Pneumatic Morphogenesis

Pneumatic Morphogenesis, a workshop hosted by the Tangible Media Group @ MIT Media Lab, introduces ways of making and controlling transformable fabric to explore the emerging relationship between human and future materials.
This studio introduces methods of making and controlling inflatable/vacuum fabric. We provide materials and simple fabrication processes that enable designers to rapidly prototype inflatables with simple hinging transformations or texture change. Furthermore, we introduce a customized hardware that enables designers to rapidly prototype inflatable fabric. The goal of this studio is to provide hands-on experiences of designing inflatable fabric as shape-changing/stiffness-changing materials and research on transformable artifacts. Basic knowledge of programming in Arduino is required. Participants should bring their own laptop for the studio.

Time
2-4, December 2017

Workshop Format & Topics
Attendance would be limited to 12 participants, grouped into 3 teams. In order to maximize the productivity of the studio, the ideal team configuration would include one person with some experience in Arduino programming. The remaining team members would ideally come from a complementary background - such as industrial design, art, fashion or architecture.
During the morning participants will be introduced to the concepts, fabrication methods and tools of inflatable fabric. Participants would then be asked to brainstorm a new concept around a specific theme. The rest of the workshop would be spent with participants designing and fabricating their concepts. Our goal is to allow participants to fabricate and program customized shape-changing artifacts. We aim to provide the required tools and materials for fabrication.

Expected Outcomes
Participants are encouraged to build prototypes within these categories: Haptic devices; shape-change garments; interactive toys; soft robots; kinetic installations. Alternatively, participants are welcome to situate the shape-change fabric in other interactive systems such as projection, sounds installations. We will provide necessary guidance to ensure each group will have a tangible result within the one day workshop.

Instructor

Jifei Ou
Jifei Ou is a designer, researcher and PhD candidate at the MIT Media Lab, where he focuses on designing and fabricating transformable materials across scales (from μm to m). He has been leading projects that study bio-inspired and bio-derived materials to design shape-changing packaging, garments and furniture.

Felix Heibeck
Felix Heibeck is a design engineer focused on physical interaction with digital computation. He is interested in ways to create physical and playful interactions with computation.

The Tangible Media Group@MIT Media Lab

The Tangible Media Group explores the Tangible Bits & Radical Atoms visions to seamlessly couple the dual world of bits and atoms by giving dynamic physical form to digital information and computation. Radical Atoms is the future material that can transform their shape, conform to constraints, and inform the users of their affordances. Radical Atoms is a vision for the future of human-material interaction, in which all digital information has a physical manifestation so that we can interact directly with it. We no longer think of designing the interface, but rather of the interface itself as material. We may call it “Material User Interface (MUI).”