Designing Sculpting Light Systems for Information Decoration

Innovations in material, information and communication technology enable the application of efficient light sources and shape-changing techniques in our environment and everyday objects of the future. Based on this trend, we propose Sculpting Light Systems (SLS), which combine shape change with light to provide multi-modal displays of light and shape, and which support the tangible manipulation of light. In order to get a primary understanding of how to design a manipulable SLS that could seamlessly merge into the user's context by means of information decoration and tangible interaction, we discuss a framework and two design issues to explore the design space of SLS. In addition, two design cases are developed to demonstrate our framework and to further investigate the potential and challenges of designing SLS with respect to the design issues.