Negative experiences challenge the familiar ideals of ease, usability, and control that often shape interaction design practice. This work-in-progress investigates how such experiences can be intentionally engaged and mediated through materials in tangible interaction design, and how they might unfold in everyday contexts beyond artistic practice. Using a Research-through-Design approach, we combine first-person material explorations with a co-creation workshop to study how affective tensions such as discomfort, awkwardness, irritation, and even disgust or cringe arise through making. The study introduces three early-stage insights: Material Subjectivity, Materializing Negative Experiences in Practice, and The Positivity Appeal. Together, these insights show how materials can mediate and reframe negative experience as a generative design resource, offering designers new ways to approach negative experience in everyday interaction.

Soft robotic actuators can create new uses and expressions for tangible and embodied interaction. Hydrogels, popular in soft robotics for their reversible shape-changing properties, often require technical expertise and specialized laboratories for fabrication, limiting rapid iteration. Additionally, aesthetic and form-giving qualities important to designers are often overlooked. This pictorial presents Aqua-Morph, an accessible design method for fabricating 3D-printed hydrogel-based structures that self-actuate in water. Our contributions are twofold: (1) a Design Manual outlining the fabrication pipeline using Fused Deposition Modeling (FDM) 3D printing with digitally adaptable parameters for creating flexible actuators, and (2) a Tangible Movement Library of shape-changing hydrogel structures to empower designers, creative roboticists, material scientists and engineers in creating tangible interactions.

Shape-changing interfaces have been critiqued for not being sustainable despite their promising opportunities for tangible interaction. Incorporating nature inspired passive actuation mechanisms with embedded responsiveness can offer benefits for shape-changing interfaces. We introduce chitosan, a widely available biodegradable and humidity-responsive actuator that absorbs moisture from air and undergoes shape changes in response to fluctuations in humidity. Through explorative yet systematic material driven research through design, we uncover the utility and accessibility of chitosan as a reversible actuator to enable interactivity. We present the characterization of a variety of responsive structures made from chitosan films, combined with a variety of substrates. Outcomes from a generative session with designers/engineers from diverse backgrounds, provided insights into experiential properties and possible applications. We conclude with early prototypes that hold potential for wearables, haptics, self-assembly, and data-physicalization.

Interactive textiles embed sensing and actuating capabilities in their fibers and structure. Adoption of interactive textiles is complex requiring a combination of competences or collaboration between interaction designers, textile designers and textile engineers. These disciplines are typically organized in separate and unconnected departments, using different vocabularies, and requiring different information. Through focus groups with interaction designers, and interviews with experts from the three domains we developed the Interactive Textile Library (ITL). The ITL is a multi-disciplinary tool combining physical samples and a digital platform showing material characteristics, experiential qualities, interactive technology, manufacturing process and support to create and hack the samples. The ITL was evaluated with professional designers who valued the physical samples and videos. Results provide recommendations for researchers developing interactive textile material libraries that could facilitate incorporation of interactive textiles in design practice and reduce fabrication time of prototypes.