© 2017 HCII Institute, Carnegie Mellon University

Layer Jamming

2014

The jamSheets concept introduces layer jamming as an enabling technology for designing deformable, stiffness-tunable thin sheet interfaces.

  • Jifei Ou, Lining Yao, Daniel Tauber, Jürgen Steimle, Ryuma Niiyama, and Hiroshi Ishii

  • Tangible Media Group, MIT Media Lab

  • Paper - TEI 2014
  • Interface - Jamming Shoe

The basic layer jamming system is composed of an airtight envelope with multiple thin layers of “flaps” (e.g., paper) inside. The system utilizes negative air pressure to vacuum-pack the thin layers of material to amplify the friction between each layer. The higher the vacuum pressure (negative pressure), the bigger the friction between each layer. If we consider the entire envelope as one material system, the global behavior is stiffness changing.

As one of the examples for designing the composite material structure, we fabricated multiple strips, which enveloped and were weaved together to form a mesh sheet. Each strip has individual stiffness tunability. As a result, reconfigurable stiffness distribution can be tuned dynamically for the mesh sheet.
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