technomadic
notes from the ever-emerging field
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We are facing a remarkable moment within the field of interaction design. With the development of rapid prototyping processes, inexpensive chips, processors, and sensors, and increasingly computational ways of interacting with manufacturing and craft processes, our relationships to materials are rapidly transforming. The mediating infrastructure of everyday life is increasingly “smart.” The computational is increasingly mundane. As the rate of expansion into dialogue with neighboring (and not so neighboring) fields and from the nano to the urban scale occurs, we are reopening questions of materiality, experience, and form. Interaction design is executing a “material turn” [8]. Open for examination is how the discipline of interaction design might move forward alongside architecture, product design, textile design, and materials science as part of a joint area for inquiry.
As the field moves closer to materials, the necessity for a philosophy of materiality develops. Inching toward the recombination of atoms and bits, however, may mean revising our approach. At present, we have little to say about modes of composition and thus not enough to say about working across a wide range of digital and physical materials. The untapped possibility is that of new aesthetic languages, new compositional techniques, and new materialities. Composition can take just about any form and manifest at any scale. The full-blown reimagination of frozen water at the Icehotel exemplifies this matter. It is by no means alone. Already there are signs of work that does not “bridge” atoms to bits but evokes a need for new sets of descriptors to account for compositional techniques.
Projects like Bitfall use a system of synchronized magnetic valves attached to a Web interface to reorganize already present properties of falling water—surface tension, gravity, discretization into drops—into a screen for rendering digital images into tangible, if momentary, displays. Water always could have been a substrate for creating images, but somehow it takes a computational moment to see what was always there. Evocative projects like Qi and Buechley’s computational pop-up book gesture toward the potentials for developing aesthetic sensibilities from the management of materiality, computation, interaction, and text [9]. Their book blurs the relationship between structure and representation, forming the stems and leaves of mechanized paper flowers from the brushstroke application of conductive paints. The thickness and length of stroke drive electronic function, thus marrying the forms of circuit design, brush painting, and paper craft.
Perhaps it is best to view the potentials in this sort of work by drawing analogies to the importance of past aesthetic reformulations in a medium. Collage, for example (an artistic technique dually credited to Georges Braque and Pablo Picasso), enlarged the reach of painting by demonstrating the power of composition to integrate new materials into aesthetic wholes. The newspaper fragments embedded in Compotier avec fruits, violin et verre, or Composition with Fruit, Guitar and Glass (1912), demonstrate a shift in which a potential substrate for image making can become part of the image itself. Computational pop-up books, digital ice-walls, and water screens may be less self-consciously innovative than a Picasso collage, but somehow these pieces seem kindred voices in a longer conversation about the relationship between materiality, technology, and design. The development of new modes for interaction design and the organization of novel materials may very well involve as much history, formal analysis, and aesthetic theory as technological development, entrepreneurial innovation, and social scientific evaluation.
Sometimes the best way to move forward is not to build new bridges but rather to see with new eyes.
— Erica Robles, Mikael Wiberg. “From materials to materiality: thinking of computation from within an Icehotel.” interactions 18.1 (2011), P. 32-37.
