Designing with Concrete For Enhancing Everyday Interactions

Abstract

Concrete is a composite material that has mostly been used for buildings and road surfaces since early human history. It is also applied to contemporary product design, as it has rather interesting aesthetic properties. In this late-breaking work, we present a series of small-scale explorations of concrete: first in which we exploited its hydroscopicity to create an ephemeral and dynamic display, and second, where we conducted a tangible interface design to showcase the material's unique surface textures. By applying craft-based methodology to this project, we investigated the ways in which fabricating this material with digital technologies provides innovations within the HCI community. Most importantly, we attempted to discover fabrication techniques that facilitate artistic experiences and interactions with concrete without sacrificing its existing properties.

Full text

Designing with Concrete
For Enhancing Everyday Interactions
Abstract
Concrete is a composite material that has mostly been
used for buildings and road surfaces since early human
history. It is also applied to contemporary product
design, as it has rather interesting aesthetic properties.
In this late-breaking work, we present a series of
small-scale explorations of concrete: first in which we
exploited its hydroscopicity to create an ephemeral and
dynamic display, and second, where we conducted a
tangible interface design to showcase the material’s
unique surface textures. By applying craft-based
methodology to this project, we investigated the ways
in which fabricating this material with digital
technologies provides innovations within the HCI
community. Most importantly, we attempted to
discover fabrication techniques that facilitate artistic
experiences and interactions with concrete without
sacrificing its existing properties.
Author Keywords
Concrete; craft practice; digital technologies; material
properties; experience; interaction design; Human-
Computer Interaction.
ACM Classification Keywords
H.5.m. Information interfaces and presentation (e.g.,
HCI): Miscellaneous;
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Copyright is held by the author/owner(s).
CHI'16 Extended Abstracts, May 7–12, 2016, San Jose, CA, USA.
ACM 978-1-4503-4082-3 /16/05.
http://dx.doi.org/10.1145/2851581.2892372
Yanan Wang
Zhejiang University
NO.38 Zheda Rd,
Hangzhou, China
wangyanan1120@gmail.com
Shuai Liu
Zhejiang University
NO.38, Zheda Rd,
Hangzhou, China
syk920228@126.com
Yujia Lu
Zhejiang University
NO.38, Zheda Rd,
Hangzhou, China
279209562@qq.com
Jun Duan
CUMT
NO.1 University Rd,
Xuzhou, China
dj.leo.leo@gmail.com
Cheng Yao
Zhejiang University
NO.38, Zheda Rd,
Hangzhou, China
yaoch@zju.edu.cn
Fangtian Ying
Zhejiang University
NO.38, Zheda Rd,
Hangzhou, China
yingft@gmail.com
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Introduction
Concrete is a composite material composed of sand,
gravel, and water mixed with cement which hardens
over time. Favored for its robust and rigid qualities,
concrete has been commonly used throughout a
lengthy period of human history to create large-scale
installations such as buildings and road surfaces.
Additionally, its particular aesthetics (e.g., grey color,
unique textures, coldness) and craft properties make it
attractive to product designers and artists [1,15],
especially within DIY communities. Designers can
fabricate concrete with supplementary material (e.g.,
silicon, resin, optical fiber) to change its existing
properties for various purposes, as well.
Material engineers have developed different types of
concrete to enhance certain properties such as
hydroscopicity and self-repairing capability. Recent
advancements in material science have allowed
designers and architects to define changeable and
responsive properties of resources such as concrete.
Marin Philippe, for example, designed and fabricated a
fascinating, interactive concrete surface [9]. Chronos
Chromos Concrete, another innovative example, has
the properties of ordinary concrete while being able to
dynamically display text or other patterns through color
change when embedded with thermodynamic ink and
computational materials [17]. For being such a rich
material that is so ubiquitous in our environment,
however, concrete remains largely unexplored in terms
of interaction and the HCI community.
With concrete as an entry point, there are several
questions to be further explored, the most important,
perhaps, is: what roles will concrete play and how can it
gain new value in designing interactive systems beyond its
present domain? What will happen exactly if physical
concrete becomes smarter, or is endowed with new
behaviors and functions? In this study, we attempted to
address the issues summarized below by exploring future
possibilities for concrete within HCI:
§ Concrete has notable intrinsic properties such as
hygroscopicity and permeability. What happens if we
combine these characteristics with computational
technologies? Further, what can we envision for
when humans interact with the material and these
technologies?
§ Different proportions of ingredients form distinct
concrete surface textures. What happens if we utilize
these aspects to give varying materials personal
identifiers? How does this affect the ways they are
experienced, touched, and utilized aesthetically?
In this late-breaking work, we conducted a series of
small-scale explorations of concrete through two
prototypes: one first designed to exploit the material’s
hydroscopicity to create an ephemeral and dynamic
display, and a second that exploited its unique surface
textures to create a tangible interface design. We
focused especially on investigating the ways that
concrete can enhance meaningful interactions and the
experiences its unique properties can facilitate when
fabricated with digital technologies – in short, the way
concrete may apply to interaction design and HCI in the
future.
Related Work
Materials have become more and more complex in the
HCI field, and material design has created new
possibilities for interaction; they are increasingly
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entangled with users’ social experiences, as such [2, 4].
An increasing number of HCI researchers [6, 13, 18]
have begun to use materiality to characterize different
design potentials and constraints.
As Ezio Manzini states in the first sentence of his book,
The Material of Invention, ”Every object made by man
is the embodiment of what is at once thinkable and
possible” [8] – in other words, problems related to
materials are critical to effective design. Designers
must carefully hone their understanding of the
materials at hand in order to shape new expressions
and design possibilities by exploiting their unique
properties. There have been many remarkable studies
published on this subject – Vallga!rda and Redstro!m
asserted that material properties, as they relate to
technology, represent different entry points to
innovations in exploratory interaction design [17]. Ishii
and Ullmer created tangible interactions by fabricating
graspable “bits” [7], following with other researchers
[e.g., 11, 12, 14]. Giaccardi and Karana found that the
properties, embodiments, and arrangements of
materials could be not only experienced, but performed
[5].
Craft practice has been a popular topic in design
research in the last two decades especially, as craft
represents both the subject and the vehicle for
theoretical inquiry [10]. Craft practice also already is
well-recognized as a logical extension of interaction [3].
Tsaknaki et al., for example, used traditional leather
craft to provide new types of exploratory and
interactive design experiences [16]. In this late-
breaking work, we attempted to create similar
interactive design experiences with concrete by
experimenting with two prototypes, each demonstrates
a different concrete-based interaction design.
Prototypes
The following provides detailed explanations of the two
prototypes, including their distinct properties, how they
work, how they were crafted, how they were tested,
and reflections on how the material properties
benefited from being fabricated via digital technologies.
Each prototype was designed to be fun and open-ended
to encourage individuals to experience, explore, and
interact with it.
Water Shadow: We know that people enjoy playing
hand shadow games when exposed to a strong light
environment. We thought, what if we can take
advantage of certain properties of concrete (e.g.,
hydroscopicity and permeability) and merge them with
digital technologies to create a shadow puppet game
with new or no limitations on the users, and what
different experiences it will bring into our everyday
lives?
Figure 1: Water Shadow system containing concrete slab
which displays different graphics based on different hand
gestures.
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Water Shadow was designed as a dynamic, playful
concrete display system (Figure 1). The display works
by exploiting the fact that concrete darkens when wet
to create a natural color-changing (i.e., shadow)
interface in the material, which automatically
disappears after a brief period of time. Water Shadow
contained no extra coloring, as opposed to Chronos
Chromos Concrete, but instead created color changes
with plain water. We crafted several concrete slabs and
drilled arrays of holes into the back of each, then
conducted several experiments to test the
hydroscopicity and permeability of the concrete (Figure
2) to determine the appropriate amounts of water and
timeframes for water traces to appear/disappear until
finally determining the ideal way to display the shadows
(Figure 3).
Figure 3: System description about Water Shadow: camera
for input information from user hand gestures, concrete slab
for displaying dynamic information, tank for storing water, and
microcontroller to control water current.
Water went through a series of pipes to the concrete
slab, and the current was cut off or increased by
altering the flow through the pipes. Different patterns
of water traces showed in the front of concrete slab,
then disappeared. The hygroscopicity of the concrete
created a “slow motion” shadowplay process, which
allows the user to focus on interacting with the material
instead of any limitations on the game itself – in this
way, the user experiences the aesthetic properties of
concrete. As all the controlling system processed
mechanically back off the concrete slab, it would result
in increased curiosity, examination and repeating play.
Altogether, we found that combining digital
technologies with concrete craft – specifically, by
exploiting the material’s hydroscopicity – facilitated
entertaining and innovative artistic experiences.
Live Cube: Again, concrete is a composite material
and its components can be customized to create
varying surface textures. We were curious to
investigate the tactile qualities of these textures, and to
know whether they can make sounds or different
vibration frequencies – further, if we give “personality”
to a material such as concrete in this way, what
emotions or experiences could it create?
Live Cube is a series of three concrete sections each
made of different ingredients, and thus each with a
particular surface texture. In this prototype, we
conducted an informal interview to these three different
cubic concrete with questions like: If the object were a
person, what kind of person would it be? And would it
have any personality? As one participant said: “the
smooth one looks like one pretty lady with a fine voice”,
or “the roughest one seems like a man with rugged
face”. We noticed that participants tended to touch the
(a) craft concrete
(b) punch concrete slab in arrays
for water seepage
(c) convey water through pipes
(d) exhibit information
Figure 2: crafting process of
concrete and experiment tests
about hydroscopicity and
permeability
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surfaces repeatedly to really experience the roughness
of each concrete sample. Next, we took the information
from the tactile experiment to design different tones
and vibration frequencies for the concrete cube
structure; we added an Arduino-controlled platform
with one camera, three vibration components, and an
audio output device all connected by conductive ink
painted on paper connected to the cube (Figure 5).
Figure 5: Live Cube elicits dynamic vibration and tones
through the ‘touching’ behaviors, controlled by an arduino-
controlled platform.
We used a camera attached to each of the different
surface textures to obtain the black-white images
shown in Figure 4. When touched, Live Cube elicits a
corresponding tone and vibration feedback – the
smoother area vibrates weakly and sounds a smooth,
high tone, while the rougher area vibrates strongly and
emits a low, deep tone when touched.
Concrete is generally considered as a quiet, cold,
cumbersome, and even lifeless material as individuals
interact with it daily. Through Live Cube, people could
touch concrete’s surface, feel their unique textures and
various vibration frequencies, and listen to their
different ‘voices’. In this design, each cubic concrete
was given a personal identifier, and elicited a particular
and joyful emotional experience to the users, which
enticed users to touch the surfaces again and again.
Through this design, we can also find the ‘hidden’
qualities of concrete, which are not been noticed for a
long time.
Conclusion and Future Work
Through exploring the two prototypes, we tend to
demonstrate that applying craft practice into our
studies is quite useful and appropriate, especially when
enhancing concrete interactions within HCI community
and interaction design field. In this work, we articulate
concrete crafted as a material, merging with
computational technologies, can provide a great
potential for providing new types of interactions, and
most importantly enhancing meaningful user
experiences without losing its existing properties. Each
prototype illustrates the detailed techniques and
methods applied, and find that exploring new ways to
think and tinker with this ubiquitous medium brings
new possibilities into future research.
Moving forward, we plan to pursue other various
techniques for crafting of concrete, as well as to
identify new functional and aesthetic properties of the
material. We plan to design live dynamic data displays
and other interactive systems and continue user-testing
them to evaluate our design concepts for further
reflections. Though our results can extend into other
types of craft materials and design techniques, we
believe that exploring new ways to design, redesign,
and fine-tune such a ubiquitous medium as concrete
represents exciting possibilities, not limited in its
(a) cubic concrete made with
different ingredients in silicon
mold
(b) three cubic concrete samples
(c) black-white image
Figure 4: crafting cubic concrete
with different surface textures
and with corresponding digital
images.
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present domain, deserving to be explored through
various ways within HCI in this digital age.
Acknowledgements
The authors would like to thank all the reviewers for
their helpful critiques and the participants for sharing
their opinions. This project was supported by the Key
Program of the National Natural Science Foundation of
China under grant 61332017, the National Key
Technology Research and Development Program of the
Ministry of Science and Technology of China under
grant 2015BAF14B00, and the Nonprofit Applied
Technology Research Project of Zhejiang Province
under grant 2014C31047.
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