Recent advances in material-centric personal fabrication have enabled the use of custom inks and paints with functional properties to create free-form displays. However, working with these materials, such as through airbrushing, remains a skill-intensive process that limits non-specialist access, adoption, and further development. To address these challenges, we developed Dispray, an AR-augmented airbrush tool for fabricating electroluminescent displays. The tool was shaped by insights from a study with artists and engineers and refined through iterative prototyping. We evaluated Dispray by re-engaging with the original artists and engineers and conducting a follow-up study with novice users, demonstrating its effectiveness in supporting both skill acquisition and functional fabrication. This work contributes a novel approach to connecting emerging material fabrication with accessible, user-centered tools, advancing the democratisation of interactive device creation.

Consumer-level multi-material 3D printing with conductive thermoplastics enables fabrication of interactive elements for bespoke tangible devices. However, large feature sizes, high resistance materials, and limitations of printable control circuitry mean that deployable devices cannot be printed without post-print assembly steps. To address these challenges, we present Printegrated Circuits, a technique that uses traditional electronics as material to 3D print self-contained interactive objects. Embedded PCBs are placed into recesses during a pause in the print, and through a process we term Prinjection, conductive filament is injected into their plated-through holes. This automatically creates reliable electrical and mechanical contact, eliminating the need for manual wiring or bespoke connectors. We describe the custom machine code generation that supports our approach, and characterise its electrical and mechanical properties. With our 6 demonstrations, we highlight how the Printegrated Circuits process fits into existing design and prototyping workflows as well as informs future research agendas.

Over recent years, there has been significant research within HCI towards free-form physical interactive devices. However, such devices are not straightforward to design, produce and deploy on demand. Traditional development revolves around iterative prototyping through component-based assembly, limiting device structure and implementation. Material-centric personal display fabrication (DisplayFab) opens the possibility of decentralised, configurable production by low-skill makers. Currently, DisplayFab is severely limited by its embryonic stage of development, the complexity of involved processes and materials, and the challenges around designing interactive structures. We present a development framework to provide a path for future research. DisplayFab has been developed by identifying 4 key breakpoints in the existing “Personal Fabrication” framework: Material and Deposition, Conception and Software, Feedback and Interactivity and Responsible Innovation. We use these breakpoints to form a targeted literature review of relevant work. Doing this we identify 30 challenges that act as roadmap for future research in DisplayFab.

Sonolithography is the process of directed patterning of airborne particles through the exertion of acoustic radiation forces in ultrasound fields. In this work we present a novel way to explore and gain intuition about the process through tangible interaction. We demonstrate the design and use of a physical instrument for the creation of sonolithographs. The design includes the “Orbograph”, a tangible controller that embodies key acoustic parameters through direct tactile interactions; a low-cost and open-source driving circuit; and a configurable transducer array. We demonstrate its capabilities by presenting sonolithographs made with the tool that contain linear patterns, grids, circular and more complex shapes. By using different dyes and active materials, we demonstrate sonolithography's creative application as well as suggest its potential in the fabrication of interactive devices. Through this work we encourage a playful artistic exploration of the domain to motivate future research in sonolithography for tangible material interactions.

Abstract: FabricatINK explores the personal fabrication of irregularly-shaped low-power displays using electronic ink (E ink). E ink is a programmable bicolour material used in traditional form-factors such as E readers. It has potential for more versatile use within the scope of personal fabrication of custom-shaped displays, and it has the promise to be the pre-eminent material choice for this purpose. We appraise technical literature to identify properties of E ink, suited to fabrication. We identify a key roadblock, universal access to E ink as a material, and we deliver a method to circumvent this by upcycling broken electronics. We subsequently present a novel fabrication method for irregularly-shaped E ink displays. We demonstrate our fabrication process and E ink’s versatility through ten prototypes showing different applications and use cases. By addressing E ink as a material for display fabrication, we uncover the potential for users to create custom-shaped truly bistable displays.

ProtoSpray is a fabrication method that combines 3D printing and spray coating, to create interactive displays of arbitrary shapes. Our approach makes novel use of 3D printed conductive channels to create base electrodes on 3D shapes. This is then combined with spraying active materials to produce illumination. We demonstrate the feasibility and benefits of this combined approach in 6 evaluations exploring different shaped topologies. We analyze factors such as spray orientations, surface topologies and printer resolutions, to discuss how spray nozzles can be integrated into traditional 3D printers. We present a series of ProtoSprayed objects demonstrating how our technique goes beyond existing fabrication techniques by allowing creation of displays on objects with curvatures as complex as a Mobius strip. Our work provides a platform to empower makers to use displays as a fabrication material.

We present Sprayable User Interfaces: room-sized interactive surfaces that contain sensor and display elements created by airbrushing functional inks. Since airbrushing is inherently mobile, designers can create large-scale user interfaces on complex 3D geometries where existing stationary fabrication methods fail. To enable Sprayable User Interfaces, we developed a novel design and fabrication pipeline that takes a desired user interface layout as input and automatically generates stencils for airbrushing the layout onto a physical surface. After fabricating stencils from cardboard or projecting stencils digitally, designers spray each layer with an airbrush, attach a microcontroller to the user interface, and the interface is ready to be used. Our technical evaluation shows that Sprayable User Interfaces work on various geometries and surface materials, such as porous stone and rough wood. We demonstrate our system with several application examples including interactive smart home applications on a wall and a soft leather sofa, an interactive smart city application, and interactive architecture in public office spaces.