With more-than-human perspectives in design gaining attention among HCI researchers, a growing body of work attends to the hidden labor of nonhumans. Building on Chen et al.’s work that surfaces nonhuman labor, we interrogate the traditional hierarchy of creative expression by positioning fermenting sake yeast as creative collaborators rather than compliant materials. Instead of laboratory settings that presume human control, we relocate inquiry to the out-of-lab―craft of sake brewing, integrated here within an audiovisual installation called Micro Orchestrism. Based on interviews with four Japanese brewers from distinct breweries, we report statements by brewers that frame microbes as active contributors of taste creation and recognize microbial behavior does not always conform to human intent. Through the installation, we aim to provide a situated entry point for reflecting on microbial agency in a craft practice.

Neither Here Nor There is a speculative installation exploring human perception of the natural world from the perspective of four plants. Probing the act of communication as well as the indeterminate gap between what is deemed human and non-human, the installation highlights the complex role that technology plays in our current understanding of the human. Standing in large pots around a meeting table, plants engage in a free roaming discussion about what they think it means to be human and about planetary politics. Key questions and terms are fed into GPT-3 (AI-based natural language text generator) and played as plant sounds. As the plants converse in this manner, no aspect of their conversation is intuitively legible to the viewer. Viewers are invited to use a decoding app on their cell phone that translates these plant sounds. In avoiding an obvious mode of human-centric representation, the installation places the viewer in unknown territory, asking them to consider what intelligence, communication, and cognition mean beyond the human perspective.

Emerging research has demonstrated the viability of emotional communication through haptic technology inspired by interpersonal touch. However, the meaning-making of artificial touch remains ambiguous and contextual. We see this ambiguity caused by robotic touch’s "otherness" as an opportunity for exploring alternatives. To empower emotional haptic design in longitudinal out-of-lab exploration, we devise TactorBots, a design toolkit consisting of eight wearable hardware modules for rendering robotic touch gestures controlled by a web-based software application. We deployed TactorBots to thirteen designers and researchers to validate its functionality, characterize its design experience, and analyze what, how, and why alternative perceptions, practices, contexts, and metaphors would emerge in the experiment. We provide suggestions for designing future toolkits and field studies based on our experiences. Reflecting on the findings, we derive design implications for further enhancing the ambiguity and shifting the mindsets to expand the design space.

Materials are a key part of our daily experiences. Recently, researchers have been devising new ways to utilize materials directly from our physical world for the design of objects and interactions. We present a new fabrication technique that enables control of CO2 bubble positions and their size within carbonated liquids. Instead of soap bubbles, boiling water, or droplets, we show creation of patterns, images and text through sessile bubbles that exhibit a lifetime of several days. Surfaces with mixed wettability regions are created on glass and plastic using ceramic coatings or plasma projection leading to patterns that are relatively invisible to the human eye. Different regions react to liquids differently. Nucleation is activated after carbonated liquid is poured onto the surface with bubbles nucleating in hydrophobic regions with a strong adherence to the surface and can be controlled in size ranging from 0.5mm – 6.5mm. Bubbles go from initially popping or becoming buoyant during CO2 supersaturation to stabilizing at their positions within minutes. Technical evaluation shows stabilization under various conditions. Our design software allows users to import images and convert them into parametric pixelation forms conducive to fabrication that will result in nucleation of bubbles at required positions. Various applications are presented to demonstrate aspects that may be harnessed for a wide range of use in daily life. Through this work, we enable the use of carbonation bubbles as a new design material for designers and researchers.

In this work, we bring designers into the exploration of emotional robotic touch, discuss their design decisions and reflect on their insights. Prior psychology findings show humans can communicate distinct emotions solely through touch. We hypothesize that similar effects might also be applicable to robotic touch. To enable designers to easily generate and modify various types of affective touch for conveying emotions (e.g., anger, happiness, etc.), we developed a platform consisting of a robotic tactor interface and a software design tool. When conducting an elicitation study with eleven interaction designers, we discovered common patterns in their generated tactile sensations for each emotion. We also illustrate the strategies, metaphors, and reactions that the designers deployed in the design process. Our findings uncover that the “otherness” of robotic touch broadens the design possibilities of emotional communication beyond mimicking interpersonal touch.

Animals in managed care ideally are provided with environmental stimuli for their psychological and physiological well-being. Most commonly, food-based enrichment methods are used to mimic wild conditions, allowing animals to search and forage. Other sensory stimulation devices may be employed to reduce stereotypical behaviors. However, many of these devices fall short in providing choice and control to animals, an important factor in cognitive engagement. In this paper, we present a case study conducted at the San Diego Zoo that explores such design for two elephants. The resultant system, called Soundyssey, is an active auditory enrichment device for elephants that encourages play behaviors through embodied interaction. Our preliminary results indicate that elephants understood the system and interacted with the interface significantly longer than with passive objects. During the interactions, elephants showed more positive behaviors such as focused exploration, reducing the possibility of negative stereotypical behaviors. We suggest that such technologically-enhanced objects and embodied design can enhance standards of managed animal care.

There is a growing need for social interaction in Virtual Reality (VR). Current social VR applications enable human-agent or interpersonal communication, usually by means of visual and audio cues. Touch, which is also an essential method for affective communication, has not received as much attention. To address this, we introduce HexTouch, a forearm-mounted robot that performs touch behaviors in sync with the behaviors of a companion agent, to complement visual and auditory feedback in virtual reality. The robot consists of four robotic tactors driven by servo motors, which render specific tactile patterns to communicate primary emotions (fear, happiness, disgust, anger, and sympathy). We demonstrate HexTouch through a VR game with physical-virtual agent interactions that facilitate the player-companion relationship and increase the immersion of the VR experience. The player will receive affective haptic cues while collaborating with the agent to complete the mission in the game. The multisensory system for affective communication also has the potential to enhance sociality in the virtual world.

Mobile VR HMDs enable scenarios where they are being used in public, excluding all the people in the surrounding (Non-HMD Users) and reducing them to be sole bystanders. We present FaceDisplay, a modified VR HMD consisting of three touch sensitive displays and a depth camera attached to its back. People in the surrounding can perceive the virtual world through the displays and interact with the HMD user via touch or gestures. To further explore the design space of FaceDisplay, we implemented three applications (FruitSlicer, SpaceFace and Conductor) each presenting different sets of aspects of the asymmetric co-located interaction (e.g. gestures vs touch). We conducted an exploratory user study (n=16), observing pairs of people experiencing two of the applications and showing a high level of enjoyment and social interaction with and without an HMD. Based on the findings we derive design considerations for asymmetric co-located VR applications and argue that VR HMDs are currently designed having only the HMD user in mind but should also include Non-HMD Users.

Mobile VR HMDs enable users to experience virtual reality content in a variety of nomadic scenarios, excluding all the people in the surrounding (Non-HMD Users) and reducing them to be sole bystanders. This leads to a scenario where the HMD User experiences a sense of isolation and the Non-HMD Users a sense of exclusion. To battle these phenomena we present FaceDisplay, a modified VR HMD consisting of three touch sensitive displays and a depth camera attached to its back. This allows Non-HMD User to see inside the immersed users virtual world and enable them to interact via touch and gestures. We built a VR HMD prototype consisting of three additional screens and present interaction techniques and an example application that leverage the FaceDisplay design space.

Printflatables is a design and fabrication system for human-scale, functional and dynamic inflatable objects. We use inextensible thermoplastic fabric as the raw material with the key principle of introducing folds and thermal sealing. Upon inflation, the sealed object takes the expected three dimensional shape. The workflow begins with the user specifying an intended 3D model which is decomposed to two dimensional fabrication geometry. This forms the input for a numerically controlled thermal contact iron that seals layers of thermoplastic fabric. In this paper, we discuss the system design in detail, the pneumatic primitives that this technique enables and merits of being able to make large, functional and dynamic pneumatic artifacts. We demonstrate the design output through multiple objects which could motivate fabrication of inflatable media and pressure-based interfaces.