26 September – 26 December 2024
My project E-Static Soft Sensors was featured in the Luovuuden aalloilla / On the Waves of Creativity exhibition at Science Centre Heureka, Vantaa, Finland. The exhibition was produced by Aalto University in collaboration with Heureka, ran for three months, and welcomed over 10,000 visitors.
The centrepiece of the installation was an electrostatic rug designed to make the phenomenon of triboelectric charging tangible and experiential. As visitors moved and played on the rug, it built up static charge — which was then used to trigger an overhead lamp. The interaction served as a sensing event: a demonstration of how human movement on a textile surface can generate and harness static electricity as a functional signal.
Alongside the interactive piece, the exhibition foregrounded the material development and exploratory process that sits at the heart of the E-Static Soft Sensors project. Samples, experiments, and process artefacts were displayed to make visible the iterative, hands-on nature of practice-based research — inviting visitors to engage not just with the outcome, but with the research journey itself.
The exhibition offered a rare opportunity to bring this work to a broad public audience, including families and children, many of whom instinctively engaged with the rug in ways that reflected exactly the kind of embodied, curious interaction the research is built around.
Featured Photo taken by Teemu Ullgren.
This project has received funding from the European Union under the Marie Skłodowska-Curie Actions (MSCA) Postdoctoral Fellowship, Horizon Europe [Grant Agreement No. 101111112].
