- Hi, I'm Iddo Wald from the milab at IDC Herzliya, Israel,
and I'm presenting this work
on behalf of myself and Dr. Oren Zuckerman.
This work revolves around Magnetform.
Magnetform is a magnetic actuation
shape-change display toolkit.
It allows for designers with little technological knowledge
to experiment with movement in a variety of soft materials.
In the pictorial, we share the work process and results
of two studio's open-ended exploration with the platform,
and based on their work,
we offered some reflections on two main themes.
Empowering designers to participate
in shape-change exploration
and the developing practice of designing objects
which integrated motion.
Let me give you some context,
tell you about that Magnetform and share some highlights
from our experiments and our reflections.
In recent years,
there's been a growing interest in involving designers
in the evolution of shape-changing interfaces.
Previous work emphasized the importance
of bringing designers on board
to test their application potential.
And in recent work, laying out grand challenges
in shape-change interface research,
the need for developing tools for designers
was very apparent.
Tools which allow for construction and comparison of forms
help designers develop understanding of dynamic affordances,
and expand their competences,
could help addressing the challenges
of design for temporality,
integrating artifacts and interaction,
and application and content design.
As mentioned before, we were inspired by other toolkits
that aimed to make shape-change displays more accessible
for non-technical designers,
and other researchers who share our interest
in soft materials as interfaces from foam to hair.
Actuation of soft materials using magnetic force
was used before in other interfaces
and builds an earlier TUI history
with the actuated workbench,
which was a major inspiration for this project
from its early prototypes.
Based on these and the rich history of toolkits in HCI,
we defined the following design principles for the toolkit.
It should be accessible to non-technical designers,
generate movement in a wide range of soft materials,
and encourage creative exploration.
We developed a two layered system:
An actuating layer with four robotic arms,
each holding the magnet,
and a soft material layer, enabling designers
to embed magnets in any soft material they wish to explore
with magnets embedded in or attached to the soft material.
The material properties affect the nature
of the 3D movement.
For example, this foam with the slitted lines
which guides folding.
The platform was built as, well, a platform,
also in the sense that it can accept very simple commands
over serial communication saying which magnet to move,
to what location in millimeters in its own quarter.
This makes it simple to connect to other kinds of interfaces
beyond the one I'm going to show you now.
We built the animation interface using Processing,
making it usable across platforms.
Each of the dots in their quarters represent a magnet
within its quarter of platform moving range,
to which we limited the arms movements
to simplify the control.
Moving these manipulates the platform in real time
and we've also developed a method
for recording synchronous movements to all the magnets.
Let me show you how.
First, a quarter is chosen for recording in.
Then, once the dot in that quarter is clicked on,
a recording starts and stops when the mouse key's unpressed.
When starting to record another quarter,
the other one's already recorded play simultaneously.
This allows for the designers
to relate to the other moving elements
while not controlling all at once
and still creating a very refined movement.
Gestures can be saved, loaded, played,
and the reset button sends all the magnets
to their starting point of the animation.
We gave the system to two design studios
for an open-ended exploration for 15 days.
We divide the process into four stages.
Installation, Initial exploration
with three sample materials we provided,
the ones you've seen so far actually,
their initial independent experimentation period
we considered as Basic exploration with custom materials,
and we marked the Advanced exploration stage
when they started to shift into systematic
and focused process,
developing concepts from their basic exploration.
We conducted semi-structured interviews at the beginning,
middle, and end of each stage,
and asked the designers to document their process,
following some basic guidelines in a shared online folder.
At the end of the process, we had a very diverse set of data
from what we assessed by their documentation
to be a one to two hours daily,
with some much longer sessions.
We analyzed the data and recognized three themes
of materiality, process and interface with the system,
and reflection on the results and future thinking.
We gathered the most representative material
around these themes
and reviewed the two studios' work
again in light of each others.
I'll give you an overview of the studio's work
but we invite you to refer to the pictorial
and supplementary video where you can find the process
of each of the studios together with quotes
from the designers, and form your own impressions.
Studio A are Maayan Fogel and Yoni Chechick.
They studied industrial design together
and now work as a team mainly under their brand C's.
Their work involves physical product design with wood,
various metals, and specifically brass.
They make furniture, lighting objects, and luxury items,
such as their very popular brass bracelets.
Beyond that, Maayan does street statue restoration work
with metal and bronze,
and Yoni specializes in model building for architecture.
The Installation stage took three minutes
and their Initial exploration took 15 minutes,
after which they felt they were able to control the system
and were ready to go on with their independent work.
Their Basic exploration stage was very intuitive.
Working for whatever materials they could find
in their close surroundings and trying them out,
like plastic glove from latex with air and water.
They continued with balloons, styrofoam balls.
First, just the ball and then within a plastic ball
for generating a secondary motion.
Straws and rubber bands creating semi-rigid structures
with soft joints.
And a few paper folded prototypes in various patterns,
Tyvek and mixed-materials designs based on soft papers
with polygons of harder material on top of it,
which was what they chose also to take forward
for the next stage of exploration.
They wanted to achieve subtle and deliberate material movement
to communicate a message.
Interested in how the folds change the 3D structure
while reaching specific movements that they had in mind.
Studio B is Emma Margarita Ernest.
She is an interdisciplinary material designer.
She holds a BA in visual communications,
a M.Des. focusing on wearables and motion research studies,
and also studied for a MA in integrated design.
Her studio work involves mostly performance design
and information design.
In addition, she's a material researcher
in a textile research design center,
where she explores applications
for new textile technologies.
With studio B, the initial exploration was very similar.
She started by exploring movement with fabric
she commonly use in her studio.
Interested in the different movement characteristics
for each, but fairly quickly, she moved to a much more
systematic exploration of movements.
Influenced by her work process both with data
and working with choreographers,
she designed a set of movements and classified them.
Then, using a sample material,
she formed herself a vocabulary.
She tried her set of gestures on different materials
to learn about their behavior
and a few manipulations as building a guiding wire grid.
She moved to explore more advanced directions,
such as using mixed materials for characterizing movements
or functional elements like rising buttons in a textile,
forming a narrative, and combining these with projections
as a storytelling method.
Following her exploration process,
she created a graphic reflection of how she saw her process.
After the experimentation, she wanted to keep the platform
for a longer period.
She was interested in developing a method
that will allow her to design the material
in relation to the movement,
which led her to create several prototypes
of a soft metamaterial textile.
We separated our reflection to two overarching themes.
The first being, what did we learn on designing systems
to empower designers?
Did our design satisfy our design principles?
Did those principles prove themselves to be empowering
for designers to contribute to the field?
What design guidelines can we offer for other systems?
Well, first of all, from an overview of the results,
we noted that the diverse range of materials
used in various ways,
some of which we do not recall being used in shape-change.
It's also apparent that designers
were able to leverage their own professional world
of materiality, skills, and personal style in their designs.
As such, we believe even our limited experiment
with a fairly simple system
shows how it's possible to harness designers skills
and knowledge to inspire the shape-change community.
Also based on the diversity, we found the two layer system
encourages creative exploration with flexibility
to generate movement in wide range of materials.
Designers were able to easily integrate the system
into their practice and routine workflows,
from finding a place for it
to learning how to use it and leverage it.
From that we take that accessible prototyping systems
have the potential of finding their place
in the designer studios.
Be used as designed tools
and influence designers' everyday practice.
We defined our guidelines for accessibility to be
low cost, durability, small footprint,
standard connections, cross platform software,
easily installed and intuitive interfaces.
The other question is,
what can we learn about the practice of designing objects
which include motion?
How could the design process
of shape-changing objects look like?
And who would be the designers of shape-changing objects?
Both studios were drawn to exploration of expressiveness
in motion, expressing emotion or building a character.
This might be specifically due to the soft
and organic materials nature,
but could also be a response to the strong, expressive,
and social effects that autonomous movement
have been shown to have even in abstract objects.
Either way, it seems likely that expressiveness
and character of shape-changing objects
would play a big role in their design.
And it's important to build design tools
to support expressive gesture design.
In regards to working with materials and movement,
studio A intertwined the two in their process from day one.
While the studio B started by separating the movements
from the material and gradually developed the relationship
between movement and other elements,
such as structure and materiality.
We would say giving the tools for designing with motion
both in mind and in hand,
being able to physically experience and prototype
with movement in early stages of the design process
can enable creating work where the relationship
between material, motion, and expression are tightly bound.
We saw how designers everyday work manifested
in their work methods.
The object they decided to make
and how they could see the platform relates to,
or used in their work,
be it architecture or dance or performance.
So it seems like there is potential to integrate the system
into the designers everyday practice
or influence and inspire it.
But, clearly, a longer experimentation process
is needed to reveal how it actually does that.
So to conclude, following the results shown in this work,
we believe designing tools for material-oriented designers
which follow principles and guidelines
such as the ones we presented,
could allow designers to use movement
and potentially other elements
in shape-changing interactions
as another material in their design work.
This expansion of designers competences
can allow for building on their skills, experience,
formal and tacit knowledge
for making meaningful contributions
towards the development of the field of shape-change.
Thank you for watching.