Communities of practice (CoPs) play a crucial role in cross-pollination and learning within various skill-based and craft domains. These communities often share common materials, concepts, and techniques across related practices. However, due to their insular nature, exchanging knowledge between CoPs has been challenging, leading to fragmented knowledge marked by differing vocabularies and contexts. To address this issue, we introduce Anther, a system designed to highlight shared concepts and semantic overlap between distinct CoPs. Anther projects concepts onto a 2-dimensional space, providing users with comprehensive, contextual, and conceptual views. We conducted a user study, demonstrating Anther’s effectiveness in aggregating and disseminating community-based knowledge, bridging gaps between CoPs, and supporting the cross-pollination of knowledge between CoPs. Further, we present interaction vignettes that illustrate how Anther can ease entry into new domains and aide in discovering new creative techniques. This work can benefit maker communities by fostering collaborative knowledge-building across diverse domains.

Within various creative domains, communities of practice (CoPs) are instrumental in fostering knowledge creation and innovation. Although each community disseminates knowledge through resources like online video tutorials, this content is often hidden behind different contexts and semantics that limits practitioners’ ability to learn, borrow, and adapt knowledge from each other. To trace how knowledge disseminates across CoPs, we analyzed video transcripts across 25 communities and characterized them using Term Frequency Proportional Document Frequency (TF*PDF) to extracted materials, tools, and techniques concepts. Using a cluster heatmap visualization, we reveal material and material parallels as boundaries for umbrella CoPs, techniques as strong predictors of kindred CoPs, and outliers as emerging sites of hybrid CoPs. We discuss implications for the design of knowledge discovery support tools to characterize material workflows, track knowledge evolution, and develop semantic vocabularies.

Tutorials serve as a fundamental mechanism for disseminating knowledge within creative practices. Yet, tutorials struggle to convey tacit knowledge, a type of knowledge that practitioners internalize over time and experience. The subconscious nature of tacit knowledge often causes experienced practitioners to inadvertently omit fundamental actions in their instructions, which poses significant challenges for novices attempting to grasp the basics. However, no two novices are alike, making it challenging and burdensome for the tutorial author to align their tutorials with the audiences’ expertise. My doctoral research aims to create a more bespoke learning experience where tutorials are adapted to learners’ experiences without burdening the tutorial author. My contributions towards this goal include a tutorial concept extraction method that identifies the core vocabulary of a practice to inform authors of their audiences’ language, a typology that aids authors to identify key characteristics of tacit knowledge to enable richer instructions, and a framework that enables authors to use the tutorial medium effectively to maximize tacit knowledge transfer. I am currently working towards a tutorial authoring tool that leverages large language models to extract a learner’s unique and relevant experiences to create a personal knowledge inventory. Future work would combine this inventory with previous contributions to augment tutorials to be experiential, or aligned with learners’ experiences.

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.

Although a picture, GIF, or tutorial video is "worth a thousand words", every viewer has a unique perspective of which words they ‘see.’ Packed with rich meaning, these words, or descriptions, are often used to describe the ambiguity of working with materials, artifacts, and processes in creative practices. Our work reframes the traditional crowdsourced description tasks to leverage crowdworker diversity in generating a corpus of tacit descriptions. These descriptions are synthesized into a typology and describe how users communicate ambiguity and tacit knowledge embedded in unfamiliar material properties and familiar handed motions. We propose three design concepts that demonstrate how tacit descriptions could enhance the interpretation of tutorial artifacts - Tacit Layer, or breadth-first interpretation, Tacit Space, or depth-first interpretation, and Tacit Localizer, or context-based interpretation. These concepts are then translated into physical card-sort activities and used in a workshop to gauge how participants consider tacit information in their respective practices.

The ability to visually discern shape, form, and value is fundamental to observational drawing. However, developing this skill requires a drawer to perceive a “raw” version of the scene being drawn, often referred to as regaining the innocence of the eye. This work investigates how interactive projected light cues can be used to alter the perception of drawing objects and understand how users might control their own perception. We introduce an augmented reality system capable of dynamically projecting interactive light cues onto objects within a live drawing studio. We present the design of three cues that address challenging percepts for novice drawers: gauging proportion, discerning shape, and shifting visual attention. In a formal user study with novice and intermediate drawers, we evaluate the effectiveness of these cues in supporting observational drawing. We demonstrate how cues can be designed to correct subconscious errors and visually guide users in learning to draw.

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.

Compression-based haptic feedback has been used in wearables to issue notifications, provide therapeutic effects, and create immersive storytelling environments. Such worn devices are well studied on the wrists, arms, and head, however, many unconventional yet context-rich areas of the body remain underexplored. Current haptic prototyping techniques have large instrumentation costs, requiring the design of bespoke embedded devices that do not have the flexibility to be applied to other body sites. In this work, we introduce an open-source prototyping toolkit for designing, fabricating, and programming wearable compression-based interfaces, or compressables. Our approach uses a lost-PVA technique for making custom inflatable silicone bladders, an off-the-shelf pneumatics controller, and a mobile app to explore and tune haptic interactions through sketch gestures. We validate the toolkit’s open-endedness through a user study and heuristic evaluation. We use exemplar artifacts to annotate the design space of compressables and discuss opportunities to further expand haptic expression on the body.

The shift towards distance learning brought forth by the pandemic has highlighted the shortcomings of teaching physical skills at a distance. With the emergence of new augmented and connected mediums, new opportunities arise for transferring physical skills that have resisted traditional documentation methods. However, there lacks a framework that allows tutorial authors to capitalize on a new medium’s unique affordances rather than remediating existing tutorial conventions. Our work analyzes a body of tutorials rendered in various mediums for centering clay on a pottery wheel — a foundational skill that exemplifies the difficulties of physical skill transfer. Through the lens of McLuhan’s “The Medium is the Message” we synthesize a taxonomy of medium conventions and themes derived from analyzing a body of centering tutorials and observation of how a tutorial’s medium affects how learners develop physical skills. We leverage our findings to motivate design recommendations to inform how new mediums can support material practices.