The act of cracking knuckles often stems from psychological tension, nervous focus, or the satisfaction of release. Crackers explores how this habitual and often unconscious gesture can be transformed into a tangible interface for emotional reflection. The project collects data—including the auditory sounds of cracking joints from different body parts, along with their associated emotional and physical contexts—and embeds these qualities into a constellation of handcrafted ceramic artifacts. Each vessel is sculpted to either amplify or soften the sonic characteristics of cracking, mirroring the intensity or subtlety of its emotional origin. Equipped with motion and distance sensors, the ceramics respond to presence, absence, and touch, generating personified interactions that evoke feelings of tension, frustration, excitement, joy, or relief. Crackers externalizes a private bodily impulse—typically hidden or dismissed—and brings it into a shared, public space for expression and discussion. Positioned at the intersection of personal memory and collective empathy, the project invites new rituals for emotional regulation and interoceptive awareness.

3D printing onto pre-stretched fabrics has emerged as a promising technique for fabricating self-shaping textiles. However, resulting morphing behaviors are often dictated by heuristics or arbitrarily selected parameters. We present PixBric, a pixel-based design framework that enables precise morphological control through tessellated primitive geometries printed onto biaxially stretched fabrics. Upon release, these units buckle into programmed 3D forms including undulations, curling, and bistable snapping. PixBric integrates parametric modeling, mechanical simulation, and empirical evaluation to map geometric parameters to deformation outcomes. We demonstrate applications spanning morphable typography, wearable rings, and reconfigurable surfaces. PixBric bridges digital simulation (tide) with the mechanical constraints of elastic substrates (tied), transforming complex material behaviors into accessible tools for learning, experimentation, and creative fabrication.

This studio explores rapid prototyping of shape-morphing fabrics as tangible interfaces by combining parametric modeling tools with accessible 3D printing techniques. Participants will experiment with two textile-based fabrication methods: (1) 3D printing on pre-stretched textiles for programmable morphing, and (2) printing TPU-based modular mesh structures with varying parameters to explore material properties. Through hands-on exercises, participants will investigate how material parameters—such as pattern, scale, thickness, and density—define fundamental rules for shape morphing and enable the creation of responsive, expressive, and multi-stable tangible artifacts. Emphasizing thinking-through-design for desired material behaviors, the studio invites HCI researchers and designers to collaboratively explore and critically reflect on the benefits, limitations, and future integration of shape-morphing interfaces.

AuxeticBreath is an interactive new-media installation that visualizes the rhythmic respiratory rate, as well as tidal volume - the amount of air displaced or exchanged in a single breath - of collective human breaths using soft robotics covered with auxetic structures (i.e. structures with a negative Poisson's ratio, exhibiting the property of becoming thicker when stretched and narrower when compressed) [1]. The goals of this artwork are 1) to encourage audience interaction with collective breaths and user contemplation of the changing perception of respiration during the COVID-19 pandemic; and 2) to explore a new artistic approach using a combination of auxetic structures and soft robotics. The metaphors and artistic expressions of continuous inflation and deflation of elastomers, and the emission of light from the expansion of auxetic structures invite an individual's presence to become part of the larger collective installation, and to take a moment to consider underlying changing perceptions of breath during the pandemic. By employing an emerging technology, we want to encourage other artists to explore and modify techniques and methods generally only used among engineers, and to embrace them as new artistic approaches for realizing their own ideas.