Stimuli-responsive materials: Definition, classification and descriptions

Stimuli-responsive materials: definition, classification and descriptions Stimuli-responsive materials have the particularity to change one or more of their properties under a defined stimulus: through a transition phenomenon, they will turn an input, or stimulus, into an output, or response. To make a selection of these materials, a designer will consider first of all the main functionality of these materials, which is their transition phenomenon, as it gives them a capacity to process information. To get a perspective on stimuli-responsive materials and the possibilities they offer, the first step has been to class them according to their transition phenomenon. This has been done in the form of a graph where transition phenomena are represented as a link between their associated input and output. A second representation has been made starting from the first graph, but adding a link to the user of a product which use a stimuli-responsive material. To do so, the inputs of the materials has been differentiated by the fact that they can be activated by the user, the environment or by an intermediary system; the outputs has been linked to the achievable behaviors of a product and with the sensory modality the user will engage to notice these behaviors. After having proposed this classification of stimuli-responsive materials, the next step of the work is to get more detailed information about their behavior, and to organize and represent this information in a coherent and efficient way. To do so, we proposed a description for each type of transition phenomenon, which shows its most important characteristics in a visual way. This information is now being summed up in a database, which is organized with different tables and tree-structures that will describe stimuli-responsive materials, transition phenomena and the link between them. A first prototype of the database will be proposed.