“I investigate how to design for the expressive and aesthetic qualities of interactive products and particularly how shape change and haptic feed-forward affect our behavior in a subtle way.”

Miguel Bruns Alonso is Associate Professor in the Future Everyday cluster of the Department of Industrial Design and also the program director for the TU/e Innovation Space, a community for interdisciplinary hands-on education that bridges engineering design and entrepreneurship. Bruns Alonso investigates the aesthetics and emotional expressivity of interactive products with programmable material qualities (a concept he names interactive materiality) with a focus on haptic and shape-changing interfaces. He co-developed various prototypes of interactive products that respond to behavioral expressions with haptic feedback and shape change. He teaches courses relating to creativity and the basics of designing form and aesthetics of interaction at the bachelor’s degree level and courses relating to dynamic and interactive form/materiality and how this affects perception and behavior at the master’s degree level.

Bruns Alonso was part of GHOST (Generic Highly Organic Shape-changing inTerfaces), a successful Future Emerging Technologies project funded by EU-FP7. The project’s research contributions and resulting network support the definition of new directions for interaction design research on ‘smart’ materials and actuators.

Miguel Bruns Alonso focused on affective tangible interaction in his industrial design engineering studies and obtained his MSc and PhD from TU Delft. His PhD research was the project “Relax! Inherent feedback during product interaction to reduce stress” in which he explored how interactive products can respond to behavioral expressions of affect through haptic feedback.

He worked on a Fulbright Grant as visiting researcher at the Center for Design Research of Stanford University, USA, and also worked as visiting researcher at the Design Research and Ubiquitous Computing Groups of Aarhus University, Denmark. At Eindhoven University of Technology (TU/e), he held the positions of Director of Education for the bachelor’s degree program and Deputy Director of the master’s degree program of the Department of Industrial Design.