Thermal Painting is a probe to explore multisensory painting, aiming to defamiliarize, or present the familiar creative practice of painting in an unfamiliar way for artists. The system provides dynamic thermal feedback based on what color the artist is painting. In a qualitative, exploratory pilot study with 20 artists, we investigated how thermal sensations influenced their creative process. Artists described how thermal feedback impacted color selection, brush movements, comfort and flow, thematic associations, and memory triggers. This prompts plans for future work around design improvements, an in-situ field study, thermal associations, and multisensory defamiliarization. This project offers preliminary insights into the interplay of thermal sensation and creative process.

Food perception is a multisensory experience shaped by environmental cues such as ambient lighting. Previous studies have demonstrated that lighting can impact how satisfied we feel while dining. However, many of these studies were conducted in controlled laboratory settings with standardized meals, overlooking how lighting interacts with personal dietary choices and diverse dining contexts. This paper introduces LumiBite, a portable lighting system integrated into a lunchbox, designed for dining environments to enable personalized lighting adjustments during meals. Through a seven-day in-the-wild study with six participants, where they freely chose when, what, and where to eat, we explored the feasibility of deploying LumiBite and investigated how user agency in customizing lighting settings impacts dining satisfaction, sensory perception and dietary behaviors. Our findings demonstrate that LumiBite not only enhances food aesthetics but also shifts users from passive consumers to active meal curators. The study highlights key challenges, including cultural dining practices and ambient light interference, and offers actionable design principles for creating context-aware, culturally sensitive dining technologies.

Digital technologies can conduct an important role in preserving intangible cultural heritage (ICH). Nonetheless, existing work tends to be limited to digital storage, presentation, dissemination, and education, with comparatively little concentrating on production and reproduction of the craft, the key to revitalizing ICH. In this paper, we explore digital making as an approach for both the inheritance and innovation of ICH handicrafts. Taking Hairy Monkey craftsmanship as an instance, we conducted a workshop with 15 groups of makers, teaching them the traditional Hairy Monkey craft and subsequently enabling them to create innovative works with digital technologies in their own time. As revealed by our interviews with these participants, ICH brings cultural inspiration to digital making, and digital making rejuvenates ICH through innovative art forms and its positive influence on participants. As demonstrated in this paper, digital technologies can be deeply integrated with ICH through making to revitalize ICH from the core through living transmission.

Although fluidic computation has been utilized to develop interactive devices in the field of Human-Computer Interaction (HCI), the limited computation complexity of previous work hinders the exploration of richer interaction modalities. Based on the Fluidic Computation Kit we developed, this paper explores how unconventional mechanical computing can be leveraged to design shape-changing interfaces that integrate input sensing, output, and complex computation. After introducing the design space enabled by the Kit, we explain how to design four types of elementary computational components and six categories of operators. We end by providing several application scenarios which illustrate the Fluidic Computation Kit’s potential to build sophisticated circuits (e.g., a parallel processor) for use in the field of HCI.

We introduce Thermotion, a novel method using thermofluidic composites to design and display thermochromic animation effects on object surfaces. With fluidic channels embedded under the object surfaces, the composites utilize thermofluidic flows to dynamically control the surface temperature as an actuator for thermochromic paints, which enables researchers and designers for the first time to create animations not only on two and three-dimensional surfaces but also on the surface made of a few flexible everyday materials. We report the design space with six animation primitives and two modification effects, and we demonstrate the design and fabrication workflow with a customized software platform for design and simulation. A range of applications is shown leveraging the objects’ dynamic displays both visually and thermally, including dynamic artifacts, teaching aids, and ambient displays. We envision an opportunity to extend thermofluidic composites to other heat-related practices for further dynamic and programmable interactions with temperature.

Fluid fiber, with fluid flowing in a tube, is an attractive material to flexibly and dynamically display digital information. While it has recently attracted attention from the HCI field, there is currently little knowledge about this material, limited to controlling the position of the droplets to present representational information like letters and numbers. To develop a broader and deepened understanding of this material and its potential for display design, we conducted a study based on a design workshop where art and design practitioners engaged in creation practice with a toolkit we designed and developed. The toolkit includes hardware components for controlling bubbles and droplets and a GUI design tool for arranging the fluid layout. Our research reveals the structural and expressive affordance of such a fluid fiber for displaying information, highlighting the unique value of fluidity as an intuitive form to express life, emotion, movement and changes.

Accurate and effective directional feedback is crucial for an electronic traveling aid device that guides visually impaired people in walking through paths. This paper presents Tactile Compass, a hand-held device that provides continuous directional feedback with a rotatable needle pointing toward the planned direction. We conducted two lab studies to evaluate the effectiveness of the feedback solution. Results showed that, using Tactile Compass, participants could reach the target direction in place with a mean deviation of 3.03° and could smoothly navigate along paths of 60cm width, with a mean deviation from the centerline of 12.1cm. Subjective feedback showed that Tactile Compass was easy to learn and use.