Industrial Design Professor Brings Walls to Life with ‘Animated Materiality’

At first glance, the piece hanging in Wentworth Institute of Technology's Casella Gallery looks like a standard length of wood veneer. But as a visitor steps closer, the surface begins to swell and ripple.

The work is "Animated Materiality," a new installation by Katarina Richter-Lunn, assistant professor of Industrial Design in the School of Architecture and Design. Funded by a Wentworth Spark Grant, the project challenges the traditional idea that buildings must remain static, asking instead how architecture might respond to the people inside it.

The mechanics driving the movement are practical and precise. An ultrasonic sensor detects when someone approaches, triggering a microcontroller that powers a compact air pump. This action inflates flexible polyurethane pockets hidden behind the wood. To keep the veneer from cracking under the pressure, custom laser-cut patterns allow the material to flex while remaining structurally sound.

The exhibit builds on hands-on testing Richter-Lunn conducted for her doctorate at the Harvard Graduate School of Design. Her work blends design, psychology, and physiology, exploring how human signals, like heart rate variability, breathing patterns, or skin temperature, could dictate how a physical space behaves.

While her broader research uses wearable biometric trackers to feed data into software that tells the wall how to move, the Casella Gallery installation reacts to where you are, rather than how you feel. It responds to presence, demonstrating the concept at full scale without requiring visitors to wire up to a monitor.

"Animated Materiality" was developed by Richter-Lunn along with fabrication specialist Emmanuel Osorno and research assistant Gabriel Asacker. The installation is on view in the Casella Gallery, located in the Annex Building, before traveling to Pinkcomma Gallery in Boston this fall.