The Interactive Materials lab presents Material Materials at this year’s festival. This exhibition dives deep into familiar physical objects and their potential for building future interactive artifacts — each questioning and expanding the notion of what is material. Overarching all the five interactive experiences, we challenge the conventional perspective and relationships between user, designer and object — dissolving the boundaries between these roles by exposing the materiality and mechanisms underlying their operations.
With this exhibition, we hope to prompt visitors to take a second look at the things around them — not as objects with fixed meanings, but as materials that possess untapped potential for new futures that everyone can participate in defining. In turn, we seek to critically question current modes of designing and producing interactive objects, and to provoke visitors to consider their role in shaping the interactive experiences that they are a part of every day.
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Flow
Bo Han (CN), Adam Choo (SG), Jared Lim (SG), Clement Zheng (SG)
Flow questions the inner workings of everyday devices, such as the camera, which it uses as an example. Four circuits each demonstrate a different way of manipulating electron flow to facilitate different transformations between interaction and image rendering.
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NECRO TROLL
Zhen Zhou Yong (SG), Clement Zheng (SG)
Delve into the swamps of Antara Muka, where danger and riches await in equal measure. In its depths lurks the dreadful NECRO TROLL, hoarding spoils that every adventurer must challenge for a chance at unimaginable treasure. But how do you begin?
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PaperTouch Wonder
Ye Qian (CN), Joshua Tan Jianhao (SG), Hannah Ang (SG), Clement Zheng (SG)
PaperTouch Wonder explores the intersection between the physical paper and digital touchscreen devices through three interactive dioramas. Paper and touchscreens meet and merge in unfamiliar ways in each installation, distorting our perspective of common elements like touch interactions and digital screens for new hybrid interfaces.
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Pneullaboration
E Ian Siew (SG), Clement Zheng (SG), Yen Ching Chiuan (TW)
Pneullaboration explores air as a shapeable material, with a focus on utilizing opposing pneumatic interfaces, inflation and vacuum. With a need for the audiences to participate through the three roles of inflator, vacuumer, and morpher, it invites audiences to collaborate to realize the sculptural and shape-changing properties of “physicalized” air.
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row ⨉ row
Sheryl Teng (SG), Vina Setiawaty (ID), Yu Yan Goh (SG), Clement Zheng (SG)
We are surrounded by technical devices with hidden inner workings having the ability to produce various types of content — text, imagery, audio, even synthetic data. What distinguishes maker and machine? row ⨉ row explores the relationship between us and fabrication processes in the post-industrialization age through knitting.
National University of Singapore, Interactive Materials Lab (SG)
Interactive Materials Lab is a research outfit located in the Division of Industrial Design at the National University of Singapore. The lab conducts design research with a focus on human-systems interaction, particularly material systems, to support physical interaction and experience design. Our practice aims to uncover new ways of blending physical media with tangible computing, along with probing the interactive materiality that such systems facilitate.
Credits
Curated by:
Clement Zheng
Assistant professor, Division of Industrial Design, National University of Singapore.
Qian Ye
Artist, Designer, PhD student, Division of Industrial Design, National University of Singapore.
Supported by: Division of Industrial Design, College of Design and Engineering & CUTE Center, Smart Systems Institute, National University of Singapore
National University of Singapore Startup Fund and MOE Tier 1 AcRF
