Biomimetic Morphing Helix

Over thousands of years, nature has engineered, tested, and refined her technologies for the sake of growth, survival, and evolution. One such technology that has emerged from this design practice is helical morphing. Used by grape vines to grow, by seed pods to open, and by proteins to minimize their free energy, helical morphing supports  functional and interactive artifacts across scales. Inspired by these behaviors, we propose a mechanism and methods to design helical morphing UIs.

In this work, we define a unifying mechanism to explain the helical morphing of various natural and artificial systems despite their disparate compositions and constructions. Additionally, we demonstrate the mechanism with four artificial helical morphing systems, each with its own unique responsive stimuli, material composition, and structural constructs. Different UI applications are presented for each system. Ultimately, we hope this work can enrich the existing HCI toolbox for designing shape-changing materials and UIs.

Created by:

Danli Luo, Guanyun Wang, Zeyu Yan, Jack Forman, Lining Yao

Publication:

ACM SCF 2019 POSTER