Exploring Biofoam as a Material for Tangible Interaction

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ABSTRACT
Each new material developed opens a broader pallet of aesthetic and functional possibilities for designers. This paper introduces DIS to biofoam, a water-soluble, biodegradable material, and can be conductive. We describe the material in detail: the process of making the material from scratch, the material’s fabrication into forms with hand-craft techniques, and present two HCI-specific applications of the biofoam. The biofoam can be cooked, molded, layered, extruded, dissolved, or recooked, opening up possibilities to consider the entire material life cycle in the design process. We contribute design considerations to allow designers to “tune” the biofoam to the desired quality and characterize many aspects of the biofoam such as compression, spring back time, water permeability, and electrical conductivity. Finally, we discuss the unique opportunities this material and its life cycle bring to the design and HCI communities.

PUBLICATION
2020 – Eldy S. Lazaro Vasquez, Netta Ofer, Shanel Wu, Mary Etta West, Mirela Alistar, and Laura Devendorf. 2022. Exploring Biofoam as a Material for Tangible Interaction. In Proceedings of the 2022 ACM Designing Interactive Systems Conference (DIS ’22). Association for Computing Machinery, New York, NY, USA, 1525–1539. https://doi.org/10.1145/3532106.3533494

PDF – Video presentation


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Biofoam ingredients


DIS 2022: Video Presentation


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