Current 3D food printing systems impose engineering paradigms onto culinary practice, requiring users to design food as geometric models and slice them into discrete layers. This approach fundamentally misunderstands how humans create food – through continuous cooking actions like piping, filling, and spreading that encode centuries of embodied knowledge. We present SPICE (Smart Production of Individualized Culinary Essentials), a multi-material 3D printing system that reimagines food fabrication through action-oriented path planning derived from traditional cooking techniques. Rather than decomposing geometry into discontinuous layers and parallel toolpaths, SPICE generates continuous paths that directly encode cooking actions. Through three demonstration dishes, we show how preserving the gestural nature of cooking enables more intuitive control while enhancing precision over nutritional content. This work contributes to growing efforts in HCI to develop craft-informed fabrication systems, positioning food as a critical domain for exploring how computational tools can augment rather than replace embodied making practices.

Tangible narrative allow children to interact with physical objects and provides an immersive storytelling approach to influence their cognition and behavior. However, research on using tangible narratives to encourage behaviors in children remains limited. To improve children’s eating behaviors, we combined narrative transportation theory with behavior change principles to conduct a design study, called TangibleTale. Specifically, we conducted a formative user study (N = 12 pairs) to identify the characteristics of children’s engagement with tangible narrative and their interactions with parents, which were then incorporated into a design workshop (N = 12) to develop an interactive product comprising tangible elements and an accompanying app. With the produced outcomes, we conducted a comparative experiment (N = 24 pairs) in a home setting to verify and explore the role of tangible narrative in child–parent mealtime interaction. Finally, we formulated design guidelines for a tangible narrative that can serve as a reference to assist in creating more impactful products that foster positive behavioral growth in children.

The digital codification and measurement of food preparation has made strong contributions to HCI food research, whether through ingredient manipulation, workflow management, or recipe interaction. But prior work has shown that technical developments that emphasize precise gourmet practices tend to overlook the importance of cultural knowledge. Drawing on an integrative autobiographical design approach, we describe an open-source hardware toolkit that we developed to examine the process of integrating precision techniques with ritual cooking practices across three recipes: flour skin, rice wine, and doufu. Our work points to the importance of understanding precision as a cultural process with roots in personal and familial experience. We end with a reflection on the particular knowledge-forms that come from cultivating cultural relationships to fabrication processes and their implications for reading digital fabrication processes as meaningfully relational.

Nature has been a plentiful source of materials, replenishment, inspiration, and creativity. Nature collage, as a crafting technique, is a fun and educational activity for children to explore nature and engage their creativity. However, the raw material collection is limited to static things such as leaves, ignoring inspiration from nature sounds and dynamic elements such as babbling creeks. Using a mobile application, we hope to encourage children's creativity by renewing collage materials collection and careful observation in nature. To explore this, we conducted a formative study with children (N=20) and a design workshop with experts (N=6) to formulate NaCanva, an AI-assisted multi-modal collage creation system for children. Drawing on the interactivity between children and nature, NaCanva enables the multi-modal material collection, including images, sound, and videos, which differs our system from traditional collages. We validated this system with a between-subject user study (N=30), and the results suggested that NaCanva unleashes children's creativity in nature collage creation by enhancing children's multidimensional observation and engagement in nature.

3D printing, as a rapid prototyping technique, usually fabricates objects that are difficult to modify physically. This paper presents FlexTruss, a design and construction pipeline based on the assembly of modularized truss-shaped objects fabricated with conventional 3D printers and assembled by threading. To create an end-to-end system, a parametric design tool with an optimal Euler path calculation method is developed, which can support both inverse and forward design workflow and multi-material construction of modular parts. In addition, the assembly of truss modules by threading is evaluated with a series of application cases to demonstrate the affordance of FlexTruss. We believe that FlexTruss extends the design space of 3D printing beyond typically hard and fixed forms, and it will provide new capabilities for designers and researchers to explore the use of such flexible truss structures in human-object interaction.

3D printing technology makes Do-It-Yourself and reforming everyday objects a reality. However, designing and fabricating attachments that can seamlessly adapt existing objects to extended functionality is a laborious process, which requires accurate measuring, modeling, manufacturing, and assembly. This paper presents ShrinCage, a 4D printing system that allows novices to easily create shrinkable adaptations to fit and fasten existing objects. Specifically, the design tool presented in this work aid in the design of attachment that adapts to irregular morphologies, which accommodates the variations in measurements and fabrication, subsequently simplifying the modeling and assembly processes. We further conduct mechanical tests and user studies to evaluate the availability and feasibility of this method. Numerous application examples created by ShrinCage prove that it can be adopted by aesthetic modification, assistive technology, repair, upcycling, and augmented 3D printing.

From providing nutrition to facilitating social exchanges, food plays an essential role in our daily lives and cultures. In HCI, we are interested in using food as an interaction medium and a context of personal fabrication. Yet, the design space of available food printing methods is limited to shapes with minimal overhangs and materials that have a paste-like consistency. In this work, we seek to expand this design space by adapting support bath-assisted printing to the food context. The bath scaffolds the embedded materials and preserves shapes during the printing processes, enabling us to create freeform food with fluid-like materials. We provide users guidelines for choosing the appropriate support bath type and processing methods depending on the printing material's properties. A design tool suite and application examples, including confectionery arts, 4D printed food, and edible displays are also offered to demonstrate the enabled interaction design space.

As sensors and interactive devices become ubiquitous and transition outdoors and into the wild, we are met with the challenge of mass deployment and actuation. We present E-seed, a biomimetic platform that consumes little power to deploy, harvests energy from nature to install, and functions autonomously in the field. Each seed can individually self-drill into a substrate by harvesting moisture fluctuations in its ambient environment. As such, E-seed acts as a shape-changing interface to autonomously embed functional devices and interfaces into the soil, with the potential of aerial deployment in hard-to-reach locations. Our system is constructed primarily from wood veneer, making it lightweight, inexpensive, and biodegradable. In this paper, we detail our fabrication process and showcase demos that leverage the E-seed platform as a self-drilling interface. We envision that possible applications include soil sensors, sampling, and environmental monitoring for agriculture and reforestation.

Four-dimensional (4D) printing, a new technology emerged from additive manufacturing (3D printing), is widely known for its capability of programming post-fabrication shape-changing into artifacts. Fused deposition modeling (FDM)-based 4D printing, in particular, uses thermoplastics to produce artifacts and requires computational analysis to assist the design processes of complex geometries. However, these artifacts are weak against structural loads, and the design quality can be limited by less accurate material models and numerical simulations. To address these issues, this paper propounds a composite structure design made of two materials – polylactic acid (PLA) and carbon fiber reinforced PLA (CFPLA) – to increase the structural strength of 4D printed artifacts and a workflow composed of several physical experiments and series of dynamic mechanical analysis (DMA) to characterize materials. We apply this workflow to 3D printed samples fabricated with different printed parameters to accurately characterize the materials and implement a sequential finite element analysis (FEA) to achieve accurate simulations. The accuracy of deformation induced by the triggering process is both computationally and experimentally verified with several creative design examples and is measured to be at least 95%, with a confidence interval of (0.972,0.985). We believe the presented workflow is essential to the combination of geometry, material mechanism and design, and has various potential applications.