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Living Matter Lab/Unstable Design Lab
Exploring biofoam as a Material for Tangible Interaction, authored by Eldy S. Lazaro Vasquez, Netta Ofer, Shanel Wu, Mary Etta West, Mirela Alistar and Laura Devendorf ÌıintroducedÌıthe DIS audience to biofoam, a water soluble and biodegradable material thatÌıcan be made conductive.
During the DIS‘22 Multisensory Design session, lead author, Lazaro, an ATLAS PhD student, presented the team's biofoam research and demonstratedÌıthe unique opportunities the material brings to HCI communities. ÌıVasquez described the material in detail, including the process of making biofoam from scratch and fabricating the materialÌıinto forms with handcraft techniques. She also presented two HCI-specific applications of biofoam and demonstratedÌıthe different life cycles of the material, all of which can be considered in the design process;Ìıbiofoam can be cooked, molded, layered, extruded, dissolved andÌırecooked.
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Publication
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 Designing Interactive Systems Conference (DIS ’22), Association for Computing Machinery, New York, NY, USA, 1525-1529. (June 13-17, 2022—Virtual Event, Australia).Ìı