Contribution

concept design
materials design
fabrication
artifact design
basic electronics
written/visual documentation

Collaborator

Jianzhe Gu
Fang Qin

Supervisor

Lining Yao
Guanyun Wang


Conducted at Morphing Matter Lab, HCII, CMU

︎Accepted and presented at UIST '20
︎Full paper

Inspired by erodium seed, which has evolved over million of years to absorb energy from its environment and drill itself into the ground for seeding purposes, E-seed is developed to tunnel through the ground.

E-seed not only represents our effort to reverse-engineer natural actuators, but also makes me ponder the relationship between human and nature, nature and materials science, materials science and design.

We do not just learn from nature. We are paying the knowledge forward to construct a synergetic environment.

We gained our inspiration from the plant Erodium.

To reverse-engineer it, we first need to understand it. We built a spray chamber to mimic raining, bought a hundreds of different varieties of Erodium seeds, and observe how they behave.

There is the bit of materials science in the project. We searched and tested a variety of materials and processing techniques. It came down to a wood composition eventually, because it is about right - chemically identical to Erodium seed as they are both plant-based, degradable, shapeable, and water-responsive.

We processed the wood in-house. Lumbers were chopped down to blocks, run through multiple wood-preping steps to get smooth, thin, controlled veneers we wanted. The image shows me operating a jointer to prep wood surface.

I always love a project when I learn new techniques of crafting.

A resemblance in look and function, utilizing the materials engineering knowledge to transfer a piece of wood veneer into a humidity-responsive coiling actuator.

And of course it can drill.