Many current robot designs prioritize efficiency and one-size-fits-all solutions, oftentimes overlooking personalization, adaptability, and sustainability. To explore alternatives, we conducted two co-design workshops with 23 participants, who engaged with a modular robot co-design framework. Using components we provided as building blocks, participants combined, removed, and invented modules to envision how modular robots could accompany them from childhood through adulthood and into older adulthood. The participants’ designs illustrate how modularity (a) enables personalization through open-ended configuration, (b) adaptability across shifting life-stage needs, and (c) sustainability through repair, reuse, and continuity. We therefore derive design principles that establish modularity as a foundation for lifespan-oriented human–robot interaction. This work reframes modular robotics as a flexible and expressive co-design approach, supporting robots that evolve with people, rather than static products optimized for single moments or contexts of use.
The evolution of artist toolsets has created opportunities for new media and industrial growth. As these tools evolve, clear advantages of digital media emerge. Still, many digital toolsets grow further apart from their traditional predecessors, developing highly technical workflows and unfamiliar interfaces. With no standard language or classification system across artist toolsets, the measurement of these various paradigms becomes convoluted. Moreover, it is unclear how augmenting production pipelines affects the practitioner workflow within a professional studio. This paper presents a generalized approach to measuring artist tools through data collection, field studies, interviews, and an iterative refinement process. We define a broad category of creative practice known as the ‘sculptural process’ and introduce a taxonomy for a technical coding system. Our findings indicate an obstruction of artist processes for professionals in digital media, particularly 3D, exposing a significant gap between traditional and digital media. These measurements create a foundation to reinforce artist-driven design in human-computer interaction.
This paper presents FiberDrops, a tubular system that generates droplet-based gradients by controlling the flow of colored liquids within transparent liquid. While previous studies have explored visual expression using droplets, FiberDrops introduces two distinctive features. First, it employs electrohydrodynamic (EHD) pumps, providing a lightweight and silent alternative to conventional mechanical pumps. Second, by incorporating a custom connector based on microfluidic techniques, it generates fine droplets from parallel flows of transparent and colored liquids and enables precise density control. Compared with conventional on–off control of the pumps between colored and transparent liquids, this approach achieves finer droplet spacing, while allowing flexible variation of flow rate even for the same patterns. These capabilities enable visual effects such as continuous color transitions and dynamic motifs, expanding the expressiveness of fluid interfaces. This paper details the system’s design, fabrication, and control methods and demonstrates representative design examples.
This study examines fashionability in computational fashion wearables (CFWs) through the reflective accounts of ten academic researcher–designers. While wearables are often studied for technical functions, fashionability, a key to adoption and sustained use, has received less attention. Using semi-structured interviews, we captured designers’ reflections-on-action as they revisited their own prototypes and surfaced forms of tacit, practice-based knowledge that are difficult to access through conventional user studies. Reflexive thematic analysis generated five themes: Desirable Friction, Contextual and Sub-Cultural Relevance, Symbiotic Sensory Envelopes, Narrative Social Performance, and Adaptive Longevity and Circularity. These themes reposition CFWs not as seamless devices but as expressive, situated, and evolving interfaces that mediate sensory, social, and cultural experience. Our findings contribute to fashion theory and HCI by showing how designers mobilize friction, context, sensory depth, and temporality as design resources. We conclude with actionable directions for embodied prototyping, multisensory calibration, narrative staging, and modular longevity.
This paper presents WeavePrint, a parametric and multi-material additive manufacturing method for woven-like structures. By fusing traditional weaving logic with computational generation, WeavePrint overcomes limitations in pattern programmability, mechanical tunability, and build size. A parametric generator creates plain, twill, satin, and image-based jacquard patterns, while supporting curved-surface mapping and continuous vertical roll-to-roll printing for scalable production. Systematic tensile and compression tests quantify how overlap length, filament width, and multi-material combinations influence inter-layer adhesion and global mechanics. We define four motion primitives: bending, twisting, curved extension-contraction, and hinged extension-contraction, implemented through straight, diagonal, and curved weaves to produce predictable deformations. Demonstrations in wearable supports, robotic components, and rehabilitation devices highlight its broad potential in human-computer interaction. By unifying parametric modeling with multi-material continuous fabrication, WeavePrint provides a scalable route to programmable, anisotropic, and dynamically responsive interactive fabrics.
This paper introduces a novel method for weaving 3D shell-shaped fabrics directly on the loom by using the Variable Reed, a hardware modification that allows variable dent positioning along the warp. With this reed, we weave discontinuous wefts (partial weft rows) and then apply different curved profiles to the weft yarns to dynamically alter the angle between the warp and weft during weaving. This technique enables the fabric to be folded and deformed into a 3D surface after it is removed from the loom. We demonstrate our method using a series of 3D woven samples and provide a computational design tool for creating 3D shell-shaped fabrics from an input surface, illustrated by examples of a wing and a half-dome. Our approach can be used to produce 3D-shaped woven fabric for garments, upholstery, architecture, and composites.
We propose a technical method and system to enable an unmodified FDM 3D printer to fasten fabric in a manner analogous to traditional sewing. Rows of printed "needles" pierce layers of fabric with "thread" printed to fasten them together. This recreates traditional kinds of stitches while also enabling new ones. A technical evaluation shows the strength is as good or better than traditionally sewn seams. Using this sewing inspired joinery method, a software system translates traditional sewing patterns into a multi-step workflow. Steps are ordered and grouped to balance automation with traditional sequencing for human fabric handling. Intermittent requests by the system require the user to place fabric pieces aided by printed registration marks. A study suggests people with little experience can use the system and complete necessary fabric handling steps. Finally, enhanced types of seams are presented, such as decorative stitches, rivets, fringes, and print-in-place fasteners like buttons and zippers.