ID team
Industrial Design will be in Kanazawa (Japan) with contributions that fit a shift increasingly visible within soft robotics: tangible interaction and material driven design are moving more clearly to the foreground. At TU Eindhoven, the Material Aesthetics Lab helps shape this movement by connecting perspectives from interaction design and materials research to soft robotics. These contributions also show how research lines from Industrial Design come together with Mechanical Engineering and Chemistry, through long term collaboration around materials, actuation, and manufacturability.
PluShe
In the Art Gallery, Ciccy Lyu will present PluShe, developed with Miguel Bruns, Albert Schenning, Xue Wan, and Amy Winters. In PluShe, the textile itself is the interface: liquid crystal elastomer fibers are woven into the structure, allowing the surface to slowly breathe and change texture. The work focuses on texture as an expressive medium and shows how material change over time can become a form of interaction, without relying on a screen or a rigid enclosure.
Lyu will also present an extended abstract with the same coauthors, titled Textile Architectures for Interlaced Control and Actuation in Woven Liquid Crystal Elastomer Systems.
Synchronization
Alongside PluShe, Lio Huntjens will present an extended abstract titled Coupled Mechanofluidic Oscillators for Synchronization of Soft Actuators, together with Harmannus A.H. Schomaker, Stijn Koppen, Stephan Wensveen, and Johannes T.B. Overvelde. Their work starts from a familiar challenge in soft robotics: how to coordinate multiple soft limbs when designing toward autonomy. In Kanazawa, they will show an interactive interface that lets researchers program and explore synchronization between two soft limbs. By demonstrating different forms of limb synchronization, Huntjens positions this as an alternative route to designing adaptive behavior in soft robots, supported by an evaluation indicating the tool is usable and accessible for soft robotics research.
RoboFood
Amy Winters is also invited to speak in the RoboFood workshop, with a talk titled Soft, Animated, and Edible Matter. In that setting, the discussion focuses on materials and interfaces at the intersection of robotics, science, culinary art, and design, with the goal of encouraging the community to rethink where the boundaries of a robot are, and how materials can shape those boundaries.
