Interactive connected smart (ICS) materials experience

Over the past decades, emerging materials have gained prominence in design practice, driving innovation and generating added value to products and systems; they play a crucial role in improving physical performance and enhancing product language, facilitating novel dynamic experiences and unique expressive‑sensorial dimensions. Indeed, the material domain is undergoing a transformative shift, characterized by hybridization, dynamism, and interactivity, ultimately reshaping craft practices and sensorial experiences. In this context, a new class of emerging breakthrough materials defined by the umbrella definition of interactive connected smart (ICS) materials (Parisi et al., 2018) appears as pivotal in redefining meaningful experiences and making practices. This category encompasses a wide range of elements, including conductive materials, stimuli‑responsive smart materials, embeddable sensors, actuators, and microcontrollers. As in a kind of composite arrangement, these components can be combined with inactive material substrates to form hybrid material systems (HMS) enabling diverse interactive and dynamic experiences by holistically tuning their material, temporal, and form dimensions (Parisi, 2021). In this chapter, we present and discuss the embodied experience emerging from crafting HMS resulting from the hybridization of bioplastics and embedded lighting technology. For this purpose, we unfold the knowledge at the core of ICS materials and HMS. We then outline the value of the embodied experience as a result of applying a material‑centred hands‑on approach. This approach involves do‑it‑yourself (DIY) practices, material tinkering, and experimentation in a cross‑disciplinary team with eclectic backgrounds from material design and crafting to interaction design and digital fabrication. Our investigation emphasizes the central role or the expressive‑sensorial qualities and materials experience. We then present our experimentation in tinkering with hybrid bio‑based smart objects. Finally, we reflect on the crafting experience and discuss emerging methods and approaches for design practitioners dealing with ICS Materials and HMS. The emphasis lies in collaborative practices, experiential learning, and the unique materials experience resulting from the relations between form, behaviours, material qualities, and the researchers themselves.