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HYBRID ECOLOGIES LAB
Katherine W. Song, Szu Ting Tung, Alexis Kim, and Eric Paulos
Food and flavors are integral to our existence in the world. Nonetheless, taste remains an under-explored sense in interaction design. We present Füpop, a technical platform for delivering in-mouth flavors that leverages advances in electronics and molecular gastronomy. Füpop comprises a fully edible pouch placed inside the mouth against a cheek that programmatically releases different flavors when wirelessly triggered by a focused ultrasound transducer from outside the cheek. Füpop does not interfere with activities such as chewing and drinking, and its electronics may be integrated into devices already used near the cheek, such as mobile phones, audio headphones, and head-mounted displays. Füpop’s flavors are from "real foods,"" not ones imitated with synthetic reagents, providing authentic, nutritive flavors. We envision that with Füpop, flavors may be synced to music, a phone call, or events in virtual reality to enhance a user’s experience of their food and the world.
CHI 2024
New Media
Katherine W. Song, Fiona Bell, Himani Deshpande, Ilan Mandel, Tiffany Wun, Mirela Alistar, Leah Buechley, Wendy Ju, Jeeeun Kim, Eric Paulos, Samar Sabie, and Ron Wakkary
Unmaking is a counterpart to making and creating new things that has emerged as a concept of interest in diverse parts of the HCI community. Unmaking has been posed as an ally to sustainability, encouraging designers to foreground issues relating to reuse, repair, obsolescence, degradation, and decay early in their design process. As a follow-up to the 2022 Unmaking@CHI workshop, this workshop will bring together researchers and practitioners interested in unmaking as it relates to sustainability and will focus primarily on exploring the role of unmaking in material practices, drawing upon the growing body of unmaking theory to explore future research opportunities for designing physical things with sustainable materials that are transient, degradable, and intentionally unmake-able. In addition to considering the pragmatics of what and how to unmake, we seek to articulate the relationships among unmaking and other related emerging themes and sustainable material practices – including biodegradation, designing with more-than-human agencies, reuse, and repair – and propose guidelines for designing for the unmaking of physical artifacts that are sustainable, equitable, and respectful of all entities involved.
CHI EA 2024
Critical Design
Katherine W. Song
As sustainability becomes an increasingly pressing concern across disciplines, the design and fabrication communities within HCI are rapidly discovering and sharing a wealth of novel materials, tools, and workflows, allowing us to make physical artifacts that are more eco-friendly than ever before. Still, sustainability and functionality are often at odds with one another when it comes to the design of interactive systems, with most systems still relying on conventional electronic components that must be extracted and individually handled at end of life. My work offers approaches for designing decomposable interactive systems that are made with materials that are widely available, safe, and even edible, empowering the “everyday designer” to make sustainable systems for applications that do not demand long operation times or high power. Enabled by the growing ecosystem of decomposable materials and systems, I also propose new opportunities for designing for unmaking, a counterpart to making that opens the opaque, industrial processes of recycling and composting as rich design spaces to encourage further engagement and critical reflection around themes of sustainability, materiality, and consumption.
UIST 2023
New Making Renaissance
Katherine W. Song and Eric Paulos
Providing electrical power is essential for nearly all interactive technologies, yet it often remains an afterthought. Some designs handwave power altogether as an "exercise for later." Others hastily string together batteries to meet the system's electrical requirements, enclosing them in whatever box fits. Vɪᴍ is a new approach -- it elevates power as a first-class design element; it frees power from being a series of discrete elements, instead catering to exact requirements; it enables power to take on new, flexible forms; it is fabricated using low-cost, accessible materials and technologies; finally, it advances sustainability by being rechargeable, non-toxic, edible, and compostable. Vɪᴍs are decomposable battery alternatives that rapidly charge and can power small applications for hours. We present Vɪᴍs, detail their characteristics, offer design guidelines for their fabrication, and explore their use in applications spanning prototyping, fashion, and food, including novel systems that are entirely decomposable and edible.
CHI 2023
New Making Renaissance
Eric Rawn, Jingyi Li, Eric Paulos, Sarah E. Chasins
Whether a programmer with code or a potter with clay, practitioners engage in an ongoing process of working and reasoning with materials. Existing discussions in HCI have provided rich accounts of these practices and processes, which we synthesize into three themes: (1) reciprocal discovery of goals and materials, (2) local knowledge of materials, and (3) annotation for holistic interpretation. We then apply these design principles generatively to the domain of version control to present Quickpose: a version control system for creative coding. In an in-situ, longitudinal study of Quickpose guided by our themes, we collected usage data, version history, and interviews. Our study explored our participants’ material interaction behaviors and the initial promise of our proposed measures for recognizing these behaviors. Quickpose is an exploration of version control as material interaction, using existing discussions to inform domain-specific concepts, measures, and designs for version control systems.
CHI 2023
Sarah Sterman, Molly Jane Nicholas, Janaki Vivrekar, Jessica Mindel, and Eric Paulos
Documentation can support design work and create opportunities for learning and reflection. We explore how a novel documentation tool for a remote interaction design course provides insight into design process and integrates strategies from expert practice to support studio-style collaboration and reflection. Using Research through Design, we develop and deploy Kaleidoscope, an online tool for documenting design process, in an upper-level HCI class during the COVID-19 pandemic, iteratively developing it in response to student feedback and needs. We discuss key themes from the real-world deployment of Kaleidoscope, including: tensions between documentation and creation; effects of centralizing discussion; privacy and visibility in shared spaces; balancing evidence of achievement with feelings of overwhelm; and the effects of initial perceptions and incentives on tool usage. These successes and challenges provide insights to guide future tools for design documentation and HCI education that scaffold learning process as an equal partner to execution.
CHI 2023
🏆 Best Paper
Katherine W. Song*, Christine Dierk*, Szu Ting Tung, and Eric Paulos
Skin-based electronics are an emerging genre of interactive technologies. In this paper, we leverage the natural uses of lotions and propose them as mediators for driving novel, low-power, quasi-bistable, and bio-degradable electrochromic displays on the skin and other surfaces. We detail the design, fabrication, and evaluation of one such "Lotion Interface," including how it can be customized using low-cost everyday materials and technologies to trigger various visual and temporal effects – some lasting up to fifteen minutes when unpowered. We characterize different fabrication techniques and lotions to demonstrate various visual effects on a variety of skin types and tones. We highlight the safety of our design for humans and the environment. Finally, we report findings from an exploratory user study and present a range of compelling applications for Lotion Interfaces that expand the on-skin and surface interaction landscapes to include the familiar and often habitual practice of applying lotion.
CHI 2023
Cosmetic Computing
Eric Rawn
In the 1980’s and 1990’s, Xerox’s Palo Alto Research Center (PARC) was both a technological and intellectual force for the advent of pervasive computing: computation that was not only on the desks of office workers but instead became the invisible background against which we communicated, acted, and thought – in other words, computing as infrastructure. Mark Weiser, then the manager of PARC’s computer science lab, argued that such a view of computation would create a new relationship between people and computers, allowing us to ultimately shift our attention away from the computer itself: “only when things disappear… are we freed to use them without thinking and so to focus beyond them on new goals.” Computation as infrastructure has since become a material reality across the world, and continues to shape the role we envision for computers in human society.
In this talk I investigate the intellectual history of pervasive computing at PARC. Through a combination of oral history and archival records, I show how Weiser and his colleagues relied on a diverse constellation of intellectual sources, including work in Artificial Intelligence and Economics, the work of Heidegger and other existentialists, and influences from Anthropology and Sociology, to conceptualize and articulate this new relationship between humans and computation. Importantly, I argue that these conceptual foundations sharply disagreed on a fundamental picture of the world, mind, and machine, outlining three broad positions which each structured pervasive computing but saw the relationship between world and mind very differently. Clarifying how a pervasive computing worldview draws from each of these is crucial, as each, I show, structures a different conception of politics, power, and human agency in relation to computation. Therefore, I argue that understanding pervasive computing’s intellectual history is essential to critiquing and remediating the view of computation it proposes. Additionally, I argue that this history clarifies what relationship between minds and machines might be necessary for a more just technological world.
SIGCIS 2022
New Media
Sarah Sterman, Molly Jane Nicholas, and Eric Paulos
Version control systems are powerful tools for managing history information and shaping personal and collaborative processes. While many complex tools exist for software engineering, and basic functionality for capturing versions is often found in collaborative applications such as text editors and design layout tools, these systems are not attuned to the needs and behaviors of creative practitioners within those domains, and fail to support creative practitioners in many others. Through 18 semi-structured interviews across diverse domains of creativity, we investigate how creative practitioners use version histories in their process. With the familiar paradigms and features of software version control as an organizing structure, we discuss how these creative practitioners embrace, challenge, and complicate uses of version histories in four ways: using versions as a palette of materials, providing confidence and freedom to explore, leveraging low-fidelity version capture, and reflecting on and reusing versions across long time scales. We discuss how the themes present across this wide range of mediums and domains can provide insight into future designs and uses of version control systems to support creative process.
CSCW 2022
New Making Renaissance
Molly Jane Nicholas, Brian A. Smith, Rajan Vaish
We introduce Friendscope, an instant, in-the-moment experience sharing system for lightweight commercial camera glasses. Friendscope explores a new concept called a shared camera. This concept allows a wearer to share control of their camera with a remote friend, making it possible for both people to capture photos/videos from the camera in the moment. Through a user study with 48 participants, we found that users felt connected to each other, describing the shared camera as a more intimate form of livestreaming. Moreover, even privacy-sensitive users were able to retain their sense of privacy and control with the shared camera. Friendscope's different shared camera configurations give wearers ultimate control over who they share the camera with and what photos/videos they share. We conclude with design implications for future experience sharing systems.
CSCW 2022
New Media
Molly Jane Nicholas, Sarah Sterman, and Eric Paulos
Creative practice often requires persevering through moments of ambiguity, where the outcome of a process is unclear. Creative practitioners intentionally manage this process, for example by developing strategies to break out of creative ruts, or stay motivated through uncertainty. Understanding the way experts engage with and manage these creativity-relevant processes represents a rich source of foundational knowledge for designers of Creativity Support Tools. These strategies represent an opportunity for CST research: to create CSTs that embody emotional and process-focused strategies and techniques. Through interviews with expert practitioners in diverse domains including performance, craft, engineering, and design, we identify four strategies for managing process: Strategic Forgetting, Mode Switching, Embodying Process, and Aestheticizing. Understanding tool- and domain-agnostic creative strategies used by experts to manage their own creative process can inform the design of future CSTs that amplify the benefits of successful strategies and scaffold new techniques.
C&C 2022
New Making Renaissance
🏆 Best Paper
Samar Sabie, Katherine W. Song, Tapan Parikh, Steven Jackson, Eric Paulos, Kristina Lindstrom, Åsa Ståhl, Dina Sabie, Kristina Andersen, Ron Wakkary
Design is conventionally considered to be about making and creating new things. But what about the converse of that process – unmaking that which already exists? Researchers and designers have recently started to explore the concept of “unmaking” to actively think about important design issues like reuse, repair, and unintended socio-ecological impacts. They have also observed the importance of unmaking as a ubiquitous process in the world, and its relation to making in an ongoing dialectic that continually recreates our material and technological realms. Despite the increasing attention to unmaking, it remains largely under-investigated and under-theorized in HCI. The objectives of this workshop are therefore to (a) bring together a community of researchers and practitioners who are interested in exploring or showcasing the affordances of unmaking, (b) articulate the material and epistemological scopes of unmaking within HCI, and (c) reflect on frameworks, research approaches, and technical infrastructure for unmaking in HCI that can support its wider application in the field.
CHI EA 2022
New Making Renaissance
Katherine W Song, Aditi Maheshwari, Eric M Gallo, Andreea Danielescu, Eric Paulos
Sustainability is critical to our planet and thus our designs. Within HCI, there is a tension between the desire to create interactive electronic systems and sustainability. In this paper, we present the design of an interactive system comprising components that are entirely decomposable. We leverage the inherent material properties of natural materials, such as paper, leaf skeletons, and chitosan, along with silver nanowires to create a new system capable of being electrically controlled as a portable heater. This new decomposable system, capable of wirelessly heating to >70°C, is flexible, lightweight, low-cost, and reusable, and it maintains its functionality over long periods of heating and multiple power cycles. We detail its design and present a series of use cases, from enabling a novel resealable packaging system to acting as a catalyst for shape-changing designs and beyond. Finally, we highlight the important decomposable property of the interactive system when it meets end-of-life.
CHI 2022
New Making Renaissance
🎖️ Honorable Mention
Rundong Tian, Eric Paulos
Adroid enables users to borrow precision and accuracy from a robotic arm when using hand-held tools. When a tool is mounted to the robot, the user can hold and move the tool directly—Adroid measures the user’s applied forces and commands the robot to move in response. Depending on the tool and scenario, Adroid can selectively restrict certain motions. In the resulting interaction, the robot acts like a virtual “jig” which constrains the tool’s motion, augmenting the user’s accuracy, technique, and strength, while not diminishing their agency during open-ended fabrication tasks. We complement these hands-on interactions with projected augmented reality for visual feedback about the state of the system. We show how tools augmented by Adroid can support hands-on making and discuss how it can be configured to support other tasks within and beyond fabrication.
UIST 2021
New Making Renaissance
Molly Jane Nicholas, Stephanie Claudino Daffara, Eric Paulos
Work combining live performance and technology often involves incorporating technology directly into the performance as it occurs onstage, including interactive costumes, or performer-controlled sets, lighting or sound. We invert this common approach, developing technology-mediated experiences outside the temporal and spatial confines of a live theatre production. We describe the 4-month co-design process with expert theatre practitioners, and detail how the process 1) shaped our design guidelines and 2) expands the discussion around existing best practices for cross-disciplinary collaboration. In the style of research through design, we present three annotated prototypes: the Augmented Playbill, the Prayer Wheel, and Tarot Cards as well as accompanying AR applications to convey the decisions we made and the philosophy we iteratively developed throughout the project. These artifacts also embody our six design guidelines: resonant affordances, extended narrative, reflective interaction, selective reveal, personalized experience, and privileged access.
DIS 2021
New Media
Katherine W. Song and Eric Paulos
The access and growing ubiquity of digital fabrication has ushered in a celebration of creativity and “making.” However, the focus is often on the resulting static artifact or the creative process and tools to design it. We envision a post-making process that extends past these final static objects – not just in their making but in their “unmaking.” By drawing from artistic movements such as Auto-Destructive Art, intentionally inverting well-established engineering principles of structurally sound designs, and safely misusing unstable materials, we demonstrate an important extension to making – unmaking. In this paper, we provide designers with a new vocabulary of unmaking operations within standard 3D modeling tools. We demonstrate how such designs can be realized using a novel multi-material 3D printing process. Finally, we detail how unmaking allows designs to change over time, is an ally to sustainability and re-usability, and captures themes of “aura,” emotionality, and personalization.
CHI 2021
New Making Renaissance
Katherine W. Song*, Janaki Vivrekar*, Lynn Yeom*, Eric Paulos, and Niloufar Salehi
Passively consuming digital social media content often precludes users from mindfully considering the value they derive from such experiences as they engage in them. We present a system for using Twitter that requires users to continuously turn a hand crank to power their social media screen. We evaluate the device and its effects on how users value Twitter with 3 participants over 3 weeks, with the middle week of Twitter usage streamlined exclusively through our system. Using our device caused a dramatic decrease in Twitter usage for all participants, which either persisted or rebounded in the post-intervention week. Our analysis of diary studies and qualitative interviews surfaced three themes indicating shifting focus on content, shifting awareness about the role of social media, and new social dynamics around content-sharing.
CHI EA 2021
Critical Design
Sarah Sterman, Evey Huang, Vivian Liu, and Eric Paulos
Style is an important aspect of writing, shaping how audiences interpret and engage with literary works. However, for most people style is difficult to articulate precisely. While users frequently interact with computational word processing tools with well-defined metrics, such as spelling and grammar checkers, style is a significantly more nuanced concept. In this paper, we present a computational technique to help surface style in written text. We collect a dataset of crowdsourced human judgments of style, derive a model of style by training a neural net on this data, and present novel applications for visualizing and browsing style across broad bodies of literature, as well as an interactive text editor with real-time style feedback. We study these interactive style applications with users and discuss implications for enabling this novel approach to style.
CHI 2020
New Media
Rundong Tian, Vedant Saran, Mareike Kritzler, Florian Michahelles, and Eric Paulos
Advances in digital fabrication have simultaneously created new capabilities while reinforcing outdated workflows that constrain how, and by whom, these fabrication tools are used. In this work, we investigate how a new class of hybrid controlled machines can collaborate with novice and expert users alike to yield a more lucid making experience. We demonstrate these ideas through our system, Turn-by-Wire. By combining the capabilities of a traditional lathe with haptic input controllers that modulate both position and force, we detail a series of novel interaction metaphors that invite a more fluid making process spanning digital, model-centric, computer control, and embodied, adaptive, human control. We evaluate our system through a user study and discuss how these concepts generalize to other fabrication tools.
UIST 2019
New Making Renaissance
Rundong Tian
Advances in digital fabrication have created new capabilities and simultaneously reinforced outdated workflows. In my thesis work, I primarily explore alternative workflows for digital fabrication that introduce new capabilities and interactions. Methodologically, I build fabrication systems spanning mechanical design, electronics, and software in order to examine these ideas in specific detail. In this paper, I introduce related work and frame it within the historical context of digital fabrication, and discuss my previous and ongoing work.
UIST 2019
New Making Renaissance
Cesar Torres, Jessica Chang, Advaita Patel, and Eric Paulos
Hybrid practices are emerging that integrate creative materials like paint, clay, and cloth with intangible immaterials like computation, electricity, and heat. This work aims to expand the design potential of immaterial elements by transforming them into manipulatable, observable and intuitive materials. We explore one such immaterial, electric heat, and develop a maker-friendly fabrication pipeline and crafting support tool that allows users to experientially compose resistive heaters that generate heat spatially and temporally. These heaters are then used to couple heat and thermoreactive materials in a class of artifacts we term Thermoreactive Composites (TrCs). In a formal user study, we observe how designing fabrication workflows along dimensions of composability and perceivability better matches the working styles of material practitioners without domain knowledge of electronics. Through exemplar artifacts, we demonstrate the potential of heat as a creative material and discuss implications for immaterials used within creative practices.
DIS 2019
New Making Renaissance
Cesar Torres, Matthew Jörke, Emily Hill, and Eric Paulos
Tacit knowledge is a type of knowledge often existing in one's subconscious or embodied in muscle memory. Such knowledge is pervasive in creative practices yet remains difficult to observe or codify. To better understand tacit knowledge, we introduce a design method that leverages time-series data (interaction logs, physical sensor, and biosignal data) to isolate unique actions and behaviors between groups of users. This method is enacted in Eluent, a tool that distills hundreds of hours of dense activity data using an activity segmentation algorithm into a codebook – a set of distinct, characteristic sequences that comprise an activity. The results are made visually parsable in a representation we term process chromatograms that aid with 1) highlighting distinct periods of activity in creative sessions, 2) identifying distinct groups of users, and 3) characterizing periods of activity. We demonstrate the value of our method through a study of tacit process within computational notebooks and discuss ways process chromatograms can act as a knowledge mining technique, an evaluation metric, and a design-informing visualization.
C&C 2019
New Making Renaissance
Christine Dierk, Scott Carter, Patrick Chiu, Tony Dunnigan, and Don Kimber
As our landscape of wearable technologies proliferates, we find more devices situated on our heads. However, many challenges hinder them from widespread adoption — from their awkward, bulky form factor (today’s AR and VR goggles) to their socially stigmatized designs (Google Glass) and a lack of a well-developed head-based interaction design language. In this paper, we explore a socially acceptable, large, head-worn interactive wearable — a hat. We report results from a gesture elicitation study with 17 participants, extract a taxonomy of gestures, and define a set of design concerns for interactive hats. Through this lens, we detail the design and fabrication of three hat prototypes capable of sensing touch, head movements, and gestures, and including ambient displays of several types. Finally, we report an evaluation of our hat prototype and insights to inform the design of future hat technologies.
DIS 2019
Cosmetic Computing
Cesar Torres, Molly Jane Nicholas, Sangyeon Lee, and Eric Paulos
An exciting, expanding palette of hybrid materials is emerging that can be programmed to actuate by a range of external and internal stimuli. However, there exists a dichotomy between the physicality of the actuators and the intangible computational signal that is used to program them. For material practitioners, this lack of physical cues limits their ability to engage in a "conversation with materials" (CwM). This paper presents a creative workstation for supporting this epistemological style by bringing a stronger physicality to the computational signal and balance the conversation between physical and digital actors. The station utilizes a streaming architecture to distribute control across multiple devices and leverage the rich spatial cognition that a physical space affords. Through a formal user study, we characterize the actuation design practice supported by the CwM workstation and discuss opportunities for tangible interfaces to hybrid materials.
TEI 2019
New Making Renaissance
Cesar Torres
Practices are emerging which blend both physical and computational techniques and materials. This thesis contributes a framework for understanding how to compose these hybrid elements into rich, reflective new media practices that expand the aesthetic repertoire and facilitate the adoption, sharing, and teaching of hybrid techniques.
DIS 2018
New Making Renaissance
Cesar Torres, Sarah Sterman, Molly Nicholas, Richard Lin, Eric Pai, and Eric Paulos
Failure, whether it be “complete-and-utter” or “a minor set-back”, occurs in a variety of different creative practices, yet how it is perceived, handled, and recovered from is a lesser explored design space. Failing to address these perceptions of failure can have psychological repercussions, discourage users from continuing a practice, and form cultural stigma such as those associated with STEM fields. However, mediating practices to develop a culture of resiliency and perseverance is key to sustaining a (lifelong) practice and reshaping pedagogical strategies. In this work, we outline the design space of “guardians”, or elements of a creative practice that mitigate the psychological effects of failure. Through a contextual inquiry, we contribute an inventory of failure-mitigation strategies from a variety of creative disciplines. We synthesize guidelines for the design of new guardians and present a preliminary exploration of guardians for the lasercutting practice – effigies and test tags.
DIS 2018
New Making Renaissance
Johanna Okerlund, Madison Dunaway,
Celine Latulipe, David Wilson, and Eric Paulos
Maker culture has been increasingly pervasive in a variety of communities and contexts, in particular devoted spaces such as Makerspaces, Hackerspaces and Fab Labs. Several people, however, have pointed out that while one of the values of these spaces is radical inclusion, the general Maker culture can be exclusive to some based on gender, race, and socioeconomic status. With the goal of disrupting existing Maker culture by developing, diversifying, and empowering our own university Maker community, we created a semi-structured making experience that we call Statement Making. Statement Making is a Maker Fashion show that we invited anyone from the community to participate in by “making a statement” for them or a friend to wear in a runway show. We report outcomes and experiences of those who participated. We then discuss the key aspects of the event, especially surrounding its performative aspect, using design principles of Feminist HCI to argue that events with similar aspects might also be successful at disrupting existing culture.
DIS 2018
Cosmetic Computing
🎖️ Honorable Mention
Rundong Tian, Sarah Sterman, Ethan Chiou, Jeremy Warner, and Eric Paulos
Digital fabrication tools have broadened participation in making and enabled new methods of rapid physical prototyping across diverse materials. We present a novel smart tool designed to complement one of the first materials employed by humans — wood — and celebrate the fabrication practice of joinery. Our tool, MatchSticks, is a digital fabrication system tailored for joinery. Combining a portable CNC machine, touchscreen user interface, and parametric joint library, MatchSticks enables makers of varying skill to rapidly explore and create artifacts from wood. Our system embodies tacit woodworking knowledge and distills the distributed workflow of CNC tools into a hand tool; it operates on materials existing machines find difficult, produces assemblies much larger than its workspace, and supports the parallel creation of geometries. We describe the workflow and technical details of our system, present example artifacts produced by our tool, and report results from our user study.
CHI 2018
New Making Renaissance
🎖️ Honorable Mention
Christine Dierk, Molly Jane Pearce Nicholas, and Eric Paulos
As the landscape of wearable devices continues to expand, power remains a major issue for adoption, usability, and miniaturization. Users are faced with an increasing number of personal devices to manage, charge, and care for. In this work, we argue that power constraints limit the design space of wearable devices. We present AlterWear: an architecture for new wearable devices that implement a batteryless design using electromagnetic induction via NFC and bistable e-ink displays. Although these displays are active only when in proximity to an NFC-enabled device, this unique combination of hardware enables both quick, dynamic and long-term interactions with persistent visual displays. We demonstrate new wearables enabled through AlterWear with dynamic, fashion-forward, and expressive displays across several form factors, and evaluate them in a user study. By forgoing the need for onboard power, AlterWear expands the ecosystem of functional and fashionable wearable technologies.
CHI 2018
Cosmetic Computing
Christine Dierk, Sarah Sterman, Molly Jane Pearce Nicholas, and Eric Paulos
Human hair is a cultural material, with a rich history displaying individuality, cultural expression and group identity. It is malleable in length, color and style, highly visible, and embedded in a range of personal and group interactions. As wearable technologies move ever closer to the body, and embodied interactions become more common and desirable, hair presents a unique and little-explored site for novel interactions. In this paper, we present an exploration and working prototype of hair as a site for novel interaction, leveraging its position as something both public and private, social and personal, malleable and permanent. We develop applications and interactions around this new material in HäirIÖ: a novel integration of hair-based technologies and braids that combine capacitive touch input and dynamic output through color and shape change. Finally, we evaluate this hair-based interactive technology with users, including the integration of HäirIÖ within the landscape of existing wearable and mobile technologies.
TEI 2018
Cosmetic Computing
Cesar Torres, Jasper O’Leary, Molly Nicholas, and Eric Paulos
Recent digital fabrication tools have enabled new form-giving using a wide range of physical materials. However, light as a first class creative material has been largely ignored within the design of our electronic objects. Our work expands the illumination design space by treating light as a physical material. We introduce a digital design tool that simulates and visualizes physical light interactions with a variety of materials for creating custom luminaires. We further develop a computational design and fabrication process for creating custom secondary optics elements (SOEs), which provides additional handles for users to physically shape and redirect light to compose, fill, and evenly diffuse planar and volumetric geometries. Through a workshop study with novice electronic designers, we show how incorporating physical techniques to shape light alters how users view the role and function of LEDs and electronics. We produce example pieces that showcase how our approach expands the electronics aesthetic and discuss how viewing light as material can engender novel, expressive artifacts.
CHI 2017
New Making Renaissance
🏆 Best Paper
Christine Dierk, Tomás Vega Gálvez, and Eric Paulos
Beyond phones, watches, and activity tracking devices, a new ecosystem of functional and fashionable wearable technologies can easily, safely, and economically be designed, prototyped, and integrated directly on the body. In this paper, we present AlterNail, a fingernail form factor, ambient, low-power, stateful, wireless, dynamic display with onboard vibrational sensing. AlterNail integrates a batteryless design using inductive coupling with e-ink technology to enable both quick dynamic and long-term static fingernail based visual designs without the need for power. We also detail the use of simple vibrational signals to uniquely identify everyday objects as they are handled using AlterNails. The intentionally limited interactional functionality of AlterNails, coupled with the rich personal and dynamic expressive potential, combine to present a compelling range of opportunities for designers of new interactive wearable technologies. We detail a range of practical and playful applications using this technology.
CHI 2017
Cosmetic Computing
Joanne Lo, Cesar Torres, Isabel Yang, Jasper O’Leary,
Danny Kaufman, Wilmot Li, Mira Dontcheva, and Eric Paulos†
As interactive electronics become increasingly intimate and personal, the design of the circuitry is correspondingly developing a more playful and creative aesthetic. Circuit sketching and design is a multidimensional activity combining the arts, crafts, and engineering that broadens participation of electronic creation to include makers of diverse backgrounds. In order to support this design ecology, we present Ellustrate, a digital design tool that enables the functional and aesthetic design of electronic circuits with multiple conductive and dielectric materials. Ellustrate guides users through the fabrication and debugging process, easing the task of practical circuit creation while supporting designers’ aesthetic decisions throughout the circuit authoring workflow. In a formal user study, we demonstrate how Ellustrate enables a new electronic design conversation that combines electronics, materials, and visual aesthetic considerations.
UIST 2016
New Making Renaissance
Doris Jung-Lin Lee, Joanne Lo, Moonhyok Kim, and Eric Paulos
In this paper, we introduce Crowdclass, a novel framework that integrates the learning of advanced scientific concepts with the crowdsourcing microtask of image classification. In Crowdclass, we design questions to serve as both a learning experience and a scientific classification. This is different from conventional citizen science platforms which decompose high level questions into a series of simple microtasks that require no scientific background knowledge to complete. We facilitate learning within the microtask by providing content that is appropriate for the participant’s level of knowledge through scaffolding learning. We conduct a between-group study of 93 participants on Amazon Mechanical Turk comparing Crowdclass to the popular citizen science project Galaxy Zoo. We find that the scaffolding presentation of content enables learning of more challenging concepts. By understanding the relationship between user motivation, learning, and performance, we draw general design principles for learning-as-an-incentive interventions applicable to other crowdsourcing applications.
HCOMP 2016
Citizen Science
Cesar Torres, Jasper O'Leary, and Eric Paulos
LiveObjects approaches expressive object design from the lens of art theory and creates a series of IoT data objects that utilize theatricality, or the perception of an object having presence, to provoke new interactions between objects, viewers, and space. This approach utilizes actuation, materials and everyday objects to express social data. We showcase how such objects can form unique expressive personalities, expose relational data, and perturb environments to form information spaces.
DIS Companion 2016
New Media
Joanne Lo, Doris Jung-Lin Lee, Nathan Wong, David Bui, Eric Paulos
Skintillates is a wearable technology that mimics tattoos - the oldest and most commonly used on-skin displays in human culture. We demonstrate that by fabricating electrical traces and thin electronics on temporary tattoo paper, a wide array of displays and sensors can be created. Just like the traditional temporary tattoos often worn by children and adults alike, Skintillates flex naturally with the user's skin. Our simple fabrication technique also enables users to freely design and print with a full range of colors to create application-specific customized designs.
DIS 2016
Cosmetic Computing
🎖️ Honorable Mention
Cesar Torres, Wilmot Li, and Eric Paulos
Advances in digital fabrication (DF) technologies are making it easier to produce high-fidelity replicas of digital designs. However, this push-to-print paradigm limits the creative opportunities that arise from “working through a material” which involves risk, uncertainty, and serendipitous discovery. We investigate how DF artifacts can function as static intermediary tools, which we term proxies, to support crafting practice. We focus on the wire-wrapping process, where physical wire is bent into complex shapes, and build DF fixtures to aid with construction and fabrication and explore how these proxies can provide users with different levels-of-assistance. In a user study, we evaluated how these proxies affect the making process and uncovered methodological distinctions between novices and experts. We discuss how approaches such as ProxyPrint that are designed aware of the medium can create more engaging making tools that embed tacit knowledge, encourage creativity, and engage users in ways that can sustain crafting practice.
DIS 2016
New Making Renaissance
🎖️ Honorable Mention
Noura Howell, Laura Devendorf, Rundong (Kevin) Tian, Tomás Vega Galvez,
Nan-Wei Gong, Ivan Poupyrev, Eric Paulos, and Kimiko Ryokai
We explore the social meaning of clothing-based displays of biosignals. How do friends make sense of their own and each other's skin conductance display in the context of a conversation? We developed Hint, a dynamic thermochromic t-shirt with ambiguous patterns that change color when its wearer's skin conductance increases, an indication of sudden arousal. We investigated how pairs of friends, each wearing the shirt, conversed and interpreted the display. Participants shared interpretations and emotions such as joy and embarrassment were associated with an increase in skin conductance. Participants expressed desires for their skin conductance displays to help validate their feelings and show emotional engagement with others. We explore ambiguity in the context of clothing-based information displays and discuss how skin conductance display became part of social performance in our study. We suggest framing biosignals as social cues and begin to question what design territories this might uncover.
DIS 2016
Cosmetic Computing
Rundong Tian, Christine Dierk, Christopher Myers, and Eric Paulos
In 2012, air pollution in both cities and rural areas was estimated to have caused 3.7 million premature deaths. The primary pollutant was small airborne particulate matter of 10 microns or less in diameter which led to the development of cardiovascular and respiratory diseases. In response, we developed MyPart, the first personal, portable, accurate, open source air particle sensor. We demonstrate how MyPart offers substantial enhancements over most existing air particle sensors by simultaneously improving accessibility, flexibility, portability, and accuracy. We describe the evolution and implementation of the sensor design, demonstrate its performance across everyday urban environments versus a calibrated instrument, and conduct a preliminary user study to report on the overall user experience of MyPart. We also present a novel mobile visualization interface and a series of simple form factor adaptations of our design.
Since publishing this research at CHI 2016, we have further iterated on the mechanical and electrical design of the sensor. In addition, we have documented detailed build instructions for the sensor itself, as well as a test chamber for running various automated experiments.
CHI 2016
Citizen Science
Laura Devendorf, Joanne Lo, Noura Howell, Jung Lin Lee, Nan-Wei Gong, M. Emre Karagozler, Shiho Fukuhara, Ivan Poupyrev, Eric Paulos, and Kimiko Ryokai
This paper explores the role dynamic textile displays play in relation to personal style: What does it mean to wear computationally responsive clothing and why would one be motivated to do so? We developed a novel textile display technology, called Ebb, and created several woven and crochet fabric swatches that explored clothing-specific design possibilities. We engaged fashion designers and non-designers in imagining how Ebb would integrate into their design practice or personal style of dressing. Participants evaluated the appeal and utility of clothing-based displays according to a very different set of criteria than traditional screen-based computational displays. Specifically, the slowness, low-resolution, and volatility of Ebb tended to be seen as assets as opposed to technical limitations in the context of personal style. Additionally, participants envisioned various ways that ambiguous, ambient, and abstract displays of information could prompt new experiences in their everyday lives. Our paper details the complex relationships between display and personal style and offers a new design metaphor and extension of Gaver et al.'s original descriptions of ambiguity in order to guide the design of clothing-based displays for everyday life.
CHI 2016
Cosmetic Computing
🏆 Best Paper
Cesar Torres, Tim Campbell, Neil Kumar, and Eric Paulos
Digital fabrication has enabled massive creativity in hobbyist communities and professional product design. These emerging technologies excel at realizing an arbitrary shape or form; however these objects are often rigid and lack the feel desired by designers. We aim to enable physical haptic design in passive 3D printed objects. This paper identifies two core areas for extending physical design into digital fabrication: designing the external and internal haptic characteristics of an object. We present HapticPrint as a pair of design tools to easily modify the feel of a 3D model. Our external tool maps textures and UI elements onto arbitrary shapes, and our internal tool modifies the internal geometry of models for novel compliance and weight characteristics. We demonstrate the value of HapticPrint with a range of applications that expand the aesthetics of feel, usability, and interactivity in 3D artifacts.
UIST 2015
New Making Renaissance
Stacey Kuznetsov, Aniket Kittur, and Eric Paulos
Low-cost genetic sequencing, coupled with novel social media platforms and visualization techniques, present a new frontier for scientific participation, whereby people can learn, share, and act on data embedded within their own bodies. Our study of 23andMe, a popular genetic testing service, reveals how users make sense of and contextualize their genetic results, critique and evaluate the underlying research, and reflect on the broader implications of genetic testing. We frame user groups as citizen science publicsgroups that coalesce around scientific issues and work towards resolving shared concerns. Our findings show that personal genetics serves as a site for public engagement with science, whereby communities of biological citizens creatively interpret, debate, and act on professional research. We conclude with design trajectories at the intersection of genetics and creativity support tools: platforms for aggregating hybrid knowledge; tools for creative reflection on professional science; and strategies for supporting collaborations across communities.
C&C 2015
New Media
James Pierce and Eric Paulos
This project describes and explains details of the design, production and packaging of a counterfunctional device: The Obscura 1C Digital Camera. We further describe a small-scale distribution of Obscura 1C packages into everyday contexts. The paper then reflects on the various types of conceptual, imaginary and firsthand uses made of the Obscura 1C. These include its uses for everyday audiences as a unique camera and as a conceptually usable device. But we also prioritize uses particular to the HCI and design audience. These include using the Obscura 1C to articulate the concepts of inhibitive interfaces, counterfunctionality, and enabling limitations. The Obscura 1C is further used to articulate how abstract ideas can be translated into material forms, to rethink the role of packaging in user studies, and to draw attention to how discursive design objects are packaged and presented.
CHI 2015
Critical Design
Laura Devendorf and Kimiko Ryokai
Being the Machine is a system that asks humans to receive, interpret and execute the G-Code instructions typically provided to a 3D printer in order to construct new objects. In essence, Being the Machine makes the human user into a 3D printer. Technically, it consists of a laser pointer that illuminates a single dot on a surface. The dot moves along the tool-paths generated from a digital model that the human has inputted, showing the human how a 3D printer would lay down material and inviting them to follow by hand – for the human, this feels like a game of connect-the-dots, and upon completion of the task ‘described’ by the laser pointing machine, the human has sculpted a three-dimensional object. The materials used by humans to craft objects with the Being the Machine system have ranged from flowers to Cheez Whiz to pipe cleaners to balloons.
CHI 2015
New Making Renaissance
🏆 Best Paper
Tim Campbell, Cesar Torres, and Eric Paulos
Fluid User Interfaces (Fl.UIs) are liquid-based touch surfaces that use computer-vision to detect and interpret a range of tactile user inputs. While Fl.UIs have less input resolution than digital touch screens, they provide an excellent low-cost solution for rapidly prototyping non-rectilinear screen designs as well as exploring novel surface interaction techniques. Fabricated on a laser cutter using low-cost materials, Fl.UIs use unique shape outlines to displace an internal colored liquid to regions-of-interest for a camera. This paper presents a set of software tools that help users rapidly design, fabricate and author interactions with Fl.UIs. The robust construction and an unpowered surface makes Fl.UIs well-suited for outdoor and public installations. The Fl.UIs prototyping tool encourages these uncommon "screens" emerging in complex environments (i.e. urban spaces, benches, tables, fountains, sidewalks).
TEI 2015
New Making Renaissance
Eric Paulos, Rundong Tian, Chris Myers, and Paxton Paulos
Sensory Triptych is a set of exploratory, interactive sensors designed for children that invite “new ways of seeing” our world from the perspective of the here (the earth, air, and water around us), near (things just out of sight), and out there (orbiting satellites and space junk) using familiar and novel interfaces, affordances, and narratives. We present a series of novel physical design prototypes that reframe sensing technologies for children that foster an early adoption of technology usage for exploring, understanding, communicating, sharing, and changing our world. Finally, we discuss how such designs expand the potential opportunities and landscapes for our future interactive systems and experiences within the UIST community.
UIST 2014
Materiality
Joanne Lo and Eric Paulos
ShrinkyCircuits is a novel circuit prototyping technique that enables children to experienced engineers to create durable circuit boards that come in any desired color, shape, and form. This fabrication utilizes a commonly used thermoplastic material, ShrinkyDink, as the circuit substrate. This allows users to freely draw and paint to decorate the substrate, and sketch the circuit with commercially available conductive pens. The results are beautiful, fun, and relatively-durable circuit boards that cannot be achieved by traditional PCB or other circuit sketching methods. As a bonus, the conductive ink wraps around the electronic components as the substrate shrinks, thus forming a solder joint around the through-hole components during the heating (with oven or craft heat gun) process - viola! self-soldering circuits!
UIST 2014
Projects
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