Design touch matters: Bending and stretching the potentials of smart material composites

In the past decade, the interest in collaborative materials development projects with designers and materials scientists has gained momentum. Designers’ involvement in early materials development is expected to inform the development process about the potentials of a new material, beyond the values of efficiency and convenience. This paper-based...

Materializing Technologies: Surfacing Focal Things and Practices with Design

Today, the world is populated with what we colloquially refer to as “black boxes.” These are technologies that perform sophisticated operations but obfuscate these complex operations, providing us with little context to what they do, how they work, and the role they play in our lives. In simple terms, this thesis addresses the following broadly...