Can we create materials that only exist in the digital world? (S1E1)
Some experiences only exist in the physical world. Underwater, for example, we can find the giant spider crab, the sea pig, the vampire squid, bioluminescent algae, jellyfish, sea stars, and even sharks. Above water, we find the most mesmerising places, like the Glow Worm Sky of the Waipu Cave in New Zealand, sandstone formations in Arizona, or even the luminescent mushroom forest of Shikoku in Japan. And some experiences only exist in the digital world, with animation, VR, AI generative art, NFTs, science fiction, video graphics, and movie special effects. We get to discover new worlds and imagine new worlds. Our visual and auditory senses and experiences are amplified.
But what if we could create materials in the real world that only exist in the digital world? Our next guest brings the magical effects of the digital world into the physical world.
In this Season 1 Episode 1 of The Art in STEAM podcast, we are joined by Jiani Zeng — a designer, HCI researcher, and founder whose work investigates new ‘material expressions’ and design methodologies such as AIoT, soft-robotics, and multi-material 3D printing. They delve into the future of experience design, computer science in education and the use of Illusory Material - a design methodology and computational workflow that breaks down design medium into 'matters', restructuring and reinventing materiality.
Listen to the full episode on Spotify, Amazon Music and Apple Podcasts.
[Femmes Designers] We're here to focus on Illusory Material, the project you've developed with Honghao Deng. Could you tell me what inspired you both to create this project in the first place and how you got to where it is right now?
[Jiani Zeng] Let me start from our original background. I was trained as an industrial designer and received a pretty traditional design education, and my co-founder Honghao Deng is trained as an architect. So, both of us spend a lot of time in this physical design world, designing hardware, designing a physical living built environment that everyone can touch and feel. And then, we went to MIT and Harvard, studied Computational Design, and learned more about the digital aspect of technology. But, still, our love for hardware and physical design remains the same. So, we want to use digital technologies to change how people live physically and the physical objects we use daily. So, I think the core idea of Illusory Material is to use advanced computational design technologies to create tangible materials, experiences and designs that bring seemingly impossible digital interaction to physical reality; we hope to open up a new era of interactive CMF (colour, material and finish) without electronics, creating this new material experiences that respond directly to users and the environment.
[FD] Wow. So, what do you see the vision being for the application of this material in the world? I know you mentioned objects and environments; what would be a couple of examples that you would hope or feel would work?
[JZ] I think Illusory Material… initially, people just see it as a new material. It can be used in fashion design, art, and interior design. So, we have some big brands reaching out to us asking if they can use our technology to use this kind of material in luxury packaging design, like designing textiles or car designs. And I think those are great, like those are the most direct applications you can envision from this Illusory Material research, but for me, it was never about just the end application; I think we want to invent a new design methodology or a workflow, that could inspire other designers to do more unique designs, give them the tools to create something they could not create before. So, for me, this is more impactful because I want my research to be a starting point for a subject people can continue the research to create things they could not do before. Material has been viewed as static or non-responsive for centuries. If you talk about the material, you always think about the surface of the material, the look and feel of the material, and whatever you can see, you can touch the surface. We want to add depth to the material interface. So, instead of viewing it as a 2D thing or a surface, we introduced this concept of volumetric material and voxel-level design. A voxel is like a three-dimensional pixel. In our research, we used multi-material voxel printing; we were able to manipulate or change the material property at the voxel level. Imagine you have a piece of material, and we can assign different properties to each voxel inside that material.
[FD] What does the world of tomorrow look like under the lens of Illusory Material?
[JZ] I guess I will go back to my vision of designing in the physical world; I always think about another alternative to how technology should evolve. You see a lot of designs around AR, VR, and Metaverse, and it sounds like that’s the future and that’s the way to go. But digitalisation is not about taking everything to screens or the virtual world. I want to use technology to create immersive experiences in the world surrounding us, like a tangible, authentic world we can touch, smell and feel. In the future of Experience Design, it should be energy-saving, playful, dynamic and highly customisable. So, I think there are many things we can do around us using the concept of digital technology or Computational Design and creating something tangible around us. So, in many projects I've done before, you might see a physical object or a physically built environment in a final presentation. Still, we did a lot of Computational Design behind the scenes. That's how we lead to the end product or end goal. And we are using digital thinking to change how people live physically in this tangible world. I think Illusory Material eventually is really just part of this vision. More than an object, it’s like a workflow. But also, more than a workflow, it's a vision of how you modify your physical surroundings next to you using Computational Design or Digital Thinking.
