Vision and Professional Identity

Vision

The interfaces we use every day have a huge impact on what we’re able to do with them. Digital and electronic devices are now woven into nearly every part of our lives, from work to leisure. In art, the tools available to an artist have always shaped how they express themselves. Take a brush and paint on a canvas: the type of brush, the consistency of the paint, and the texture of the canvas all play a role in what an artist can do. The same is true for musicians and their instruments. For stringed instruments, it’s the type of strings, and whether to use a pick or your fingers. For woodwinds, it’s the reed; for pianists, the size of the keys. These factors all shape how a musician interacts with their instrument, and what they’re able to express through it.

Music production has changed fundamentally as its tools have evolved. What started as a way to capture the essence of a single instrument turned into multiple tracks recorded onto magnetic tape, and eventually into the near-limitless possibilities of digital music production. Many techniques in song arrangement are possible now that were once unimaginable.

But as we’ve moved further from the original act of recording sound, something has been lost: the ability to capture the essence of a real instrument. Our screens, keyboards, and cursors only afford so much when it comes to capturing that richness.

Through the introduction of MIDI in the 1980s, the groundwork was laid for musicians to control complex sound configurations through familiar interfaces like the piano. Sound that once had to be produced in a studio, recorded, edited, and arranged from multiple recordings could now be performed live. Many of these new interfaces, however, were still just buttons, knobs, and sliders that didn’t capture the rich, embodied gestures associated with acoustic instruments.

I felt this frustration myself, as a guitar player who later got into digital music production. Playing a musical instrument and producing music may seem similar, if only because both involve the word music. To most people who don’t make music themselves, the two probably sound interchangeable. But for me, the experience of doing either could hardly be more different. Playing an instrument carries an emotional depth that’s expressed in the moment itself, while producing music felt closer to editing a video or programming a computer.

Deformable interfaces could offer a solution. HCI research shows that musicians using deformable interfaces systematically map physical deformation onto musical parameters, experiencing the interface as embodying the sound it controls rather than simply triggering it [6]. Yet non-rigid and deformable interfaces are still rarely framed for music at all: a 2020 survey of practitioners and pioneers in the field found their use in composition and performance sparse and unsystematic [1]. Most modern musical tools are still built from screens and knobs, separating control into individually adjusted parameters rather than a single continuous, embodied gesture.

Deformable interfaces respond to this by treating expression as continuous motion instead of discrete control. A device you can bend, squeeze, or twist can carry as much nuance in one gesture as a guitarist’s hand carries in a single string bend.

In my thesis, Tabula, I set out to find a tangible answer to one question: how can deformable interfaces enable musical expressivity? The answer turned out to rest on two core principles. The interface should use high-resolution responsive sensing to capture fine motor skill, and it should entangle multiple sound parameters into a single deforming device, so that one gesture reshapes several sonic qualities at once. I borrow the idea of entanglement from feedback-based practices like Mudd’s no-input mixing desk [5]; Tabula applies that same principle physically, coupling multiple parameters through one deforming material.

Although Tabula was designed for musical interaction, the same principles could extend to other domains where discrete controls fall short of how people actually want to interact, such as gaming and automotive interfaces. Music is a universal human practice and a widely used vessel for expressivity research [2]. Investigating expressive interfaces through music can serve as a safe testbed, which could result in insights transferable to use cases beyond music.

Professional Identity

I like to think of myself as a designer’s designer: I design through making, first-person, rather than handing the making off to someone else. That habit started before this master’s. I got into 3D-printing early on during my bachelor’s in Industrial Design, building and modifying my own open-source printers. Assembling and taking apart a printer piece by piece, firmware and kinematics included, gave me better insight into how these devices work, and how to better design for the fabrication process. I also built up a deep working knowledge of materials: PLA, PETG, TPU, ABS, ASA, polypropylene, and foaming filaments, each with its own characteristics and printing behavior. I later worked as a student assistant helping other design students tailor their 3D models specifically to the FDM process, which taught me how differently people want to use 3D printing, and how the right modeling techniques can make almost any idea filament fabrication-ready.

Research through Design sits at the core of how I work because of my curiosity. I design through inquiry and towards the unanswered, not a set design objective. I ask how a design should look, then iteratively and creatively try out different solutions to find what works best. This can take different forms: it might mean different algorithms that interpret sensor data into feedback for a user, or it might mean exploring different aesthetic morphologies. My first project for the Industrial Design Master’s, Aqua-Morph, is an example of iterative design on different material characteristics, following the Material Driven Design (MDD) method [4]. What came out of this process is now an open-access paper at TEI ‘25 [3].

My making-first instinct is what let me act on the frustrations I experienced with electronic music production. I went back to the embedded programming (C, Arduino) and analog and digital electronics I’d picked up in my bachelor’s. I read up on the latest digital musical instrument (DMI) research and investigated what already existed on the market. With this knowledge and my experience, I set out to build an interface that could actually carry musical expression. During my Preparation Project, one of my pitfalls became very apparent. This first-person-focused making instinct means I tend to lose myself in the making, and I sometimes don’t reach out enough to outside experts. This is a missed opportunity in projects regarding music, especially because I have built up an extensive network as a practicing DJ and musician. During my thesis, I set out to familiarize myself with and practice the co-design method. Tabula, the deformable interface I built for my thesis, is ultimately the result of this.

A core belief I hold about design, engineering, fabrication, and tools is that they should be openly accessible. A connected community of people who share that interest can accomplish more, and more effectively, than anyone working alone. If someone needs a bug fixed, it’s better to reach out to an active community than to wait indefinitely for a company that may never reply, something I’ve experienced firsthand. But openness only works if it isn’t abused by power-hungry individuals: cases like Prusa vs. Bambu Lab show what happens when designs are taken without credit. Some people profit at the community’s expense, taking the progress everyone else contributed to without giving credit. Not only is this against the publishing license that many open-source projects are released under, but it also negates scientific integrity. The ethic started for me in the open-source 3D-printing community as a maker, and I still try to carry that same openness. But it has made me reconsider my approach. Rather than sharing my designs as a whole, I think it’s more appropriate to share them in a modular fashion, for several reasons. It prevents third parties from mindlessly copying my work: anyone who wants it would have to piece it together with effort, something I learned from building open-source printers. This process of piecing things together is also a valuable learning opportunity, since it requires a deep dive into the project, a skill that risks being lost now that LLMs are so readily accessible. Though only a select few may take the time to add to or improve on what I’ve made, that’s where I see the true value of open source. What ultimately makes me valuable as a designer is the combined knowledge and skills I’ve gained through the open-source community and its projects, knowledge and skills that, ironically, can’t be open-sourced.

References:
[1] Alberto Boem, Giovanni M. Troiano, Giacomo Lepri, and Victor Zappi. 2020. Non-Rigid Musical Interfaces: Exploring Practices, Takes, and Future Perspective. In Proceedings of the International Conference on New Interfaces for Musical Expression (NIME 2020), 17–22. https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.4813288
[2] Miguel Bruns, Stijn Ossevoort, and Marianne Graves Petersen. 2021. Expressivity in Interaction: a Framework for Design. In Proceedings of the 2021 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI ‘21). Association for Computing Machinery, New York, NY, USA, Article 163, 1–13. https://doi.org/10.1145/3411764.3445231
[3] Jing Ya Huang, Hannah Eikens, Miguel Bruns, and Amy Winters. 2025. Aqua-Morph: A Design Method for Fabricating Shape-Changing Hydrogel Structures. In Proceedings of the Nineteenth International Conference on Tangible, Embedded, and Embodied Interaction (TEI ‘25). Association for Computing Machinery, New York, NY, USA, Article 53, 1–15. https://doi.org/10.1145/3689050.3704421
[4] Karana, E., Barati, B., Rognoli, V., & Zeeuw van der Laan, A. (2015). Material driven design (MDD): A method to design for material experiences. In International Journal of Design, 9(2), 35-54. https://www.ijdesign.org/index.php/IJDesign/article/view/1965/693
[5] Tom Mudd. 2023. Playing with Feedback: Unpredictability, Immediacy, and Entangled Agency in the No-input Mixing Desk. In Proceedings of the 2023 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI ‘23). ACM. https://doi.org/10.1145/3544548.3580662
[6] Giovanni Maria Troiano, Esben Warming Pedersen, and Kasper Hornbæk. 2015. Deformable Interfaces for Performing Music. In Proceedings of the 33rd Annual ACM Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI ‘15). Association for Computing Machinery. https://doi.org/10.1145/2702123.2702492