“DATA < > MATERIALS”
A two-day Hackathon dealing with Bio-based materials, digital manufacturing, speculative design and interactive artifacts following an experimental approach consisting of colorful hands-on activities.
Project Team: Andrea Torrone, Aurelie Glaser, Davide Minighin, Elena Ukolova, Leonardo Saletta.
Organized by Polifactory.
Introduced by a talk from Markus Holzbach, guest professor of Visualization and Materialization at the Offenbach University of Art and Design and head of the Institute for Materials Design, the hackathon challenged the participant students to experiment with bioplastics, sensors, and Arduino to produce interactive material prototypes able to sense and respond to data, starting from a vision of the future.
Stimulated by a set of speculative scenarios created through the InDATA Scraping Tool participants developed ideas of interactive products informed by data.
In a team of five product and interaction designers, we selected a scenario describing a future in which humans and society are perfect.
We started by problematizing and contextualizing possible materials in a social, environmental and ethical future dimension such as the one of "Perfect humanity"
The output of such considerations led us to think that even in the most developed society there will always be a part of people who will rebel to any definition of perfection.
Once decided to project for these people, the purpose was to think and envision potential applications of bio-polymers in such context.
We developed the concept of a mask able to hide the nodal points of the face, fooling facial recognition systems thanks to the properties of the polymer created and to the flashes produced by embedded LEDs activated automatically in situations of danger.
We studied the "ingredients" properties and the recipes to cook bio-polymers following a do-it-yourself approach.
The technology was embedded by programming sensors and actuators using Arduino so that the lighting generated by the LEDs would start only when activated manually or when the sound of the environment around would reach a very high level (people screaming)
The bio-mask worn by a rioter
In the process of materializing hybrid materials in the form of prototypes and experimental demonstrators we learned both the technological potentialities and the limitations of using bio-materials. The results is a responsive and material-based prototype able to react to external stimula or inputs, delivering a specific action.
Some bio-polymers samples produced during the Hackathon.
