1 Crafting the Immaterial Materiality for Expressive Interfaces & Interactions Fatih Kursat Ozenc* Miso Kim** John Zimmerman*** * Carnegie Mellon University School of Design Pittsburgh, US, kursat@cmu.edu ** Carnegie Mellon University School of Design Pittsburgh, US, misok@andrew.cmu.edu ***Carnegie Mellon University School of Design & HCII Pittsburgh, US, johnz@cs.cmu.edu Abstract: As the fields of interaction and service design heavily rely on motion and interaction as their material, there is a substantial need to address the nature of such materiality, and to develop methods and tools to work and communicate with its immateriality. In order to further investigate the nature of the immateriality and how the future tools and methods can help designers to design expressive interfaces and interactions, we propose a 6- hour workshop with design professionals in interaction and service design fields, professionals working in teams, and educators teaching interaction and service design. Our eventual goal is to investigate features of a novel tool to enable designers to more easily explore immaterial material for creativity and effectiveness in their designs, and enable them to seed expressions for emotional and felt-life qualities in interactive products and services. Crafting immaterial materiality effectively will also lead designers to grow better communication channels with other stakeholders for co-creating expressive interfaces and interactions. Key words: interaction, expression, tools, methods, and gestures 1. Problem Designers are traditionally engaged in a conversation with their material during the design process [6]. An industrial designer, for instance, can continuously experiment with the validity of her design work as she bends the plywood in the workshop, and she can be inspired by the nature of the material while working with it by hand. However, it is difficult for an interaction designer to have this conversation with material and develop a tacit knowledge of her subject matter, due to the nature of motion and interaction being the immaterial materiality [5]. In addition, the increasing complexity of design problems requires more and more teamwork and collaboration among designers and experts from diverse fields. But interaction designers do not have a systematical method or tool to support communication of their ideas with different stakeholders. Designers often find themselves handing off static, annotated, screen designs [3,4], before they have sufficiently refined the ideas to know that this is what they want, but these static means often limit their reflection in action and proper communication within the team. As the fields of interaction and service design transform the design practices and rely on motion and interaction as their material, there is a substantial need to address the nature of such materiality, and develop methods and tools [2] to work and communicate with this immateriality. 2. Background