The words for today generated some possibilities: mouth/ears/nose on characters that grow/shrink; characters with mouth/ears/nose that grow/shrink; characters made out of mouth/ears/nose that grow/shrink.
What really caught my imagination was the grow/shrink part. I thought about materials and in particular, was interested in the fingers of soft robots. I was interested in creating mouth/eyes/ears that could change shape based on pneumatics.
While I roughly had an idea of how a soft robotic gripper would work, I wanted to test it out. I got balloons and put tape on one side to see how it would bend. It didn't always turn out how I expected. For one, it curls up along the direction of the tape when deflating (towards sticky side), but when inflating, the bend is not noticeable.
I wondered if restricting the volumes of air to smaller chambers would help, as in the case of robotic grippers: chambers on the side that will expand more, piece of bendable plastic on the other. Basically, one side that changes a lot vs another side that barely changes.
To create these chambers I restricted the diameter at intervals, and glued each interval together.
This seemed to work more. So I made faces:
This was a rather difficult one, but it elicited a lot of interest, smiles and sounds of fun from everyone on D12 (even when a balloon burst). This was a rather important criteria for me: an exploration of things that are fun or promote play.
On later searching, this is relevant:
https://ideas.ted.com/a-peek-into-the-brave-new-world-of-programmable-materials/