Desktop Biofibers Spinning: An Open-Source Machine for Exploring Biobased Fibers and their Application Towards Sustainable Smart Textile DesignSmart textiles combine electronics with traditional textile forms, showing great promise in creating soft and flexible interactive systems for human-computer interaction and robotics. However, they also present significant sustainability challenges as they merge two substantial waste streams: textiles and electronics. This paper contributes to sustainability efforts by focusing on the integration of biobased materials that are biodegradable, compostable, and recyclable in the design of smart textiles. We introduce a Desktop Biofibers Spinning Machine to enable smart textile innovators to explore biobased fibers (i.e., biofibers) and envision applications in sustainable smart textiles. We describe the machine's design, a usage walkthrough, considerations for fiber spinning, and an exploration of various formulations to make gelatin biofibers. We provide several examples of biofibers integrated into smart textile applications. Finally, we discuss lessons learned from working with biofibers and the unique opportunities our machine brings to the fiber design space in HCI.2024EVEldy S. Lazaro Vasquez et al.University of Colorado BoulderElectronic Textiles (E-textiles)Shape-Changing Materials & 4D PrintingCHI
Crafting Interactive Circuits on Glazed Ceramic WareGlazed ceramic is a versatile material that we use every day. In this paper, we present a new approach that instruments existing glazed ceramic ware with interactive electronic circuits. We informed this work by collaborating with a ceramics designer and connected his craft practice to our experience in physical computing. From this partnership, we developed a systematic approach that begins with the subtractive fabrication of traces on glazed ceramic surfaces via the resist-blasting technique, followed by applying conductive ink into the inlaid traces. We capture and detail this approach through an annotated flowchart for others to refer to, as well as externalize the material insights we uncovered through ceramic and circuit swatches. We then demonstrate a range of interactive home applications built with this approach. Finally, we reflect on the process we took and discuss the importance of collaborating with craftspeople for material-driven research within HCI.2023CZClement Zheng et al.National University of Singapore, National University of SingaporeCircuit Making & Hardware PrototypingTextile Art & Craft DigitizationCHI
AdaCAD: Parametric Design as a New Form of Notation for Complex WeavingWoven textiles are increasingly a medium through which HCI is inventing new technologies. Key challenges in integrating woven textiles in HCI include the high level of textile knowledge required to make effective use of the new possibilities they afford and the need for tools that bridge the concerns of textile designers and concerns of HCI researchers. This paper presents AdaCAD, a parametric design tool for designing woven textile structures. Through our design and evaluation of AdaCAD we found that parametric design helps weavers notate and explain the logics behind the complex structures they generate. We discuss these finding in relation to prior work in integrating craft and/or weaving in HCI, histories of woven notation, and boundary object theory to illuminate further possibilities for collaboration between craftspeople and HCI practitioners.2023LDLaura Devendorf et al.University of Colorado BoulderTextile Art & Craft DigitizationCHI
The Eco-Technical Interface: Attuning to the InstrumentalGiven the ongoing environmental crisis and recent calls within HCI to engage with its cascading effects on the more-than-human world, this paper introduces the concept of the eco-technical interface as a critical zone at which designers can surface and subvert issues of multispecies relations such as nonhuman instrumentalization. The eco-technical interface represents the sites at which human, non-human, and technological interfaces overlap, ranging from remote sensing for conservation to smart devices for precision agriculture to community science platforms for species identification. Here, we highlight the pervasiveness of the eco-technical interface as a set of sites for further HCI inquiry, engage with the politics and instrumentalizing tendencies at three particular sites, and demonstrate tactics for cultivating attunement to, refexively accounting for, and subverting instrumentalization in multispecies encounter.2022MLMaya Livio et al.University of ColoradoSustainable HCIHuman-Nature Relationships (More-than-Human Design)CHI
Self-deStaining Textiles: Designing Interactive Systems with Fabric, Stains and LightThis work introduces “destaining” as an interactive component for the HCI community. While staining happens unintentionally (e.g., spilling coffee), destaining can be used as an intentional design tool that selectively degrades stains on textiles. We explore the design space using silver doped titanium dioxide (TiO2/Ag), stains and light as a set of design primitives for interactive systems. We then developed replicable and accessible fabrication and testing methods that enable HCI researchers and designers to upgrade various fabrics to self-destaining textiles. Next, we demonstrate a Self-deStaining textile interface with embedded Light Emitting Diodes (LEDs) and moisture sensors that activate cleaning. Lastly, we showcase how the textile can be used in everyday objects such as self-cleaning clothes, a patterning station for phone cases, and accessories that change patterns and colors based on the user’s experiences.2021FBFiona Bell et al.University of Colorado, BoulderShape-Changing Interfaces & Soft Robotic MaterialsDigital Art Installations & Interactive PerformanceCHI
Entangling the Roles of Maker and Interpreter in Interpersonal Data Narratives: Explorations in Sound and YarnTo explore how materials, data, and humans collaborate to produce physical data representations, we created a series of artefacts from personal data we collected (about commuting, forgetting, and busy-ness) in different media---yarn and sound. We exchanged these artefacts without providing guidelines for how to interpret them in order to study where the boundary between maker and interpreter emerges. Through creating hand-crafted physicalizations and sonifications, we present three themes on making personal data narratives: matching data to the materials (and vice versa), accepting the materials’ will to co-author, and negotiating between the experience of the data and data of the experience. In exchanging the artefacts, we explored the role of the interpreter as a re-maker and how multiple narratives can productively co-exist. We conclude with a discussion about how reimagining the roles of maker and interpreter might lead to new interactions with personal data narratives.2020MFMikhaila Friske et al.Data StorytellingData PhysicalizationDIS
Unfabricate: Designing Smart Textiles for DisassemblySmart textiles development is combining computing and textile technologies to create tactile, functional objects such as smart garments, soft medical devices, and space suits. However, the field also combines the massive waste streams of both the digital electronics and textiles industries. The following work explores how HCI researchers might be poised to address sustainability and waste in future smart textiles development through interventions at design time. Specifically, we perform a design inquiry into techniques and practices for reclaiming and reusing smart textiles materials and explore how such techniques can be integrated into smart textiles design tools. Beginning with a practice in sustainable or "slow" fashion, unravelling a garment into yarn, the suite of explorations titled "Unfabricate" probes values of time and labor in crafting a garment; speculates how a smart textile garment may be designed with reuse in mind; and imagines how electronic and textile components may be given new life in novel uses.2020SWShanel Wu et al.University of Colorado BoulderElectronic Textiles (E-textiles)Sustainable HCIEcological Design & Green ComputingCHI
What HCI Can Learn from ASMR: Becoming Enchanted with the MundaneIn this paper we explore how the qualities of Autonomous Sensory Meridian Response (ASMR) media–its pairing of sonic and visual design, ability to subvert fast-paced technology for slow experiences, production of somatic responses, and attention to the everyday–might reveal new design possibilities for interactions with wearable technology. We recount our year-long design inquiry into the subject which began with an interview with a "live" ASMR creator and design probes, a series of first-person design exercises, and resulted in the creation of two interactive garments for attending, noticing, and becoming enchanted with our our everyday surroundings. We conclude by suggesting that these ASMR inspired designs cultivate personal, intimate, embodied, and felt practices of attention within our everyday, mundane, environments.2020JKJosephine Klefeker et al.University of Colorado BoulderIn-Vehicle Haptic, Audio & Multimodal FeedbackHaptic WearablesCHI
Making Design Memoirs: Understanding and Honoring Difficult ExperiencesDesign is commonly understood as a storytelling practice, yet we have few narratives with which to describe the felt experiences of struggle, pain, and difficulty, beyond treating them as subjects to resolve. This work uses the praxis of embodied design as a way to bring more complex narratives to the community for contemplation---to engage and entangle personal and difficult stories within a public context. We propose the term Design Memoirs for these first-person practices and reflections. Design Memoirs are subjective and corporeal in nature, and provide a direct and observable way to reckon with felt experiences through, and for, design. We demonstrate Design Memoirs by drawing on our own experiences as mothers, caregivers, and corporeal subjects. Following Barad, we propose a practice of diffractive reading to locate resonances between Design Memoirs which render difficult autobiographical material addressable, shareable, and open for new interpretations. We present this strategy as a method for arriving at deeper understandings of difficult experiences.2020LDLaura Devendorf et al.University of Colorado BoulderEmpowerment of Marginalized GroupsDesign FictionCHI
Craftspeople as Technical Collaborators: Lessons Learned through an Experimental Weaving ResidencyWhile craft has had increasing influence on HCI research, HCI researchers tend to engage craft in limited capacities, often focusing on the juxtapositions of "traditional" craft and "innovative" computing. In this paper, we describe the structure and results of a six-week "experimental weaving residency" to show how HCI practitioners, engineers, and craftspeople perform similar work and can productively collaborate to envision new technological interfaces at early stages of development. We address both social and technical challenges of residencies and critically reflect on biases about technical and craft labor that we held prior to the residency. We share our experiences and lessons learned in the hopes of supporting future collaborations with craftspeople and broadening the techniques we use to address design challenges.2020LDLaura Devendorf et al.University of Colorado BoulderMakerspace CultureParticipatory DesignCHI
AdaCAD: Crafting Software For Smart Textiles DesignWoven smart textiles are useful in creating flexible electronics because they integrate circuitry into the structure of the fabric itself. However, there do not yet exist tools that support the specific needs of smart textiles weavers. This paper describes the process and development of AdaCAD, an application for composing smart textile weave drafts. By augmenting traditional weaving drafts, AdaCAD allows weavers to design woven structures and circuitry in tandem and offers specific support for common smart textiles techniques. We describe these techniques, how our tool supports them alongside feedback from smart textiles weavers. We conclude with a reflection on smart textiles practice more broadly and suggest that the metaphor of coproduction can be fruitful in creating effective tools and envisioning future applications in this space.2019MFMikhaila Friske et al.University of Colorado BoulderElectronic Textiles (E-textiles)Shape-Changing Materials & 4D PrintingCustomizable & Personalized ObjectsCHI
From HCI to HCI-Amusement: Strategies for Engaging what New Technology Makes OldNotions of what counts as a contribution to HCI continue to be contested as our field expands to accommodate perspectives from the arts and humanities. This paper aims to advance the position of the arts and further contribute to these debates by actively exploring what a "non-contribution" would look like in HCI. We do this by taking inspiration from Fluxus, a collective of artists in the 1950's and 1960's who actively challenged and reworked practices of fine arts institutions by producing radically accessible, ephemeral, and modest works of "art-amusement." We use Fluxus to develop three analogous forms of "HCI-amusements," each of which shed light on dominant practices and values within HCI by resisting to fit into its logics.2019LDLaura Devendorf et al.University of Colorado BoulderDigital Art Installations & Interactive PerformanceInteractive Narrative & Immersive StorytellingCHI
Design for Collaborative Survival: An Inquiry into Human-Fungi RelationshipsIn response to recent calls for HCI to address ongoing environmental crises and existential threats, this paper introduces the concept of collaborative survival and examines how it shapes the design of interactive artifacts. Collaborative survival describes how our (human) ability to persist as a species is deeply entangled with and dependent upon the health of a multitude of other species. We explore collaborative survival within the context of designing tools for mushroom foraging and reflect on how interactive products can open new pathways for noticing and joining-with these entanglements towards preferable futures. In addition to highlighting three tactics—engagement, attunement and expansion—that can guide designs towards multispecies flourishing, our prototypes illustrate the potential for wearable technology to extend the body into the environment.2018JLJen Liu et al.University of Colorado BoulderSustainable HCIHuman-Nature Relationships (More-than-Human Design)CHI
Disruptive Improvisations: Making Use of Non-Deterministic Art Practices in HCIThe goal of this one-day workshop is to open space for disruptive techniques and strategies to be used in the making, prototyping, and conceptualizations of the artifacts and systems developed and imagined within HCI. Specifically, this workshop draws on strategies from art, speculative design, and activism, as we aim to productively “trouble” the design processes behind HCI. We frame these explorations as "disruptive improvisations" — tactics artists and designers use to make the familiar strange or creatively problematize in order to foster new insights. The workshop invites participants to inquire through making and take up key themes as starting points to develop disruptive improvisations for design. These include modesty, scarcity, uselessness, no-technology, and failure. The workshop will produce a zine workbook or pamphlet to be distributed during the conference to bring visibility to the role these tactics of making in a creative design practices.2018KAKristina Andersen et al.Design FictionCHI
Tensions of Data-Driven Reflection: A Case Study of Real-Time Emotional BiosensingBiosensing displays, increasingly enrolled in emotional reflection, promise authoritative insight by presenting users’ emotions as discrete categories. Rather than machines interpreting emotions, we sought to explore an alternative with emotional biosensing displays in which users formed their own interpretations and felt comfortable critiquing the display. So, we designed, implemented, and deployed, as a technology probe, an emotional biosensory display: Ripple is a shirt whose pattern changes color responding to the wearer’s skin conductance, which is associated with excitement. 17 participants wore Ripple over 2 days of daily life. While some participants appreciated the ‘physical connection’ Ripple provided between body and emotion, for others Ripple fostered insecurities about ‘how much’ feeling they had. Despite our design intentions, we found participants rarely questioned the display’s relation to their feelings. Using biopolitics to speculate on Ripple’s surprising authority, we highlight ethical stakes of biosensory representations for sense of self and ways of feeling.2018NHNoura Howell et al.University of California, BerkeleyShape-Changing Interfaces & Soft Robotic MaterialsBiosensors & Physiological MonitoringCHI