Design for Playfulness with Interactive Soft Materials: Description document

Abstract

Designing for interactive play brings new dimensions for play experience blended with digital and physical characteristics. Starting from the insights of two interactive soft toy projects, the authors explore interactive soft materials in designing for playfulness through a material-driven design approach. This can bring a new dimension in designing interaction for ludic experiences and reveal specific characteristics of soft materials. By combining somaesthetic and embodied design methods, the studio aims at exploring what makes soft materials playful. Moreover, it addresses how technology can enhance the playfulness of these materials and what kind of playful interaction scenarios can be imagined with interactive soft materials by involving the whole-body in the design process. The learnings from the studio will help the authors build a framework which shows the potential and describes the characteristics of interactive soft materials to create new tangible, embedded and embodied interactions for play.