Revolutionizing Interaction: Venous Materials by Hila Mor

Interactive Materials Inspired by Nature's Vein Structures

Veins, whether in leaves or the human body, inform us of internal and external physical conditions through color changes. Drawing from this, Venous Materials change color and display dynamic graphics in response to user interaction. These materials can be used to create responsive objects, animate dynamic graphics, and visualize body movement and balance.

The technology behind Venous Materials was developed through research on current Microfluidics, specifically designed for human interaction and UX design. A specialized computational tool was developed for the design process, simulating and visualizing the color change and display of the flow within the material according to user input. The production process involves laser engraving and manual lab processes, using PDMS silicone and ecoline ink.

The Venous Materials project started in June 2019 and was completed in April 2020 at the MIT Media Lab, Tangible Media group, in Cambridge, MA. The project team included Hila Mor, Tianyu Yu, Ken Nakagaki, Benjamin Harvey Miller, Yichen Jia, and Hiroshi Ishii.

The design and fabrication methods for interactive fluidic mechanisms that respond to deformation by mechanical inputs from the user were presented in this work. The Venous design tool provides designers with a simple way to create and validate designs of fluidic structures. It allows users to design the geometry, and simulate the flow with intended mechanical force dynamically. This leads to Interactive applications of Venous Materials, to augment human movement and everyday objects.

While current computer chips and electronics usually require rigid and bulky components that challenge the integration with varied objects or fabrics, Venous Materials is a soft and self-contained mechanism that utilizes the motion of daily activities as its energy source. Design of micro-fluid dynamics is not an intuitive task, but this approach and computational tool allows the design, simulation, and prototyping of fluidic interactive sensors that can be embedded in, or attached to, any object.

All photo and video credits for this project go to Tangible Media Group, MIT Media Lab. The work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 Unported License.