Interaction Design with Functional Plastics

Designers will soon be able to print working electronics—sensors, displays, and circuits—using cheap plastic materials on the same desktop tools they already use for laser cutting and sculpting. Today, building a functional prototype that looks like a finished product means gluing rigid silicon circuit boards inside a plastic shell. This fellowship attacks that disconnect. It develops "functional plastics"—conducting polymers that can be printed or arranged to form electronic components—so that the electronics and the product's physical form are made from the same material, at the same time, on the same machine. The core problem is that current design tools treat shape and function as separate problems; this work merges them. If successful, the platform could transform how physical products are prototyped. Instead of sending out for custom circuit boards, a designer could print a working sensor into a chair's armrest or a display into a packaging mock-up in a single afternoon. The project also creates open-source hardware and software interfaces that hide the underlying materials science, making the technology accessible to designers without engineering backgrounds. This is applied research with a clear near-term target: giving product designers the ability to manipulate form and electronic function together, cheaply and quickly.