ActuEating: Designing, Studying and Exploring Actuating Decorative Artefacts

Actuating, dynamic materials offer substantial potential to enhance interior designs but there are currently few examples of how they might be utilised or impact user experiences. As part of a design-led exploration, we have prototyped (Wizard-of-Oz) an actuating, dining table runner (ActuEater1), and then developed a fully-interactive fabric version that both changes shape and colour (ActuEater2). Four in-situ deployments of ‘ActuEaters’ in different dinner settings and subsequent ‘design crits’ showed insights into how people perceive, interpret and interact with such slow-technology in interesting (and often unexpected) ways. The results of our ‘ActuEating’ studies provide evidence for how an actuating artefact can be simultaneously a resource for social engagement and an interactive decorative. In response, we explore design opportunities for situating novel interactive materials in everyday settings, taking the leap into a new generation of interactive spaces, and critically considering new aesthetic possibilities

The data hungry home

It's said that the pleasure is in the giving, not the receiving. This belief is validated by how humans interact with their family, friends and society as well as their gardens, homes, and pets. Yet for ubiquitous devices, this dynamic is reversed with devices as the donors and owners as the recipients. This paper explores an alternative paradigm where these devices are elevated, becoming members of Data Hungry Homes, allowing us to build relationships with them using the principles that we apply to family, pets or houseplants. These devices are developed to fit into a new concept of the home, can symbiotically interact with us and possess needs and traits that yield unexpected positive or negative outcomes from interacting with them. Such relationships could enrich our lives through our endeavours to “feed” our Data Hungry Homes, possibly leading us to explore new avenues and interactions outside and inside the home

Organic User Interfaces for InteractiveInterior Design

PhD ThesisOrganic User Interfaces (OUIs) are flexible, actuated, digital interfaces characterized by being aesthetically pleasing, physically manipulated and ubiquitously embedded within real-world environments. I postulate that OUIs have specific qualities that offer great potential to realize the vision of smart spaces and ubiquitous computing environments. This thesis makes the case for embedding OUI interaction into architectural spaces, interior elements and decorative artefacts using smart materials – a concept I term ‘OUI Interiors’. Through this thesis, I investigate: 1) What interactive materials and making techniques can be used to design and build OUIs? 2) What OUI decorative artefacts and interior elements can we create? and 3) What can we learn for design by situating OUI interiors? These key research questions form the basis of this PhD and guide all stages of inquiry, analysis, and reporting. Grounded by the state-of-the-art of Interactive Interiors in both research and practice, I developed new techniques of seamlessly embedding smart materials into interior finishing materials via research through design exploration (in the form of a Swatchbook). I also prototyped a number of interactive decorative objects that change shape and colour as a form of organicactuation, in response to seamless soft-sensing (presented in a Product Catalogue). These inspirational artefacts include table-runners, wall-art, pattern-changing wall-tiles, furry-throw, vase, cushion and matching painting, rug, objets d’art and tasselled curtain. Moreover, my situated studies of how people interact idiosyncratically with interactive decorative objects provide insights and reflections on the overall material experience. Through multi-disciplinary collaboration, I have also put these materials in the hands of designers to realize the potentials and limitations of such a paradigm and design three interactive spaces. The results of my research are materialized in a tangible outcome (a Manifesto) exploring design opportunities of OUI Interior Design, and critically considering new aesthetic possibilities

Extending the Design Space of E-textile Assistive Smart Environment Applications

The thriving field of Smart Environments has allowed computing devices to gain new capabilities and develop new interfaces, thus becoming more and more part of our lives. In many of these areas it is unthinkable to renounce to the assisting functionality such as e.g. comfort and safety functions during driving, safety functionality while working in an industrial plant, or self-optimization of daily activities with a Smartwatch. Adults spend a lot of time on flexible surfaces such as in the office chair, in bed or in the car seat. These are crucial parts of our environments. Even though environments have become smarter with integrated computing gaining new capabilities and new interfaces, mostly rigid surfaces and objects have become smarter. In this thesis, I build on the advantages flexible and bendable surfaces have to offer and look into the creation process of assistive Smart Environment applications leveraging these surfaces. I have done this with three main contributions. First, since most Smart Environment applications are built-in into rigid surfaces, I extend the body of knowledge by designing new assistive applications integrated in flexible surfaces such as comfortable chairs, beds, or any type of soft, flexible objects. These developed applications offer assistance e.g. through preventive functionality such as decubitus ulcer prevention while lying in bed, back pain prevention while sitting on a chair or emotion detection while detecting movements on a couch. Second, I propose a new framework for the design process of flexible surface prototypes and its challenges of creating hardware prototypes in multiple iterations, using resources such as work time and material costs. I address this research challenge by creating a simulation framework which can be used to design applications with changing surface shape. In a first step I validate the simulation framework by building a real prototype and a simulated prototype and compare the results in terms of sensor amount and sensor placement. Furthermore, I use this developed simulation framework to analyse the influence it has on an application design if the developer is experienced or not. Finally, since sensor capabilities play a major role during the design process, and humans come often in contact with surfaces made of fabric, I combine the integration advantages of fabric and those of capacitive proximity sensing electrodes. By conducting a multitude of capacitive proximity sensing measurements, I determine the performance of electrodes made by varying properties such as material, shape, size, pattern density, stitching type, or supporting fabric. I discuss the results from this performance evaluation and condense them into e-textile capacitive sensing electrode guidelines, applied exemplary on the use case of creating a bed sheet for breathing rate detection

Finding Roles for Interactive Furniture in Homes with EmotoCouch

Furniture is the building block of the spaces we inhabit. Its design and its functions shape how we use spaces, as individuals and as groups. While being an integral part of our lives, furniture is unaware of what happens around it. But what if furniture could change its appearance? What situations should it respond to? How might it communicate its state to those around it? Can we use emotional expression for such communication? To find and explore roles for interactive furniture in domestic spaces, we built EmotoCouch: a provocative prototype that uses combinations of color, patterns, and haptics designed to convey emotions. We gathered feedback to the concept of an emotional couch from an online study with 138 participants and in a laboratory study with 14 parent-child pairs. Our findings identify promising future directions, use cases, and opportunities for the use of emotion for expressive communication by furniture