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Linda Hirsch, Eleni Econoomidou, Irina Paraschivoiu, Tanja Doering, Andreas Butz
Material Meets the City: Exploring Novel and Advanced Materials for the Smart Urban Built Environment
In Proceedings of the Fifteenth International Conference on Tangible, Embedded, and Embodied Interaction, Feb. 2021. (bib)

Our urban built environment is shaped by many aspects, such as transportation, human activity, and materiality. Materials, their affordances, and experiences play a particular role in this context, influencing what we perceive and how we interact. In the past decades, the main developments in Urban Interaction Design (UIxD) looked at media facades as public displays or the augmentation of smart buildings toward more sustainable energy consumption. These applications, though, have little connection to daily public activities and their social dynamics. In comparison, the urban outdoors is still quite dominated by physical artifacts and their material qualities with limited embedded digital technologies. Questions arise, such as, what influence material qualities and choices have on urban space design? And what trends derive from this influence that are relevant for interaction design?