Touch and Feel Soft Hardware

Abstract

With soft hardware we refer to electronic components, coatings, and shells built from materials that make them elastic, flexible, floppy and malleable. By introducing new material properties into electronic and computational contexts we expect to open new paths for designing interactive things. Building electronics with textile and other soft materials may easily degrade elements such as speed, power, and storage capacities; however, these constraints can be acceptable if not down right desirable in these new contexts. We see how sensors, actuators, computers and even battery cells made of soft materials enables us to embed them into soft shapes that in turn afford certain forms of interaction. With the term soft hardware, we also highlight the interplay between computational and physical materials in interaction designs.