Smart material interfaces: "a material step to the future"

Over the past years the technology push and the creation of new technological materials made available on the market many new smart materials. Smart Material Interfaces (SMIs) want to take advantage of these materials to overcome traditional patterns of interaction, leaving behind the "digital feeling" by a more continuous space of interaction, tightly coupling digital and physical world by means of the smart materials' properties. With this workshop about SMIs, we want to draw attention to the emerging field, stimulating research and development in interfaces that make use of smart materials and encourage new and different modalities of interaction.