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Recognizing the limitations of form factors 📱 🖥 💻 🖱 and gestures 👆🏼in hardware interface design and interaction design, the thesis attempts to use suppleness 🍮 🤸🏾‍♀️ 🧈 ☁️ as a methodology to innovate the design of interaction in human-computer interaction (HCI). The research incorporates the adoption of soft concepts 〰️and materials 🧻 🧽 🧶 in the art and design field. Through exploring contextual literature and soft characteristics within materials and philosophy, softness is framed as an ideology of fluidity, responsiveness, and flexibility. Tactilely, we sense the quality and characteristics of softness intimately and instantly. The intersection between our bodies and materials happens at the moment when our skin makes contact with other surfaces. Therefore, the body becomes an entity for us to perceive softness. The theory of embodied interaction (Dourish 2004) and affective computing (Picard 2000) serves as the fundamental research to speculate the possibilities of form in the realm of interaction design in a form of tangible interaction.

The capstone project employs speculative 🔮 and critical design approaches to identify future scenarios and experimenting with home surroundings, in turn, it stimulates the users to rethink their relationships with digital interfaces. Grounded in Metamodernism, the investigations hope to achieve the balance between various viewpoints, intersecting of tactility, whole body parts, and affection within the human. Based on the reviews of existing literature and various experiments on pliable materials, artifacts, and visualizations, my dissertation reframes the concept of softness and extends to supple interaction and methodology.