AirCraft: Exploring Air as a Design Medium

Air is fundamental to life, yet it is rarely considered a design material in interactive systems. We experience air through breathing, wind, and subtle currents that shape our sensory and emotional states. In design, however, air is often treated as an invisible utility or reduced to technically complex pneumatic technologies, which can limit creative exploration for designers and makers.

This project introduces AirCraft, a toolkit that reframes air as an accessible and expressive medium for interaction design. Instead of prioritizing technical complexity, AirCraft focuses on the elemental qualities of air such as flow, pressure, rhythm, direction, and impermanence, and how these qualities are felt through the body. The toolkit is modular and easy to use, enabling rapid prototyping of air based interactions without prior engineering experience.

AirCraft was deployed through generative design workshops with designers and makers from diverse backgrounds. Participants used the toolkit to create exploratory artifacts including ambient installations, playful interfaces, and speculative works that foregrounded air’s sensory and atmospheric potential. These workshops encouraged embodied thinking, non visual interaction, and attention to subtle physical phenomena as carriers of meaning.

The outcomes show how working with air can shift design practices toward more sensory, experiential, and environmentally attuned interactions. By lowering technical barriers and expanding the material vocabulary of interaction design, this project positions air as a powerful yet underexplored medium for expression, interaction, and lived experience.

This project was made possible with support of the Frank-Ratchye Further Fund Grant #2024-007. Additional images are available here.