Process documentation plays a central role in HCI and maker culture, where prototypes circulate through images, renders, and reproducible files that render making legible and transferable. Yet not all material practices lend themselves to clean, sequential representation. Processes that are time intensive, internally transformative, or physically immersive often produce incomplete records, shaping what can be analyzed and legitimized within research cultures oriented toward visibility and rapid iteration.

Digital modeling tools often abstract away material behavior, making it difficult for designers to reason about how artifacts will feel, flex, or fail in the real world. In this paper, we present Beadle, a design tool that supports tangible, hands-on exploration of thermoplastic behavior through a craft-based workflow built on fuse beads. Rather than relying on simulation-based modeling systems, Beadle allows users to design structures and cells using 3D printed fuse beads with diverse functional properties. The familiar geometry of fuse beads supports rapid generation of materiads – collections of intentionally partial material probes designed to be interpreted relationally through contrast and comparison. A workshop user study with 11 participants demonstrated how Beadle supports reasoning about material properties, catalyze creative directions, serve as creative rivals, and act as a material debugging strategy. We discuss how hands-on workflows can complement digital CAD tools by offering alternative pathways to develop material intuition.

Interviewing is pivotal in design thinking for understanding user needs. This study evaluates the use of AI-simulated virtual users in a laddering interview training workshop, where participants practiced skills with both human peers and a virtual user via the Wizard of Oz method, incorporating voice/video calls and text messaging. Analysis of 40 interview transcripts identified themes of improved exploratory conversation, rapport building, and reduced anxiety. Virtual users enhanced participant confidence and lowered cognitive load, leading to better performance. These findings suggest that integrating chatbots and virtual agents into educational frameworks could significantly enhance learner engagement and skill development across various interactive domains. Future research should refine virtual user designs to better mimic human interactions, optimizing training for real-world interviews.

Communities 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.

Capacitive touch relies on electrodes to detect and interpret touch gestures. These electrodes are conventionally designed as rigid, grid-like structures, optimized for manufacturing efficiency. However, the advent of diverse conductive materials opens new avenues for enhancing the way electrodes are designed. In this paper, we develop a textile-silicone sensor composite using embedded conductive yarn as a capacitive touch electrode. By deviating from the grid pattern, we explore how alternative patterns can inspire novel, playful, and expressive gestures. We describe our design process for conceptualizing gestures from electrode design principles and iteratively test gesture detection using an off-the-shelf CNN model. Our approach in developing a textile-silicone sensor with unique electrode designs enables the development of creative, comfortable and customizable haptic interfaces.

Within 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) to 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.

Silicone has long been an influential material in haptic design due to its durability, flexibility, and versatility. However, its flat and smooth surface restricts potential applications. Using microtextures, we can improve on earlier designs by exploiting microtextured silicone’s sensory perception and influence on users’ emotions and feelings. In this paper, we explore the applications and benefits of microtextures in haptic design. We conduct a between-subjects psychophysics experiment to characterize the sensory perception of each texture using an adapted form of the Geneva Emotion Wheel. We also report the results of a card sort elicitation task to better understand how textures can improve and influence user actions for tactile user interface applications. Finally, we analyze the results and discuss the unique features of each silicone sample that contributed to users’ experiences, as well as potential future implementation in textiles, wearable devices, and robotics.

Entering 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.

Although 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.

The 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.

Packaging design has witnessed an impressive transformation with the rise of computer-aided design (CAD) and computer numerical control (CNC) machines. Like many CNC-reliant practices, there is an inherent cost to working through the CAD-CAM workflow, especially when fit and measurement are involved. Although quick to generate prototypes, the workflow is also quick to consume materials leading to unsustainable design practices. Here, we present a more sustainable packaging design process through Proto-Pack, a CAD toolkit for procedurally generating modular, reusable, and reconfigurable packaging building blocks that increase a prototype’s lifespan and utility. We show how Proto-Pack can be used to enable a sustainable workflow that reduces design footprints, supports thinking through doing, and encourages reuse of materials.

The 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.

Conductive 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.

The “material turn” in HCI has placed a renewed focus on informing design from the relationships found in material-based interactions. While several ethnographic works provide insight into how practitioners converse with materials, it is less understood how these conversations transform into a skilled practitioner’s relationship with a material. We examine the material practice of glazing that gives ceramics its decorative and functional characteristics and involves fusing mixtures of silica, alumina, and flux onto a clay body through kiln firing. This practice evolves over decades developing from multiple trajectories including theoretical foundations, systematic experimentation, and happy accidents. This work describes virtual site visits with six expert ceramicists and documents how material knowledge is externalized in practice, teaching, and the studio environment. We synthesize our findings into a framework to inform the design of material interactions that moves beyond discrete and momentary material encounters towards lifelong material epochs.

Compression-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.

The 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.

Silicone 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.

Hybrid practices are emerging that integrate creative materials like paint, clay, and cloth with intangible immaterials like computation, electricity, and heat. This work aims to expand the design potential of immaterial elements by transforming them into manipulatable, observable and intuitive materials. We explore one such immaterial, electric heat, and develop a maker-friendly fabrication pipeline and crafting support tool that allows users to experientially compose resistive heaters that generate heat spatially and temporally. These heaters are then used to couple heat and thermoreactive materials in a class of artifacts we term Thermoreactive Composites (TrCs). In a formal user study, we observe how designing fabrication workflows along dimensions of composability and perceivability better matches the working styles of material practitioners without domain knowledge of electronics. Through exemplar artifacts, we demonstrate the potential of heat as a creative material and discuss implications for immaterials used within creative practices.

Tacit knowledge is a type of knowledge often existing in one's subconscious or embodied in muscle memory. Such knowledge is pervasive in creative practices yet remains difficult to observe or codify. To better understand tacit knowledge, we introduce a design method that leverages time-series data (interaction logs, physical sensor, and biosignal data) to isolate unique actions and behaviors between groups of users. This method is enacted in Eluent, a tool that distills hundreds of hours of dense activity data using an activity segmentation algorithm into a codebook - a set of distinct, characteristic sequences that comprise an activity. The results are made visually parsable in a representation we term process chromatograms that aid with 1) highlighting distinct periods of activity in creative sessions, 2) identifying distinct groups of users, and 3) characterizing periods of activity. We demonstrate the value of our method through a study of tacit process within computational notebooks and discuss ways process chromatograms can act as a knowledge mining technique, an evaluation metric, and a design-informing visualization.

An exciting, expanding palette of hybrid materials is emerging that can be programmed to actuate by a range of external and internal stimuli. However, there exists a dichotomy between the physicality of the actuators and the intangible computational signal that is used to program them. For material practitioners, this lack of physical cues limits their ability to engage in a "conversation with materials" (CwM). This paper presents a creative workstation for supporting this epistemological style by bringing a stronger physicality to the computational signal and balance the conversation between physical and digital actors. The station utilizes a streaming architecture to distribute control across multiple devices and leverage the rich spatial cognition that a physical space affords. Through a formal user study, we characterize the actuation design practice supported by the CwM workstation and discuss opportunities for tangible interfaces to hybrid materials.

Failure, whether it be "complete-and-utter" or "a minor setback", occurs in a variety of different creative practices, yet how it is perceived, handled, and recovered from is a lesser explored design space. Failing to address these perceptions of failure can have psychological repercussions, discourage users from continuing a practice, and form cultural stigma such as those associated with STEM fields. However, mediating practices to develop a culture of resiliency and perseverance is key to sustaining a (lifelong) practice and reshaping pedagogical strategies. In this work, we outline the design space of "guardians", or elements of a creative practice that mitigate the psychological effects of failure. Through contextual inquiry, we contribute an inventory of failure-mitigation strategies from a variety of creative disciplines. We synthesize guidelines for the design of new guardians and present a preliminary exploration of guardians for the lasercutting practice -- effigies and test tags.

Recent digital fabrication tools have enabled new form-giving using a wide range of physical materials. However, light as a first class creative material has been largely ignored within the design of our electronic objects. Our work expands the illumination design space by treating light as a physical material. We introduce a digital design tool that simulates and visualizes physical light interactions with a variety of materials for creating custom luminaires. We further develop a computational design and fabrication process for creating custom secondary optics elements (SOEs), which provides additional handles for users to physically shape and redirect light to compose, fill, and evenly diffuse planar and volumetric geometries. Through a workshop study with novice electronic designers, we show how incorporating physical techniques to shape light alters how users view the role and function of LEDs and electronics. We produce example pieces that showcase how our approach expands the electronics aesthetic and discuss how viewing light as material can engender novel, expressive artifacts.

Advances in digital fabrication (DF) technologies are making it easier to produce high-fidelity replicas of digital designs. However, this push-to-print paradigm limits the creative opportunities that arise from the process of "working through a material" which involves risk, uncertainty, and serendipitous discovery. We investigate how DF artifacts can function as static intermediary tools, which we term proxies, to support crafting practice. We focus on the wire-wrapping process where physical wire is bent into complex shapes and build DF fixtures to aid with construction and fabrication. We explore how these proxies can be generated to provide users with different levels-of-assistance and evaluate how these proxies affect the making process. We show that our proxies affect quality and speed and yield different making experiences between novice and expert craftspeople. We derive design principles to inform future proxy design and discuss how approaches such as ProxyPrint that are designed aware of the medium can create more engaging making tools that can embed tacit knowledge, encourage creativity, and sustain crafting practice.

As interactive electronics become increasingly intimate and personal, the design of circuitry is correspondingly developing a more playful and creative aesthetic. Circuit sketching and design is a multidimensional activity which combines the arts, crafts, and engineering broadening participation of electronic creation to include makers of diverse backgrounds. In order to support this design ecology, we present Ellustrate, a digital design tool that enables the functional and aesthetic design of electronic circuits with multiple conductive and dielectric materials. Ellustrate guides users through the fabrication and debugging process, easing the task of practical circuit creation while supporting designers' aesthetic decisions throughout the circuit authoring workflow. In a formal user study, we demonstrate how Ellustrate enables a new electronic design conversation that combines electronics, materials, and visual aesthetic concerns.

The creative promise of 3D digital fabrication tools is tremendous. However due to the wide range of tools and interfaces, a common static file format called STL is used for sharing designs. While customization tools add creative handles to these digital models, they are often constrained to pre-configured parameters limiting the creative potential of shared digital models. We introduce MetaMorphe, a novel digital fabrication framework that uses a common web-programming metaphor to enable users to easily transform static 3D models into re-formed, re-made, and re-imagined customized personal artifacts. We demonstrate the compatibility of MetaMorphe with three well-established design interfaces, direction manipulation, scripted-CAD, and generative design. Through a user study with design experts, MetaMorphe reveals that decisions that physically produce bespoke artifacts or encode unique metadata actively affect perceptions of authorship, agency, and authenticity. We discuss how expressive model-building tools such as MetaMorphe enable a cultural shift in 3D design in terms of participation, personalization, and creativity.

Fluid User Interfaces (Fl.UIs) are liquid-based touch surfaces that use computer vision to detect and interpret a range of tactile user inputs. While Fl.UIs have less input resolution than digital touch screens, they provide an excellent low-cost solution for rapidly prototyping non-rectilinear screen designs as well as exploring novel surface interaction techniques. Fabricated on a laser cutter using low-cost materials, Fl.UIs use unique shape outlines to displace an internal colored liquid to regions-of-interest for a camera. This paper presents a set of software tools that help users rapidly design, fabricate and author interactions with Fl.UIs. The robust construction and an unpowered surface makes Fl.UIs well-suited for outdoor and public installations. Our Fl.UIs prototyping tool encourages these uncommon "screens" to emerge in complex environments (i.e. urban spaces, benches, tables, fountains, sidewalks).

Digital fabrication has enabled massive creativity in hobbyist communities and professional product design. These emerging technologies excel at realizing an arbitrary shape or form; however these objects are often rigid and lack the feel desired by designers. We aim to enable physical haptic design in passive 3D printed objects. This paper identifies two core areas for extending physical design into digital fabrication: designing the external and internal haptic characteristics of an object. We present HapticPrint as a pair of design tools to easily modify the feel of a 3D model. Our external tool maps textures and UI elements onto arbitrary shapes, and our internal tool modifies the internal geometry of models for novel compliance and weight characteristics. We demonstrate the value of HapticPrint with a range of applications that expand the aesthetics of feel, usability, and interactivity in 3D artifacts.

Advances in data mining and knowledge discovery have transformed the way Web sites are designed. However, while visual presentation is an intrinsic part of the Web, traditional data mining techniques ignore render-time page structures and their attributes. This paper introduces design mining for the Web: using knowledge discovery techniques to understand design demographics, automate design curation, and support data-driven design tools. This idea is manifest in Webzeitgeist, a platform for large-scale design mining comprising a repository of over 100,000 Web pages and 100 million design elements. This paper describes the principles driving design mining, the implementation of the Webzeitgeist architecture, and the new class of data-driven design applications it enables.