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THING Lab

“EmotiTactor: Exploring How Designers Approach Emotional Robotic Touch,” authored by Ran Zhou, Harpreet Sareen, Yufei Zhang and Assistant Professor Daniel Leithinger, director of the THING Lab, won a Best Pictorial Honorable Mention award at the ACM SIGCHI Conference on Designing Interactive Systems (DIS '22). Zhou, an ATLAS PhD student who was also the for DIS'22, presented the research during the Multisensory Design session.

Prior psychology findings show humans can communicate distinct emotions solely through touch, and in this work, THING Lab researchers hypothesize that similar effects might also be applicable to robotic touch. Their findings uncover that the "otherness" of robotic touch broadens the design possibilities of emotional communication beyond mimicking interpersonal touch. Bringing designers into the exploration of emotional robotic touch, the researchers discuss their design decisions and reflect on their insights. To enable designers to easily generate and modify various types of affective touch for conveying emotions (e.g., anger, happiness, etc.), the researchers also developed a platform consisting of a robotic tactor interface and a software design tool. When conducting an elicitation study with 11 interaction designers, they discovered common patterns in their generated tactile sensations for each emotion.The researchers also illustrated the strategies, metaphors, and reactions that the designers deployed in the design process.

Publication

Ran Zhou, Harpreet Sareen, Yufei Zhang, and Daniel Leithinger. 2022. EmotiTactor: Exploring How Designers Approach Emotional Robotic Touch. In Designing Interactive Systems Conference (DIS '22). Association for Computing Machinery, New York, NY, USA, 1330–1344. https://doi.org/10.1145/3532106.3533487 .pdf  (June 13-17, 2022—Virtual Event, Australia) [Best Pictorial Honorable Mention].
 

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Living Matter Lab/Unstable Design Lab

Exploring biofoam as a Material for Tangible Interaction, authored by Eldy S. Lazaro Vasquez, Netta Ofer, Shanel Wu,Mary Etta West, Mirela Alistar and Laura Devendorf  introduced the DIS audience to biofoam, a water soluble and biodegradable material that can be made conductive.

During the DIS‘22 Multisensory Design session, lead author, Lazaro, an ATLAS PhD student, presented the team's biofoam research and demonstrated the unique opportunities the material brings to HCI communities.  Vasquez described the material in detail, including the process of making biofoam from scratch and fabricating the material into forms with handcraft techniques. She also presented two HCI-specific applications of biofoam and demonstrated the different life cycles of the material, all of which can be considered in the design process; biofoam can be cooked, molded, layered, extruded, dissolved and recooked.

Publication

Eldy S. Lazaro Vasquez, Netta Ofer,Shanel Wu, Mary Etta West, Mirela Alistar and Laura Devendorf. 2022. Exploring Biofoam as a Material for Tangible Interaction. In Designing Interactive Systems Conference (DIS ’22), Association for Computing Machinery, New York, NY, USA, 1525-1529. https://doi.org/10.1145/3532106.3533494 (June 13-17, 2022—Virtual Event, Australia). 

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Unstable Design Lab

As HCI continues to integrate craft techniques into its repertoire, tensions have emerged between what is new and known—knowledge that resides in communities and histories rather than individuals—and how to transfer between the written word and material know-how. The researchers explored those tensions through the process of writing and instructing. The project's goal is two fold: first, to help HCI understand the potential that a deep understanding of weave structures can hold for advancing the HCI field, and second, to explore how a pictorial might support formats that have long been used for communicating craft knowledge.

Publication

Laura Devendorf, Sasha De Koninck, and Etta Sandry. 2022. An Introduction to Weave Structure for HCI: A How-to and Reflection on Modes of Exchange. In Designing Interactive Systems Conference (DIS ’22), Association for Computing Machinery, New York, NY, USA. 629-642. https://doi.org/10.1145/3532106.3534567 (June 13-17, 2022—Virtual Event, Australia) [Best Pictorial Honorable Mention Award].
 

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Unstable Design Lab/Superhuman Computing Lab/BEEM Lab

“Knitting Access: Exploring Stateful Textiles with People with Disabilities,” authored by Annika Muehlbradt (PhD Comp. Sci’22) and researchers Shaun Kane, director of the Superhuman Computing Lab, Laura Devendorf, director of the Unstable Design Lab, and Gregory Whiting, director of the BEEM Lab, won a DIS’22 Honorable Mention award. Muehlbradt, an alumna of the Unstable Design and Superhuman Computing labs, presented the research during the Interaction Techniques track. 

“Knitting Access” addresses how non-digital textile interfaces can fit meaningfully into the lives of people with disabilities and examines the qualities of textile interfaces that are important to them. It also explores new forms of self-tracking data that may appeal to people with disabilities, such as pressing in knitted “bubbles,” to count a specific activity or mood. For instance, some of the research subjects used the knitted bubbles to count work breaks, track hydration, or to note their emotions, like anxiety.

Publication

Annika Muehlbradt, Gregory Whiting, Shaun Kane and  Laura Devendorf. 2022. Knitting Access: Exploring Stateful Textiles with People with Disabilities. In Designing Interactive Systems Conference (DIS ’22). Association for Computing Machinery, New York, NY, USA, 1058-1070. https://doi.org/10.1145/3532106.3533551 pdf (June 13-17, 2022, Virtual Event, Australia) [Best Paper Honorable Mention Award].

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