The key to preserving traditional crafts lies in living transmission, which is inseparable from sustaining artistic production, audience consumption, and progressive innovation with the physical media. As HCI researchers, we focus on the hybrid crafts field, which involves numerous cross-disciplinary integration cases between traditional craftsmanship and digital technology at the physical level, providing inspiration for innovating and enlivening traditional crafts. We conducted a multi-perspective review of 85 hybrid craft articles related to traditional crafts over the past decade, considering aspects such as craft categories, digital technology, target users, and research areas. Through reflection, we propose a design framework for fostering innovation and revitalizing traditional crafts. This paper aims to offer insight into the innovation and enlivenment of traditional crafts through a hybrid craft perspective while also serving as a first review of the hybrid craft field from the traditional craftsmanship perspective.

Taking a famous Chinese painting for a case study, the paper presents a virtual exhibition platform. Through the platform, users can walk into the scenes in the painting with virtual candles in hands, know the scenes which are endowed vitality by attaching actor performances, and see every detail of the artwork. The scenes change their light, shades and shadows in real time by the candles, just as real scenes. For real-time candle-moving and light-changing interaction, in implementation, we render the light effects at densely sampled user positions offline, and extract the light, shades and shadows as masks; during online processing, the system merges the artwork with masks chosen by the positions of candles. The system, novel in both design and techniques, has been partially used in the Palace Museum (Beijing).

A new kind of lab is being established to study and promote collaborative learning and hands-on creativity in China: the Lifelong Learning Lab. The goal of this lab is to support current reform efforts in the Chinese education system, with its traditional focus on rote learning and exam results, by developing effective ways to integrate collaborative and hands-on learning experiences. The emphasis is on collaboration between different age groups, from pre-K to primary school through high school and university and even beyond, to the emerging world of online education in China. As a prototype of this lifelong learning approach, we describe here results from an initiative called LEGO2NANO, where undergraduate and graduate students from China and the UK collaborated with Chinese high school and middle-school students to design a novel hands-on science learning experience based on a DIY Atomic Force Microscope. We detail a range of outcomes of this student-led collaborative design initiative, ranging from hardware and software development to interactive design and child psychology.