MagnaDip Kit: A User-Friendly Toolkit for Streamlined Fabrication of Electromagnetic Responsive Textiles
Zhiyu Li, Xiaoyu Zhang, Jiamin Guan, Xipei Ren · 2024
Smart materials play an essential role in enhancing the efficiency and diversity of human-computer interaction (HCI). This paper focuses on the domain of flexible smart materials. We introduce MagnaDip Kit, a toolkit designed for creating magnetic textiles, aiming at democratizing the innovation of new materials, facilitating the wider adoption of smart materials in everyday applications. The MagnaDip Kit ensures a straightforward and user-friendly manufacturing process, and serves as a resource for designers to employ smart materials in prototypes. Combining interdisciplinary knowledge from materials science and design, we aim to provide a tangible production experience, enabling the expansion of novel interaction modalities beyond traditional computing. Based on the toolkit's output, we further integrated the characteristics of electromagnetic responsive textiles to create a light-responsive interactive prototype, demonstrating one of the applications of smart materials. Relying on CHI2024, we seek feedback from an international audience to refine the toolkit and conduct additional workshops.