Multi-layered weaving is a technique for weaving multiple layers in tandem through selective warp and weft interlacement, offering unique opportunities for HCI design research, in whole-garment construction, e-textiles, and 3D fabrication. Multilayer weaving is a complex process with varied design methods and fabrication workflows that are not optimized for in most weaving design tools. We believe that HCI researchers can benefit from multilayer weaving as a manufacturing technique and could contribute to the development of new computational design tools for weaving. To identify opportunities and alignments in multilayer weaving design practice for HCI researchers, we provide a systematic overview of contemporary multilayer design practices. We analyze existing multilayer weaving design tools for manual and semi-automated weaving to identify strengths and breakdowns across design representations, interaction modalities, and artifacts. We integrate our analysis with prior HCI interaction principles and strategies from human-centered programming and computer-aided design to present future opportunities for developing expressive, multilayer computational design technologies for weaving.

Sociocultural engineering research is being systematically attacked under the current US government, pressuring researchers to eliminate cultural inquiry from our work. These attacks present an existential crisis for HCI because technological innovation and understanding cultural impact are fundamentally intertwined. Marginalized HCI practitioners are at particular risk from these policies. Compliance with authoritarian demands is untenable. We need strategic, principled ways of resisting. We propose the augmented undercommons, a framework grounded in Harney and Moten’s undercommons that supports liberatory, culturally grounded technology development parallel and in opposition to ethically compromised institutions. We outline five guiding principles, demonstrate their use in HCI through three case studies, and reflect further on one principle’s dimensions in practice. The augmented undercommons builds upon past knowledge from oppressed scholars to offer one possible survival strategy for our current moment, while critically reflecting on the HCI community’s current and future responsibilities.

Researchers can build craft-aligned digital fabrication technologies by designing interfaces inspired by craft tools. This process often demands real-time physical interactions not supported by today’s automation-focused CNC control systems. We theorize we can lower engineering challenges for craft-aligned CNC prototyping by allowing designers to modify existing CNCs to support both automated and real-time control. We contribute a new creative motion control system, Stepdance, which consists of two elements: 1) modular controllers that replace the G-code controller of a CNC and can be chained together to develop new interfaces, and 2) a modular programming library that supports declarative mappings between live user input, pre-programmed operations, and machine motion. We developed Stepdance with practitioners at the Haystack Mountain School of Craft, where we used the system to modify commercial plotters and 3D printers. We analyze the resulting artifacts, interactions, and ideas to discuss how Stepdance can broaden the practice of CNC design via physical metaphor.

Ceramics practice is an embodied activity where creators use manual tools in unique ways to shape physical material. Clay 3D printing uses the same material as manual ceramics craft, enabling new opportunities for form and texture by precisely controlling the 3D printing toolpath. However, current clay 3D printing design workflows require developing forms through digital software rather than tool-based making. We present Clay ARtools, an augmented reality (AR) system for designing clay 3D printed vessels. We developed Clay ARtools in collaboration with a professional ceramicist to create AR toolpath editing operations that reference manual use of ceramic tools. Through the design and fabrication of 3D-printed clay artifacts, we demonstrate how AR ceramic tools enable precise and controllable modifications of the toolpath, from the overall form down to individual toolpath points. We demonstrate how extending physical tool metaphors with digital representations and numerical precision enables craft-like interaction with CAM-based design techniques.

Figure 1: AniMate supports the creation of animated sequences through a combination of natural language and direct manipulation controls via narrative motion blocks.Example 1: A) The animator creates a narrative motion block and uses natural language to specify an action (e.g.roll tomato ).The system processes the request and generates a set of custom sliders parametrizing the action.B) If the animator wants to add irregularities in the motion path (e.g. to avoid a rock ), C) they can directly move the points of the tomato's motion path around the rock.Example 2: D) The animator can also draw the motion path directly by moving the visual element (e.g. the butterfly ), which automatically generates a narrative motion block.E) To add specificity, stylization or secondary motion to the animation, the animator can edit the narrative motion block by using natural language input to generate additional controls (e.g.add loops, and align to path ).F) Using the newly generated sliders, the animator can modify the new effects (e.g.change the amplitude of the loops).

Augmented reality (AR) is a rapidly proliferating technology that offers opportunities to blend digital and physical contexts but also poses significant risks.This work seeks to inform responsible AR development with the insights of AR practitioners who engage with complex socio-cultural tensions.We analyze the implementation of AR involving vulnerable communities in human rights * Both authors contributed equally to this research.

pattern viewer re-assembly plan pattern library 1. undo seams 3. add yellow tiles 2. rotate front left leg right leg tank top shorts back Making a first garment Wearing the garment Second garment Re-using tiles to make a second garment 20 tiles 30 assemblies 2 hr 30 min 4 hr 40 min 32 tiles 56 assemblies 37 tiles 65 assemblies 5 hr 25 min 3D-printed connector and assembly technique easy and risk-free disassemblyFigure 1: texTile is a workflow for modular tile-based garment construction within the crochet granny squares technique.The texTile workflow supports making and re-making garments by re-using crochet tiles.We develop this workflow by leveraging tools from computational fabrication and computational design.We design a non-permanent assembly technique using 3D-printed connectors, and a software tool with a pattern library, pattern viewer and re-assembly plan.

Proponents of digital fabrication argue that future technologies will fundamentally reshape manufacturing; however, we still have a limited understanding of the relationship between contemporary digital fabrication technologies and the values and labor of people who make things. Contemporary materialist theories can offer insights into how interaction modalities with machines and materials influence human production activities. We aim to implement these theoretical principles in technical system development. We focus on action as a bridging concept between abstract notions regarding human-machine-material relationships and concrete digital fabrication system features. We use CNC-milled surface texture production on wood as a case study. We follow a research-through-design process to develop Millipath, an action-oriented programming platform enabling the parametric design of machine toolpaths. Through the analysis of autobiographical data from fabricating artifacts, we investigate how digital fabrication systems informed by materialist theories support expressive modes of production and design decisions in response to material behaviors.

Building new software tools for professional digital fabrication requires that HCI researchers understand domain-specific materials and fabrication workflows to ensure software operations align with professional manufacturing requirements. To bridge the research-practice divide, we adopt a practice-driven software development methodology for digital fabrication in an artist-in-residence program. In our method, HCI researchers and craft professionals collaboratively develop software tools over three months. We piloted our methodology through two consecutive computational ceramics residencies with five professional craftspeople. The teams produced five novel software tools for clay 3D printing and hundreds of ceramic artifacts. We provide a detailed description of our methodology through artist and HCI researcher accounts and an analysis of the integration of software ideation, implementation, and debugging with professional art and craft production. Our work demonstrates a systematic mechanism for achieving meaningful digital fabrication software contributions with mutual benefit for artists and researchers.

Digital fabrication can be a rich creative domain for young people. Most youth-oriented digital fabrication activities focus on CAD, where practitioners design solid geometry. Professional designers frequently bypass CAD and instead design at the level of the machine toolpath. This CAM-based design process allows for material exploration, unique textures, and complex shapes. We recognize young people’s role as designers and seek to adapt professional digital fabrication techniques to meaningful youth design activities. We present a youth-oriented CAM-based design curriculum consisting of 1) hands-on activities that introduce machine toolpath concepts, 2) a learner-oriented CAM software interface that scaffolds digital toolpath creation, and 3) project-oriented design activities that integrate CAM-based design and manual craft for ceramics and textile production. We evaluated our approach through a workshop with twelve high school students. Our research shows that young people can skillfully apply CAM-based design and manual craft to create functional and personally meaningful artifacts.

This paper presents the design and outcomes of SketchPath, a system that uses hand-drawn toolpaths to design for clay 3D printing. Drawing, as a direct manipulation technique, allows artists to design with the expressiveness of CAM-based tools without needing to work with a numerical system or constrained system. SketchPath works to provide artists with direct control over the outcomes of their form by not abstracting away machine operations or constraining the kinds of artifacts that can be produced. Artifacts produced with SketchPath emerge at a unique intersection of manual qualities and machine precision, creating works that blend handmade and machine aesthetics. In interactions with our system, ceramicists without a background in CAD/CAM were able to produce more complex forms with limited training, suggesting the future of CAM-based fabrication design can take on a wider range of modalities.

Skilled potters use manual tools with direct material engagement. In contrast, the design of clay 3D printers and workflows reinforces industrial CNC manufacturing conventions. To understand how digital fabrication can serve skilled craft practitioners, we ask: how might clay 3D printing function if it had evolved from traditional pottery tools? To examine this question, we created the Digital Pottery Wheel (DPW), a throwing wheel with 3D printing capabilities. The DPW consists of a polar mechanical architecture that looks and functions like a pottery wheel while supporting 3D printing and a real-time modular control system that blends automated and manual control. We worked with ceramicists to develop interactions that include printing onto thrown forms, throwing to manipulate printed forms, and integrating manual control, recording, and playback to re-execute manually produced forms. We demonstrate how using a physical metaphor to guide digital fabrication machine design results in new products, workflows, and perceptions.

Software-first digital fabrication workflows are often at odds with material-driven approaches to design. Material-driven design is especially critical in manual ceramics, where the craftsperson shapes the form through hands-on engagement. We present the Craft-Aligned Scanner (CAS), a 3D scanning and clay-3D printing system that enables practitioners to design for digital fabrication through traditional pottery techniques. The CAS augments a pottery wheel that has 3D printing capabilities with a precision distance sensor on a vertically oriented linear axis. By increasing the height of the sensor as the wheel turns, we directly synthesize a 3D spiralized toolpath from the geometry of the object on the wheel, enabling the craftsperson to immediately transition from manual fabrication to 3D printing without leaving the tool. We develop new digital fabrication workflows with CAS to augment scanned forms with functional features and add both procedurally and real-time-generated surface textures. CAS demonstrates how 3D printers can support material-first digital fabrication design without foregoing the expressive possibilities of software-based design.

Macrame friendship bracelet creators produce ornate geometric motifs through the manual execution of sequential and iterative knot operations. By choosing different permutations of knot types and varying the number of operations in a sequence, creators fabricate different bracelet designs. Friendship bracelet patterns are often designed prior to fabrication using digital design tools. Existing digital tools require creators to manipulate designs at the level of each individual knot. As a result, creators must invest extensive manual effort in authoring and editing patterns. Furthermore, these tools limit creators’ ability to manipulate higher-level design elements. We observed that friendship bracelets can be represented as repetitions of parameterized motifs rather than a series of individual knot operations. We present Knotation, a parametric design system to generate friendship bracelet patterns. The system abstracts existing popular motifs into modules that can be easily manipulated and modified by the user to produce visually interesting designs. Through a workshop with novice macrame creators, we show how our approach engages users with the craft using parametric design, and examine desirable aspects of Knotation’s computational framework.

Understanding how professionals use digital fabrication in production workflows is critical for future research in digital fabrication technologies. We interviewed thirteen professionals who use digital fabrication for the low-volume manufacturing of commercial products. From these interviews, we describe the workflows used for nine products created with a variety of materials and manufacturing methods. We show how digital fabrication professionals use software development to support physical production, how they rely on multiple partial representations in development, how they develop manufacturing processes, and how machine control is its own design space. We build from these findings to argue that future digital fabrication systems should support the exploration of material and machine behavior alongside geometry, that simulation is insufficient for understanding the design space, and that material constraints and resource management are meaningful design dimensions to support. By observing how professionals learn, we suggest ways digital fabrication systems can scaffold the mastery of new fabrication techniques.

Clay 3D printing provides the benefits of digital fabrication automation and reconfigurability through a method that evokes manual clay coiling. Existing design technologies for clay 3D printing reflect the general 3D printing workflow in which solid forms are designed in CAD and then converted into a toolpath. In contrast, in hand-coiling, form is determined by the actions taken by the artist’s hands through space in response to the material. We theorized that an action-oriented approach for clay 3D printing could allow creators to design digital fabrication toolpaths that reflect clay material properties. We present CoilCAM, a domain-specific CAM programming system that supports the integrated generation of parametric forms and surface textures through mathematically defined toolpath operations. We developed CoilCAM in collaboration with ceramics professionals and evaluated CoilCAM’s relevance to manual ceramics by reinterpreting hand-made ceramic vessels. This process revealed the importance of iterative variation and embodied experience in action-oriented workflows.

Procedural functionality enables visual creators to rapidly edit, explore alternatives, and fine-tune artwork in many domains including illustration, motion graphics, and interactive animation. Symbolic procedural tools, such as textual programming languages, are highly expressive but often limit directly manipulating concrete artwork; whereas direct manipulation tools support some procedural expression but limit creators to pre-defined behaviors and inputs. Inspired by visions of using geometric input to create procedural relationships, we identify an opportunity to use vector geometry from artwork to specify expressive user-defined procedural functions. We present Drawing Transforms (DTs), a technique that enables the use of any drawing to procedurally transform the stylistic, spatial, and temporal properties of target artwork. We apply DTs in a prototype motion graphics system to author continuous and discrete transformations, modify multiple elements in a composition simultaneously, create animations, and control fine-grained procedural instantiation. We discuss how DTs can unify procedural authoring through direct manipulation across visual media domains.

New printing strategies have enabled 3D-printed materials that imitate traditional textiles. These filament-based textiles are easy to fabricate but lack the look and feel of fiber textiles. We seek to augment 3D-printed textiles with needlecraft to produce composite materials that integrate the programmability of additive fabrication with the richness of traditional textile craft. We present PunchPrint: a technique for integrating fiber and filament in a textile by combining punch needle embroidery and 3D printing. Using a toolpath that imitates textile weave structure, we print a flexible fabric that provides a substrate for punch needle production. We evaluate our material’s robustness through tensile strength and needle compatibility tests. We integrate our technique into a parametric design tool and produce functional artifacts that show how PunchPrint broadens punch needle craft by reducing labor in small, detailed artifacts, enabling the integration of openings and multiple yarn weights, and scaffolding soft 3D structures.

Reality Distortion Room (RDR) is a proof-of-concept augmented reality system using projection mapping and unencumbered interaction with the Microsoft RoomAlive system to study a user’s locomotive response to visual effects that seemingly transform the physical room the user is in. This study presents five effects that augment the appearance of a physical room to subtly encourage user motion. Our experiment demonstrates users’ reactions to the different distortion and augmentation effects in a standard living room, with the distortion effects projected as wall grids, furniture holograms, and small particles in the air. The augmented living room can give the impression of becoming elongated, wrapped, shifted, elevated, and enlarged. The study results support the implementation of AR experiences in limited physical spaces by providing an initial understanding of how users can be subtly encouraged to move throughout a room.

Surface ornamentation is a rich component of ceramic manufacture wherein craftspeople use multiple methods to create intricate patterns on vessels. Computational fabrication can extend manual ceramic ornamentation through procedural pattern generation and automated fabrication; however, to be effective in traditional ceramics, computational fabrication systems must remain compatible with existing processes and materials. We contribute an interactive design workflow, CeramWrap, in which craftspeople can procedurally design and fabricate decorative patterned stencils tailored to radially symmetrical vessels. Our approach extends manual techniques through a workflow where craftspeople design and edit repetitive motifs directly on a 3D digital model of a vessel and then interactively adjust the unrolling of the 3D design to a 2D format suitable for digitally fabricating stencils and templates. Through a series of example artifacts, we demonstrate how our workflow generalizes across multiple vessel geometries, supports manual and digital clay fabrication, and is adaptable to different surface ornamentation methods.

Augmented Reality (AR) in human rights museums and memorialization efforts can empower these initiatives to create stronger connections between audiences and victims; however, there is little research on the risks of depicting sensitive narratives through immersive technologies. We examined the opportunities and challenges of applying AR to memorialization by designing and deploying an AR application with a human rights museum in Colombia. We report lessons from our collaboration about navigating the risk of re-victimizing testimonial authors while creating engaging AR interactions. Furthermore, we report on a user study where participants interacted with our museum exhibition. Based on observations of our co-design process and the user study results, we discuss implications for immersive application design with strategies for selecting immersive content, balancing audience engagement, and identifying technology gaps. Finally, we reflect on the implications for collaborations between HCI researchers, human rights professionals, and organizations to inform designs involving sensitive narratives.

As machine learning methods become more powerful and capture more nuances of human behavior, biases in the dataset can shape what the model learns and is evaluated on. This paper explores and attempts to quantify the uncertainties and biases due to annotator demographics when creating sentiment analysis datasets. We ask >1000 crowdworkers to provide their demographic information and annotations for multimodal sentiment data and its component modalities. We show that demographic differences among annotators impute a significant effect on their ratings, and that these effects also occur in each component modality. We compare predictions of different state-of-the-art multimodal machine learning algorithms against annotations provided by different demographic groups, and find that changing annotator demographics can cause >4.5 in accuracy difference when determining positive versus negative sentiment. Our findings underscore the importance of accounting for crowdworker attributes, such as demographics, when building datasets, evaluating algorithms, and interpreting results for sentiment analysis.

Digital fabrication courses that relied on physical makerspaces were severely disrupted by COVID-19. As universities shut down in Spring 2020, instructors developed new models for digital fabrication at a distance. Through interviews with faculty and students and examination of course materials, we recount the experiences of eight remote digital fabrication courses. We found that learning with hobbyist equipment and online social networks could emulate using industrial equipment in shared workshops. Furthermore, at-home digital fabrication offered unique learning opportunities including more iteration, machine tuning, and maintenance. These opportunities depended on new forms of labor and varied based on student living situations. Our findings have implications for remote and in-person digital fabrication instruction. They indicate how access to tools was important, but not as critical as providing opportunities for iteration; they show how remote fabrication exacerbated student inequities; and they suggest strategies for evaluating trade-offs in remote fabrication models with respect to learning objectives.

This paper explores software’s role in visual art production by examining how artists use and develop software. We conducted interviews with professional artists who were collaborating with software developers, learning software development, and building and maintaining software. We found artists were motivated to learn software development for intellectual growth and access to technical communities. Artists valued efficient workflows through skilled manual execution and personal software development, but avoided high-level forms of software automation. Artists identified conflicts between their priorities and those of professional developers and computational art communities, which influenced how they used computational aesthetics in their work. These findings contribute to efforts in systems engineering research to integrate end-user programming and creativity support across software and physical media, suggesting opportunities for artists as collaborators. Artists’ experiences writing software can guide technical implementations of domain-specific representations, and their experiences in interdisciplinary production can aid inclusive community building around computational tools.

Live coding-the real-time procedural creation of audiovisual works-suggests opportunities to extend hand-drawn animation; however, existing live coding systems are incompatible with manual animation workflows. Manual input is not a primary datatype in existing live coding languages and live coding tools require using symbolic programming environments. We theorize that by applying direct manipulation to the domain of live coding, we can enable animators to create expressive mappings between hand-drawn animations and audio effects in real time. We present Megafauna, a sketch-based system for audiovisual performance, informed by interviews with professional animators. Megafauna supports the integrated generation and control of hand-drawn animation and audio sequences by enabling animators to directly sketch mapping functions between animation frames and sound oscillators. We demonstrate the expressive potential of Megafauna by reproducing animated compositions from procedural and manual domains and show how the system supports manual expression and exploration in live performance.

In this work, we present a system that adds augmented reality interaction and 3D-space utilization to educational videoconferencing for a more engaging distance learning experience. We developed infrastructure and user interfaces that enable the use of an instructor’s physical 3D space as a teaching stage, promote student interaction, and take advantage of the flexibility of adding virtual content to the physical world. The system is implemented using hand-held mobile augmented reality to maximize device availability, scalability, and ready deployment, elevating traditional video lectures to immersive mixed reality experiences. We use multiple devices on the teacher’s end to provide different simultaneous views of a teaching space towards a better understanding of the 3D space.

Programming offers new opportunities for visual art creation, but understanding and manipulating the abstract representations that make programming powerful can pose challenges for artists who are accustomed to manual tools and concrete visual interaction. We hypothesize that we can reduce these barriers through programming environments that link state to visual artwork output. We created Demystified Dynamic Brushes (DDB), a tool that bidirectionally links code, numerical data, and artwork across the programming interface and the execution environment - i.e., the artist's in-progress artwork. DDB automatically records stylus input as artists draw, and stores a history of brush state and output in relation to the input. This structure enables artists to inspect current and past numerical input, state, and output and control program execution through the direct selection of visual geometric elements in the drawing canvas. An observational study suggests that artists engage in program inspection when they can visually access geometric state information on the drawing canvas in the process of manual drawing.

Audio travel podcasts are a valuable source of information for travelers. Yet, travel is, in many ways, a visual experience and the lack of visuals in travel podcasts can make it difficult for listeners to fully understand the places being discussed. We present Crosscast: a system for automatically adding visuals to audio travel podcasts. Given an audio travel podcast as input, Crosscast uses natural language processing and text mining to identify geographic locations and descriptive keywords within the podcast transcript. Crosscast then uses these locations and keywords to automatically select relevant photos from online repositories and synchronizes their display to align with the audio narration. In a user evaluation, we find that 85.7% of the participants preferred Crosscast generated audio-visual travel podcasts compared to audio-only travel podcasts.

Procedural art, or art made with programming, suggests opportunities to extend traditional arts like painting and drawing; however, this potential is limited by tools that conflict with manual practices. Programming languages present learning barriers and manual drawing input is not a first class primitive in common programming models. We hypothesize that by developing programming languages and environments that align with how manual artists work, we can build procedural systems that enhance, rather than displace, manual art. To explore this, we developed Dynamic Brushes, a programming and drawing environment motivated by interviews with artists. Dynamic Brushes enables the creation of ad-hoc drawing tools that transform stylus inputs to procedural patterns. Applications range from transforming individual strokes to behaviors that draw multiple strokes simultaneously, respond to temporal events, and leverage external data. Results from an extended evaluation with artists provide guidelines for learnable, expressive systems that blend manual and procedural creation.

Computation is a powerful artistic medium. Artists with experience in programming have demonstrated the unique creative opportunities of using code to make art. Currently, manual artists interested in using procedural techniques must undergo the difficult process of learning to program, and must adopt tools and practices far removed from those to which they are accustomed. We hypothesize that, through the right direct manipulation interface, we can enable accessible and expressive procedural art creation. To explore this, we developed Para, a digital illustration tool that supports the creation of declarative constraints in vector artwork. Para's constraints enable procedural relationships while facilitating live manual control and non-linear editing. Constraints can be combined with duplication behaviors and ordered collections of artwork to produce complex, dynamic compositions. We use the results of two open-ended studies with professional artists and designers to provide guidelines for accessible tools that integrate manual and procedural expression.

People have been making things for a long time, yet digital making has developed mostly within an industrial context. We question how non-digital craft cultures can inform the design of digital tools. Furthermore, what methods can help us understand these cultures in ways that are relevant to digital practice? As makers ourselves, we see potential for collaborative making to mitigate barriers in communication and provide insight into non-digital practices and values. To evaluate this approach, we visited a hunter-gatherer community that preserves an ancient craft, bringing with us digital design and fabrication tools. Working together, we merged digital tools with ostrich eggshell jewelry craft. We use this experience to draw conclusions about making as a form of communication, the importance of supporting appropriation and immediacy in collaborations, the challenge of combining abstract design tools with concrete approaches, and the value of incorporating design and making into communal life.

The combination of computational design and digital fabrication offers many exciting possibilities for art, design, and creative expression. We seek to make computational design accessible by developing tools that allow novices to use programming and digital fabrication to produce personal and functional objects. In this paper, we describe our development of Codeable Objects, a preliminary computational-design programing tool developed to work in conjunction with digital-fabrication machines. We also present our evaluation of the tool based on a set of user studies in which people built computationally generated crafts, clothing, and accessories. These studies illuminated the viability (and challenges) of engaging novice programmers through design and digital fabrication, and provide a platform for future work in developing programming tools to support personal expression.