"It Puts Life into My Creations": Understanding Fluid Fiber as a Media for Expressive Display

Fluid fiber, with fluid flowing in a tube, is an attractive material to flexibly and dynamically display digital information. While it has recently attracted attention from the HCI field, there is currently little knowledge about this material, limited to controlling the position of the droplets to present representational information like letters and numbers. To develop a broader and deepened understanding of this material and its potential for display design, we conducted a study based on a design workshop where art and design practitioners engaged in creation practice with a toolkit we designed and developed. The toolkit includes hardware components for controlling bubbles and droplets and a GUI design tool for arranging the fluid layout. Our research reveals the structural and expressive affordance of such a fluid fiber for displaying information, highlighting the unique value of fluidity as an intuitive form to express life, emotion, movement and changes.