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- Barbara Pollini
BARBARA POLLINI
Ph.D. Candidate - Politecnico di Milano, Department of Design, Italy
Supervisor
Since 2010 I have been dealing with sustainable design; specializing with a Master in Ecodesign and Eco-innovation, where I learned a life cycle design approach, and a Master's Degree in Computational Design, where I deepened the integration of biomimicry for the development of new materials, based on generative modelling and additive manufacturing.
Over the years, I have researched D4S from different perspectives: as a designer, educator and consultant, deepening in recent years the topic of sustainable materials (mainly circular, organic, waste-based and biofabricated ones), paying attention to both industrial production and self-production phenomena, such as DIY-Materials. Matter, and its management in the design process, are often crucial in the environmental impact of products and services; for the same reason, materials can become a turning point in innovation and sustainability for future productions. This is the case for materials made from and with living organisms, which are today the focus of my PhD research. With a transdisciplinary approach combining material design, biology and ecology, the study investigates how this new emerging materiality can be framed in the context of sustainable design. As a PhD candidate, I have been involved in the EU-funded project "MaDe: Material Designers. Boosting Talent towards Circular Economy". Currently, I'm involved in the research project "De_Forma: Design Explorations on bio-Fabricated Organic Materials" in Politecnico di Milano; I'm a Visiting PhD student at ITESO, Universidad Jesuita de Guadalajara, Mexico, collaborating with Materioteca ITESO and lecturing for the course of Circular Materials; I'm sharing my research path(s) on healing-meterialities.design, an online observatory where I'm making available tools, publications and expert interviews on biodesign and biofabricated materials.
Current Project
HEALING MATERIALITIES FROM A BIODESIGN PERSPECTIVE
My research focuses on those material scenarios based on the regenerative processes of resources instead of depletion. Including both living materials (made of and with living organisms) and life-enabling materials (inert materials welcoming and supporting life), this study develops in a context of multispecies design.
The research intersects the constantly evolving concept of sustainability, the material design discipline, and biodesign – the latter being a radical approach based on the integration of living organisms as functional components in the design process. The study originates from a transdisciplinary approach, adopted to understand the implications that living materials can have on sustainable design, aiming to define the boundaries of newly designed materialities where the final goal is to support life.
The conceptual framework deriving from this research is defined as Healing Materialities, highlighting the reconciling and repairing attitude of these materials, and framing them in a regenerative design perspective.
My research path is available via an online observatory where tools, publications, and interviews with experts are shared (beta version accessible here).
Publications
Pollini, B. (2021). Sustainable design, biomimicry and biomaterials: exploring interactivity, connectivity and smartness in Nature. Chapter in: Rognoli, V., Ferraro, V (Eds.), “ICS Materials: interactive, connected, and smart materials”, Franco Angeli, Milano. pp 60–73
Rognoli V., Ayala-Garcia C., Pollini B. (2021). DIY Recipes. Ingredients, Processes and Materials Qualities. Chapter in: Clèries L., Rognoli V., Solanki S. e Llorach P. (Eds.), “Material Designers. Boosting talent towards circular economies”, Elisava School of Design and Engineering, Barcelona.
Pollini B., Lavagna M., Rognoli V. (2020). LCA-based material selection in the early stages of design: environmental benefits, tools, obstacles and opportunities. IX Conference of the Italian LCA Network Association, Cortina d'Ampezzo (BL).
Pollini B., Pietroni L., Mascitti J., Paciotti D. (2020). Towards a new material culture. bio-inspired design, parametric modeling, material design, digital manufacture. In Perriccioli M., Rigillo M., Russo Ermolli S., Tucci F., Design in the Digital Age. Technology, Nature, Culture (pp. 208-212). Bologna: Politecnica University Press, Maggioli editore.
Rognoli V., Santulli C., Pollini B. (2017). DIY-Materials design as an invention process. DIID. Disegno industriale, Industrial Design, vol.62/63, pp.9-17, Rome.
Pollini B., Maccagnan F. (2017). Thinking with our hands. Materia Rinnovabile / Renewable Matter N°19, December2017/January2018, ISSN 2385-2240, edited by Edizioni Ambiente
- Prarthana Majumdar
Prarthana Majumdar
Ph.D. Candidate - Delft University of Technology, The Netherlands
Supervisors
Prarthana Majumdar is a PhD candidate in the department of Design Engineering at Delft University of Technology, the Netherlands.
Prarthana graduated as the highest performer in Mechanical Engineer from Indian Institute of Technology Guwahati (IIT) and later received her Masters Cum Laude from Stanford University, USA. She worked at Apple, Inc. for two years wherein she fell in love with good design. She has interned in the field of Sustainable Management for small scale handicraft industries in India. She has also been leading two projects for the development of portals that promote connectivity among students and alumni in IIT's.
Her areas of interest are: Materials, Innovation Strategy, Technology Do-it-yourself.
Project (2016-17)
DIY MATERIAL EXPERIENCES IN DELTAS
Her project as a PhD scholar focuses on promoting Do-it-Yourself material practices in the Base of the Pyramid, primarily India and Bangladesh. She focuses on Social Innovation and Materials Experience to understand how local eco-materials and recycled materials can be used for prosumption products in such developing countries. The project aims at bridging concepts and technologies like 3D printing and crowdsourcing to the realm of Design for Base of the Pyramid and contributing towards democratization of innovation and manufacturing in this segment that constitutes 70% of the global population.
PublicationS
- Majumdar, P., Karana, E., Ghazal, S., Sonneveld, M.H. (2017). The Plastic Bakery: A case of material driven design. In Alive. Active. Adaptive: Proceedings of International Conference on Experiential Knowledge and Emerging Materials (EKSIG 2017), June 19-20, Delft, the Netherlands, pp. 116-128.
Majumdar, P., & Banerjee, S. (2017). The Challenges to Sustainable Growth of the Micro Scale Kuhila Craft Industry in India (6th International Conference on Research and Design, iCoRD’17).
Majumdar, P., Ji, S., & Banerjee, S. (2017). Disconnect between Consumer Preferences of Young-Urban Buyers and the Value Proposition of the Rattan and Bamboo Furniture Industry in Assam (6th International Conference on Research and Design, iCoRD’17)
- Bahar Barati
BaharEH Barati
Ph.D. Candidate - Delft University of Technology, The Netherlands
Supervisors
Bahareh is currently working towards her Ph.D. degree on the topic of creative design with underdeveloped smart materials. In the context of Light.Touch.Matters, a European Union FP7 project (2013-2016), she has explored the situation of designing in “upstream” collaborative projects to enable “design-driven” material innovation. Her work acknowledges that looking at product design as an ad-hoc wrapping for some pre-determined material characteristics overshadows the importance of making and realizing in “negotiation with the material”. Giving power to this overlooked voice in discovering new possibilities with underdeveloped materials, her research put forward a number of theoretical and practical design supports (Hyperlink to the LTM design tool). The design supports particularly focus on characterizing and communicating the temporal and experiential aspects of these underdeveloped smart materials, as the development team explore the unique potentials of material-product development. Prior to this PhD research, Bahareh acquired her M.Sc. (cum laude) in Integrated Product Design from Technical University of Delft in 2012. In collaboration with Phillips Research (Eindhoven, the Netherlands), she developed a probe set for sensory evaluation of textile materials for her graduation project (Hyperlink to graduation project). In 2013, she was nominated for UfD-Royal HaskoningDHV Best Graduate Award. Bahareh is an alumnus of the University of Tehran and has maintained her contact with this university, through providing guidance and recently a workshop on interaction design (hyperlink to the news).
Current Project
DESIGNING WITH UNDERDEVELOPED SMART MATERIALS
February 2013 marked the start of Light.Touch.Matters, in which designers and material researchers joined forces to develop a completely new generation of smart materials that can sense touch and respond with luminescence. The base technologies are novel piezo plastics and flexible organic light-emitting diodes (OLEDs). Being thin, flexible and formable, these ‘light touch materials’ promise to revolutionize product design by integrating luminescence and touch in such a way that eventually the product becomes the interface (Project Link).
In this project, Bahareh’s reserach aims at supporting a more profound understanding of underdeveloped smart material composites and their potentials. To that aim, she developed functional demonstrators that instantiate the design space, physical probes that explicate the (material-related) design variables, and a hybrid tool that allows for higher fidelity experiences of these underdeveloped smart materials. Together these components constitute a design toolkit
Publications
Barati, B., Karana, E., Foole, M. (2017). Experience Prototyping’ Smart Material Composites. In Alive. Active. Adaptive: Proceedings of International Conference on Experiential Knowledge and Emerging Materials (EKSIG 2017), June 19-20, Delft, the Netherlands, pp. 50-65.
Barati, B., Karana, E., & Hekkert, P. (in review, available upon request). Understanding The Experiential Qualities of Light Touch Matters: Toward a Tool Kit. Journal of Artifact.
Jansen, K., Claus, S., Barati, B. (2017). Designing of a semi-transparent Electroluminescent Umbrella. In Proceedings of Smart System Integration.
Barati, B., Karana, E., Jansen, K., & Hekkert, P. (2016, February). Functional Demonstrators to Support Understanding of Smart Materials. In Proceedings of the TEI'16: Tenth International Conference on Tangible, Embedded, and Embodied Interaction (pp. 386-391). ACM.
Barati, B., Karana, E., & Hekkert, P., Jönsthövel, I. (2015, November). Designing with an Underdeveloped Computational Composite for Materials Experience. In Proceedings of EKSIG 2015: Experiential Knowledge Special Interest Group.
Barati, B., Karana, E, Hekkert, P. (2015, October). From Way Finding in the Dark to Interactive CPR Trainer: Designing with Computational Composites. In Proceedings of DesForm 2015.
- Barati, B., Karana, E., Sekulovski, D., & Pont, S. C. (2015). Retail lighting and textiles: Designing a lighting probe set. Lighting Research and Technology, 1-22.
Karana, E., Barati, B., Rognoli, V., & Zeeuw Van Der Laan, A. (2015). Material driven design (MDD): A method to design for material experiences. International journal of design, 19 (2) 2015.
- Holly Robbins
Holly Robbins
Ph.D. Candidate - Delft University of Technology, The Netherlands
Supervisors
Holly Robbins is a PhD candidate of Industrial Design at Delft University of Technology (The Netherlands) where she works at the intersection of social sciences, humanities, and design. Her work focuses on shaping relationships with data-intensive objects (those connected to the Internet and that collect data) that are based on reciprocity. Holly’s work explores how design approaches can express the im/materiality of these objects- where the materials of these technologies can be just outside our grasp such as code and algorithms. Specifically, she explores how traces can serve to support the relationship between people and the im/material qualities of these objects.
As a part of TU Delft’s ID Studio Lab and the Connected Everyday Lab, Holly uses a research through design approach. She collaborates closely with students, professional designers, and companies to put her conceptual and theoretical work into designed objects.
Current Project
DESIGN WITH (AND FOR) TRACES
As technologies become more and more complex, the tasks that they perform become masked in an effort to make them more usable. However, what’s lost with this masking is the ability to understand how they work and the role that they play in our lives. This is especially worrisome with connected objects that have the additional capabilities of harvesting data from people and for its connectivity to the Internet. This leads to overconsumption, disposability, and ethical concerns.
This research project is the PhD research of Holly Robbins and considers how we can change the relationship that we have with connected objects and people. It uses traces as a design approach to engage people in the task the technology performs as well as in situating the technology in our lives. Traces have the potential to communicate the relationship between person and object which occurs with both digital and physical materials. This has implications for ethics as well as sustainability.
Publications
- Robbins, H., Giaccardi, E., Karana, E. (2016). Traces as an Approach to Design for Focal Things and Practices. In Proceedings of NordiCHI’16: 11th Nordic Conference on Human-Computer Interaction. October 23 – 27, 2016, Gothenburg, Sweden. ACM, 2016.
- Robbins, Holly; Elisa Giaccardi; and Elvin Karana. “Politics of Impermanence: Traces of Use as a Design Strategy for Technologies.” Workshop: Things Fall Apart; Unpacking the Temporalities of Impermanence for HCI. NordiCHI’16: 11th Nordic Conference on Human-Computer Interaction. October 24, 2016, Gothenburg, Sweden. ACM, 2016.
- Robbins, Holly; Elisa Giaccardi; Elvin Karana; and Patrizia D’Olivo. (2015). “Understanding and Designing with (and for) Material Traces.” Studies in Material Thinking 13(01).
- Robbins, Holly; Elisa Giaccardi; and Elvin Karana. “De-Commodifying the Device: A Materialist Design Approach for Communication With and Through Connected Objects.” Workshop: The Future of Making: Where Industrial and Personal Fabrication Meet. Critical Alternatives 2015. Aarhus, Denmark. August 2015.
- Robbins, Holly. “Disrupting the Device Paradigm: Designing for Mutual Praxis in Connected Objects.” Participatory Innovation Conference 2015. The Hague, The Netherlands. May 2015.
- Giaccardi, Elisa; Elvin Karana; Holly Robbins; and Patrizia D’Olivo. (2014) “Growing traces on objects of daily use: A product design perspective for HCI.” Proceedings of the 2014 conference on Designing interactive systems. ACM, 2014.
- Anouk Zeeuw van der Laan
ANOUK ZEEUW VAN DER LAAN
Ph.D. Candidate - Dyson School of Design Engineering at Imperial College London
Supervisor
Dr. Marco Aurisicchio
Dr. Elvin Karana
Dr. Valentina Rognoli
Anouk is a PhD Candidate at the Dyson School of Design Engineering at Imperial College London. She received her BSc. and MSc. in Industrial Design Engineering at Delft University of Technology. Anouk developed an interest for materials and why materials that can last centuries, are often selected for disposable products used for minutes. Her MSc thesis was material-driven and aimed to investigate opportunities for the use of waste materials, such as waste coffee grounds [1]. After her graduation Anouk continued to work with a Material-Driven Design approach in the development of new materials in collaboration with Innventia. To better understand the mismatch of material lifetime and product lifetime, Anouk joined the Kraft Heinz Company to learn about materials in the fast-moving consumer goods industry. She worked in continuous improvement, packaging procurement and packaging R&D.
Publications
Karana E., Barati, B., Rognoli V., Zeeuw Van Der Laan, A., (2015). Material Driven Design (MDD): A Method To Design For Material Experiences. International Journal of Design, 9(2), 35-54.
Zeeuw van der Laan, A. and Aurisicchio, M. (2017) ‘Planned Obsolescence in the Circular Economy’, in PLATE conference 2017, pp. 446–452. doi: 10.3233/978-1-61499-820-4-446.
- Wasabii Ng
WASABII NG
PhD Candidate – Delft University of Technology, The Netherlands.
SUPERVISORS
Prof. Dr. Elvin Karana
Prof. Dr. Han Wosten
Prof. Valentina Rognoli
Wasabii Ng is a PhD candidate at the Faculty of Industrial Design Engineering.
Under the Materializing Futures Section, Wasabii explores the design potentials of mycelium-based materials, with a particular interest in tuning their experiential qualities through unusual techniques (such as sound), which offers immense possibilities for cleaner production and the design of novel responsive artefacts. Her research brings together research techniques from biology and design in a unique iterative manner. She works under the supervision of Prof. Elvin Karana, Prof. Han Wosten (Utrecht University) and Dr. Valentina Rognoli (PoliMi). Wasabii also has an affiliation with the Biobased Art and Design Group at the Avans University of Applied Sciences, guiding students and researchers on designing with mycelium-based materials.
Previously she graduated with a First-Class Honours BA in Textile Design at Chelsea College Of Art, University of the Arts London; and she holds a MA in Information Experience Design from the Royal College Of Art (RCA) London. Her work has been internationally exhibited and runs workshops for educational purposes. Her previous grants includes projects such as Cuddly Fungi (funding awarded Creative Stimulerings Fonds) and Another bite of the cherry (H2020-SC6-CO-CREATION-2016-3 Project number: 763784).
- Bruna Petreca
Dr. Bruna Petreca
Post Doc - Delft University of Technology, The Netherlands
Supervisors
Bruna is a Post-Doc design researcher and practitioner. She holds a BA in Fashion & Textiles (Universidade de São Paulo), and a PhD in Design Products from the Royal College of Art (funded by CNPq, Brazil). She is interested in our experience with materials, with a focus on textiles, and investigates how to support designers in exploring and expressing the multisensory aspects of this rich experience. Through her PhD research she has contributed an understanding of how textile selection happens in design through tacit processes and embodied aspects, and applied those insights to design a tool that supports designers’ embodied textile selection processes - ‘The sCrIPT Toolkit’. She is taking this research forward with a focus on factoring sensory, embodied and affective experience into the design of materials experience, physically and digitally. Having worked in a technology research institute for a number of years, she has gained experience in manufacture of textiles and apparel, quality control, and R&D projects. The dissemination of her work has occurred mainly through publications, participating in events relevant for the design and human-computer interaction communities, and through workshops and teaching in diverse institutions such as London College of Fashion, Royal College of Art, University of the Arts Bremen, Centro Universitário Belas Artes de São Paulo, etc. Her research occasionally extends to collaborations with designers and artist, presently collaborating with Projeto Co. Recently, Bruna has supported the Centro Universitário Belas Artes de São Paulo to structure and open their Design & Immersive Experiences Lab, as its supervisor.
Current Project
MULTI-SITUATED MATERIALS
With the notion of Multi-situated Materials (Karana, Giaccardi, Rognoli, in press), we suggest that if the materials of a product can enable an individual to resourcefully situate the product in multiple contexts and as part of multiple practices, the product will remain appropriate and will continue to generate value for a longer time. Take Soft Light by Simon Frambach as an example. It is a lamp that can be used for illumination, but it is unique and conspicuous for its soft nature. It is made of an elastomeric material. The use of this material involves unconventional practices of squeezing and pressing not usually associated to lighting items. This soft, pumpkin- shaped product produces soft light, but because of its ductility can also be used as a warm and pleasant pillow, or as a crevice-filling device to be placed between any object and a wall, or between two objects, without fearing that it will get broken or damaged. In designing multi-situated materials, the main challenge is to identify what the properties and qualities of such materials should be. In this project we will research into the qualities of materials, which enable them to be situated in multiple contexts as part of multiple practices in daily life.
Publications
Petreca, B., Saito, C., Yu, X., Bianchini-Berthouse, N., Brown, A., Cox, J., Glancy, M., Bauerley, S. (2017). Radically Relational: Using Textiles As A Platform ToDevelop Methods For Embodied Design Processes. In Alive. Active. Adaptive: Proceedings of International Conference on Experiential Knowledge and Emerging Materials (EKSIG 2017), June 19-20, Delft, the Netherlands, pp. 261-274.
Material is a Medium. It communicates ideas, beliefs, approaches; compels us to think, feel and act in certain ways; enables and enhances functionality and utility. Materials Experience emphasises this role of materials as being simultaneously technical and experiential.
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