PV-Tiles: Towards Closely-Coupled Photovoltaic and Digital Materials for Useful, Beautiful and Sustainable Interactive Surfaces

Abstract

The interactive, digital future with its seductive vision of Internet-of-Things connected sensors, actuators and displays comes at a high cost in terms of both energy demands and the clutter it brings to the physical world. But what if such devices were made of materials that enabled them to self-power their interactive features? And, what if those materials were directly used to build aesthetically pleasing environments and objects that met practical physical needs as well as digital ones? In this paper we introduce PV-Tiles-a novel material that closely couples photovoltaic energy harvesting and light sensing materials with digital interface components. We consider potential contexts, use-cases and light gestures surfaced through co-creation workshops; and, present initial technological designs and prototypes. The work opens a new set of opportunities and collaborations between HCI and material science, stimulating technical and design pointers to accommodate and exploit the material's properties.

PV-Pix: Slum Community Co-design of Self-Powered Deformable Smart Messaging Materials

“…With his help, we surveyed the built environments in Dharavi and found that tiles are not only a pervasive and aesthetically decorated building material, but also one that is manufactured locally by potters who have been working in Dharavi for over a century [14]. This suggested that the PV-Tiles concept, as developed by Meena et al [21], would be a fruitful starting place to explore and co-design self-powered computational materials that could be embedded into Dharavi's built environment and potentially even manufactured nearby. The PV-Tiles concept closely couples the energy harvesting material with an interactive display and sensors into a tile module so that self-powering interfaces can be fully integrated with surfaces as diverse as kitchen walls, foors and tabletops.…”

“…While the liaison recruited participants, spoke with potters and found space in a community centre for us to host a design workshop, the team of researchers developed probes-strategically incomplete prototypes-to surface specifc material constraints or material properties of self-powered interfaces and interactions as suggested in [21]. Our co-design workshops with residents of Dharavi, therefore, became a dialogue of people, place, and self-powered digital materials [30].…”

“…Discussions surrounding the individual probes, at the start of the workshop, showed that participants understood the concepts and constraints behind each of them and the overall aims of the PV-Tile concept [21]. After this introductory session we asked the participants to consider the use of PV-Tile-like modules in home and public settings.…”

“…Although not explicitly designed for such contexts, self-powered devices and services such as those proposed in [1,8] seem to provide partial solutions to these issues. However, instead of seeking to deploy such proposals in an emergent user context to solve a problem, we set out to actively and deeply engage with people living in large slum communities 1 in Mumbai, India, openly to explore interaction forms that go beyond those that have been imagined by conventional users [21].…”

“…Zhang et al's OptoSense demonstrates how everyday objects can be extended with PVmaterials arranged along diferent dimensions that can be leveraged to sense changes in ambient light intensity as well as power microcontrollers to infer user interactions from changes in light intensity, such as moving a hand over an object [40]. Meena et al's PV-Tiles develop similar sensing abilities, but also demonstrate that organic PV materials (OPV), which can be semi-transparent or coloured, can be laid down in geometric patterns to ofer aesthetic qualities much like that of a patterned tile [21]. Whereas Grosse-Puppendahl et al [8] separated out PV from display, the semi-transparent OPV material of PV-Tiles can be layered on top of a display, which is further layered on top of microcontrollers and wireless communication modules.…”