HCI meets Material Science: A Literature Review of Morphing Materials for the Design of Shape-Changing Interfaces

With the proliferation of flexible displays and the advances in smart materials, it is now possible to create interactive devices that are not only flexible but can reconfigure into any shape on demand. Several Human Computer Interaction (HCI) and robotics researchers have started designing, prototyping and evaluating shape-changing devices, realising, however, that this vision still requires many engineering challenges to be addressed. On the material science front, we need breakthroughs in stable and accessible materials to create novel, proof-of-concept devices. On the interactive devices side, we require a deeper appreciation for the material properties and an understanding of how exploiting material properties can provide affordances that unleash the human interactive potential. While these challenges are interesting for the respective research fields, we believe that the true power of shape-changing devices can be magnified by bringing together these communities. In this paper we therefore present a review of advances made in shape-changing materials and discuss their applications within an HCI context.