Food and flavors are integral to our existence in the world. Nonetheless, taste remains an under-explored sense in interaction design. We present Füpop, a technical platform for delivering in-mouth flavors that leverages advances in electronics and molecular gastronomy. Füpop comprises a fully edible pouch placed inside the mouth against a cheek that programmatically releases different flavors when wirelessly triggered by a focused ultrasound transducer from outside the cheek. Füpop does not interfere with activities such as chewing and drinking, and its electronics may be integrated into devices already used near the cheek, such as mobile phones, audio headphones, and head-mounted displays. Füpop’s flavors are from “real foods,” not ones imitated with synthetic reagents, providing authentic, nutritive flavors. We envision that with Füpop, flavors may be synced to music, a phone call, or events in virtual reality to enhance a user’s experience of their food and the world.

Whether a programmer with code or a potter with clay, practitioners engage in an ongoing process of working and reasoning with materials. Existing discussions in HCI have provided rich accounts of these practices and processes, which we synthesize into three themes: (1) reciprocal discovery of goals and materials, (2) local knowledge of materials, and (3) annotation for holistic interpretation. We then apply these design principles generatively to the domain of version control to present Quickpose: a version control system for creative coding. In an in-situ, longitudinal study of Quickpose guided by our themes, we collected usage data, version history, and interviews. Our study explored our participants’ material interaction behaviors and the initial promise of our proposed measures for recognizing these behaviors. Quickpose is an exploration of version control as material interaction, using existing discussions to inform domain-specific concepts, measures, and designs for version control systems.

Skin-based electronics are an emerging genre of interactive technologies. In this paper, we leverage the natural uses of lotions and propose them as mediators for driving novel, low-power, quasi-bistable, and bio-degradable electrochromic displays on the skin and other surfaces. We detail the design, fabrication, and evaluation of one such “Lotion Interface,” including how it can be customized using low-cost everyday materials and technologies to trigger various visual and temporal effects – some lasting up to fifteen minutes when unpowered. We characterize different fabrication techniques and lotions to demonstrate various visual effects on a variety of skin types and tones. We highlight the safety of our design for humans and the environment. Finally, we report findings from an exploratory user study and present a range of compelling applications for Lotion Interfaces that expand the on-skin and surface interaction landscapes to include the familiar and often habitual practice of applying lotion.

Providing electrical power is essential for nearly all interactive technologies, yet it often remains an afterthought. Some designs handwave power altogether as an “exercise for later.” Others hastily string together batteries to meet the system’s electrical requirements, enclosing them in whatever box fits. Vim is a new approach – it elevates power as a first-class design element; it frees power from being a series of discrete elements, instead catering to exact requirements; it enables power to take on new, flexible forms; it is fabricated using low-cost, accessible materials and technologies; finally, it advances sustainability by being rechargeable, non-toxic, edible, and compostable. Vims are decomposable battery alternatives that rapidly charge and can power small applications for hours. We present Vims, detail their characteristics, offer design guidelines for their fabrication, and explore their use in applications spanning prototyping, fashion, and food, including novel systems that are entirely decomposable and edible.

Documentation can support design work and create opportunities for learning and reflection. We explore how a novel documentation tool for a remote interaction design course provides insight into design process and integrates strategies from expert practice to support studio-style collaboration and reflection. Using Research through Design, we develop and deploy Kaleidoscope, an online tool for documenting design process, in an upper-level HCI class during the COVID-19 pandemic, iteratively developing it in response to student feedback and needs. We discuss key themes from the real-world deployment of Kaleidoscope, including: tensions between documentation and creation; effects of centralizing discussion; privacy and visibility in shared spaces; balancing evidence of achievement with feelings of overwhelm; and the effects of initial perceptions and incentives on tool usage. These successes and challenges provide insights to guide future tools for design documentation and HCI education that scaffold learning process as an equal partner to execution.

Creative practice often requires persevering through moments of ambiguity, where the outcome of a process is unclear. Creative practitioners intentionally manage this process, for example by developing strategies to break out of creative ruts, or stay motivated through uncertainty. Understanding the way experts engage with and manage these creativity-relevant processes represents a rich source of foundational knowledge for designers of Creativity Support Tools. These strategies represent an opportunity for CST research: to create CSTs that embody emotional and process-focused strategies and techniques. Through interviews with expert practitioners in diverse domains including performance, craft, engineering, and design, we identify four strategies for managing process: Strategic Forgetting, Mode Switching, Embodying Process, and Aestheticizing. Understanding tool- and domain-agnostic creative strategies used by experts to manage their own creative process can inform the design of future CSTs that amplify the benefits of successful strategies and scaffold new techniques.

Sustainability is critical to our planet and thus our designs. Within HCI, there is a tension between the desire to create interactive electronic systems and sustainability. In this paper, we present the design of an interactive system comprising components that are entirely decomposable. We leverage the inherent material properties of natural materials, such as paper, leaf skeletons, and chitosan, along with silver nanowires to create a new system capable of being electrically controlled as a portable heater. This new decomposable system, capable of wirelessly heating to >70°C, is flexible, lightweight, low-cost, and reusable, and it maintains its functionality over long periods of heating and multiple power cycles. We detail its design and present a series of use cases, from enabling a novel resealable packaging system to acting as a catalyst for shape-changing designs and beyond. Finally, we highlight the important decomposable property of the interactive system when it meets end-of-life.

Version control systems are powerful tools for managing history information and shaping personal and collaborative processes. While many complex tools exist for software engineering, and basic functionality for capturing versions is often found in collaborative applications such as text editors and design layout tools, these systems are not attuned to the needs and behaviors of creative practitioners within those domains, and fail to support creative practitioners in many others. Through 18 semi-structured interviews across diverse domains of creativity, we investigate how creative practitioners use version histories in their process. With the familiar paradigms and features of software version control as an organizing structure, we discuss how these creative practitioners embrace, challenge, and complicate uses of version histories in four ways: using versions as a palette of materials, providing confidence and freedom to explore, leveraging low-fidelity version capture, and reflecting on and reusing versions across long time scales. We discuss how the themes present across this wide range of mediums and domains can provide insight into future designs and uses of version control systems to support creative process.

Work combining live performance and technology often involves incorporating technology directly into the performance as it occurs onstage, including interactive costumes, or performer-controlled sets, lighting or sound. We invert this common approach, developing technology-mediated experiences outside the temporal and spatial confines of a live theatre production. We describe the 4-month co-design process with expert theatre practitioners, and detail how the process 1) shaped our design guidelines and 2) expands the discussion around existing best practices for cross-disciplinary collaboration. In the style of research through design, we present three annotated prototypes: the Augmented Playbill, the Prayer Wheel, and Tarot Cards as well as accompanying AR applications to convey the decisions we made and the philosophy we iteratively developed throughout the project. These artifacts also embody our six design guidelines: resonant affordances, extended narrative, reflective interaction, selective reveal, personalized experience, and privileged access.

The access and growing ubiquity of digital fabrication has ushered in a celebration of creativity and “making.” However, the focus is often on the resulting static artifact or the creative process and tools to design it. We envision a post-making process that extends past these final static objects — not just in their making but in their “unmaking.” By drawing from artistic movements such as Auto-Destructive Art, intentionally inverting well-established engineering principles of structurally sound designs, and safely misusing unstable materials, we demonstrate an important extension to making — unmaking. In this paper, we provide designers with a new vocabulary of unmaking operations within standard 3D modeling tools. We demonstrate how such designs can be realized using a novel multi-material 3D printing process. Finally, we detail how unmaking allows designs to change over time, is an ally to sustainability and re-usability, and captures themes of “aura,” emotionality, and personalization.

Adroid1 enables users to borrow precision and accuracy from a robotic arm when using hand-held tools. When a tool is mounted to the robot, the user can hold and move the tool directly—Adroid measures the user’s applied forces and commands the robot to move in response. Depending on the tool and scenario, Adroid can selectively restrict certain motions. In the resulting interaction, the robot acts like a virtual “jig” which constrains the tool’s motion, augmenting the user’s accuracy, technique, and strength, while not diminishing their agency during open-ended fabrication tasks. We complement these hands-on interactions with projected augmented reality for visual feedback about the state of the system. We show how tools augmented by Adroid can support hands-on making and discuss how it can be configured to support other tasks within and beyond fabrication.

Style is an important aspect of writing, shaping how audiences interpret and engage with literary works. However, for most people style is difficult to articulate precisely. While users frequently interact with computational word processing tools with well-defined metrics, such as spelling and grammar checkers, style is a significantly more nuanced concept. In this paper, we present a computational technique to help surface style in written text. We collect a dataset of crowdsourced human judgments of style, derive a model of style by training a neural net on this data, and present novel applications for visualizing and browsing style across broad bodies of literature, as well as an interactive text editor with real-time style feedback. We study these interactive style applications with users and discuss implications for enabling this novel approach to style.

Hybrid practices are emerging that integrate creative materials like paint, clay, and cloth with intangible immaterials like computation, electricity, and heat. This work aims to expand the design potential of immaterial elements by transforming them into manipulatable, observable and intuitive materials. We explore one such immaterial, electric heat, and develop a maker-friendly fabrication pipeline and crafting support tool that allows users to experientially compose resistive heaters that generate heat spatially and temporally. These heaters are then used to couple heat and thermoreactive materials in a class of artifacts we term Thermoreactive Composites (TrCs). In a formal user study, we observe how designing fabrication workflows along dimensions of composability and perceivability better matches the working styles of material practitioners without domain knowledge of electronics. Through exemplar artifacts, we demonstrate the potential of heat as a creative material and discuss implications for immaterials used within creative practices.

Tacit knowledge is a type of knowledge often existing in one's subconscious or embodied in muscle memory. Such knowledge is pervasive in creative practices yet remains difficult to observe or codify. To better understand tacit knowledge, we introduce a design method that leverages time-series data (interaction logs, physical sensor, and biosignal data) to isolate unique actions and behaviors between groups of users. This method is enacted in Eluent, a tool that distills hundreds of hours of dense activity data using an activity segmentation algorithm into a codebook - a set of distinct, characteristic sequences that comprise an activity. The results are made visually parsable in a representation we term process chromatograms that aid with 1) highlighting distinct periods of activity in creative sessions, 2) identifying distinct groups of users, and 3) characterizing periods of activity. We demonstrate the value of our method through a study of tacit process within computational notebooks and discuss ways process chromatograms can act as a knowledge mining technique, an evaluation metric, and a design-informing visualization.

An exciting, expanding palette of hybrid materials is emerging that can be programmed to actuate by a range of external and internal stimuli. However, there exists a dichotomy between the physicality of the actuators and the intangible computational signal that is used to program them. For material practitioners, this lack of physical cues limits their ability to engage in a "conversation with materials" (CwM). This paper presents a creative workstation for supporting this epistemological style by bringing a stronger physicality to the computational signal and balance the conversation between physical and digital actors. The station utilizes a streaming architecture to distribute control across multiple devices and leverage the rich spatial cognition that a physical space affords. Through a formal user study, we characterize the actuation design practice supported by the CwM workstation and discuss opportunities for tangible interfaces to hybrid materials.

Advances in digital fabrication have simultaneously created new capabilities while reinforcing outdated workflows that constrain how, and by whom, these fabrication tools are used. In this paper, we investigate how a new class of hybrid-controlled machines can collaborate with novice and expert users alike to yield a more lucid making experience. We demonstrate these ideas through our system, Turn-by-Wire. By combining the capabilities of a traditional lathe with haptic input controllers that modulate both position and force, we detail a series of novel interaction metaphors that invite a more fluid making process spanning digital, model-centric, computer control, and embodied, adaptive, human control. We evaluate our system through a user study and discuss how these concepts generalize to other fabrication tools.

Maker culture has been increasingly pervasive in a variety of communities and contexts, in particular devoted spaces such as Makerspaces, Hackerspaces and Fab Labs. Several people, however, have pointed out that while one of the values of these spaces is radical inclusion, the general Maker culture can be exclusive to some based on gender, race, and socioeconomic status. With the goal of disrupting existing Maker culture by developing, diversifying, and empowering our own university Maker community, we created a semi-structured making experience that we call Statement Making. Statement Making is a Maker Fashion show that we invited anyone from the community to participate in by "making a statement" for them or a friend to wear in a runway show. We report outcomes and experiences of those who participated. We then discuss the key aspects of the event, especially surrounding its performative aspect, using design principles of Feminist HCI to argue that events with similar aspects might also be successful at disrupting existing culture.

Failure, whether it be "complete-and-utter" or "a minor setback", occurs in a variety of different creative practices, yet how it is perceived, handled, and recovered from is a lesser explored design space. Failing to address these perceptions of failure can have psychological repercussions, discourage users from continuing a practice, and form cultural stigma such as those associated with STEM fields. However, mediating practices to develop a culture of resiliency and perseverance is key to sustaining a (lifelong) practice and reshaping pedagogical strategies. In this work, we outline the design space of "guardians", or elements of a creative practice that mitigate the psychological effects of failure. Through contextual inquiry, we contribute an inventory of failure-mitigation strategies from a variety of creative disciplines. We synthesize guidelines for the design of new guardians and present a preliminary exploration of guardians for the lasercutting practice -- effigies and test tags.

As the landscape of wearable devices continues to expand, power remains a major issue for adoption, usability, and miniaturization. Users are faced with an increasing number of personal devices to manage, charge, and care for. In this work, we argue that power constraints limit the design space of wearable devices. We present AlterWear: an architecture for new wearable devices that implement a batteryless design using electromagnetic induction via NFC and bistable e-ink displays. Although these displays are active only when in proximity to an NFC-enabled device, this unique combination of hardware enables both quick, dynamic and long-term interactions with persistent visual displays. We demonstrate new wearables enabled through AlterWear with dynamic, fashion-forward, and expressive displays across several form factors, and evaluate them in a user study. By forgoing the need for onboard power, AlterWear expands the ecosystem of functional and fashionable wearable technologies.

Digital fabrication tools have broadened participation in making and enabled new methods of rapid physical prototyping across diverse materials. We present a novel smart tool designed to complement one of the first materials employed by humans - wood - and celebrate the fabrication practice of joinery. Our tool, MatchSticks, is a digital fabrication system tailored for joinery. Combining a portable CNC machine, touchscreen user interface, and parametric joint library, MatchSticks enables makers of varying skill to rapidly explore and create artifacts from wood. Our system embodies tacit woodworking knowledge and distills the distributed workflow of CNC tools into a hand tool; it operates on materials existing machines find difficult, produces assemblies much larger than its workspace, and supports the parallel creation of geometries. We describe the workflow and technical details of our system, present example artifacts produced by our tool, and report results from our user study.

Human hair is a cultural material, with a rich history displaying individuality, cultural expression and group identity. It is malleable in length, color and style, highly visible, and embedded in a range of personal and group interactions. As wearable technologies move ever closer to the body, and embodied interactions become more common and desirable, hair presents a unique and little-explored site for novel interactions. In this paper, we present an exploration and working prototype of hair as a site for novel interaction, leveraging its position as something both public and private, social and personal, malleable and permanent. We develop applications and interactions around this new material in HäirIÖ: a novel integration of hair-based technologies and braids that combine capacitive touch input and dynamic output through color and shape change. Finally, we evaluate this hair-based interactive technology with users, including the integration of HäirIÖ within the landscape of existing wearable and mobile technologies.

Beyond phones, watches, and activity tracking devices, a new ecosystem of functional and fashionable wearable technologies can easily, safely, and economically be designed, prototyped, and integrated directly on the body. In this paper, we present AlterNail, a fingernail form factor, ambient, low-power, stateful, wireless, dynamic display with onboard vibrational sensing. AlterNail integrates a batteryless design using inductive coupling with e-ink technology to enable both quick dynamic and long-term static fingernail based visual designs without the need for power. We also detail the use of simple vibrational signals to uniquely identify everyday objects as they are handled using AlterNails. The intentionally limited interactional functionality of AlterNails, coupled with the rich personal and dynamic expressive potential, combine to present a compelling range of opportunities for designers of new interactive wearable technologies. We detail a range of practical and playful applications using this technology.

Recent digital fabrication tools have enabled new form-giving using a wide range of physical materials. However, light as a first class creative material has been largely ignored within the design of our electronic objects. Our work expands the illumination design space by treating light as a physical material. We introduce a digital design tool that simulates and visualizes physical light interactions with a variety of materials for creating custom luminaires. We further develop a computational design and fabrication process for creating custom secondary optics elements (SOEs), which provides additional handles for users to physically shape and redirect light to compose, fill, and evenly diffuse planar and volumetric geometries. Through a workshop study with novice electronic designers, we show how incorporating physical techniques to shape light alters how users view the role and function of LEDs and electronics. We produce example pieces that showcase how our approach expands the electronics aesthetic and discuss how viewing light as material can engender novel, expressive artifacts.

This paper explores the social meaning of clothing-based displays of biosignals. How do friends make sense of their own and each other's skin conductance display in the context of a conversation? We developed Hint, a dynamic thermochromic t-shirt whose ambiguous pattern changes color when its wearer's skin conductance increases, an indication of sudden arousal. We investigated how pairs of friends each wearing the shirt conversed and interpreted the display. Participants shared a broad range of interpretations; e.g., joy and embarrassment were associated with an increase in skin conductance. Additionally, participants expressed desires for their skin conductance display to help validate their feelings and show emotional engagement with others. We explore ambiguity in the context of clothing-based information displays and discuss how skin conductance display became part of social performance in our study. From there, we suggest framing biosignals as social cues along with facial expression, gestures, etc., and begin to question what design territories this might uncover.

Skintillates is a wearable technology that mimics tattoos - the oldest and most commonly used on-skin displays in human culture. We demonstrate that by fabricating electrical traces and thin electronics on temporary tattoo paper, a wide array of displays and sensors can be created. Just like the traditional temporary tattoos often worn by children and adults alike, Skintillates flex naturally with the user's skin. Our simple fabrication technique also enables users to freely design and print with a full range of colors to create application-specific customized designs. We demonstrate the technical capabilities of Skintillates as sensors and as expressive personal and private displays through a series of application examples. Finally, we detail the results of a set of user studies that highlight the user experience, comfort, durability, acceptability, and application potential for Skintillates.

Advances in digital fabrication (DF) technologies are making it easier to produce high-fidelity replicas of digital designs. However, this push-to-print paradigm limits the creative opportunities that arise from the process of "working through a material" which involves risk, uncertainty, and serendipitous discovery. We investigate how DF artifacts can function as static intermediary tools, which we term proxies, to support crafting practice. We focus on the wire-wrapping process where physical wire is bent into complex shapes and build DF fixtures to aid with construction and fabrication. We explore how these proxies can be generated to provide users with different levels-of-assistance and evaluate how these proxies affect the making process. We show that our proxies affect quality and speed and yield different making experiences between novice and expert craftspeople. We derive design principles to inform future proxy design and discuss how approaches such as ProxyPrint that are designed aware of the medium can create more engaging making tools that can embed tacit knowledge, encourage creativity, and sustain crafting practice.

This paper explores the role dynamic textile displays play in relation to personal style: What does it mean to wear computationally responsive clothing and why would one be motivated to do so? We developed a novel textile display technology, called Ebb, and created several woven and crochet fabric swatches that explored clothing-specific design possibilities. We engaged fashion designers and non-designers in imagining how Ebb would integrate into their design practice or personal style of dressing. Participants evaluated the appeal and utility of clothing-based displays according to a very different set of criteria than traditional screen-based computational displays. Specifically, the slowness, low-resolution, and volatility of Ebb tended to be seen as assets as opposed to technical limitations in the context of personal style. Additionally, participants envisioned various ways that ambiguous, ambient, and abstract displays of information could prompt new experiences in their everyday lives. Our paper details the complex relationships between display and personal style and offers a new design metaphor and extension of Gaver et al.'s original descriptions of ambiguity in order to guide the design of clothing-based displays for everyday life.

In 2012, air pollution in both cities and rural areas was estimated to have caused 3.7 million premature deaths, 88% of those in at risk communities. The primary pollutant was small airborne particulate matter of 10 microns or less in diameter which led to the development of cardiovascular and respiratory diseases. In response, we developed MyPart, the first personal, portable, and accurate particle sensor under $50 capable of distinguishing and counting differently sized particles. We demonstrate how MyPart offers substantial enhancements over most existing air particle sensors by simultaneously improving accessibility, flexibility, portability, and accuracy. We describe the evolution and implementation of the sensor design, demonstrate its performance across twenty everyday urban environments versus a calibrated instrument, and conduct a preliminary user study to report on the overall user experience of MyPart. We also present a novel smart-phone visualization interface and a series of simple form factor adaptations of our design.

In this paper, we introduce Crowdclass, a novel framework that integrates the learning of advanced scientific concepts with the crowdsourcing microtask of image classification. In Crowdclass, we design questions to serve as both a learning experience and a scientific classification. This is different from conventional citizen science platforms which decompose high level questions into a series of simple microtasks that require no scientific background knowledge to complete. We facilitate learning within the microtask by providing content that is appropriate for the participant’s level of knowledge through scaffolding learning. We conduct a between-group study of 93 participants on Amazon Mechanical Turk comparing Crowdclass to the popular citizen science project Galaxy Zoo. We find that the scaffolding presentation of content enables learning of more challenging concepts. By understanding the relationship between user motivation, learning, and performance, we draw general design principles for learning-as-an-incentive interventions applicable to other crowdsourcing applications.

As interactive electronics become increasingly intimate and personal, the design of circuitry is correspondingly developing a more playful and creative aesthetic. Circuit sketching and design is a multidimensional activity which combines the arts, crafts, and engineering broadening participation of electronic creation to include makers of diverse backgrounds. In order to support this design ecology, we present Ellustrate, a digital design tool that enables the functional and aesthetic design of electronic circuits with multiple conductive and dielectric materials. Ellustrate guides users through the fabrication and debugging process, easing the task of practical circuit creation while supporting designers' aesthetic decisions throughout the circuit authoring workflow. In a formal user study, we demonstrate how Ellustrate enables a new electronic design conversation that combines electronics, materials, and visual aesthetic concerns.

Low-cost genetic sequencing, coupled with novel social media platforms and visualization techniques, present a new frontier for scientific participation, whereby people can learn, share, and act on data embedded within their own bodies. Our study of 23andMe, a popular genetic testing service, reveals how users make sense of and contextualize their genetic results, critique and evaluate the underlying research, and reflect on the broader implications of genetic testing. We frame user groups as citizen science publicsgroups that coalesce around scientific issues and work towards resolving shared concerns. Our findings show that personal genetics serves as a site for public engagement with science, whereby communities of biological citizens creatively interpret, debate, and act on professional research. We conclude with design trajectories at the intersection of genetics and creativity support tools: platforms for aggregating hybrid knowledge; tools for creative reflection on professional science; and strategies for supporting collaborations across communities.

The creative promise of 3D digital fabrication tools is tremendous. However due to the wide range of tools and interfaces, a common static file format called STL is used for sharing designs. While customization tools add creative handles to these digital models, they are often constrained to pre-configured parameters limiting the creative potential of shared digital models. We introduce MetaMorphe, a novel digital fabrication framework that uses a common web-programming metaphor to enable users to easily transform static 3D models into re-formed, re-made, and re-imagined customized personal artifacts. We demonstrate the compatibility of MetaMorphe with three well-established design interfaces, direction manipulation, scripted-CAD, and generative design. Through a user study with design experts, MetaMorphe reveals that decisions that physically produce bespoke artifacts or encode unique metadata actively affect perceptions of authorship, agency, and authenticity. We discuss how expressive model-building tools such as MetaMorphe enable a cultural shift in 3D design in terms of participation, personalization, and creativity.

Volunteer campaigns for data collection make it possible for non-profit organizations to extend their ability to monitor and respond to critical environmental and societal issues. Yet mobile data collection technologies that have the potential to lower the costs and increase the accuracy of volunteer-collected data are not commonly used in these campaigns. In this paper we conduct a series of studies that reveal the complex issues affecting technology adoption in this domain. First, we surveyed and interviewed existing volunteering campaigns to map out current technology usage within volunteer campaigns. Next, we provided two organizations with a customizable tool for data collection (Sensr) and studied its use and non-use across six real volunteer-driven campaigns over six months. Our study explored success and failure across the first few phases of the campaign lifecycle (campaign creation, initial deployment, and adoption). Our results highlight the impact of resource constraints, cognitive factors, the depth of volunteer engagement, and stakeholders' perspective on technology as important factors contributing to the adoption and usage of mobile data collection technologies. We use these findings to argue for specific design features to accelerate the adoption and use of such tools in volunteer data collection campaigns.

DIYbio (Do It Yourself Biology) is a growing movement of scientists, hobbyists, artists, and tinkerers who practice biology outside of professional settings. In this paper, we present our work with several open source DIYbio tools, including OpenPCR and Pearl Blue Transilluminator, which can be used to test DNA samples for specific sequences. We frame these platforms as things that gather heterogeneous materials and concerns, and enable new forms of knowledge transfer. Working with these hybrid systems in professional and DIY settings, we conducted a workshop where non-biologists tested food products for genetic modifications. Our findings suggest new design directions at the intersection of biology, technology, and DIY: i) DIYbio platforms as rich tools for hybrid knowledge production; and ii) open source biology as a site for public engagement with science.

This paper describes and explains details of the design, production and packaging of a counterfunctional device: The Obscura 1C Digital Camera. We further describe a small-scale distribution of Obscura 1C packages into everyday contexts. The paper then reflects on the various types of conceptual, imaginary and firsthand uses made of the Obscura 1C. These include its uses for everyday audiences as a unique camera and as a conceptually usable device. But we also prioritize uses particular to the HCI and design audience. These include using the Obscura 1C to articulate the concepts of inhibitive interfaces, counterfunctionality, and enabling limitations. The Obscura 1C is further used to articulate how abstract ideas can be translated into material forms, to rethink the role of packaging in user studies, and to draw attention to how discursive design objects are packaged and presented.

Fluid User Interfaces (Fl.UIs) are liquid-based touch surfaces that use computer vision to detect and interpret a range of tactile user inputs. While Fl.UIs have less input resolution than digital touch screens, they provide an excellent low-cost solution for rapidly prototyping non-rectilinear screen designs as well as exploring novel surface interaction techniques. Fabricated on a laser cutter using low-cost materials, Fl.UIs use unique shape outlines to displace an internal colored liquid to regions-of-interest for a camera. This paper presents a set of software tools that help users rapidly design, fabricate and author interactions with Fl.UIs. The robust construction and an unpowered surface makes Fl.UIs well-suited for outdoor and public installations. Our Fl.UIs prototyping tool encourages these uncommon "screens" to emerge in complex environments (i.e. urban spaces, benches, tables, fountains, sidewalks).

Digital fabrication has enabled massive creativity in hobbyist communities and professional product design. These emerging technologies excel at realizing an arbitrary shape or form; however these objects are often rigid and lack the feel desired by designers. We aim to enable physical haptic design in passive 3D printed objects. This paper identifies two core areas for extending physical design into digital fabrication: designing the external and internal haptic characteristics of an object. We present HapticPrint as a pair of design tools to easily modify the feel of a 3D model. Our external tool maps textures and UI elements onto arbitrary shapes, and our internal tool modifies the internal geometry of models for novel compliance and weight characteristics. We demonstrate the value of HapticPrint with a range of applications that expand the aesthetics of feel, usability, and interactivity in 3D artifacts.

This Pictorial takes a different look at digital cameras and photos. It frames this look within a counterfunctional design perspective. This works is presented not as a design process documentation, but rather as a type of visual-textual design artifact. We see it as a means to present new concepts composed of both the textual-theoretical and visual-designerly varieties. While cameras and photos are the ostensible thematic focus, these technologies are in turn used as a focusing device for a broader conceptual theme: designing digital limitations.

This paper presents a set of design studies and discussions investigating new possibilities in designing digital limitations. Focusing on digital photography as a medium, we present design prototypes and experiments including Ultra-Low Resolution Displays, Inaccessible Cameras, and a set of point-and-shoot digital camera variants. Our design work is based on the concept of a counterfunctional thing-a thing that figuratively counters some of its own functionality. We present the concept of counterfunctionality as a way of approaching the design of interactive technology. In conclusion we connect our work with critical discourses surrounding technology and the value of designing limitations.

We present an ultra low-cost sensing system, which enables participants to see and reflect on the particulates in their air. Drawing on prior work in paper computing, we introduce small sensors for particulate pollution that can be easily assembled from common paper materials for less than $1 USD, and mailed by regular postal service to residents of entire neighborhoods, cities, or geographic regions. Recipients collect particulate samples using these sensors and mail them back to a central location, where the particles are viewed and analyzed via a microscope. The data, which includes rich images of actual air pollution particles, can then be broadcast to larger audiences. This paper details the design of our system and its deployment with a local air quality activist community. We conclude by highlighting the tradeoffs between high-tech and low-tech sensing, and suggest opportunities for tangible interaction to support rich, new ways of seeing our environment.

In this paper we describe the development of ShrinkyCircuits, a novel electronic prototyping technique that captures the flexibility of sketching and leverages properties of a common everyday plastic polymer to enable low-cost, miniature, planar, and curved, multi-layer circuit designs in minutes. ShrinkyCircuits take advantage of inexpensive prestressed polymer film that shrinks to its original size when exposed to heat. This enables improved electrical characteristics though sintering of the conductive electrical layer, partial self-assembly of the circuit and components, and mechanically robust custom shapes Including curves and non-planar form factors. We demonstrate the range and adaptability of ShrinkyCircuits designs from simple hand drawn circuits with through-hole components to complex multilayer, printed circuit boards (PCB), with curved and irregular shaped electronic layouts and surface mount components. Our approach enables users to create extremely customized circuit boards with dense circuit layouts while avoiding messy chemical etching, expensive board milling machines, or time consuming delays in using outside PCB production houses.

Sensory Triptych is a set of exploratory, interactive sensors designed for children that invite "new ways of seeing" our world from the perspective of the here (the earth, air, and water around us), near (things just out of sight), and out there (orbiting satellites and space junk) using familiar and novel interfaces, affordances, and narratives. We present a series of novel physical design prototypes that reframe sensing technologies for children that foster an early adoption of technology usage for exploring, understanding, communicating, sharing, and changing our world. Finally, we discuss how such designs expand the potential opportunities and landscapes for our future interactive systems and experiences within the UIST community.

We are at an important technological inflection point. Most of our computing systems have been designed and built by professionally trained experts (i.e. us -- computer scientists, engineers, and designers) for use in specific domains and to solve explicit prob-lems. Artifacts often called "user manuals" traditionally prescribed the appropriate usage of these tools and implied an acceptable etiquette for interaction and experience. A fringe group of individuals usually labeled "hackers" or "amateurs" or "makers" have challenged this producer-consumer model of technology by creating novel hardware and software features to "improve" our research and products while a similar creative group of technicians called "artists" have redirected the techniques, tools, and tenets of accepted technological usage away from their typical manifestations in practicality and product. Over time the technological artifacts of these fringe groups and the support for their rhetoric have gained them a foothold into computing culture and eroded the established power discontinuities within the practice of computing research. We now expect our computing tools to be driven by an architecture of open participation and democracy that encourages users to add value to their tools and applications as they use them. Similarly, the bar for enabling the design of novel, personal computing systems and "hardware remixes" has fallen to the point where many non-experts and novices are readily embracing and creating fascinating and ingenious computing artifacts outside of our official and traditionally sanctioned academic and industrial research communities.

We present the design and deployment of a bio-electronic sensing system. This system visualizes bacterial activity inside Winogradsky columns, which incubate soil samples to culture the naturally occurring microorganisms as they process metals and nutrients in the soil. Our month-long deployments with two urban communities offer insights into individual and collective appropriations of living sensing systems. These findings reveal future design trajectories that build on emergent themes in HumanComputer Interaction (HCI), including: new perspectives on materiality, which arise from integrating organic materials with the digital; a reframing of time, as systems shift from providing instant feedback to supporting prolonged engagement; and an emphasis on collective modes of participation beyond individual behavior change.

Indoor air quality (IAQ) is important for health as people spend the majority of time indoors, and it is particularly interesting over outdoor air because it strongly ties to indoor activities. Some activities easily exacerbate IAQ, resulting in serious pollution. However, people may not notice such changes because many pollutants are colorless and odorless, while many activities are inconspicuous and routine. We implemented inAir, a system that measures and visualizes IAQ that households appropriate and integrate into everyday life. The research goals of this work include understanding the IAQ dynamics with respect to habitual behaviors and analyzing behavioral and quantitative changes towards improving IAQ by the use of inAir. From our longitudinal study for four months, we found that inAir successfully elicited the reflection upon, and the modification of habitual behaviors for healthy domestic environments, which resulted in the significant improvement of IAQ.

This paper offers new theoretical and design insights into nteractive technology. By initially considering electric technology broadly, our work informs how HCI approaches a range of specific interactive or digital things and materials. Theoretically, we contribute a rigorous analysis of electric technology using the experiential lens of phenomenology. A major result is to characterize electric technology by three forms of materiality: the electric object, its electric materiality, and electric power. In terms of design, we present and analyze novel interactive form prototypes. Our theoretical contributions offer new insight into design artifacts, just as our novel design artifacts help reveal new theoretical insight.

Across HCI and social computing platforms, mobile applications that support citizen science, empowering non-experts to explore, collect, and share data have emerged. While many of these efforts have been successful, it remains difficult to create citizen science applications without extensive programming expertise. To address this concern, we present Sensr, an authoring environment that enables people without programming skills to build mobile data collection and management tools for citizen science. We demonstrate how Sensr allows people without technical skills to create mobile applications. Findings from our case study demonstrate that our system successfully overcomes technical constraints and provides a simple way to create mobile data collection tools.

Over the past decade, a diverse community of biologists, artists, engineers and hobbyists has emerged to pursue biology projects outside of traditional laboratories. Though still in its nascent form, this DIYbio (Do It Yourself Biology) movement has given rise to a host of technical innovations and sharing mechanisms that enable hobbyists to experiment with organic materials. As these developments continue to expand science practice beyond professional settings and into hackspaces, art studios and private homes, HCI research is presented with a range of new opportunities and concerns.

DIYbio (Do It Yourself Biology) aims to 'open source', tinker and experiment with biology outside of professional settings. In this paper, we present the origins, practices, and challenges of DIYbio initiatives around the world. Our findings depict DIYbio as operating across intersections ('seams') between a range of stakeholders, materials and concerns. To map out the role of Human Computer Interaction (HCI) across these seams, we present design exercises (functional prototypes) that explore three areas for future work: internal collaboration tools within the DIYbio and professional community; mechanisms for external communication with stakeholders from the general public; and bio-electronic assemblies of organic and digital materials. In doing so, we hope to critically re-envision the role of HCI at the emerging intersection of biology, computation and DIY.

This paper creatively explores and critically inquires into power and energy at scales at which it can be generated by human bodily kinetic motion, with goals of promoting more engaging, meaningful, and sustainable interactions with and through interactive technology and electricity. To do so we delineate and name the research and design space of interactive microgeneration (IμG) and the subarea of human-power microgeneration (HPμG). We then present findings from a qualitative study employing (i) novel design prototypes we designed (e.g., a hand-powered mobile phone), (ii) commercially available products (e.g., a solar phone charger), and (iii) common everyday products (e.g., a kitchen knife, a food processor). Our empirical study and design explorations point to new design and research opportunities and challenges related to the generation and consumption of electrical energy in everyday life.

This paper proposes and investigates the area of local energy for interactive systems design. We characterize local energy in terms of three themes: contextuality, seasonality, and visibility/tangibility. Here we focus on two specific local energy technologies domestic, electrical generation from wind and solar. In order to investigate this area we design, deploy and study a novel local energy device: The Local Energy Indicator. We conclude by outlining directions for future work related to local energy for interactive design.

Time is a difficult concept for parents to communicate with young children. We developed TimeBlocks, a novel tangible, playful object to facilitate communication about concepts of time with young children. TimeBlocks consists of a set of cubic blocks that function as a physical progress bar. Parents and children can physically manipulate the blocks to represent the concept of time. We evaluated TimeBlocks through a field study in which six families tried TimeBlocks for four days at their homes. The results indicate that TimeBlocks played a useful role in facilitating the often challenging task of time-related communication between parents and children. We also report on a range of observed insightful novel uses of TimeBlocks in our study.

Motivated by a recent surge of research related to energy and sustainability, this paper presents a review of energy-related work within HCI as well as from literature outside of HCI. Our review of energy-related HCI research identifies a central cluster of work focused on electricity consumption feedback (ECF). Our review of literature outside of HCI highlights a number of emerging energy systems trends of strong relevance to HCI and interaction design, including smart grid, demand response, and distributed generation technologies. We conclude by outlining a range of opportunities for HCI to engage with the experiential, behavioral, social, and cultural aspects of these emerging systems, including highlighting new areas for ECF research that move beyond our field's current focus on energy feedback displays to increase awareness and motivate individual conservation behavior.

E-waste is a generic term embracing various forms of electric and electronic equipment that is loosely discarded, surplus, obsolete, or broken [27]. When e-waste is improperly discarded as trash, there are predictable negative impacts on the environment and human health. Existing e-waste solutions range from designing for reuse to fabricating with eco-friendly decomposable materials to more radical critiques of current practices surrounding capitalism and consumerism. Complementary to theses efforts, this paper presents an accessible reuse framework that encourages creativity while maintaining personal ownership of e-waste. Through a series of online surveys of existing personal e-waste stockpiling behaviors combined with observational studies of existing reuse practices, we developed a design reuse vocabulary: materials, shapes, and operations to enable wide ranging and creative reuse of obsolete electronics by everyday people. We operationalized this vocabulary and evaluated its legibility and usefulness. As a result, we derived a novel reuse composition framework: reuse as-is, remake, and remanufacture designed to be accessible and to have broader impact in encouraging creative reuse across a wide range of e-waste types beyond those specifically used in our study. We believe these frameworks will be a catalyst for the creative reuse of e-waste.

Our work explores the convergence between participatory sensing, political activism and public expressions. Unlike prior research, which focuses on personal sensing, we present low-cost, networked air quality sensors, designed to be repositioned across public landscapes by communities of citizen stakeholders. Our GPS-enabled sensors report dust, exhaust, or VOC's (volatile organic compounds), along with temperature, humidity and light levels to a website that visualizes this data in real time. The sensors can be attached to a variety of surfaces serving as research probes to demarcate ('tag') public spaces with environmental concerns. We deploy our fully functional system with four urban communities - parents, bicyclists, homeless and activists, positioning our system as a tool for studying and supporting community togetherness and public activism. Our findings highlight community sharing of the physical sensors and dialogues surrounding the collected data.

With over 13.3 million children living below poverty line in the United States, there is a pressing need for engaging HCI research with children at the socio-economic margins. Drawing from design studio culture and art therapy literature, we explore wearable computing as a creative and tangible medium (similar to markers, paints, clays, etc.) for motivating 'at-risk' children in hands-on making and expressive instantiation of ideas. Working with a local outreach organization for 'at-risk' middle school girls, we conducted five weekly workshops during which participants ideated, designed and implemented personal wearable computing projects. These sessions inspired participants (age 10-12) who tend to be uninterested and uncooperative in educational activities to complete interactive projects and engage with workshop volunteers as mentors and peers. We present the challenges, merits and outcomes of our approach, proposing wearable computing as a healing outlet and a mentoring strategy for at-risk children.

We present a qualitative study of reacquisition-the acquisition of previously possessed goods-involving in-depth interviews with 18 reacquirers within or nearby Pittsburgh, PA, USA. Based on critiques of sustainable consumption and our findings, we reframe technology consumption as acquisition, possession, dispossession and reacquisition. We present four reacquisition orientations describing our participants' motivations and practices: casual, necessary, critical, and experiential. We then present a range of findings including issues with work, time and effort involved in reacquisition, and values and practices of care and patience associated with invested reacquirers. We conclude with implications for designing technologies to support current reacquisition practices, as well as broader opportunities for HCI and interaction design to incorporate non-mainstream reacquisition practices and values into more mainstream technologies.

This paper investigates the philosophical question of how we can experience energy with the aim of informing the design of future ways of experiencing energy by means of technology. Four human-technology relations formulated by philosopher of technology Don Ihde are presented. Each is then developed in the context of electrical interactive technologies. In conclusion these human-electricity and human-technology relations are employed in order to interpret current work related to energy and sustainability within HCI and point to future work in these areas.

Spectacle computing is a novel strategy for vibrantly projecting information into the public sphere using expressive and tangible media. We demonstrate an example of this computing meme with large, glowing balloons that change color based on input from attached air quality sensors (exhaust, diesel, or volatile organic compounds). In two public installations (city street and public park) and a deployment with six everyday citizens, we invited stakeholders to playfully explore and actively participate in visualizing surrounding air quality. We also created a do-it-yourself (DIY) kit that includes a printed circuit board, electronic parts and instructions for building the air quality balloons. In a workshop, six non-expert users successfully assembled functional balloons, validating our technology as a DIY tool for public air quality visualization. Our deployments and workshop highlight play and spectacle as essential elements for public participation and activism. We outline design guidelines for future spectacle computing projects that engage stakeholders with environmental data and empower them to transform urban landscapes.

Sensing has played a significant role in the evolution of ubiquitous computing systems, enabling many of today's compelling interactive and ubiquitous experiences. In this paper, we argue for expanding the current landscape of sensing to include living organisms such as plants and animals, along with traditional tools and digital devices. We present a field study of ten individuals who routinely work with living organisms such as plants, fish, reptiles and bees, and rely on these organisms as well as analog instruments and digital sensors to infer environmental conditions and inform future actions. Our findings offer a new perspective on everyday biomarkers, and we use the lens of organic and non-digital sensing to reflect on current sensing paradigms in ubiquitous computing. We conclude with three opportunity areas to help frame future work in ubiquitous sensing: (1) incorporating traditional technologies and living systems into ubiquitous sensing applications, (2) developing information technologies that teach new ways of 'seeing', and (3) supporting richer forms of metadata to unite stakeholders through their actions, interests and concerns.

Recent convergence between low-cost technology, artform and political discourse presents a new design space for enabling public participation and expression. We explore non-experts' use of place-based, modular sensors to activate, author and provoke urban landscapes. Our work with communities of bicyclists, students, parents, and homeless people suggests design opportunities for merging grassroots data collection with public expressions and activism. Members of each community were given probes that represent the measurement of exhaust, smog, pathogens, chemicals, noise or dust, and asked to engage with them as fully functional sensors over the course of one week. Our findings offer insights into participation, environmental sensing, and data sharing within and across four different communities, revealing design implications for future sensing systems as instruments of social currency and political change.

Street art and political activism have a rich history of shaping urban landscapes. Our work explores the processes by which public artists and political activists contribute to public spaces, introducing opportunities for HCI researchers to engage with the people who shape the aesthetic feel of our cities. We present WallBots-autonomous, wall-crawling robots as a research probe for public expression across a wide range of surfaces and hard-to-reach places, including bus stops, whiteboards, streetpoles, trashcans, moving vehicles and building walls. We evaluate WallBots as a low-cost DIY authoring tool for public artists and activists. Our study of six individuals who extensively contribute to public spaces offers insights into the materials and practices behind grassroots public expression. We then leverage feedback from participants, among them a graffiti artist, light painter, political activists, and street musician, to evaluate interaction techniques for manipulating WallBots as a medium for public expression across a range of surfaces. Our findings expose a research space for technological interventions in the context of street art, and we conclude with design insights for magnetic kinetic systems as an approach for supporting engagement, expression and creativity in public spaces.

Energy feedback systems, particularly residential energy feedback systems (REFS), have emerged as a key area for HCI and interaction design. However, we argue that HCI researchers, designers and others concerned with the design and evaluation of interactive systems should more strongly consider the ineffectiveness of such systems, including not only potential limitations of specific types of REFS or REFS in general but also potentially counterproductive or harmful effects of REFS. In this paper we outline research questions and issues for future work based on critical gaps in REFS research identified from (i) a review of REFS literature and (ii) findings from two qualitative studies of commercial home energy monitors.

Motivated and informed by perspectives on sustainability and design, this paper draws on a diverse body of scholarly works related to energy and materiality to articulate a perspective on energy-as-materiality and propose a design approach of materializing energy. Three critical themes are presented: the intangibility of energy, the undifferentiatedness of energy, and the availability of energy. Each theme is developed through combination of critical investigation and design exploration, including the development and deployment of several novel design artifacts: Energy Mementos and The Local Energy Lamp. A framework for interacting with energy-as-materiality is proposed involving collecting, keeping, sharing, and activating energy. A number of additional concepts are also introduced, such as energy attachment, energy engagement, energy attunement, local energy and energy meta-data. Our work contributes both a broader, more integrative design perspective on energy and materiality as well as a diversity of more specific concepts and artifacts that may be of service to designers and researchers of interactive systems concerned with sustainability and energy.

This paper describes inAir, a tool for sharing measurements and visualizations of indoor air quality within one's social network. Poor indoor air quality is difficult for humans to detect through sight and smell alone and can contribute to the development of chronic diseases. Through a four-week long study of fourteen households as six groups, we found that inAir (1) increased awareness of, and reflection on air quality, (2) promoted behavioral changes that resulted in improved indoor air quality, and (3) demonstrated the persuasive power of sharing for furthering improvements to indoor air quality in terms of fostering new social awareness and behavior changes as well as strengthening social bonds and prompting collaborative efforts across social networks to improve human health and well being.

Water is our most precious and most rapidly declining natural resource. We explore pervasive technology as an approach for promoting water conservation in public and private spaces. We hope to motivate immediate reduction in water use as well as higher-order behaviors (seeking new information, etc) through unobtrusive low-cost water flow sensing and several persuasive displays. Early prototypes were installed at public faucets and a private (shared) shower, logging water usage first without and then with ambient displays. This pilot study led to design iterations, culminating in long-term deployment of sensors in four private showers over the course of three weeks. Sensors first logged baseline water usage without visualization. Then, two display styles, ambient and numeric, were deployed in random order, each showing individual and average water consumption. Quantitative data along with participants' feedback contrast the effectiveness of numeric displays against abstract visualization in this very important domain of water conservation and public health.

This paper presents findings from a qualitative study of people's everyday interactions with energy-consuming products and systems in the home. Initial results from a large online survey are also considered. This research focuses not only on "conservation behavior" but importantly investigates interactions with technology that may be characterized as "normal consumption" or "over-consumption." A novel vocabulary for analyzing and designing energy-conserving interactions is proposed based on our findings, including: cutting, trimming, switching, upgrading, and shifting. Using the proposed vocabulary, and informed by theoretical developments from various literatures, this paper demonstrates ways in which everyday interactions with technology in the home are performed without conscious consideration of energy consumption but rather are unconscious, habitual, and irrational. Implications for the design of energy-conserving interactions with technology and broader challenges for HCI research are proposed.

Energy use in the home is a topic of increasing interest and concern, and one on which technology can have a significant impact. However, existing work typically focuses on moderately affluent homeowners who have relative autonomy with respect to their home, or does not address socio-economic status, class, and other related issues. For the 30% of the U.S. population who rent their homes, many key decisions regarding energy use must be negotiated with a landlord. Because energy use impacts the bottom line of both landlords and tenants, this can be a source of conflict in the landlord/tenant relationship. Ubicomp technologies for reducing energy use in rental units must engage with landlord/tenant conflicts to be successful. Unfortunately, little detailed knowledge is available about the impact of landlord/tenant conflicts on energy use. We present an analysis of a series of qualitative studies with landlords and tenants. We argue that a consideration of multiple stakeholders, and the power imbalances among them, will drive important new research questions and lead to more widely applicable solutions. The main contribution of our work is a set of open research questions and design recommendations for technologies that may affect and be affected by the conflict between stakeholders around energy use.

We designed and prototyped WearAir, an expressive T-shirt to sense the wearer's surrounding air quality as indicated by the measured volatile organic compounds (VOCs) and publicly express those levels through visually expressive patterns. Although poor air quality has been shown to affect human health, our daily exposure to such pollutants has been inadequately captured and publicly shared. Our work is designed to accurately measure and publicly express the immediately local air quality. Obtaining information regarding air quality indirectly from others might help people to increase their awareness to air quality.

Researchers are developing mobile sensing platforms to facilitate public awareness of environmental conditions. However, turning such awareness into practical community action and political change requires more than just collecting and presenting data. To inform research on mobile environmental sensing, we conducted design fieldwork with government, private, and public interest stakeholders. In parallel, we built an environmental air quality sensing system and deployed it on street sweeping vehicles in a major U.S. city; this served as a research vehicle"by grounding our interviews and affording us status as environmental action researchers. In this paper, we present a qualitative analysis of the landscape of environmental action, focusing on insights that will help researchers frame meaningful technological interventions.

Personal energy consumption, specifically home energy consumption such as heating, cooling, and electricity, has been an important environmental and economic topic for decades. Despite the attention paid to this area, few researchers have specifically explored these issues within a community that makes up approximately 30% of U.S. households -- those below the federal poverty line. We present a study of 26 low-income households in two very different locations -- a small town in the Southern U.S. and a northerly metropolitan area. Through a photo-elicitation study and directed interviews, we explore the relationship between energy saving behaviors, external factors, and users' intrinsic values and beliefs. Most of our participants are committed to saving energy for non-financial reasons, even when not responsible for paying bills. Challenges to saving energy include safety and lack of control over the environment. We discuss how Ubicomp technologies for saving energy can address some of these challenges.

Good indoor air quality is a vital part of human health. Poor indoor air quality can contribute to the development of chronic respiratory diseases such as asthma, heart disease, and lung cancer. Complicating matters, poor air quality is extremely difficult for humans to detect through sight and smell alone and existing sensing equipment is designed to be used by and provide data for scientists rather than everyday citizens. We propose inAir, a tool for measuring, visualizing, and learning about indoor air quality. inAir provides historical and real-time visualizations of indoor air quality by measuring tiny hazardous airborne particles as small as 0.5 microns in size. Through user studies we demonstrate how inAir promotes greater awareness and motivates individual actions to improve indoor air quality.

We are at an important technological inflection point. Most of our computing systems have been designed and built by professionally trained experts (i.e. us--computer scientists, engineers, and designers) for use in specific domains and to solve explicit problems. Artifacts often called "user manuals" traditionally prescribed the appropriate usage of these tools and implied an acceptable etiquette for interaction and experience. A fringe group of individuals usually labeled "hackers" or "nerds" have challenged this producer-consumer model of technology by hacking novel hardware and software features to "improve" our research and products while a similar creative group of technicians called "artists" have re-directed the techniques, tools, and tenets of accepted technological usage away from their typical manifestations in practicality and product. Over time the technological artifacts of these fringe groups and the support for their rhetoric have gained them a foothold into computing culture and eroded the established power discontinuities within the practice of computing research. We now expect our computing tools to be driven by an architecture of open participation and democracy that encourages users to add value to their tools and applications as they use them. Similarly, the bar for enabling the design of novel, personal computing systems and "hardware remixes" has fallen to the point where many non-experts and novices are readily embracing and creating fascinating and ingenious computing artifacts outside of our official and traditionally sanctioned academic research communities.

While we should celebrate our success at evolving many vital aspects of the human-technology interactive experience, we question the scope of this progress. Step back with us for a moment. What really matters? Everyday life spans a wide range of emotions and experiences - from improving productivity and efficiency to promoting wonderment and daydreaming. But our research and designs do not reflect this important life balance. The research we undertake and the applications we build employ technology primarily for improving tasks and solving problems. Our claim is that our successful future technological tools, the one we really want to cohabitate with, will be those that incorporate the full range of life experiences. In this paper we present wonderment as a design concept, introduce a novel toolkit based on mobile phone technology for promoting non-experts to participate in the creating of new objects of wonderment, and finally describe probe style interventions used to inform the design of a specific object of wonderment based on urban sounds and ringtones called Hullabaloo.

No longer confined to our offices, schools, and homes, technology is expanding at an astonishing rate across our everyday public urban landscapes. From the visible (mobile phones, laptops, and blackberries) to the invisible (GPS, WiFi, GSM, and EVDO), we find the full spectrum of digital technologies transforming nearly every facet of our urban experience. Many current urban computing systems focus on improving our efficiency and productivity in the city by providing "location services" and/or interactive navigation and mapping tools. While agreeing with the need for such systems, we are reminded that urban life spans a much wider range of emotions and experiences. Our claim is that our successful future urban technological tools will be those that incorporate the full range of urban experiences -- from improving productivity and efficiency to promoting wonderment and daydreaming. We discuss intervention as a research strategy for understanding wonderment; demonstrate an example of such a study using a matchbook experiment to expose relationships between locations and emotions within a city; and use the results to develop Sashay -- a mobile phone application that promotes wonderment by visualizing an individual's personal patterns across the invisible, manufactured geography of mobile phone cellular towers.

Urban Atmospheres captures a unique, synergistic moment - expanding urban populations, rapid adoption of Bluetooth mobile devices, tiny ad hoc sensor networks, and the widespread influence of wireless technologies across our growing urban landscapes. The United Nations recently reported that 48 percent of the world's population current live in urban areas and that this number is expected to exceed the 50 percent mark world wide by 2007 [1]. In developed nations the number of urban dwellers is even more dramatic - expected to exceed 75%. Current studies project Bluetooth-enabled devices to reach 5.4 billion units by 2005 - five times the number of mobile phones or Internet connections [2]. Mobile phone penetration already exceeds 80% of the population in places like the European Union (EU) and parts of Asia [3]. WiFi hardware is being deployed at the astonishing rate of one every 4 seconds globally [4]. We argue that now is the time to initiate inspirational research into the very essence of these newly emerging technological urban spaces. We desire to move towards an improved understanding of the emotional experience of urban life. This paper describes Urban Probes - a lightweight, provocative, intervention methodology designed to rapidly deconstruct urban situations, reveal new opportunities for technology in urban spaces, and guide future long term research in urban computing. We also describe a completed Urban Probe exploring urban trash.

As humans we live and interact across a wildly diverse set of physical spaces. We each formulate our own personal meaning of place using a myriad of observable cues such as public-private, large-small, daytime-nighttime, loud-quiet, and crowded-empty. Not surprisingly, it is the people with which we share such spaces that dominate our perception of place. Sometimes these people are friends, family and colleagues. More often, and particularly in public urban spaces we inhabit, the individuals who affect us are ones that we repeatedly observe and yet do not directly interact with - our Familiar Strangers. This paper explores our often ignored yet real relationships with Familiar Strangers. We describe several experiments and studies that led to designs for both a personal, body-worn, wireless device and a mobile phone based application that extend the Familiar Stranger relationship while respecting the delicate, yet important, constraints of our feelings and affinities with strangers in pubic places.

Internet-based "online robots" now provide public access to remote locations such as museums and laboratories. The Tele-Actor is a collaborative online teleoperation system for distance learning that allows many students to simultaneously share control of a single mobile resource. Our goal is to preserve the educational advantages of field trips without the drawbacks of group travel. We propose the "spatial dynamic voting" (SDV) interface for multiple operator single robot (MOSR) teleoperation. The SDV collects, displays, and analyzes a sequence of spatial votes from multiple online operators at their Internet browsers. The votes drive the motion of a single mobile robot or human "Tele-Actor". The paper describes Version 3.0 of the system architecture, SDV interface, algorithms for automated goal selection, and metrics for collaboration and leadership. We report results from a July 2001 field test with 56 remote users.

Article Free Access Share on PRoP: personal roving presence Authors: Eric Paulos Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Sciences, University of California, Berkeley, Berkeley, CA Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Sciences, University of California, Berkeley, Berkeley, CAView Profile , John Canny Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Sciences, University of California, Berkeley, Berkeley, CA Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Sciences, University of California, Berkeley, Berkeley, CAView Profile Authors Info & Claims CHI '98: Proceedings of the SIGCHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing SystemsJanuary 1998 Pages 296–303https://doi.org/10.1145/274644.274686Published:01 January 1998Publication History 94citation765DownloadsMetricsTotal Citations94Total Downloads765Last 12 Months92Last 6 weeks25 Get Citation AlertsNew Citation Alert added!This alert has been successfully added and will be sent to:You will be notified whenever a record that you have chosen has been cited.To manage your alert preferences, click on the button below.Manage my AlertsNew Citation Alert!Please log in to your account Save to BinderSave to BinderCreate a New BinderNameCancelCreateExport CitationPublisher SiteeReaderPDF

At the intersection of telerobotics, computer networking and human social interaction we have chosen to explore an area we identify as personal tele-embodiment. At the core of this research is an emphasis on the individual person rather than the intricate complexities of the machine. While the mechanical elements of our system are essential to its over-all functionality, our research is driven solely by the study and understanding of the social and psychological aspects of extended human-human interactions rather than the latest techno-gadgetry. In this paper we emphasize the importance of the human component and describe the development of one such simple, inexpensive, Internet-controlled, untethered telerobot or PRoP (personal roving presence) that provides several fundamental elements of personal tele-embodiment.

Article Interfacing reality (panel): exploring emerging trends between humans and machines Share on Authors: Eric Paulos University of California, Berkeley University of California, BerkeleyView Profile , John Canny University of California, Berkeley University of California, BerkeleyView Profile , Eduardo Kac School of the Art Institute of Chicago School of the Art Institute of ChicagoView Profile , Ken Goldberg University of California, Berkeley University of California, BerkeleyView Profile , Mark Pauline Survival Research Laboratories Survival Research LaboratoriesView Profile , Stelarc Performance Artist Performance ArtistView Profile Authors Info & Claims SIGGRAPH '97: Proceedings of the 24th annual conference on Computer graphics and interactive techniquesAugust 1997 Pages 448–451https://doi.org/10.1145/258734.258904Online:03 August 1997Publication History 0citation384DownloadsMetricsTotal Citations0Total Downloads384Last 12 Months0Last 6 weeks0 Get Citation AlertsNew Citation Alert added!This alert has been successfully added and will be sent to:You will be notified whenever a record that you have chosen has been cited.To manage your alert preferences, click on the button below.Manage my AlertsNew Citation Alert!Please log in to your account Save to BinderSave to BinderCreate a New BinderNameCancelCreateExport CitationPublisher SiteGet Access

Robots provide us with a means to move around in, visualize, and interact with a remote physical world. We have exploited these physical properties coupled with the growing diversity of users on the World Wide Web (WWW) to create a WWW based telerobotic remote environment browser. This browser, called Mechanical Gaze, allows multiple remote WWW users to control a robot arm with an attached camera to explore a real remote environment. The environment varies but is typically composed of collections of physical museum exhibits which WWW users can view at various positions, orientations, and levels of resolution.

Peg-in-hole insertion is not only a longstanding problem in robotics but the most common automated mechanical assembly task. In this paper the authors present a high precision, self-calibrating peg-in-hole insertion strategy using several very simple, inexpensive, and accurate optical sensors. The self-calibrating feature allows the authors to achieve successful dead-reckoning insertions with tolerances of 25 microns without any accurate initial position information for the robot, pegs, or holes. The program the authors implemented works for any cylindrical peg, and the sensing steps do not depend on the peg diameter, which the program does not know. The key to the strategy is the use of a fixed sensor to localize both a mobile sensor and the peg, while the mobile sensor localizes the hole. The authors' strategy is extremely fast, localizing pegs as they are en route to their insertion location without pausing. The result is that insertion times are dominated by the transport time between pick and place operations.>