Computational tools for fabrication often treat materials as passive rather than active participants in design, abstracting away relationships between craftspeople and materials. For craft communities that value relational practices, abstractions limit the adoption and creative uptake of computational tools which might otherwise be beneficial. To understand how better tool design could support richer relations between individuals, tools, and materials, we interviewed expert woodworkers, fiber artists, and metalworkers. We identify three orders of convivial relations central to craft: immediate relations between individuals, tools, and materials; mid-range relations between communities, platforms, and shared materials; and extended relations between institutions, infrastructures, and ecologies. Our analysis shows how craftspeople engage and struggle with convivial relations across all three orders, creating workflows that learn from materials while supporting autonomy. We conclude with design principles for computational tools and infrastructures to better support material dialogue, collective knowledge, and accountability, along with richer and more convivial relations between craftspeople, tools, and the material worlds around them.

Edge devices are often deployed at scale, yet their environmental impact, shaped by complex interactions between hardware choices, workload demands, power systems, and deployment context, has been overlooked by the mobile computing community. We present MicroGreen, a design-time framework that enables carbon-aware design for edge ML systems. By combining component-level carbon models with workload profiling and environment-aware energy analysis, MicroGreen identifies carbon-optimal configurations across diverse conditions. Our results show that the most energy-efficient processor is not always the most sustainable, and that ambient energy availability, inference rate, and deployment lifetime can shift the carbon-optimal design by over an order of magnitude. Through a real vision-based visitor detection and counting deployment in New York City parks, we demonstrate that heterogeneous, location-aware designs reduce total emissions by 47.72% compared to a homogeneous baseline.

Figure 1: Seven smart-plugs from a variety of vendors operating collectively as an IoT cluster

Micromobility vehicles, such as e-scooters, provide ecological and financial advantages over automotive transportation. However, as with car drivers, micromobility users often perform non-driving related tasks (NDRTs), interacting with stereo controls or navigation tasks, which can lead to accidents. It remains unclear what control interfaces are appropriate and safe for micromobility. We evaluated six interface modalities for NDRTs and conducted a within-subjects study with 35 participants (yielding N=210 observations) in an e-scooter simulator to compare modality safety and preferences. Our results align with existing work on gaze and tactility in the automotive NDRTs context. However, unique to e-scooters, interfaces that required users to alter their grip on the handlebars were less preferred as they compromised stability. Social comfort also emerged as a critical factor due to concerns about public visibility. This work aims to encourage the design of safer, more socially acceptable interfaces for e-scooters and other emerging micromobility vehicles.

Goods are designed, produced, and eventually purchased by consumers who will typically use them as their marketing and branding suggests. What happens when, instead, existing products are used to provide the foundational components for novel devices? We argue that post-consumer product reuse should be a central and ongoing concern in the design of interactive devices. This paper examines four case studies of interactive devices produced by reusing and repurposing existing consumer products. By critically analyzing these case studies, we demonstrate how reuse is leveraged in practice to exploit macro and micro economic niches. These case studies illustrate factors beyond noble ecological intent that make reuse sustainable: mechanical robustness, affordability, and technological bootstrapping. We conclude with a discussion of the challenges and opportunities inherent to this mode of production.

Computing devices become waste for a variety of reasons. They breakdown, become obsolete, or are no longer trendy. These events are so common that currently, e-waste has become the largest consumer waste stream in the world. However, taking apart e-waste devices reveals how they often contain many useful parts and components that could be scrapped and creatively integrated into new forms. These include highly expressive materials like sensors, displays, micro-controllers, etc. This workshop will explore processes in creative making with e-waste, examining the unique materiality of e-waste and how its reuse differs and/or converges with other material reuse processes. To do so, our workshop will combine hands-on activities (tear downs, rapid prototyping, and tutorials) with discussion of the challenges and opportunities in this space. We aim to use these activities to explore how HCI can better support the creative acts of making with e-waste across a wide audience.

The introduction of robots in public spaces raises many questions concerning emergent interactions with robots. In this paper, we use video analysis to study two robotic trashcans deployed in a busy city square. We focus on the movement-based practices that emerged between the robot, the robot operators, and the inhabitants of the square. These practices spanned ways of attracting the robot and disposing of trash, the robot ’asking’ for trash, ’demonstrations’ by those in the square, as well as passersby in the square navigating around and in coordination with the robots. In discussion, we document these ’spontaneous simple sequential systematics’ - interactions that were systematic (they had an order), sequential (they had parts that happened one at a time), simple (in that they could be understood and copied by an observer) and spontaneous (they could be produced with no prompting or training). Building on this we discuss how we might think of robotic motion as a design space, along with HCI contributions to urban robotics.

The volatility of modern economics, and marketing paired with highly extended and globalized supply chains produces goods with explicit market inefficiencies. This pictorial explores a design process, “Garbatrage,” wherein designers exploit the difference in value between parts in waste product and those used in new products. Drawing upon our own material re-use of hoverboards, we inductively outline a framework to help designers consider the micro- and macro-economic context of material recapture of waste components, necessary to make for more circular economies and sustainable supply chains at scale. We then apply this framework to identify other potential targets for Garbatrage. We conclude with opportunities for design to make the practice of Garbatrage more widely adoptable.

This study examines three modalities for designing live-in van interiors. Participants (N=18) situated within an empty van were asked to explore potential designs using physical cardboard prototyping, a commercial software application (Vanspace 3D) for planning van interiors, and an augmented reality application that we developed. Participants were asked to think aloud as they designed van interiors for fictive journeys using each modality. A qualitative evaluation was conducted to assess how participants’ conceptualizations of space shifted across the use of each prototyping method. The results demonstrate that each design method influenced design outcomes due to the physicality of the task. This study highlights the importance of considering the role of physicality in the selection of prototyping modality for the design exploration process.

Marginalized communities’ access to and use of ICT have long been a concern in HCI4D and social computing. Many works in this domain have pointed out that the challenges to access to ICT often go beyond limited computing resources and skills and frequently include many other socio-cultural factors. In this paper, we report three of the factors that arose while studying rural Bangladeshi women’s access to ICT: stigma, rumor, and superstition. Through an eight-month-long mix-method study with 23 rural women in Jessore, we explored the forms of fear and resistance to use computing devices prevalent among this population, particularly among the women we studied. We report how their stigma, rumors and superstitions often entangled with each other and created a gender-specific resistance to women’s ICT use. This paper further discusses how this resistance was connected to a weak economy and insufficient legal and educational infrastructure in the rural community. We extend the discussion to implications for design, policy, patriarchy, and other social practices to address these human factors in HCI4D and social sustainability scholarship.

The proliferation of e-cigarettes and portable vaporizers presents new opportunities for accurately and unobtrusively tracking e-cigarette use. PuffPacket is a hardware and soft-ware research platform that leverages the technology built into vaporizers, e-cigarettes and other electronic drug delivery devices to ubiquitously track their usage. The system piggybacks on the signals these devices use to directly measure and track the nicotine consumed by users. PuffPacket augments e-cigarettes with Bluetooth to calculate the frequency, intensity, and duration of each inhalation. This information is augmented with smartphone-based location and activity information to help identify potential contextual triggers. Puff-Packet is generalizable to a wide variety of electronic nicotine,THC, and other drug delivery devices currently on the mar-ket. The hardware and software for PuffPacket is open-source so it can be expanded upon and leveraged for mobile health tracking research.