Merlett: A struggling creature

Project conducted for the Master course "Interactive Materiality"

Duration: 3 months

Designers: Hanna Loschacoff, Isa Jansen and Stefan Hubbert

Contribution: Conceptualization, Interaction Design, Ideation of form and experience/expressivity, Mechanical prototyping, Material explorations using digital fabrication and narrative building connected to academic research in HCI, Exploratory Sketching

Exhibited at: Dutch Design Week (DDW) at the 4TU exhibition (2025) and IEE RoboSoft Conference (2025)

This project explored speculative interfaces through a material-centered design approach, resulting in "Merlett," an uncanny interactive entity. The 1-meter plastic vent tube with steel horns creates a worm-like shape with organic movements. Users interact through hand movements, triggering diverse reactions via servo motors, speakers, and sensors. Merlett's expressivity showcases vulnerability, stimulating empathy and care. This performative object challenges perceptions, creating new forms of emotional connection and interaction, exemplifying the potential of interactive materiality in producing emotionally expressive experiences.

Final design

Interaction Loop and Expressivity

Process

Methodology: Material Driven Design (Research through Design)
Starting point: Choosing the material transition of Contraction to Expansion

Material explorations of contraction and expansion

Mood board: mechanisms research and movement exploration

Material exploration: Making mechanisms, translating material qualities, aesthetic and sound explorations

Manipulating and recreating the material properties of the chosen material using 3D printing

Choice: Using the vent tube as the material

Exploring and designing interactions and emotional expressivity

Realizing desired movement, sensing and actuation using Arduino microcontroller, a capacitive sensor, two servo motors and a rotary to linear mechanism