Home décor defines how people experience and share spaces, with the decorative elements forming the ‘interface’ to the home. Despite the opportunities of embedding technology within these elements, research to date has not explored this fully. This paper brings home décor to interaction design utilizing decorative elements as a vehicle to incorporate tangible interaction in domestic spaces. In an IKEA-like format, we designed a product catalogue of our own prototypes that illustrate the possibilities of the nearest future. These design illustrations should offer inspiration to those who wish to work with interactive materials (e.g. appearance-changing and soft-sensing), particularly in the context of interactive spaces. Through making, situating, and speculating, we show how designing interactive décor can be a promising area in Research-though-Design.
This research is published here: https://doi.org/10.1145/3430524.3446074
“How would we design interactive soft furnishing” is a question that involves deeper design research than common prototype development. The crafting of objects that we will sit or step on, lean towards, and pour water into requires considerations beyond making a wired gadget or rough proof-of-concept device. By exploring the set of design qualities of interior objects, we can envision their near-future versions, their materialities and their interactivities, in addition to the extended living experience entailed. Through RtD, we present an interplay of three methodological strands: critical making, critical engagement, and critical speculation.
The ideas we present in this catalogue are not specifying what should be made, but rather showing some possibilities, as exemplary decoractives presented to inspire design imagination.
For example, the above square-shaped tiles act as large buttons that users can activate one after another to turn on and off different patterns. Thus, people can play with the endless combinations of plain and patterned tiles on their walls. The unique texture of ceramic and its aesthetic appeal should also play an important role in the experiential effect of TacTiles. We imagine TacTiles deployed in the splashback of a kitchen, interacting in three different modes: 1) responding to touch, allowing users to play with its pattern and add a new eye-catching focal point every while; 2) responding to ambient heat while cooking, revealing the unseen and (often) unfelt smoke and heat; and 3) autonomously actuating changing its patterns over time for a dynamic environment.
Another example is this morphing vase where the shape of the vase can be altered from different sides at various angles, depending on the shape it was in last and on the overall bent origami form. The shape-memory springs inside are connected to an Arduino microcontroller that also has a proximity sensor connected to detect user interaction when (re)placing flowers or approaching its top opening. MORVAZ also enables hand manipulations to its flexible origami structure allowing people to actively change its physical shape as desired.