Aqua-Morph

Aqua-Morph

Aqua-Morph is a design method for fabricating 3D-printed hydrogel structures that self-actuate in water, developed with Jing-Ya Huang, Miguel Bruns, and Amy Winters, and published at TEI ‘25.

Hydrogels are popular in soft robotics for their reversible shape-changing properties, but they usually require technical expertise and specialized lab equipment to fabricate, which limits rapid iteration. Aqua-Morph instead presents an accessible fabrication pipeline built on FDM 3D printing, with digitally adjustable parameters for creating flexible actuators, plus a tangible movement library of shape-changing hydrogel structures.

This was my first design project in the master’s, and the project that anchored Research through Design as how I work: building, testing, and modifying the fabrication process directly is how the design method itself took shape.

Read the paper: Aqua-Morph: A Design Method for Fabricating Shape-Changing Hydrogel Structures (Huang, Eikens, Bruns & Winters, TEI ‘25).