Ice as an Interactive Visualization Material: a Design Space

Ice is a familiar material to all, with a wide set of applications across artistic, cultural, scientific and technical domains. Most recently, the natural beauty of ice combined with its ephemerality is symbolic of the fragility of the global environment and climate change. Ice has been utilized as a design material in many formats, yet research has not so far presented a systematic framework for its applications. This paper presents a design space for ice as a design material and introduces examples and domains where ice has been utilized, particularly as part of interactive systems. The framework describes design properties that include e.g. state change, granularity and structural properties of ice.