Sustainabot – Exploring the Use of Everyday Foodstuffs as Output and Input for and with Emergent Users

Mainstream digital interactions are spread over a plethora of devices and form-factors, from mobiles to laptops; printouts to large screens. For emergent users, however, such abundance of choice is rarely accessible or affordable. In particular, viewing mobile content on a larger screen, or printing out copies, is often not available. In this paper we present Sustainabot – a small robot printer that uses everyday materials to print shapes and patterns from mobile phones. Sustainabot was proposed and developed by and with emergent users through a series of co-creation workshops. We begin by discussing this process, then detail the open-source mobile printer prototype. We carried out two evaluations of Sustainabot, the first focused on printing with materials in situ, and the second on understandability of its output. We present these results, and discuss opportunities and challenges for similar developments. We conclude by highlighting where and how similar devices could be used in future.