Morphological Interfaces: On Body Transforming Technologies.

A close integration of human and machine has been envisioned by researchers and artists for generations, however, there has been little effort in investigating the possibility and plausibility of the idea until recent years. We seek to open a discussion on how the notion of self is plastic, and how innately we are capable of empowering and extending ourselves through technologies. Neuroscience studies show using a tool not only offers new capabilities, but also reconstructs our cognitive architecture to include the tool as a part of ourselves. This adaptive nature of the body image poses an opportunity for designing interfaces that become natural extensions to us. In this paper we introduce previous studies drawn from various fields of study, and discuss the role of the body in the self-world relationship, body image plasticity, and how designing the body may affect neural developments. We also offer a categorization of related technologies, along with our current explorations. Finally, potential issues and challenges in realizing the presented form of interfaces are addressed.