Interactive Loofah, 2024-2025

Yingting Gao, Jing Xie, Fiona Bell, Alex Cabral, Josiah Hester, HyunJoo Oh

Interactive Loofah: Exploring the Design Process of Material-driven Interactions, TEI 2026. PDF

Natural and biodegradable materials are increasingly recognised within the field of tangible and embodied interaction for their potential to support sustainable and sensory engagement. Loofah—a fibrous plant-based material—presents distinctive properties, including porosity, absorbency, and compressibility, affording transformations such as swelling, softening, and deformation in response to the environment. Contributing to the field, this studio explores the loofah as a medium for material-driven interaction design. Participants will investigate its structural, tactile, and visual properties, and explore how such transformations might function as interactional expressions. As a vehicle, participants are invited to deconstruct and re-make loofah artefacts to reveal and reflect on its material 'ingredients', before re-making them using simple fabrication techniques. By examining the material, we aim to make its unique agency visible, better understand challenges specific to natural materials in interaction design, and speculate on future sustainable and reflective ways of making. The studio will culminate in a rich set of material "recipe cards" documenting the participants' explorations, which will be shared with the broader HCI and Design communities to support ongoing conversation and action toward material agency and ecological interaction.