Preface SMI 2013

These are the proceedings of the second international workshop on Smart Material Interfaces`(SMI 2013), held in Sydney, Australia on December 13th. This second workshop is held in conjunction with the 15th ACM International Conference on Multimodal Interaction (ICMI 2013). The first workshop on Smart Material Interfaces (SMI 2012) was held during ICMI 2012, in Santa Monica, California, USA. The objective of this workshop is to draw attention to the emerging field of smart material interfaces which spans the areas of design, engineering and architecture. These novel composites, which in some cases are already celebrated as the answer for the 21st century’s technological needs, are generally referred to as materials that are capable of sensing the environment and actively responding to environmental changes by changing their physical properties. This allows the control of physical properties such as shape, size and color by using certain stimuli (electric or magnetic fields, light, temperature or stress). Some common smart materials appear in the form of polymers, ceramics, memory metals or hydro gels. The workshop aims at stimulating research and development in interfaces that make novel use of such smart materials, and will provide a platform for state-of-the-art design of smart material interfaces.