Figure 1. FEEK pebble lights by Karim Rashid [ 7].

 

have any organic shape, for example, curved like the light fixtures in Figure 1. There are clear advantages to the use of such displays, such as when working with curved data sets, like 3D models or geographical information. Another missing property is deformability.

While fashion designers like Yves Saint Laurent take deformability for granted, it is not at all common in human-computer interactions. Yet deformability eases many real-world tasks, like storing things, or reading this magazine article, for example. The page flip is, in fact, a wonderfully effective way of navigating documents. Its affordance and ability to open a document at a random location is not easily mirrored by a mouse click. Deformability also allows tools to adapt their func- tionality to different contexts: a newspaper can serve information equally Figure 2. (a) Chandelier ^{well as fish. Clearly, this with jelly morphology (C. Roux,} circa 1907); (b) Concept moldable kind of shape-shifting flex- mouse with jelly anatomy ibility is not found in your ^{(Lite-On, 2007).} average e-book reader.

But might it one day be? New materials, such as E-Ink and Organic light-emitting diode (OLED) displays by Polymer Vision and Sony not only mimick the high contrast but also the deformability of paper, potentially making flatland interfaces a thing of the past. Interaction designers and researchers around the world are starting to work alternate, virtually analog, degrees of input. This design stream aims to develop

computers that can take on any shape or form: from an aluminum can to a Lumalive jacket.

 

ORGANIC DESIGN: NATURAL MORPHOLOGIES AS INSPIRATION FOR INDUSTRIAL DESIGN

With displays in any form will come a wealth of interactive blobjects that literally shape their own functionality. E-book readers that page down upon a flick of the computing substrate. Beverage cans with browsers displaying RSS feeds and movie trailers. When pondering the design space of such future blobject computers, the anatomies and morphologies of biological organisms form an interesting source of inspira-

tion. Natural organisms almost exclusively rely on flexible materials and non-planar shapes. For example, the leaves of plants form resilient solar panels that bend rather than break when challenged. They are not just flexible to adapt to their environment, they also grow and adjust shape to maximize solar efficiency. Computers may one day do just that.

 

Haeckel’s Art Forms in Nature [ 1] was one of the first catalogues to celebrate organic morphologies. The book, which came out in 1904, was an instant hit with designers protesting modern industrialist art. Art Nouveau designer Constant Roux even used one of Haeckel’s plates on invertibrate morphologies as an inspiration for a chandelier (see Figure 2a).

 

ORGANIC ARCHITECTURE: BALANCING INDUSTRIAL WITH NATURAL DESIGN Haeckel’s radiolarians also inspired Art Nouveau architect René Binet’s entrance gate to the 1900 Paris World Expo. But within 10 years, the forces of