Search

We present Electriflow: a new class of soft electrohydraulic actuators as building blocks for prototyping shape-changing interfaces. These actuators are silent and fast in operation and can be fabricated with commodity materials. Electriflow generates an immediate hydraulic force upon electrostatic activation without an external fluid supply source, enabling a simple and compact self-contained design. This paper describes the materials and mechanisms of these shape-changing building blocks, as well as the underlying fabrication process, which includes a software tool that assists in their design, shape visualization and construction. Finally, we explore four classes of application prototypes: tangible animation, actuating origami creases, shape-changing phone, and shape-changing bowl.

In this paper, we present electrohydraulic actuators for origami inspired shape-changing interfaces, which are capable of producing sharp hinge-like bends. These compliant actuators generate an immediate hydraulic force upon electrostatic activation without an external fluid supply source, are silent and fast in operation, and can be fabricated with commodity materials. We experimentally investigate the characteristics of these actuators and present application scenarios for actuating existing objects as well as origami folds. In addition, we present a software tool for the design and fabrication of shape-changing interfaces using these electrohydraulic actuators. We also discuss how this work opens avenues for other possible applications in Human Computer Interaction (HCI).

E-textiles, which embed circuitry into textile fabrics, blend art and creative expression with engineering, making it a popular choice for STEAM classrooms [6, 12]. Currently, e-textile development relies on tools intended for traditional embedded systems, which utilize printed circuit boards and insulated wires. These tools do not translate well to e-textiles, which utilize fabric and uninsulated conductive thread. This mismatch of tools and materials can lead to an overly complicated development process for novices. In particular, rapid prototyping tools for traditional embedded systems are poorly matched for e-textile prototyping. This paper presents the ThreadBoard, a tool that supports rapid prototyping of e-textile circuits. With rapid prototyping, students can test circuit designs and identify circuitry errors prior to their sewn project. We present the design process used to iteratively create the ThreadBoard’s layout, with the goal of improving its usability for e-textile creators.

The e-textile landscape has enabled creators to combine textile materiality with electronic capability. However, the tools that e-textile creators use have been adapted from traditional textile or hardware tools. This puts creators at a disadvantage, as e-textile projects present new and unique challenges that currently can only be addressed using a non-specialized toolset. This paper introduces the first iteration of a wearable e-textile debugging tool to assist novice engineers in problem solving e-textile circuitry errors. These errors are often only detected after the project is fully built and are resolved only by disassembling the circuit. Our tool actively monitors the continuity of the conductive thread as the user stitches, which enables the user to identify and correct circuitry errors as they create their project.

Today's STEM classrooms have expanded the domain of computer science education from a basic two-toned terminal screen to now include helpful Integrated Development Environments(IDE) (BlueJ, Eclipse), block-based programming (MIT Scratch, Greenfoot), and even physical computing with embedded systems (Arduino, LEGO Mindstorms). But no matter which environment a student starts programming in, all students will eventually need help in finding and fixing bugs in their code. While the helpful IDE's have debugger tools built in (breakpoints for pausing your program, ways to view/modify variable values, and "stepping" through code execution), in many of the other programming environments, students are limited to using print statements to try and "see" what is happening inside their program. Most students who learn to write code for Arduino microcontrollers will start within the Arduino IDE, but the official Arduino IDE does not currently provide any debugging tools. Instead, a student would have to move on to a professional IDE such as Atmel Studio or acquire a hardware debugger in order to add breakpoints or view their program's variables. But each of these options has a steep learning curve, additional costs, and can require complex configurations. Based on research of student debugging practices[3, 7] and our own classroom observations, we have developed an Arduino software library, called Arduino Debugger, which provides some of these debugging tools (ex. breakpoints) while staying within the official Arduino IDE. This work continues a previous library, (redacted), which focused on features specific to e-textiles development boards. The Arduino Debugger library has been modified to support not only e-textile boards (LilyPad, Adafruit Circuit Playground) but most AVR and ARM based Arduino boards. We are also in the process of testing a set of Debugging Code Templates to see how they might increase student adoption of debugging tools.

Large-scale shape-changing interfaces have great potential, but creating such systems requires substantial time, cost, space, and efforts, which hinders the research community to explore interactions beyond the scale of human hands. We introduce modular inflatable actuators as building blocks for prototyping room-scale shape-changing interfaces. Each actuator can change its height from 15cm to 150cm, actuated and controlled by air pressure. Each unit is low-cost (8 USD), lightweight (10 kg), compact (15 cm), and robust, making it well-suited for prototyping room-scale shape transformations. Moreover, our modular and reconfigurable design allows researchers and designers to quickly construct different geometries and to explore various applications. This paper contributes to the design and implementation of highly extendable inflatable actuators, and demonstrates a range of scenarios that can leverage this modular building block., Comment: TEI 2020

This paper introduces LiftTiles, a modular and reconfigurable room-scale shape display. LiftTiles consist of an array of retractable and inflatable actuator that is compact (e.g., 15cm tall) and light (e.g., 1.8kg), while extending up to 1.5m to allow for large-scale shape transformation. Inflatable actuation also provides a robust structure that can support heavy objects (e.g., 10 kg weight). This paper describes the design and implementation of LiftTiles and explores the application space for reconfigurable room-scale shape displays.

As robots increasingly enter our daily lives, there is a need to understand how to design robots capable of emotional interaction with humans, especially children, due to their sensitivity and vulnerability. For example, robots that provide children with social and emotional support might be more effective at also helping children develop cognitive abilities, rather than designing robots that focus solely on helping children acquire cognitive skill. In this paper, we examine the design of robots that can provide human-like hugs as a particular form of social and emotional support. We first discuss the need to design robots that can interact emotionally with children. Then, we present the development of a shirt augmented with pressure sensors used to collect data on how humans hug each other. Finally, we detail the design of "Hugbot", a soft robot that could use this data to give human-like hugs, and discuss our planned future work on this system.

We present Mechamagnets, a technique for facilitating the design and fabrication of haptic and functional inputs for physical interfaces. This technique consists of a set of 3D printed spatial constraints which facilitate different physical movements, as well as unpowered haptic profiles created by embedding static magnets in 3D printed parts. We propose the Mechamagnets taxonomy to map the design space of this technique for designers and makers. Furthermore, we leverage the use of magnets by instrumenting these objects with linear Hall effect sensors to create functional digital inputs. We showcase Mechamagnets with a series of novel physical interfaces made with this technique.

Recent innovations in fashion and smart textiles have contributed new visions of wearable computing, addressing the body through the cultural and social self. In this work, we draw on speculative design, maker technologies, and zoomorphism to explore how wearables might support sociability, and present Hooze, a fashion accessory that entices touch through its zoomorphic qualities and visual appearance. We describe our design and prototyping process, and reflect on how Hooze inspires transformative designs of wearables.

This paper introduces Dynamic 3D Printing, a fast and reconstructable shape formation system. Dynamic 3D Printing can assemble an arbitrary three-dimensional shape from a large number of small physical elements. Also, it can disassemble the shape back to elements and reconstruct a new shape. Dynamic 3D Printing combines the capabilities of 3D printers and shape displays: Like conventional 3D printing, it can generate arbitrary and graspable three-dimensional shapes, while allowing shapes to be rapidly formed and reformed as in a shape display. To demonstrate the idea, we describe the design and implementation of Dynablock, a working prototype of a dynamic 3D printer. Dynablock can form a three-dimensional shape in seconds by assembling 3,000 9 mm blocks, leveraging a 24 x 16 pin-based shape display as a parallel assembler. Dynamic 3D printing is a step toward achieving our long-term vision in which 3D printing becomes an interactive medium, rather than the means for fabrication that it is today. In this paper, we explore possibilities for this vision by illustrating application scenarios that are difficult to achieve with conventional 3D printing or shape display systems.

Creative iterative development over the past several years has generated an extensive set of computational tools, learning resources, and materials in the realm of paper mechatronics - an educational craft and design approach that weaves computational and mechanical elements into established traditions of children's construction with paper. Here, we both reflect upon our past and recent work of paper mechatronics, then look to the near- to medium-term future to speculate upon both the emerging trends in technology design and expanding learning potential of this medium for children along material, spatial, and temporal dimensions. We summarize lessons learned through various children's workshops with our materials; and we use these lessons as a foundation upon which to create a wide variety of novel tools and activities in educational papercrafting. We speculate upon the frontiers of this work based on current convergences and shifts in tangible creative computational media.

We present Compositional 3D Printing, recasting the 3D printer as a tool for expression that responds to real-time design decisions, analogous to composing a piece of music using a mixer. Our paradigm supports a wide range of inputs and interactions for designers, to be used in the moment; not only before printing, but anytime during production. We propose the design space of this digital fabrication paradigm, and outline methods and technical details with which researchers and practitioners can expand this space.

We present PEP (Printed Electronic Papercrafts), a set of design and fabrication techniques to integrate electronic based interactivities into printed papercrafts via 3D sculpting. We explore the design space of PEP, integrating four functions into 3D paper products: actuation, sensing, display, and communication, leveraging the expressive and technical opportunities enabled by paper-like functional layers with a stack of paper. We outline a seven-step workflow, introduce a design tool we developed as an add-on to an existing CAD environment, and demonstrate example applications that combine the electronic enabled functionality, the capability of 3D sculpting, and the unique creative affordances by the materiality of paper.

We explore a new approach to programming swarm user interfaces (Swarm UI) by leveraging direct physical manipulation. Existing Swarm UI applications are written using a robot programming framework: users work on a computer screen and think in terms of low-level controls. In contrast, our approach allows programmers to work in physical space by directly manipulating objects and think in terms of high-level interface design. Inspired by current UI programming practices, we introduce a four-step workflow-create elements, abstract attributes, specify behaviors, and propagate changes-for Swarm UI programming. We propose a set of direct physical manipulation techniques to support each step in this workflow. To demonstrate these concepts, we developed Reactile, a Swarm UI programming environment that actuates a swarm of small magnets and displays spatial information of program states using a DLP projector. Two user studies-an in-class survey with 148 students and a lab interview with eight participants-confirm that our approach is intuitive and understandable for programming Swarm UIs.

This studio invites participants to design and build machines with different kinds of paper and craft materials. We will introduce papercrafting using our design tool "FoldMecha", mechanical components, and prototyping methods for physical construction.Participants interact with sample projects and explore a motion library, then begin the ideation process for their own working machine. During the studio, papercrafting techniques and various craft materials will be provided to further inspire participants creative process.The goal is to provide hands-on experiences in designing and building machines with paper using design tools and prototyping techniques that we have developed. The studio will culminate in the "show & tell" demo and discussion about bottom up and bricolage design approaches as a means of creative thinking and learning. Outcomes will be showcased at the TEI events.

We present FoldMecha, a computer-aided design (CAD) system for exploratory construction of mechanical papercraft. FoldMecha enables students to (a) design their own movements with simple mechanisms by modifying parameters and (b) build physical prototypes. This paper describes the system, as well as associated prototyping methods that make the construction process easier and more adaptable to widely different creations. The paper also discusses a week-long workshop that we held with six teenagers using FoldMecha. The teens successfully designed and built their own mechanisms, and adapted them to a variety of creations. Throughout the workshop, they progressively achieved an advanced level of skill and understanding about mechanical movements.

This late breaking work submission describes the development of tools and techniques aimed to simplify the development and use of musical robots. We describe these tools and techniques as utilized to produce an event known as SolidNoise. The event showcased a series of automated instruments and musical compositions created for the robotic ensemble. Our developments are motivated by historical examples of automated instruments and our vision for musical robots in the future.

This Interactivity Demonstration submission describes new tools and techniques aimed to simplify the development and use of musical robots. We describe these tools and techniques as utilized to produce an event known as SolidNoise. The event showcased a series of automated instruments and musical compositions created for the robotic ensemble. Our developments are motivated by historical examples of automated instruments and our vision for musical robots in the future. We will demonstrate our musical robots and the platform used to make them, at CHI.

We present a kit comprising cardboard mechanical components and a custom printed circuit board, designed to support novices in building computational percussive instruments with everyday materials. We set three design criteria: accessibility, adaptability, and expressivity. We conducted two workshops with experts and novices to assess the usability of our kit and observe the variety of constructions that users make. The kit enabled both experts and novices to build working instruments and to explore creative experimentation with different materials and objects.

We present FoldMecha, a computational tool to help non-experts design and build paper mechanical toys. By customizing templates a user can experiment with basic mechanisms, design their own model, print and cut out a folding net to construct the toy. We used the tool to build two kinds of paper automata models: walkers and flowers.

Paper Mechatronics is a novel interdisciplinary design medium for children, enabled by recent advances in craft technologies: the term refers to a reappraisal of traditional educational papercrafts in combination with accessible mechanical, electronic, and computational elements. We present a design case study--building computationally-enhanced paper flowers--and discuss the iterative design process involved in the creation. We also describe a workshop we conducted with teenagers to evaluate paper mechatronics as a creative learning activity for children. We conclude with a discussion of future directions.

We present a modular tangible user interface system and corresponding actuators for creating music with everyday objects. Users create percussive patterns by controlling algorithmic parameters, or by directly playing the interface. Various mechanical solutions allow users to investigate physical objects as sound sources. A standalone physical interface and an associated graphical programming environment enable different levels of user engagement and hardware/software transparency. We discuss a tool space in-between open and closed design concepts, as well as the physical and software design of the Kitsch-Instrument itself. We also describe recent interactions with the interface at a public event and discuss future plans.

We present Cube-in, a kit designed to help beginners learn about fundamental concepts in physical computing. Through play and observation, Cube-in users can investigate digital and analog signals, inputs and outputs, and mapping between inputs and outputs before they work on electronics and construct circuits. By simplifying interaction methods, Cube-in provides an accessible entry point to key physical computing concepts.

This workshop explores the implications and opportunities of digital fabrication for the field of human-computer interaction. We highlight five themes: design tools and interfaces, online collaboration around physical objects, prototyping in the interaction design process, hands-on learning, and unique, personalized artifacts. For each, we provide an overview and a survey of related work. The workshop seeks to foster a network of researchers and others working in these and related areas. It explores potential research directions and ways that the CHI community can make a positive impact on design, craft, and maker culture.

Sketch It, Make It (SIMI) is a modeling tool that enables non-experts to design items for fabrication with laser cutters. SIMI recognizes rough, freehand input as a user iteratively edits a structured vector drawing. The tool combines the strengths of sketch-based interaction with the power of constraint-based modeling. Several interaction techniques are combined to present a coherent system that makes it easier to make precise designs for laser cutters.

Giffi is a computationally enhanced construction kit that enables children to build kinetic forms through purposeful play and discovery.

Spectacle computing is a novel strategy for vibrantly projecting information into the public sphere using expressive and tangible media. We demonstrate an example of this computing meme with large, glowing balloons that change color based on input from attached air quality sensors (exhaust, diesel, or volatile organic compounds). In two public installations (city street and public park) and a deployment with six everyday citizens, we invited stakeholders to playfully explore and actively participate in visualizing surrounding air quality. We also created a do-it-yourself (DIY) kit that includes a printed circuit board, electronic parts and instructions for building the air quality balloons. In a workshop, six non-expert users successfully assembled functional balloons, validating our technology as a DIY tool for public air quality visualization. Our deployments and workshop highlight play and spectacle as essential elements for public participation and activism. We outline design guidelines for future spectacle computing projects that engage stakeholders with environmental data and empower them to transform urban landscapes.

Street art and political activism have a rich history of shaping urban landscapes. Our work explores the processes by which public artists and political activists contribute to public spaces, introducing opportunities for HCI researchers to engage with the people who shape the aesthetic feel of our cities. We present WallBots-autonomous, wall-crawling robots as a research probe for public expression across a wide range of surfaces and hard-to-reach places, including bus stops, whiteboards, streetpoles, trashcans, moving vehicles and building walls. We evaluate WallBots as a low-cost DIY authoring tool for public artists and activists. Our study of six individuals who extensively contribute to public spaces offers insights into the materials and practices behind grassroots public expression. We then leverage feedback from participants, among them a graffiti artist, light painter, political activists, and street musician, to evaluate interaction techniques for manipulating WallBots as a medium for public expression across a range of surfaces. Our findings expose a research space for technological interventions in the context of street art, and we conclude with design insights for magnetic kinetic systems as an approach for supporting engagement, expression and creativity in public spaces.

If you have a laser cutter, you can build your own TOPAOKO. We describe work in progress on TOPAOKO, an interactive construction kit that encourages experimentation and play with pieces of a hardboard based, embedded circuit, kit. We describe each component of the kit and examples of constructions built with it.

Drummers and non-drummers alike can often be seen making percussive gestures on their chests, knees and feet. Ubiquitous Drums enhances this experience by providing musical feedback for these and other gestures. This paper describes the implementation and evolution of this tangible, wearable musical instrument.

To accommodate frequent emergencies, interruptions, and delays, hospital staff continually make and coordinate changes to the surgery schedule. The technical and social aspects of coordination in surgical suites have been described by prior studies. This paper addresses an understudied aspect of coordination: the physical environment. Based on a field study of four surgical suites in two large academic centers, we show how the physical layout of hallways and rooms, and barriers and spaces around displays and key coordinators, support or fail to support the common information spaces used for coordination. We use the concept "information hotspots" to represent how physical places and their characteristics facilitate coordination. We developed design principles based on the concept of information hotspots that should guide architectural considerations for coordination in dynamic environments such as hospitals.

As communities develop technological literacy and explore how technology can impact their lives, the future of urban computing will come from grass-roots initiatives in addition to traditional top-down urban planning. To this end, we aim to engage the do-it- yourself (DIY) community in exploring how individuals can add technology to their communities. As design probes into this space, we have built prototype devices around off-the-shelf technology, open-ended interactions and simple engineering techniques familiar to the DIY community. Through evolving these devices with both the technical DIY community and Pittsburgh's local communities, we hope to spark citizen-led efforts in bringing novel applications of computing to our communities.

We describe a family of interactive devices made from paper and simple electronics: Paper Robots, Paper Speakers and Paper Lamps. We developed construction techniques for these paper devices and the Paper Factory software with which novice users can create and build their own designs. The process and materials support DIY design and could be used with low-cost production and shipment from an external service.

The TEI Work-in-Progress workshop invited submissions about designing, making, studying, exploring and experiencing of projects on tangible, embedded and embodied interaction. The workshop aimed to provoke, intrigue, and inspire the TEI community by sharing work-in-progress practice, late breaking innovation, cutting-edge research, and controversial and compelling work. It provided a venue for eliciting feedback and fostering discussions and collaborations among TEI colleagues. The TEI Work-in-Progress workshop provided an opportunity for members of the TEI community with common and diverse interests to meet in the context of a focused and interactive discussion and a showcase for exciting new work that is still at an early stage.

This paper presents the concept and the design of an ambient display with an anthropomorphic interface to communicate environmental data. Numeric display and control, as in a thermostat, is replaced by a digital interactive portrait with the aim of making interaction engaging and undemanding.

We present a series of prototype devices that use real-time input to fabricate physical form: Interactive Fabrication. Our work maps out the problem space of real-time control for digital fabrication devices, and examines where alternative interfaces for digital fabrication are relevant. We conclude by reflecting upon the potential of interactive fabrication and outline a number of considerations for future research in this area.

Research on sketching with computers dates to the earliest days of modern computing. Recent work in this area, combined with other advances in hardware and software technologies promises, finally, significant impact. The kinds, qualities, and purposes of sketch-based interaction, or visual languages, vary as widely as do other forms of language. In addition to practical applications in every domain, advances in sketch-based interaction and modeling can help us understand and support visual thinking.

We developed Escape Machine, a puzzle game in which children control the behavior of characters in a maze by manipulating a tangible state machine built with Posey, our computationally-enhanced hub-and-strut construction kit. We observed children ages nine to eleven playing the game in several sessions. The qualitative results of this observation validate the promise of Posey and Escape Machine to engage children in manipulating algorithmic specifications for behavior.

Posey is a physical construction kit that is instrumented to capture assembly and configuration information and convey it to a host computer. We have used Posey to build applications that deploy a reconfigurable physical model as a tangible interface for various domains. We demonstrate these applications to support a case for computationally enhanced construction kits as a semi-general interaction modality.

Graphs are a versatile representation of many systems in computer science, the social sciences, and mathematics, but graph theory is not taught in schools. We present our work on Graphmaster, a computationally enhanced construction kit that enables children to build graphs of their own and investigate their properties by experimenting with algorithms that operate on them. The system is distributed; microcontrollers inside each node execute an interpreted language in parallel. Graphmaster, with its magnetic connectors, illuminated edges, and capacitive sensing, encourages children to develop intuitions about connectivity long before they are introduced to the notation and formulas of graph theory.

We present a methodology for building objects-to-think-computationally-with and illustrate its application in developing our Escape Machine game. The input mechanism for this game is a tangible state machine built with Posey, our computationally enhanced construction kit. Through manipulating this state machine children create an algorithmic specification for the behavior of both the avatar and its enemies in an attempt to navigate a maze without being eaten. We outline several strategies for success at Escape Machine and discuss how it embeds an important computational thinking concept in interaction with a tangible device.

We describe Posey, a computationally-enhanced hub-and-strut construction kit for learning and play. Posey employs a ball and socket connection that allows users to move the parts of an assembled model. Hubs and struts are optocoupled through the ball and socket joints using infrared LEDs and photosensors. Wireless transmitters in the hubs send connection and geometry information to a host computer. The host computer assembles a representation of the physical model as the user creates and configures it. Application programs can then use this representation to control computational models in particular domains.

The roBlocks construction kit is a tangible concurrent programming environment that encapsulates sensory, kinetic, and computational behavior in modular building block units that snap together to construct robots. The choice of a protocol for propagating values through the constructed robot affects its behavior.

This paper describes our observations and reflections about the relationships between making and creativity, in the context of design and computing.

We are developing a graduate curriculum and summer workshop on design research intended to prepare graduate students to do research about the nature of design or research about a class of designs, including concepts, models, and methods for that class. We expect our workshop to advance the science of design of softwareintensive systems by creating a open community of design researchers, both in software design and in related disciplines, who are knowledgeable about design and design research methods and who are interested in advancing the field. The curriculum will create a common basis for discussion and identify core material to master, while the flexible format of the workshop will encourage the introduction of new ideas and new methods. The goals of our course and workshop are to (1) develop an open community of graduate students, faculty, and industry researchers who are actively engaged in the advancement of software design research and (2) to associate this community with the larger community of researchers from related areas of design research who can contribute to the software design community and who can take ideas from software design back to their own research communities. We will offer a week-long summer workshop in May 2007, in which PhD students who are just beginning to develop their research proposals will have the opportunity to work closely with faculty and researchers who are on the forefront of software design research and related design fields.

We describe work in progress on roBlocks, a computational construction kit that encourages users to experiment and play with a collection of sensor, logic and actuator blocks, exposing them to a variety of advanced concepts including kinematics, feedback and distributed control. Its interface presents novice users with a simple, tangible set of robotic blocks, whereas advanced users work with software tools to analyze and rewrite the programs embedded in each block. Early results suggest that roBlocks may be an effective vehicle to expose young people to complex ideas in science, technology, engineering and mathematics.

Navigational Blocks provide a tangible user interface for applications such as information kiosks. Orientation, movement, and relative position of electronically and microprocessor augmented physical blocks support visitor querying, retrieving, understanding, navigation and exploration of an historical information database.