Digital modeling tools often abstract away material behavior, making it difficult for designers to reason about how artifacts will feel, flex, or fail in the real world. In this paper, we present Beadle, a design tool that supports tangible, hands-on exploration of thermoplastic behavior through a craft-based workflow built on fuse beads. Rather than relying on simulation-based modeling systems, Beadle allows users to design structures and cells using 3D printed fuse beads with diverse functional properties. The familiar geometry of fuse beads supports rapid generation of materiads – collections of intentionally partial material probes designed to be interpreted relationally through contrast and comparison. A workshop user study with 11 participants demonstrated how Beadle supports reasoning about material properties, catalyze creative directions, serve as creative rivals, and act as a material debugging strategy. We discuss how hands-on workflows can complement digital CAD tools by offering alternative pathways to develop material intuition.

Entering a cognitive state of flow is a natural response of the mind that allows people to fully concentrate and cope with tedious, and often repetitive tasks. Understanding how to trigger or sustain flow remains limited by retrospective surveys, presenting a need to better document flow. Through a validation study, we first establish braidmaking as a flow-inducing task. We then study how braidmaking can be used to unpack the experience of flow on a moment-by-moment basis. Using an instrumented Kumihimo braidmaking tool and off-the-shelf biosignal wristbands, we record the experiences of 24 users engaged in 3 different braidmaking tasks. Feature vectors motivated from flow literature were extracted from activity data (IMU, EMG, EDA, heart rate, skin temperature, braiding telemetry) and annotated with Flow Short Scale (FSS) scores. Together, this dataset and data-capture system form the first open-access and holistic platform for mining flow data and synthesizing flow-aware design principles.

The ecology of thermoplastic materials is rapidly evolving, enabling an exciting landscape of functional, aesthetic, and interactive forms. Despite their utility in fused filament fabrication (FFF), an even larger and untapped design space exists for thermoplastics. In this work, we introduce a design method that leverages similarities with a more mature medium (glass) to guide a material-centered exploration of a new medium (thermoplastics). Through a collaboration between domain experts in thermoplastics and glass, we synthesized an ontology of kilnforming techniques and developed an annotated portfolio of thermoplastic kilnforms that capture generative design directions for altering the phenomenological qualities of plastic, prototyping metamaterials, and composite forms, and engaging with other material practices. We discuss how material parallels can continue to expand the role of thermoplastics as a design material and how ontology-driven design can serve as a means of localizing, questioning, and generating material knowledge.

Conductive thread is a common material in e-textile toolkits that allows practitioners to create connections between electronic components sewn on fabric. When powered, conductive threads are used as resistive heaters to activate thermochromic dyes or pigments on textiles to create interactive, aesthetic, and ambient textile displays. In this work, we introduce Embr, a creative framework for supporting hand-embroidered liquid crystal textile displays (LCTDs). This framework includes a characterization of conductive embroidery stitches, an expanded repertoire of thermal formgiving techniques, and a thread modeling tool used to simulate mechanical, thermal, and electrical behaviors of LCTDs. Through exemplar artifacts, we annotate a morphological design space of LCTDs and discuss the tensions and opportunities of satisfying the wider range of electrical, craft, cultural, aesthetic, and functional concerns inherent to e-textile practices.