TuneCatalogs: Capturing the Goldilocks Zone by Framing Opportunistic Tuning PracticesAn often overlooked aspect of making is the art of achieving the perfect fit, property, setting, or aesthetic. Tuning is a common practice, but many in-the-moment adjustments are internalized and rarely documented, resulting in wasted materials, time, and effort. In many cases, only the ideal outcome is recorded, leaving the boundaries of the ``Goldilocks Zone'' undefined and elusive. To address this, we examined different tuning practices across making communities and developed a tuning documentation tool that enables users to author standardized tuning experiments, log and evaluate different candidates over time, and synthesize insights about the tuning space. An applied tuning study with 10 participants and a two-week diary study with 5 participants reveal that cataloging tuning experiments enhances the literacy of tool and material capabilities and aid in sharing and addressing tuning needs. We discuss how formalizing tuning practices can reciprocally support exploratory practices and foster different tuning workflows.2025MRMohammad Abu Nasir Rakib et al.Circuit Making & Hardware PrototypingComputational Methods in HCIDIS
RheoMap: Mapping Inks, Gels, Pastes, and Slurries within a Rheological Embedding Space using Retraction-Extrusion Pressure Sensor VectorsViscous materials such as inks, gels, pastes, and slurries are ubiquitous across domains like food science, smart materials, digital fabrication, and the arts. However, their dynamic and unpredictable behavior—shifting over time and in response to environmental factors—poses challenges, often requiring costly equipment for accurate rheological analysis. This paper presents a low-cost, accessible sensing routine that retracts and extrudes viscous materials through an air tube, generating sensor vectors rich in rheological data. By embedding data from 26 rheologically diverse materials into a two-dimensional space, we create RheoMaps that allow for tracking material changes over time, distinguishing concentrations, and tuning rheological behaviors. These maps offer practical benefits for detecting preparation errors, guiding material design and documentation, and providing tutorial waypoints. We further discuss how this approach can be extended to extract relational insights from sensor data, improving material literacy and manipulation across a range of applications.2025HVHoang Vuong et al.University of Texas at Arlington, The Hybrid AtelierDesktop 3D Printing & Personal FabricationCircuit Making & Hardware PrototypingCHI
Anther: Cross-Pollinating Communities of Practice via Video TutorialsCommunities of practice (CoPs) play a crucial role in cross-pollination and learning within various skill-based and craft domains. These communities often share common materials, concepts, and techniques across related practices. However, due to their insular nature, exchanging knowledge between CoPs has been challenging, leading to fragmented knowledge marked by differing vocabularies and contexts. To address this issue, we introduce Anther, a system designed to highlight shared concepts and semantic overlap between distinct CoPs. Anther projects concepts onto a 2-dimensional space, providing users with comprehensive, contextual, and conceptual views. We conducted a user study, demonstrating Anther’s effectiveness in aggregating and disseminating community-based knowledge, bridging gaps between CoPs, and supporting the cross-pollination of knowledge between CoPs. Further, we present interaction vignettes that illustrate how Anther can ease entry into new domains and aide in discovering new creative techniques. This work can benefit maker communities by fostering collaborative knowledge-building across diverse domains.2024AEAdam Emerson et al.Crowdsourcing Task Design & Quality ControlMakerspace CultureDIS
Shared, Shaped, and Stolen: Tracing Sites of Knowledge Transfer across Creative Communities of PracticeWithin various creative domains, communities of practice (CoPs) are instrumental in fostering knowledge creation and innovation. Although each community disseminates knowledge through resources like online video tutorials, this content is often hidden behind different contexts and semantics that limits practitioners' ability to learn, borrow, and adapt knowledge from each other. To trace how knowledge disseminates across CoPs, we analyzed video transcripts across 25 communities and characterized them using Term Frequency Proportional Document Frequency (TF*PDF) of extracted materials, tools, and techniques concepts. Using a cluster heatmap visualization, we reveal material and material parallels as boundaries for umbrella CoPs, techniques as strong predictors of kindred CoPs, and outliers as emerging sites of hybrid CoPs. We discuss implications for the design of knowledge discovery support tools to characterize material workflows, track knowledge evolution, and develop semantic vocabularies.2024AEAdam Emerson et al.Knowledge Management & Team AwarenessCitizen Science & Crowdsourced DataC&C
Thermoplastic Kilnforms: Extending Glass Kilnforming Techniques to Thermoplastic Materials using Ontology-Driven DesignThe ecology of thermoplastic materials is rapidly evolving, enabling an exciting landscape of functional, aesthetic, and interactive forms. Despite their utility in fused filament fabrication (FFF), an even larger and untapped design space exists for thermoplastics. In this work, we introduce a design method that leverages similarities with a more mature medium (glass) to guide a material-centered exploration of a new medium (thermoplastics). Through a collaboration between domain experts in thermoplastics and glass, we synthesized an ontology of kilnforming techniques and developed an annotated portfolio of thermoplastic kilnforms that capture generative design directions for altering the phenomenological qualities of plastic, prototyping metamaterials, and composite forms, and engaging with other material practices. We discuss how material parallels can continue to expand the role of thermoplastics as a design material and how ontology-driven design can serve as a means of localizing, questioning, and generating material knowledge.2023MRMohammad Abu Nasir Rakib et al.Shape-Changing Interfaces & Soft Robotic MaterialsShape-Changing Materials & 4D PrintingDIS
BraidFlow: A Flow-annotated Dataset of Kumihimo Braidmaking ActivityEntering a cognitive state of flow is a natural response of the mind that allows people to fully concentrate and cope with tedious, and often repetitive tasks. Understanding how to trigger or sustain flow remains limited by retrospective surveys, presenting a need to better document flow. Through a validation study, we first establish braidmaking as a flow-inducing task. We then study how braidmaking can be used to unpack the experience of flow on a moment-by-moment basis. Using an instrumented Kumihimo braidmaking tool and off-the-shelf biosignal wristbands, we record the experiences of 24 users engaged in 3 different braidmaking tasks. Feature vectors motivated from flow literature were extracted from activity data (IMU, EMG, EDA, heart rate, skin temperature, braiding telemetry) and annotated with Flow Short Scale (FSS) scores. Together, this dataset and data-capture system form the first open-access and holistic platform for mining flow data and synthesizing flow-aware design principles.2023AZAkib Zaman et al.Full-Body Interaction & Embodied InputBiosensors & Physiological MonitoringComputational Methods in HCIDIS
Tacit Descriptions: Uncovering Ambiguity in Crowdsourced Descriptions of Motions and MaterialsAlthough a picture, GIF, or tutorial video is "worth a thousand words", every viewer has a unique perspective of which words they ‘see.’ Packed with rich meaning, these words, or descriptions, are often used to describe the ambiguity of working with materials, artifacts, and processes in creative practices. Our work reframes the traditional crowdsourced description tasks to leverage crowdworker diversity in generating a corpus of tacit descriptions. These descriptions are synthesized into a typology and describe how users communicate ambiguity and tacit knowledge embedded in unfamiliar material properties and familiar handed motions. We propose three design concepts that demonstrate how tacit descriptions could enhance the interpretation of tutorial artifacts - Tacit Layer, or breadth-first interpretation, Tacit Space, or depth-first interpretation, and Tacit Localizer, or context-based interpretation. These concepts are then translated into physical card-sort activities and used in a workshop to gauge how participants consider tacit information in their respective practices.2023SEShreyosi Endow et al.Crowdsourcing Task Design & Quality ControlLaser Cutting & Digital FabricationDIS
Cogcues: Shifting Perception through Interactive Projected Cues in Still Life DrawingThe ability to visually discern shape, form, and value is fundamental to observational drawing. However, developing this skill requires a drawer to perceive a “raw” version of the scene being drawn, often referred to as regaining the innocence of the eye. This work investigates how interactive projected light cues can be used to alter the perception of drawing objects and understand how users might control their own perception. We introduce an augmented reality system capable of dynamically projecting interactive light cues onto objects within a live drawing studio. We present the design of three cues that address challenging percepts for novice drawers: gauging proportion, discerning shape, and shifting visual attention. In a formal user study with novice and intermediate drawers, we evaluate the effectiveness of these cues in supporting observational drawing. We demonstrate how cues can be designed to correct subconscious errors and visually guide users in learning to draw. We also discuss the role of augmented reality in supporting cognition in physical skill development.2023BPBijisa Pyakurel et al.AR Navigation & Context AwarenessDigital Art Installations & Interactive PerformanceC&C
Embr: A Creative Framework for Hand Embroidered Liquid Crystal Textile DisplaysConductive thread is a common material in e-textile toolkits that allows practitioners to create connections between electronic components sewn on fabric. When powered, conductive threads are used as resistive heaters to activate thermochromic dyes or pigments on textiles to create interactive, aesthetic, and ambient textile displays. In this work, we introduce Embr, a creative framework for supporting hand-embroidered liquid crystal textile displays (LCTDs). This framework includes a characterization of conductive embroidery stitches, an expanded repertoire of thermal formgiving techniques, and a thread modeling tool used to simulate mechanical, thermal, and electrical behaviors of LCTDs. Through exemplar artifacts, we annotate a morphological design space of LCTDs and discuss the tensions and opportunities of satisfying the wider range of electrical, craft, cultural, aesthetic, and functional concerns inherent to e-textile practices.2022SEShreyosi Endow et al.University of Texas at ArlingtonElectronic Textiles (E-textiles)Customizable & Personalized ObjectsMakerspace CultureCHI
Compressables: A Haptic Prototyping Toolkit for Wearable Compression-based InterfacesCompression-based haptic feedback has been used in wearables to issue notifications, provide therapeutic effects, and create immersive storytelling environments. Such worn devices are well studied on the wrists, arms, and head, however, many unconventional yet context-rich areas of the body remain underexplored. Current haptic prototyping techniques have large instrumentation costs, requiring the design of bespoke embedded devices that do not have the flexibility to be applied to other body sites. In this work, we introduce an open-source prototyping toolkit for designing, fabricating, and programming wearable compression-based interfaces, or compressables. Our approach uses a lost-PVA technique for making custom inflatable silicone bladders, an off-the-shelf pneumatics controller, and a mobile app to explore and tune haptic interactions through sketch gestures. We validate the toolkit’s open-endedness through a user study and heuristic evaluation. We use exemplar artifacts to annotate the design space of compressables and discuss opportunities to further expand haptic expression on the body.2021SEShreyosi Endow et al.Vibrotactile Feedback & Skin StimulationHaptic WearablesPrototyping & User TestingDIS
"I'm Better Off on my Own'': Understanding How a Tutorial's Medium Affects Physical Skill DevelopmentThe shift towards distance learning brought forth by the pandemic has highlighted the shortcomings of teaching physical skills at a distance. With the emergence of new augmented and connected mediums, new opportunities arise for transferring physical skills that have resisted traditional documentation methods. However, there lacks a framework that allows tutorial authors to capitalize on a new medium's unique affordances rather than remediating existing tutorial conventions. Our work analyzes a body of tutorials rendered in various mediums for centering clay on a pottery wheel- a foundational skill that exemplifies the difficulties of physical skill transfer. Through the lens of McLuhan's "The Medium is the Message'' we synthesize a taxonomy of medium conventions and themes derived from analyzing a body of centering tutorials and observation of how a tutorial's medium affects how learners develop physical skills. We leverage our findings to motivate design recommendations to inform how new mediums can support material practices.2021SEShreyosi Endow et al.Full-Body Interaction & Embodied InputSpecial Education TechnologyInteractive Narrative & Immersive StorytellingDIS
LociMotion: Towards Learning a Strong Authentication Secret in a Single SessionIn this work, we design and evaluate LociMotion, a training interface to learn a strong authentication secret in a single session. LociMotion automatically takes a random password with twelve lowercase letters (56-bit entropy) to generate the training interface. It first leverages users' spatial and visual (declarative) memory by showing them a video clip based on the method of loci, and then consolidates the learning process by having them play a computer game that leverages their motor (procedural) memory. The results of a memorability study with 300 participants showed that LociMotion had a significantly higher recall success rate than a control condition. A second study with 200 participants demonstrated the effectiveness of LociMotion over a period of time (99%, 96%, and 81% recall success rates after 1, 4, and 18 days, respectively). LociMotion offers an alternative to the spaced repetition technique, as it does not require dozens of training sessions.2021JDJayesh Doolani et al.UT-ArlingtonPrivacy by Design & User ControlPasswords & AuthenticationCHI
Siloseam: A Morphogenetic Workflow for the Design and Fabrication of Inflatable Silicone BladdersSilicone is a transformative design material found within a variety of emerging HCI practices including shape-changing interfaces, soft robotics, and wearables. However, workflows for designing and fabricating silicone forms require a time-intensive mold-cast-cure pipeline that limits the experiential knowledge that can be gained from working directly with silicone. In this work, we conduct a material-centric exploration of silicone and develop designerly workflows for creating inflatable silicone bladders. We present Siloseam, a creative framework that streamlines a bladder design and fabrication process, collects tacit knowledge involved in recovering from errors, and introduces new workflows that reuse existing molds. A set of exemplar artifacts demonstrates an expanded repertoire of silicone forms that leverage various configurations of airtight seams to create playful, haptic interactions. We discuss the remaining challenges in integrating silicone with a broader range of materials and opportunities for developing designerly workflows for other mold-and-cast processes.2020HMHedieh Moradi et al.Shape-Changing Interfaces & Soft Robotic MaterialsShape-Changing Materials & 4D PrintingDIS