SKIRIM: Self-actuated Kinetic Interaction with Rich Interactive Materials

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Before the smart home, the only thing at home that would suddenly move by itself was the toaster. Today, smart blinds close themselves, and dishwashers open their doors. These kinds of shape change, however, are designed based on technical considerations, and often alien to the home environment. Instead, SKIRIM explores how soft shape-changing materials can create effective, yet unobtrusive user interfaces that blend naturally into the everyday home. SKIRIM thus takes the next step of blending digital and physical environments in the home, moving from passive interactive everyday surfaces to soft, actively shape-changing interfaces that dynamically alter their physical form. Shape-changing materials are fundamentally available, but interaction techniques, models of their effect on humans, design tools, fabrication processes, and UI design guidelines are still severely lacking—especially in soft shape-changing SKIRIM interfaces, which we focus on because of their fit to the home environment. To achieve this, we study in what smart home scenarios such interfaces make sense, develop predictive models of the effect of SKIRIM interface parameters (like speed of change) on users, explore new digital fabrication approaches, and conceptualize, prototype, and evaluate tools for professionals and end users designing and customizing SKIRIM interfaces. We thus combine fundamental research methods with research through design and the user-centered approach of modern HCI. Our work packages are designed to deeply integrate the work from our three labs. Therefore, each WP exhibits a similar research-driven methodological approach, but focusing on more and more complex challenges of SKIRIM interfaces, from their individual building blocks, to combining blocks into UIs, to merging them with real-world materials at home and beyond. Along this path, our focus shifts from professionals to end users, and from lab to real-world studies. SKIRIM contributes to the SPP in key ways: Its interfaces have the potential to truly blend into home environments; by changing shape they can scale to different users, tasks, and environments beyond the home; they enable eyes-free use, a key issue in the smart home; and research into SKIRIM is timely, because it tackles grand challenges of turning soft shape change from a material property into a scalable interaction paradigm. All three PIs of this proposal have an exceptionally strong background in HCI, with over 20,000 combined citations. They are currently Co-PIs on the SPP 2199 RIME project. Their experience complements each other ideally, with PI Steimle focusing on materials and fabrication, PI Borchers on interaction techniques, design tools, and prototype-based empirical studies, and PI Boll on smart home environments, multimodal interface design, participatory design, and acceptance studies.