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- Serena Camere
Dr. Serena Camere
Post Doc - Delft University of Technology, The Netherlands
Supervisor
Serena Camere is a multidisciplinary industrial designer and Post-Doc researcher working with bio-based Emerging Materials. In the research project “Growing Design”, she deals with materials grown from living organisms, such as fungi and bacteria.
Serena concluded the PhD (cum laude) in March 2016 with a thesis titled “Experience (Virtual) Prototyping”, which explored the potential of new CAD/CAM technologies for experience-driven multisensory design. Within this research, she developed methods and tools for designers, to assist them during the use of these technologies for experience-driven design. During her MSc. in Milan, she matured a deep interest for materials that evolved into her graduation project, ‘Segni in Superficie/Timelapse’, which was awarded with honors at the Politecnico di Milano and the Honorable Mention of Lucky Strike Talented Design Award 2013. For this project, Serena collaborated with Serralunga design company to research new expressive qualities of plastics, developing a technique to make plastics age gracefully.
After the PhD, her research naturally evolved towards the Experiential Characterization of Materials, coupling her interest for materials with the research skills developed during the PhD. In the STW-funded project “Mycelium-based materials for product design”, she is in charge of conducting a series of characterization studies (both on a technical and experiential level) to assess the material’s properties. The results of these studies will be then used to stimulate the further development of the material and its embodiment in products.
During her career, Serena has been constantly seeking for opportunities to merge design practice and design research. This has led her to engage in several design contests and projects, in parallel to the academic career. In the past, Serena has collaborated with design studios and design companies, such as Skitch, Serralunga, Alessi, Woodnotes, Camparisoda, Eurochocolate, Design Innovation and Fiat-Chrysler.
PROJECT (2016-2017)
GROWING DESIGN
One of the challenges of this century is to transform our current economy into an eco-friendly and self-sustaining system. An innovative approach is the use of mycelium for the development of materials. Mycelium is an interwoven network of fungal filamentous cells called hyphae. Fungi form these mycelia on a wide variety of organic substrates. Mushroom forming fungi are known for their efficient colonization of ligno-cellulosic substrates like wood and straw. In this project, we aim to develop a palette of mycelium-based composite materials with different physical properties ranging from elastic to rigid, water-absorbing to water-repellent, and porous to compact. The MELAB Post Doc researcher, Serena Camere, explores how mycelium based materials are experienced in products. The results of the research support further development of the material.
Publications
- Camere, S., Karana, E. (2017). Growing Materials for Product Design. In Alive. Active. Adaptive: Proceedings of International Conference on Experiential Knowledge and Emerging Materials (EKSIG 2017), June 19-20, Delft, the Netherlands, pp. 101-115.
Karana, E., Blauwhoff, D., Hultink, E. J., Camere, S. (in preparation, available upon request), When The Material Grows: A Case Of Material Driven Design
Camere, S., Schifferstein, H.N.J. & Bordegoni, M. (2016). Materializing experiential visions into sensory properties. The use of the Experience Map. In Proceedings of Design and Emotion 2016, September 27-30 (pp.201-210) (Best Paper Award)
Camere, S. (2016). Experience (Virtual) Prototyping. The use of virtual technologies to support experience-driven design process (Doctoral dissertation, Politecnico di Milano, Italy).
Camere, S., & Bordegoni, M. (2016). A lens on future products: an Expanded notion of prototyping practice. In Proceedings of DESIGN2016, Dubrovnik, Croatia, May 16-19.
Camere, S., & Bordegoni, M. (2016). Unfolding the notion of Experience (Virtual) Prototyping: A Framework for Prototyping in an Experience-Driven Design Process. Journal of Integrated Design and Process Science, 20(2), 17-30.
Caruso, G., Camere, S., & Bordegoni, M. (2016). System based on abstract prototyping and motion capture to support car interior design. Computer-Aided Design and Applications, 13(2), 228-235.
Bordegoni, M., Camere, S., Caruso, G., & Cugini, U. (2015). Body tracking as a generative tool for experience design. In International Conference on Digital Human Modeling and Applications in Health, Safety, Ergonomics and Risk Management (pp. 122-133). Springer International Publishing.
Camere, S., & Bordegoni, M. (2015). A strategy to support experience design process: the principle of accordance. Theoretical Issues in Ergonomics Science, 16(4), 347-365.
Camere, S., Caruso, G., Bordegoni, M., Di Bartolo, C., Mauri, D., & Pisino, E. (2015). Form follows data: a method to support concept generation coupling experience design with motion capture. In DS 80-5 Proceedings of the 20th International Conference on Engineering Design (ICED 15) Vol 5: Design Methods and Tools-Part 1, Milan, Italy, 27-30.07. 15.
Camere, S., Schifferstein, H. N., & Bordegoni, M. (2015). The experience map. A tool to support experience-driven multisensory design. In Proceedings of DesForm 2015 (pp.147-155), 13-17 October, Politecnico di Milano, Italy.
Camere, S., & Bordegoni, M. (2014). The Role of the Designer in the Affective Design Process: the Principle of Accordance. In Proceedings of the 5th Conference on Applied Human Factors and Engineering (pp. 66-77).
- Gatti, E., Bordegoni, M., & Camere, S. (2014). Experiences and Senses: An experimental based methodology for design optimization. In Proceedings of 9th International Conference on Design & Emotion (pp.340-348), October 8-10, Bogota, Colombia.
- Jose Martinez Castro
Jose Martinez Castro
Researcher – Delft University of Technology, The Netherlands.
SUPERVISORS
Prof. Dr. Elvin Karana
Jose is a researcher at TU Delft, Faculty of Industrial Design Engineering. Throughout his studies, he has been passionate on exploring the intersection between biology, engineering, and design. In 2019, he obtained a Bachelor's Degree in Mechanical Engineering from the University of British Columbia (Canada) where he specialized in Biomedical Engineering. During his Bachelor's degree, Jose interned at numerous companies and research labs ranging from developing accessible surgical equipment to conducting sports fabric aerodynamic testing for clients such as Nike and Sugoi.
He continued his studies at TU Delft in the Master's Program of Integrated Product Design. During his Master's, Jose became interested in combining computational design with biological/bioinspired systems to develop unique material experiences. In 2021, he presented his thesis with the Materials Experience Lab on using material driven design (MDD) with computational tools to create Tex(alive), an animated textile toolkit to aid designers in exploring the material experience of livingness in shape-changing interfaces.
Currently, Jose continues his research with the Materials Experience Lab where he supports ongoing research with emerging and living materials by incorporating computational design and digital visualization techniques.
Current Project
COLOURED BY FLAVO
Flavo bacteria's structural color and responsiveness to its environment presents a unique interactive medium. Designing with such living organisms presents new challenges when its temporality and surrounding conditions lead to variable expressions by the organism. Jose's role is to utilize the ongoing characterization research of Flavo Bacteria to develop and envision a future digital tool that can aid biodesigners in understanding and designing with these living organisms.
Publications
Esfandiari, H., Martinez, J., Gonzalez Alvarez, A., Street, J., Anglin, C., & Hodgson, A. J. (2017). An automated, robust and closed form mini-RSA system for intraoperative C-arm calibration. International Journal of Computer Assisted Radiology and Surgery, 12, S37-S38.
- Elvin Karana
Prof. DR. Elvin Karana
Professor - Delft University of Technology
Co-Founder and Co-Head of Materials Experience Lab - The Netherlands
Elvin Karana is Professor of Materials Innovation and Design in the Faculty of Industrial Design Engineering at Delft University of Technology. Giving emphasis to materials’ role in design as experiential and yet deeply rooted in their inherent properties, Elvin explores and navigates the productive shifts between materials science and design for materials and product development in synergy. Over the last years she developed theories, tools and methods to enable the understanding of materials experience actionable in material-driven design practice. In 2015, she co-founded the international research group Materials Experience Lab with Valentina Rognoli (Politecnico di Milano). Elvin has over 80 scientific publications in peer reviewed journals and conferences. She is the main editor of Materials Experience: Fundamentals of Materials and Design (Elsevier, 2014). In 2019, she founded the creative biodesign research lab Material Incubator, that aims at designing materials that incorporate living organisms, and exploring their potential in fostering an alternative notion of the everyday. Material Incubator brings together researchers and practitioners from Avans University of Applied Sciences and Delft University of Technology.
- Shahar Livne
SHAHAR LIVNE
Designer in residence
SUPERVISOR
Shahar Livne (1989) is an Israeli-born designer located in Eindhoven, The Netherlands. Her lifelong fascinations in nature, biology, science and more developed into intuitive material experimentation way of work during her bachelor studies at the Design Academy Eindhoven. Since 2014, Shahar’s body of work focuses on material research and her work process is characterized by trial and error experimentation in the search for interesting results. Some of her projects deal with obscure materials such as animals blood, man-made fossils, crystallization and more. Her projects starting points are often stories about places, cultures and everyday life, yet, materials are always in the center used as carriers of narratives. Shahar Sees herself as a conceptual material designer with an intuitive and research approach that materializes through written research and expressive objects compositions. currently, she works on developing her graduation projects from the Design Academy Eindhoven where she graduated at in 2017, investigating speculative material occurrences in nature.
Project (2018)
IN COLLABORATION WITH THE MATERIALS EXPERIENCE LAB
Environmental changes, deforestation and the spread of man-made pollutants are inevitably threatening the existence of natural materials and transforming nature as we know it. At the same time, new natural materials which are the result of environmental contamination are emerging, and man-made materials such as plastic are proliferating in our surroundings.
Investigating a post-plastic future, where the only place to extract petroleum-based plastics will be from nature in a new hybrid form, plastics will regain a new value, far beyond the way we see it in our current time.
By creating and developing Lithoplast- a speculative material which might be the result of thousands of years of natural metabolism and its encounter with the "golden spike" of humanity- plastics, Shahar embodies and research questions with this new raw material that can be processed in a similar way to clay and is acting as an ultimate symbol of the transformation of matter and the inevitable shifts of materials between nature, synthetic and cultural aspects.
In this project, Shahar would like to use the MDD method to explore whether Lithoplast is experienced as natural or synthetic and how she can systematically tailor its qualities to enhance or worsen the experience of naturalness through craftsmanship and design objects. - Jiwei Zhou
JIWEI ZHOU
PhD Candidate - Delft University of Technology, The Netherlands
Instagram: @jiwei_zhou_ @the_tea_recipes
SUPERVISORS
Prof. Dr. Elvin Karana
Prof. Dr. Elisa Giaccardi
Dr. Zjenja Doubrovski
Jiwei graduated from Tongji University in Shanghai with Bachelor of Engineer in Industrial Design. She then completed “Design for Interaction” master track and obtained Master of Science at Delft University of Technology. Throughout her growth towards a designer and a design researcher she has been fascinated with materials and their relationships with people. Her bachelor thesis developed a clay-like material from tea waste from the tea industry in her hometown Sichuan in China. In her master thesis, in collaboration with Diana Scherer - who developed Interwoven textile grown from plant roots, she explored the potential of digital bio-fabrication with plant roots in weaving three dimensional artefacts (supervised by Elvin Karana and Jun Wu). As a designer she aims to create things that bring new perspectives and inspirations to both people and our society.Jiwei’s design practices usually departure from novel materials, with a special focus on emerging experiences and social implications they bring to human society. Her main research fields are bio-based materials, “growing design” and “living artefacts”.
Current Project
“HABITALITIES” WITH LIVING ARTEFACTS
As a PhD candidate at the Materials Experience Lab of Delft University of Technology, she studies "habitabilities of living artefacts". To raise critical questions about our social relationship with living materials, her current design practice investigates mediums and ways to augment the expressions of well-being of photosynthetic micro-organisms that are in a mutualistic relationship with humans, thus promoting "habitabilities" for both humans and our living cohabitants.
- 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
- Roya Aghighi
ROYA AGHIGHI
Designer in residence
SUPERVISOR
Roya is a multidisciplinary designer holding two industrial design degrees from Emily Carr University of Art and Design, Canada and Iran University of Science and Technology. Through her practice she aims to highlight the critical role of design in shaping human behaviours. Being a multidisciplinary designer, she activates the gap between various fields and aims to push the borders between traditional academic disciplines to explore and introduce alternative future possibilities.
She has been exploring with materials as the fundamental element to re-imagine the role of designer as well as shifting the emphasis from product to process. She believes that focusing on materials could shape a new way to experience the world and how we position ourselves within it. Roya has been one of the material activist designers-collaborating with material engineers, scientists and biologists at University of British Colombia for past years to activate bio-design practices in Canada. She was speaker, Panelist and her work was presented in various exhibitions and conferences such as: Fashion Colloquium-Arnhem Netherlands 2018, Vancouver Design Week-2018, Pollima Material Revolution-Los Angles 2018, Bioneers conference-Los Angles 2018. Roya currently is a designer in residence at Material Experience Lab working on application of living textiles in design practice and researching its impact on human interactions with clothing.
CURRENT Project
IN COLLABORATION WITH THE MATERIALS EXPERIENCE LAB
The adoption of fast fashion has had disruptive effects on environmental, social and behavioural factors globally. The drastic increase to the environmental impacts of textile waste and fast fashion consumption urgently need to be addressed. The fundamentals of our global/economic fashion industry need to be restructured beginning with the destructive nature of our current mainstream relationship to clothing. This dynamic has significant consequences. Fashion consumption has become a passive act, and we no longer care for the longevity of our clothing. Clothing is often disposed long before it reaches its expected life. The negative impacts of textile and fashion industry from environmental aspects are far greater than what it could be seen on the surface. From the 500,000 toxic nano-fibres that are released into water every time we wash our clothes, to the enormous carbon emissions emitted through both the production and disposal of our clothing, fashion has become a compromise that comes at a huge human, social, and environmental cost. What if clothes were alive and photosynthesized?
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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