Abstract
The control of material appearance has become richer than before, giving designers new expressive freedom. Designers need tools and techniques to handle this freedom when designing products. We present a simple but powerful technique to explore material expression in the conceptual phase of the design process. Colours and patterns are projected on foam and paper models to enable designers to quickly visualise and judge materials in context of the products shape.





Similar content being viewed by others
References
Stappers PJ (2005) Creative connections: user, designers, context, and tools. J Pers Ubiquitous Comput (this issue)
Zijlstra E (2002) Future materials for architecture & design. Materia, Rotterdam
Keller AI, Stappers PJ, Hoeben A (2000) TRI: inspiration support for a design studio environment. Int J Des Comput 3:1–17
Piper B, Ratti C, Ishii H (2002) Illuminating clay: a 3-D tangible interface for landscape analysis. In: Proceedings of CHI’2000, pp 355–362
Raskar R, Welch G, Low K, Bandyopadhyay D (2001) Shader lamps. In: Eurographics workshop on rendering, London
Verlinden JC, de Smit A, Peeters AWJ, van Gelderen MH (2003) Development of a flexible augmented prototyping system. J WSCG 11(1):496–503
Matkovic K, Psik T, Wagner I, Gracanin D. Dynamic texturing of real objects in an augmented reality system, Technical report vrvis. http://www.vrvis.at/TR/2004/TR_VRVis_2004_034_Full.pdf
Fitzmaurice G, Ishiii H, Buxton W (1995) Bricks: laying the foundations of graspable user interfaces. In: CHI’1995, pp 442–449
Acknowledgements
I would like to thank Jouke Verlinden for his feedback, Edwin Branbergen and Inge van Bruinessen who helped to build and test the prototypes.
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Corresponding author
Additional information
This paper is part of the 3AD design colloquium creative connections.
Rights and permissions
About this article
Cite this article
Saakes, D. Material light: exploring expressive materials. Pers Ubiquit Comput 10, 144–147 (2006). https://doi.org/10.1007/s00779-005-0021-z
Received:
Accepted:
Published:
Issue Date:
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s00779-005-0021-z