Interactive Materiality - 2024
Project name: “ZED: Exploring how to Manipulate Light Through a Tangible Interaction”
Co-designers: Jelmer Bontje, Jens Vervoort
Grade: 7.6
Expertise Areas: TR / CA
Project description
This course focussed on picking a material and manipulating their characteristics. The material that the team chose was light. Through a Material Driven Design process (Karana et al., 2015), the team tinkered with light, shadow, colour and shapes to create interesting light patterns. In the end, a multisensorial (Winters et al., 2022) “light instrument” was created which uses embodied interaction to create a custom light and sound experience.
Reflection
It was interesting to see how an intangible “material” such as light, still has characteristics which you can design for and with. It challenged me to think about ways to make light tangible and manipulate it, which resulted in a synergy between light and other materials.
Furthermore, physical prototyping was done using vinyl, acrylic, plywood and metal tubing. This was my first time laser cutting vinyl sheets and I was impressed how accurate and beautiful the patterns were when light shone through it. Knowing how to use the laser cutter, could also make future projects more accurate and efficient.
Karana, E., Barati, B., Rognoli, V., & Zeeuw Van Der Laan, A. (2015). Material driven design (MDD): A method to design for material experiences. International journal of design, 9(2), 35-54.https://re.public.polimi.it/handle/11311/979536
Winters, A. K., de Waart, S. G., & Bruns, M. (2022). Tension-and-Release: A design principle for dynamic materials. International Journal of Design, 16(2), 1-14. https://research.tue.nl/en/publications/tension-and-release-a-design-principle-for-dynamic-materials