‘Experience Prototyping’ Smart Material Composites

Abstract

This paper presents the concept and development of a real-time hybrid tool to support the designers in experience prototyping of an underdeveloped smart material composite. In a EU project, Light- Touch-Matters, designers have been asked to explore the potential of composites of OLED technology and Piezoelectric polymer, that are assumed to revolutionize the ways we interact with our surrounding products. However, these technologies are not yet at the stage for designers to be investigated directly and/or implemented across different projects. To realize the potential of the material development, it is essential for designers to understand how these developing composites
and their attributes might be experienced. Elaborating the gap in capturing and prototyping the performative and dynamic qualities of these composites across five design cases, we propose a material-driven approach complemented by generative Chroma keying tools to fill in this gap. Testing an initial post-processed Chroma keying technique with a group of designers, we further developed a real-time hybrid simulator, which we present in the last section of this paper.