texTile: Making and Re-making Crochet Granny Square Garments Through Computational Design and 3D-printed ConnectorsThe rapid turnover of clothing contributes significantly to textile waste. Modular garment-making offers a potential solution by extending garment lifetimes through repair, resizing, and re-purposing, but producing modular garments introduces challenges not supported by existing design approaches or fabrication techniques. We explore the integration of computational design and digital fabrication to propose an alternative path for fashion, where making and re-making become integral to our relationship with garments. We present texTile, a modular fashion workflow that enables designers to assemble reusable crochet tiles into garments. To support our workflow, we developed digitally fabricated connectors for easy assembly and disassembly, a custom pattern solver and user interface to guide garment design, and a visualization tool to help plan manual assembly and reassembly. We conducted a user study with four experienced crocheters. Our results show that texTile can support the construction of tailored garments that integrate re-use as a core principle.2025AVAshley Del Valle et al.Shape-Changing Materials & 4D PrintingCustomizable & Personalized ObjectsEcological Design & Green ComputingDIS
Lessons from AR Memorialization: Artists' and Activists' Approaches to Responsible AR DevelopmentAugmented reality (AR) is a rapidly proliferating technology that offers opportunities to blend digital and physical contexts but also poses significant risks. This work seeks to inform responsible AR development with the insights of AR practitioners who engage with complex socio-cultural tensions. We analyze the implementation of AR involving vulnerable communities in human rights memorialization: preserving and conveying memories of human rights violations and resistance. We interviewed creators of eight AR projects addressing racism, state violence, and gender-based violence. Our findings highlight how creators represented sensitive narratives through non-violent portrayals, community participation, and agency. They used AR spatial interactions to engage audiences emotionally and sought media portrayals that were not tied to a specific technology's lifespan. We discuss how these approaches can inform future AR development through the integration of AR production with other media, prioritizing ownership in personal AR representations, and developing authoring techniques that enable immersive participation.2025AGAna Cardenas Gasca et al.Technology Ethics & Critical HCIMuseum & Cultural Heritage DigitizationDIS
Millipath: Bridging Materialist Theory and System Development for Surface Texture FabricationProponents of digital fabrication argue that future technologies will fundamentally reshape manufacturing; however, we still have a limited understanding of the relationship between contemporary digital fabrication technologies and the values and labor of people who make things. Contemporary materialist theories can offer insights into how interaction modalities with machines and materials influence human production activities. We aim to implement these theoretical principles in technical system development. We focus on action as a bridging concept between abstract notions regarding human-machine-material relationships and concrete digital fabrication system features. We use CNC-milled surface texture production on wood as a case study. We follow a research-through-design process to develop Millipath, an action-oriented programming platform enabling the parametric design of machine toolpaths. Through the analysis of autobiographical data from fabricating artifacts, we investigate how digital fabrication systems informed by materialist theories support expressive modes of production and design decisions in response to material behaviors.2024SBSam Bourgault et al.Shape-Changing Materials & 4D PrintingMakerspace CultureDIS
Practice-driven Software Development: A Collaborative Method for Digital Fabrication Systems Research in a Residency ProgramBuilding new software tools for professional digital fabrication requires that HCI researchers understand domain-specific materials and fabrication workflows to ensure software operations align with professional manufacturing requirements. To bridge the research-practice divide, we adopt a practice-driven software development methodology for digital fabrication in an artist-in-residence program. In our method, HCI researchers and craft professionals collaboratively develop software tools over three months. We piloted our methodology through two consecutive computational ceramics residencies with five professional craftspeople. The teams produced five novel software tools for clay 3D printing and hundreds of ceramic artifacts. We provide a detailed description of our methodology through artist and HCI researcher accounts and an analysis of the integration of software ideation, implementation, and debugging with professional art and craft production. Our work demonstrates a systematic mechanism for achieving meaningful digital fabrication software contributions with mutual benefit for artists and researchers.2024MTMert Toka et al.Desktop 3D Printing & Personal FabricationLaser Cutting & Digital FabricationComputational Methods in HCIDIS
SketchPath: Using Digital Drawing to Integrate the Gestural Qualities of Craft in CAM-Based Clay 3D PrintingThis paper presents the design and outcomes of SketchPath, a system that uses hand-drawn toolpaths to design for clay 3D printing. Drawing, as a direct manipulation technique, allows artists to design with the expressiveness of CAM-based tools without needing to work with a numerical system or constrained system. SketchPath works to provide artists with direct control over the outcomes of their form by not abstracting away machine operations or constraining the kinds of artifacts that can be produced. Artifacts produced with SketchPath emerge at a unique intersection of manual qualities and machine precision, creating works that blend handmade and machine aesthetics. In interactions with our system, ceramicists without a background in CAD/CAM were able to produce more complex forms with limited training, suggesting the future of CAM-based fabrication design can take on a wider range of modalities.2024DFDevon Frost et al.University of California, Santa BarbaraShape-Changing Interfaces & Soft Robotic MaterialsDesktop 3D Printing & Personal FabricationCHI
Throwing Out Conventions: Reimagining Craft-Centered CNC Tool Design through the Digital Pottery WheelSkilled potters use manual tools with direct material engagement. In contrast, the design of clay 3D printers and workflows reinforces industrial CNC manufacturing conventions. To understand how digital fabrication can serve skilled craft practitioners, we ask: how might clay 3D printing function if it had evolved from traditional pottery tools? To examine this question, we created the Digital Pottery Wheel (DPW), a throwing wheel with 3D printing capabilities. The DPW consists of a polar mechanical architecture that looks and functions like a pottery wheel while supporting 3D printing and a real-time modular control system that blends automated and manual control. We worked with ceramicists to develop interactions that include printing onto thrown forms, throwing to manipulate printed forms, and integrating manual control, recording, and playback to re-execute manually produced forms. We demonstrate how using a physical metaphor to guide digital fabrication machine design results in new products, workflows, and perceptions.2024IMIlan E Moyer et al.Massachusetts Institute of TechnologyProgramming Education & Computational ThinkingShape-Changing Materials & 4D PrintingCustomizable & Personalized ObjectsCHI
CoilCAM: Enabling Parametric Design for Clay 3D Printing Through an Action-Oriented Toolpath Programming SystemClay 3D printing provides the benefits of digital fabrication automation and reconfigurability through a method that evokes manual clay coiling. Existing design technologies for clay 3D printing reflect the general 3D printing workflow in which solid forms are designed in CAD and then converted to a toolpath. In contrast, in hand-coiling, form is determined by the actions taken by the artist’s hands through space in response to the material. We theorize that an action-oriented approach for clay 3D printing could allow creators to design digital fabrication toolpaths that reflect clay material properties. We present CoilCAM, a domain-specific CAM programming system that supports the integrated generation of parametric forms and surface textures through mathematically defined toolpath operations. We developed CoilCAM in collaboration with ceramics professionals and evaluated CoilCAM’s relevance to manual ceramics by reinterpreting hand-made ceramic vessels. This process revealed the importance of iterative variation and embodied experience in action-oriented workflows.2023SBSam Bourgault et al.University of California, Santa BarbaraDesktop 3D Printing & Personal FabricationShape-Changing Materials & 4D PrintingCHI
Drawing Transforms: A Unifying Interaction Primitive to Procedurally Manipulate Graphics across Style, Space, and TimeProcedural functionality enables visual creators to rapidly edit, explore alternatives, and fine-tune artwork in many domains including illustration, motion graphics, and interactive animation. Symbolic procedural tools, such as textual programming languages, are highly expressive but often limit directly manipulating concrete artwork; whereas direct manipulation tools support some procedural expression but limit creators to pre-defined behaviors and inputs. Inspired by visions of using geometric input to create procedural relationships, we identify an opportunity to use vector geometry from artwork to specify expressive user-defined procedural functions. We present Drawing Transforms (DTs), a technique that enables the use of any drawing to procedurally transform the stylistic, spatial, and temporal properties of target artwork. We apply DTs in a prototype motion graphics system to author continuous and discrete transformations, modify multiple elements in a composition simultaneously, create animations, and control fine-grained procedural instantiation. We discuss how DTs can unify procedural authoring through direct manipulation across visual media domains.2023SHSonia Hashim et al.University of California Santa BarbaraInteractive Data Visualization3D Modeling & AnimationCHI
Impact of Annotator Demographics on Sentiment Dataset LabelingAs machine learning methods become more powerful and capture more nuances of human behavior, biases in the dataset can shape what the model learns and is evaluated on. This paper explores and attempts to quantify the uncertainties and biases due to \textit{annotator} demographics when creating sentiment analysis datasets. We ask $>$1000 crowdworkers to provide their demographic information and annotations for multimodal sentiment data and its component modalities. We show that demographic differences among annotators impute a significant effect on their ratings, and that these effects also occur in each component modality. We compare predictions of different state-of-the-art multimodal machine learning algorithms against annotations provided by different demographic groups, and find that changing annotator demographics can cause $>$4.5\% in accuracy difference when determining positive versus negative sentiment. Our findings underscore the importance of accounting for crowdworker attributes, such as demographics, when building datasets, evaluating algorithms, and interpreting results for sentiment analysis.2022YDZijian Ding et al.Data, Bias and FairnessCSCW
What We Can Learn From Visual Artists About Software DevelopmentThis paper explores software’s role in visual art production by examining how artists use and develop software. We conducted interviews with professional artists who were collaborating with software developers, learning software development, and building and maintaining software. We found artists were motivated to learn software development for intellectual growth and access to technical communities. Artists valued efficient workflows through skilled manual execution and personal software development, but avoided high-level forms of software automation. Artists identified conflicts between their priorities and those of professional developers and computational art communities, which influenced how they used computational aesthetics in their work. These findings contribute to efforts in systems engineering research to integrate end-user programming and creativity support across software and physical media, suggesting opportunities for artists as collaborators. Artists’ experiences writing software can guide technical implementations of domain-specific representations, and their experiences in interdisciplinary production can aid inclusive community building around computational tools.2021JLJingyi Li et al.Stanford UniversityGraphic Design & Typography ToolsCreative Coding & Computational ArtCHI
Remote Learners, Home Makers: How Digital Fabrication Was Taught Online During a PandemicDigital fabrication courses that relied on physical makerspaces were severely disrupted by COVID-19. As universities shut down in Spring 2020, instructors developed new models for digital fabrication at a distance. Through interviews with faculty and students and examination of course materials, we recount the experiences of eight remote digital fabrication courses. We found that learning with hobbyist equipment and online social networks could emulate using industrial equipment in shared workshops. Furthermore, at-home digital fabrication offered unique learning opportunities including more iteration, machine tuning, and maintenance. These opportunities depended on new forms of labor and varied based on student living situations. Our findings have implications for remote and in-person digital fabrication instruction. They indicate how access to tools was important, but not as critical as providing opportunities for iteration; they show how remote fabrication exacerbated student inequities; and they suggest strategies for evaluating trade-offs in remote fabrication models with respect to learning objectives.2021GBGabrielle Benabdallah et al.University of WashingtonAging-Friendly Technology DesignLaser Cutting & Digital FabricationMakerspace CultureCHI
Supporting Visual Artists in Programming through Direct Inspection and Control of Program ExecutionProgramming offers new opportunities for visual art creation, but understanding and manipulating the abstract representations that make programming powerful can pose challenges for artists who are accustomed to manual tools and concrete visual interaction. We hypothesize that we can reduce these barriers through programming environments that link state to visual artwork output. We created Demystified Dynamic Brushes (DDB), a tool that bidirectionally links code, numerical data, and artwork across the programming interface and the execution environment – i.e., the artist's in-progress artwork. DDB automatically records stylus input as artists draw, and stores a history of brush state and output in relation to the input. This structure enables artists to inspect current and past numerical input, state, and output and control program execution through the direct selection of visual geometric elements in the drawing canvas. An observational study suggests that artists engage in program inspection when they can visually access geometric state information on the drawing canvas in the process of manual drawing.2020JLJingyi Li et al.Stanford UniversityCreative Coding & Computational ArtCreative Collaboration & Feedback SystemsCHI