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Scholarly Works (10 results)

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Peer Reviewed

Hybrid Aesthetics: Bridging Material Practices and Digital Fabrication through Computational Crafting Proxies

Torres, Cesar Armando
Advisor(s): Paulos, Eric

UC Berkeley Electronic Theses and Dissertations (2019)

Creative technologies like digital fabrication led to the rise of the Maker movement, engendering grassroots innovation in education, manufacturing, and healthcare. Today, these creative technologies stand at a crossroads – despite a significant rise in participation, a deeper engagement with design and material is absent from traditional computer-aided design workflows. In this thesis, I will motivate the need for creative technologies to support the morphogenetic model of making, a thinking and working style characteristic of how practitioners work with physical materials but difficult to access in digital design tools. To communicate my findings, I introduce the concept of a Crafting Proxy, an intermediary between a practitioner and a material that can be used to facilitate the interpretation, manipulation, and evaluation of a material as a part of a creative process. In these works, I employ a Research through Design (RtD) methodology to construct intermediate-level knowledge around the design, implementation, and evaluation of Crafting Proxies. I’ll demonstrate how Crafting Proxies can be enacted within physical materials, physical tools, and physical practices to support morphogenetic workflows in domains such as light and heater design, and metalworking. As a result, this work contributes a design method for creating crafting proxies and a set of design principles that inform how new materials and digital fabrication technologies can foreground the existing knowledge and practices of material practitioners and generate new forms and aesthetics that can alter the trajectory of the Maker movement towards a New Making Renaissance.

Cover page: Hybrid Aesthetics: Bridging Material Practices and Digital Fabrication through Computational Crafting Proxies

Article
Peer Reviewed

HapticPrint

UC Berkeley Previously Published Works (2015)

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.

Creative Commons 'BY-NC-SA' version 4.0 license

Article
Peer Reviewed

MetaMorphe

UC Berkeley Previously Published Works (2015)

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 Meta- Morphe 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.

Article
Peer Reviewed

Geobacter Dominates the Inner Layers of a Stratified Biofilm on a Fluidized Anode During Brewery Wastewater Treatment.

LBL Publications (2018)

In this study, we designed a microbial electrochemical fluidized bed reactor (ME-FBR), with an electroconductive anodic bed made of activated carbon particles for treating a brewery wastewater. Under a batch operating mode, acetate and propionate consumption rates were 13-fold and 2.4-fold higher, respectively, when the fluidized anode was polarized (0.2 V) with respect to open circuit conditions. Operating in a continuous mode, this system could effectively treat the brewery effluent at organic loading rates (OLR) over 1.7 kg m^-3_NRV d^-1 and with removal efficiencies of 95 ± 1.4% (hydraulic retention time of 1 day and an influent of 1.7 g-COD L^-1). The coulombic efficiency values highly depended upon the OLR applied, and varied from a 56 ± 15% to 10 ± 1%. Fluorescence in situ hybridization (FISH) analysis revealed a relative high abundance of Geobacter species (ca. 20%), and clearly showed a natural microbial stratification. Interestingly, the Geobacter cluster was highly enriched in the innermost layers of the biofilm (thickness of 10 μm), which were in contact with the electroconductive particles of bed, whereas the rest of bacteria were located in the outermost layers. To our knowledge, this is the first time that such a clear microbial stratification has been observed on an anode-respiring biofilm. Our results revealed the relevant role of Geobacter in switching between the electrode and other microbial communities performing metabolic reactions in the outermost environment of the biofilm.

Cover page: <i>Geobacter</i> Dominates the Inner Layers of a Stratified Biofilm on a Fluidized Anode During Brewery Wastewater Treatment.

Article
Peer Reviewed

LiveObjects

UC Berkeley Previously Published Works (2016)

LiveObjects approaches expressive object design from the lens of art theory utilizing theatricality, or the perception of an object having presence, to create a series of IoT data objects. This approach actuates materials and everyday objects to express social data and provokes new interactions between objects, viewers, and space. We showcase how such objects can form unique expressive personalities, expose relational data, and perturb environments to form information spaces.

Article
Peer Reviewed

ProxyPrint

UC Berkeley Previously Published Works (2016)

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.

Article
Peer Reviewed

HapticPrint: Designing Feel Aesthetics for Digital Fabrication.

UC Berkeley Previously Published Works (2015)

Creative Commons 'BY-SA' version 4.0 license

Article
Peer Reviewed

Fl.UIs

UC Berkeley Previously Published Works (2015)

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).

Article
Peer Reviewed

Aesthetic Electronics

UC Berkeley Previously Published Works (2016)

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.

Article
Peer Reviewed

Illumination Aesthetics

UC Berkeley Previously Published Works (2017)

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. Copyright is held by the owner/author(s).