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- 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.
- 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.
- Clarice Risseeuw
CLARICE RISSEEUW
PhD Candidate – Delft University of Technology, The Netherlands.
Supervisor
Dr. Holly McQuillan
Dr. Joana Martins
Clarice is a PhD candidate at the TU Delft, exploring the potential of flavobacteria’s living colour as responsive medium. She holds a bachelor’s degree in Industrial Design Engineering as well as a master’s degree in Integrated Product Design from the same university. During her studies in Delft and an exchange program at the NTNU, Norway, she was more and more attracted to bio design as it was the perfect way to combine her passions for design and nature. She started working with flavobacteria during her graduation project, in which she characterized, captured and communicated this organism’s vivid structural colourations. Afterwards, she joined Materials Experience Lab as a biodesign researcher of Caradt to continue her research. Still amazed by this beautiful microorganism, Clarice has now returned to the TU Delft as a PhD candidate, supervised by Prof. Dr. Elvin Karana, Dr. Holly McQuillan and Dr. Joana Martins.
Current Project
The PhD research focuses on exploring the potential of flavobacteria’s living colour as responsive medium. Bridging microbiology and design, we aim to take flavobacteria out of the lab and develop a living responsive material able to communicate through vivid colourations. Here we envision soft interfaces that can be activated by the user, offering unique possibilities for interaction design.
- 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.
- Raphael Kim
Raphael Kim
Postdoctoral researcher - Delft University of Technology, The Netherlands
Supervisors
Prof. Dr. Elvin Karana
Raphael is a postdoctoral researcher and designer engaged in critical explorations of bio-technology in the field of Human-Computer Interaction (HCI): Through making, growing, writing, and speculating, Raphael strives to continue unpacking the social and cultural implications of considering living agents – namely microbes and DNA – as computational materials for interaction.
Following his Master’s in Design Interactions from Royal College of Art in London, Raphael gained his PhD from Queen Mary University of London. His thesis (2020), titled Effects of Microbial Integration on Player Experiences of Hybrid Biological Digital Games, investigated ways in which distinct microbial materiality could be harnessed into design processes towards enhancing playful experiences of human-computer interaction. Outcomes of the research, along with his latest studies on viruses and DNA, have been published at major international academic venues (e.g., ACM CHI), where he plays an integral role in the growth of Biological-HCI and Microbe-HCI; an emerging set of communities with a special penchant (and curiosity) for artefacts with molecular, organic, microbial turns.
Raphael has previously taught at the Royal College of Art in London, serving as a visiting lecturer for MA. Design Interactions and MA. Innovation Design Engineering, delivering modules, workshops, and tutorials with special focus on biotechnology and biodesign. Utilizing his prior professional laboratory experience – which includes working as full-time research assistant for Roche Pharmaceuticals R&D (Switzerland), Okinawa Institute of Science and Technology (Japan), and Baum Lab at Imperial College (UK) – Raphael brings an added, first-hand biotechnological grounding and insight towards supporting and leading his design students.
Current Project
EVOLVING MATERIALITY OF DNA AND IMPLICATIONS FOR INTERACTION DESIGN
With advances in technology, storage of digital artefacts as DNA molecules is likely to become mainstream in the near future. Yet whilst the emerging technology is poised to address the environmental issues surrounding excess global data production, the social and cultural aspects of how we would use the technology remain largely unexplored.
This research project aims to address this gap, using material-focused approaches. It first acknowledges the fact that the mechanics of the emerging technology would shift our current material understandings of DNA: Not only is DNA a naturally occurring molecule that carry genetic information packaged within living cells, DNA can also be synthetic, a carrier of digital information, and embeddable within both the living and non-living artefacts. The qualitative research will unpack the new materiality of DNA in further detail, and identify its potential implications on how we might design and experience DNA artefacts.
Publications
Kim, R., Linehan, C., & Pschetz, L. (2022). Navigating Imaginaries of DNA-Based Digital Data Storage. In Proceedings of the 2022 CHI conference on human factors in computing systems (pp. 1-15). https://doi.org/10.1145/3491102.3501911
Kim, R., Pschetz, L., Linehan, C., Lee, C.H., & Poslad, S. (2021). Archives in DNA: Workshop Exploring Implications of an Emerging Bio-Digital Technology through Design Fiction. In Academic Mindtrek 2021 (pp. 1-4). https://doi.org/10.1145/3464327.3464966
Kim, R. (2021). Virus as Quasi-Living Bio-Material for Interaction Design: Practical, Ethical, and Philosophical Implications. In Extended Abstracts of the 2021 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (pp. 1-7). https://doi.org/10.1145/3411763.3451770
Kim, R., Pataranutaporn, P., Forman, J., Lee, S.A., Riedel-Kruse, I.H., Alistar, M., Vasquez, E.S.L., Vega, K., van Dierendonck, R., Gome, G., Zuckerman, O., Vujic, A., Kong, D.S., Maes, P., Ishii, H., Sra, M., & Poslad, S. (2021). Microbe-HCI: Introduction and direction for growth. In Extended Abstracts of the 2021 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (pp. 1-4). https://doi.org/10.1145/3411763.3450408
Välk, S., Chen, Y., Kalossaka, L., Kim, R., Mougenot, C., Pschetz, L., Ramirez-Figueroa, C., Sayuti, N.A.A., & Sommer, B. (2021, December). Narratives in Biodesign: Bridging Methods, Processes and Tools. IASDR Conference 2021. Hong Kong Polytechnic University.
Gough, P., Forman, J., Pataranutaporn, P., Hepburn, L-A., Ramirez-Figueroa, C., Cooper, C., Vujic, A., Kong, D.S., Kim, R., Maes, P., Ishii, H., Sra, M., & Ahmadpour, N. (2021). Speculating on biodesign in the future home. In Extended Abstracts of the 2021 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (pp. 1-5). https://doi.org/10.1145/3411763.3441353
Kim, R., Thomas, S., van Dierendonck, R., Bryan-Kinns, N., & Poslad, S. (2020). Working with nature's lag: Initial design lessons for slow biotic games. In International Conference on the Foundations of Digital Games (pp. 1-4). https://doi.org/10.1145/3402942.3409790
Kim, R., Thomas, S., van Dierendonck, R., Wood, C., & Poslad, S. (2020). Toward growable computer games: insights from biotic game ideation workshops. Interactions, 27(2), 82-85. https://doi.org/10.1145/3378563
Kim, R. (2020). DNA as digital data storage: Opportunities and challenges for HCI. In International Conference on Human-Computer Interaction (pp. 225-232). Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-60700-5_29
Kim, R., & Poslad, S. (2019). Growable, invisible, connected toys: twitching towards ubiquitous bacterial computing. In Proceedings of the Halfway to the Future Symposium 2019 (pp. 1-9). https://doi.org/10.1145/3363384.3363387
Kim, R., van Dierendonck, R., & Poslad, S. (2019). Moldy ghosts and yeasty invasions: Glitches in hybrid bio-digital games. In Extended Abstracts of the 2019 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (pp. 1-6). https://doi.org/10.1145/3290607.3312895
Kim, R., & Poslad, S. (2019). Augmentable experiences in hybrid biological digital games. Acoustic Space Journal, 17, 165-173.
Kim, R., & Poslad, S. (2019). The thing with E. coli: Highlighting opportunities and challenges of integrating bacteria in IoT and HCI. arXiv preprint arXiv:1910.01974. https://arxiv.org/abs/1910.01974
Kim, R., Thomas, S., van Dierendonck, R., Kaniadakis, A., & Poslad, S. (2018). Microbial integration on player experience of hybrid bio-digital games. In International Conference on Intelligent Technologies for Interactive Entertainment (pp. 148-159). Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-16447-8_15
Kim, R., Thomas, S., van Dierendonck, R., & Poslad, S. (2018). A new mould rush: Designing for a slow bio-digital game driven by living micro-organisms. In Proceedings of the 13th International Conference on the Foundations of Digital Games (pp. 1-9). https://doi.org/10.1145/3235765.3235798
Kim, R. (2015). Fungal indices. In C. Arozqueta, & R. Azaola (Eds.), Future mirrors (pp. 11-14). Modelab.
- 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?
- Davine Blauwhoff
Davine Blauwhoff
Researcher - Delft University of Technology, The Netherlands
Supervisor
In 2016 Davine Blauwhoff (26) graduated as an Industrial Designer from Delft University of Technology. Her previous studies include a bachelor program Industrial Design at the University of Technology Eindhoven and the propaedeutic year at the Design Academy Eindhoven. Apart from education, she enjoys various sports (field hockey and athletics) and expresses her creativity by making interior design products or cooking spectacular food!
Throughout the years of studying design, at different institutions, she developed a strong interest in materials. To her, materials are a source of inspiration and a way to express ideas. During her graduation she did a Material Driven Design project where Fungi (mycelium) was the point of departure. Of course this has to be one of her favorite materials! Slightly more conventional, she is very fond of wood (especially Olive wood) and finds ceramics very exciting to work with.
As a graduated industrial designer, Davine positions herself between design, materials and research and has a strong interest in innovation and sustainability. Throughout the design process she thoroughly analyzes, explores and experiments in a structured way. Preferring to visualize, shape and detail her ideas through prototyping, she can translate her creativity into something tangible. In her work she pays a lot of attention to aesthetics where both shape and material integrate to support its function and product interaction.
Currently Davine has two part-time occupations, which are both material driven: 1) Freelance design researcher at TU Delft on a project with waste fibers & bio-plastics (Recurf) and 2) Junior researcher at CoE BBE (Centre of Expertise Biobased Economy) working with mycelium for the building industry. Prior working experiences comprise an internship at Studio Kees, an industrial Design agency, and Materia, an online material library.
CURRENT PROJECT
RECURF
The residents of Amsterdam produce an average of 17kg of textile waste per person per year. Of this, only 16% is collected separately. The rest end up as residual waste and will be incinerated. Only apart of the separated gathered textile is suitable for reuse or high quality recycling. The combination of textile wastefibres and bio-based plastics produce new materials with unique properties. Together with clothing collection organization Sympany, the AUAS is doing research to the possibilities of making lasting products with the discarded textiles of the inhabitants of Amsterdam. But also companies as Starbucks and Schiphol airport have textile waste flows; a unique circular product and business model arises by processing these for example in furniture for their own shops or departure and arrival halls.
In this project, Materials Experience Lab Researcher, Davine Blauwhoff, explores the design potential of waste textile-PLA composite materials. Applying the Material Driven Design (MDD) method (link), Davine develops unique materials and product applications which bring the unique qualities of the material forward.
PUBLICATIONS
- Karana, E., Blauwhoff, D., Hultink, E. J., Camere, S. (in preparation, available upon request), When The Material Grows: A Case Of Material Driven Design
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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