Foam Sheets as Material for Fabricating Large and Functional Soft Objects

Abstract

We report on our experiments to fabricate soft, functional and furniture size objects from PE foam sheets. This material is desirable because it is flexible, lightweight, widely available in a variety of thicknesses, and could be made out of sugar cane. We present a set of unique joining mechanisms that exploit the flexibility and do not use adhesive or fasteners. We show how to program softness in meta structures to avoid the use of multiple materials. Finally, we demonstrate a number of examples and discuss the applicability for prototyping as well as customization in deploying the design.