring new insights to the effective application of the MDD method to diverse projects