The Joy of Laser Cutting: Using recipes and food to teach digital manufacturing

Laser cutters are powerful and versatile tools that can introduce significant untapped potential to creative practitioners. However, currently available learning materials for working with these machines are not designed with these users’ needs or interests in mind. To address this gap, I developed the Joy of Laser Cutting. This project uses recipes, food and visual language from the world of cookery as tools to reframe online DIY tutorials and appeal to creative practitioners. Interviews with artists and specialists who currently work with laser cutters were conducted to better understand the challenges and opportunities that this technology presents. Finally, workshops were held in which users engaged with the project to provide insights that fed back into the final design. This thesis identifies the importance of demystifying digital fabrication and presenting laser cutters as complex and imperfect mediums that offer users the opportunity to master them and expand their creative potential

Documenting Downloadable Assistive Technologies

This major research project explores Downloadable Assistive Technologies (DAT) and the possibilities as well as the limitations of publishing and fabricating DAT through online 3D printing communities. A design probe was used for this research within the context of Thingiverse, in the form of a 3D printed dog wheelchair design probe – the FiGO Dog Wheelchair. FiGO enabled an exploration of issues of design and communication of DAT. Through research involving both end users as well as a health professional, as well as interactions within the FiGO project page on Thingiverse, criteria for communicating DAT published on Thingiverse were developed, and a second FiGO project page reflecting these criteria was prototyped and evaluated. It is concluded that DAT could potentially benefit most greatly from a structured set of guidelines of use and communication of risks in the form of a design brief, and that there are specific considerations to developing a meaningful design brief for DAT including: 1) Tell the story of the design, 2) Do not make assumptions about the end user, 3) Clear instruction about the design use, 4) Inclusion of source files to enable user participation and extension of the design

The digital virtual dimension of the meal

In a not so distant future 3D food printers are poised to take over the preparation of our meals, lightening the load of meal preparation by taking on ‘the difficult parts of making food that is hard and/or time consuming to make fully by hand’ (Foodini, 2014). Similarly, food photocopiers that reproduce the molecular structure of food hold the promise of repurposing leftovers into brand new meals (Electrolux, 2009). This future may be unpalatable to some because it supposes a corrosion of human knowledge and a brutal displacement and reduction of human competence by ever-increasing automation of domestic practices within the home kitchen (see for example Fırat and Dholakia, 1998). A less extreme, but more present infiltration of technology within the kitchen is that of devices like tablets, smartphones and laptops that are routinely used in preparing meals. Based on a global survey of 7,000 cooks, Allrecipes.com (2013) found that nearly half of respondents used smartphones while shopping for food, while almost a third of American and UK cooks surveyed said to routinely use their mobile phones to find recipes. Through these devices home cooks can access an array of food related content including step by step tutorials on YouTube, recipes and recipe reviews on specialist foodie websites and blogs, and themed meal ideas on Pinterest boards. We refer to these devices as digital virtual (DV) devices in that they open up new spaces and opportunities for the home cook. The integrative ontology of the digital virtual (see Shields 2002; Denegri-Knott and Molesworth, 2010; Molesworth and Denegri-Knott, 2012) that we use here enables us to navigate and consider how consumers’ minds (their imagination, memory and knowledge), the digital virtual spaces located on the screens like YouTube and BBC Good Food website, as well as the device itself – as a physical artefact, interact in practice. For us, this helps overcome some of the essentialism that is inherited by perspectives that create clear demarcations between reality and virtuality (for a critique see Shields, 2002; Denegri-Knott and Molesworth, 2010) which deny the presence of constitutive elements of practice, their various locations and how they come into play, in this case, during, meal preparation. Whilst popular, the presence of DV devices in the kitchen may raise concerns about the growing digitisation of meal preparations, which sees technology as driving the transformation of human practices. A way of eliding the technology determinist standpoint, where use of DV devices like tablets is seen as displacing human labour, is by adopting a practice-based language to account for how human and non-human actors come together in configuring practice. Adopting this approach has two key consequences for our understanding of doing the meal. First, it enables us to document in detail the many ways in which meal practices are transformed when knowledges, skills, and competences necessary to carry out practices around meal preparation are not only distributed across enthusiastic home cooks and material artefacts (such as hand mixers, food processors, cookers, freezers, recipe books and instruction manuals) and other people, but also located in digital virtual space. Second, it helps us see the kind of new meal work that is required from the home cook in maintaining the coupling between the cook and their devices. In this chapter we discuss the intersection between DV devices and food consumption and resultant practices they configure. Drawing on insights gleaned from in depth interviews with 29 cooking enthusiasts living the South of England, we provide an overview of new configurations, placing emphasis on the ways in which various components of practice – knowledge, competence and commitment – are redistributed between our home cooks and their DV devices. While we acknowledge the significance of ultimate goals, which are to be substantiated and attained through meal work, for example the expression of caring parent or competent cook (see for example Molander’s (2011) work on meal preparation as a meta-practice of love and motherhood) here we focus less on the teleoaffective, or goal dimension of practices to deal with specific meal related projects and tasks, like knowing how to decorate a pirate chest birthday cake or make gluten free bread. In this way we can better hone in on the way in which the coming together of technology and home cook produce new forms of doing meal work

Tooth loss caused by displaced elastic during simple preprosthetic orthodontic treatment

The use of elastics to close a diastema or correct tooth malpositions can create unintended consequences if not properly controlled. The American Association of Orthodontists recently issued a consumer alert, warning of "a substantial risk for irreparable damage" from a new trend called "do-it-yourself" orthodontics, consisting of patients autonomously using elastics to correct tooth position. The elastics can work their way below the gums and around the roots of the teeth, causing damage to the periodontium and even resulting in tooth loss. The cost of implants to replace these teeth would well exceed the cost of proper orthodontic care. This damage could also occur in a dental office, when a general dentist tries to perform a simplified orthodontic correction of a minor tooth malposition. The present case report describes a case of tooth loss caused by a displaced intraoral elastic, which occurred during a simple preprosthetic orthodontic treatment

Education innovation through material innovation in primary education : the grow-it-yourself workshop

In recent years more STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics) topics have been incorporated in mainstream public education. Although the benefits of STEM instruction are broadly recognised in secondary school curricula, STEM topics in primary education are rather limited, leaving a gap in manipulative skills building and in preparation processes for the next school level. This paper reflects on the outcomes of a design workshop attended by 12 primary school students (9 to 12 years old) in Belgium. Mycelium, a fungi-based natural material now used in innovative sustainable applications, served as a means to introduce early learners engineering basics through self-made learning tools. Students grew their own 3-D structures to build a 'Grow-It-Yourself biodegradable playground using mycelium as a primary source. The paper stems from an in-progress research that investigates the opportunities of how mycelium as a material innovation can be used as a medium to create innovation in primary education through a learning-by-design approach. Reflections on the workshop's instructional guidelines are included along with an extension of the call for support for primary school teachers delivering STEM topics in their classes

Domestic Widgets: Leveraging Household Creativity in Co-Creating Data Physicalisations

The home environment is a complex design space, especially when it has multiple inhabitants. As such, the home presents challenges for the design of smart products. Householders may be different ages and have differing interests, needs, and attitudes towards technology. We pursued a research-through-design study with family households to envision and ‘co-create’ the future of data-enabled artifacts for their homes. We have iteratively developed domestic research artefacts for these households that are open, data-enabled, physical visualizations. These artefacts - called Domestic Widgets - are customisable in their design and functionality throughout their lifespan. The development process highlights design challenges for sustained co-creation and the leveraging of household creativity in (co-creation) research toolkits. These include the need to allow and inspire iterative customization, the need to accommodate changing roles within the home ecology, and the aim that such design should be inclusive for all family members (irrespective of age and technical proficiency), whilst maintaining a role and purpose in the home. We invite the RTD community to critically discuss our, and other, open and iterative end-user designs for sustained co-creation. By presenting unbuilt and interactive pre-built Domestic Widgets, we interactively foster engagement with practises of sustained co-creation

Taking stock and charting the future: The management and implications of DIY laboratories for innovation and society

DiY science, as a field of research and practice, has grown rapidly over the past few decades. However, a significant portion of the DiY corpus focuses on technical issues in engineering and health disciplines, which limits our knowledge about the administration of DiY innovation and other related topics. To further advance the field, this special issue examines the management and implications of DiY laboratories for innovation and society. It contributes to a better understanding of the contextual and individual antecedents, operations, governance, business models, and strategies of DiY labs. The chosen papers, representing a mix of review, conceptual, and qualitative methodologies from across Africa, Asia, and Europe, provide different approaches and views that extend the current boundaries of extant knowledge regarding DiY labs and science. This special issue also highlights what remains to be pursued and outlines some interesting future research directions

HANDLING CHANGE IN A PRODUCTION TASKBOT. EFFICIENTLY MANAGING THE GROWTH OF TWIZ, AN ALEXA ASSISTANT

A Conversational Agent aims to converse with users, with a focus on natural behaviour and responses. They can be extremely complex as there are several parts which constitute it, several courses of action and infinite possible inputs. As so, behaviour checking is essential, especially if used in a production context, as wrong behaviour can have big consequences. Nevertheless, developing a robust and correctly behaving Task Bot, should not hinder research and must allow for continuous improvement of vanguard solutions. Hence, manual testing of such a complex system is bound to encounter several limits, either on the extension of the testing or on the time consumption of developers’ work. As so, we propose the development of a tool to automatically test, with a much broader test surface, these highly sophisticated systems. We introduce a solution, which leverages past conversation replay and mimicking to generate synthetic conversations. This allows for time-savings on quality assurance and better change handling. A key part of a Conversational Agent is the retrieval component. This is responsible for the correct retrieval of information, that is useful to the user. In task-guiding assistants, the retrieval element should not narrow the user’s behaviour, by omitting tasks that could be relevant. However, achieving perfect information matching to a user’s query is arduous, since there could be a plethora of words the user could say in order to attempt to accomplish an objective. To tackle this, we make use of a semantic retrieval algorithm adapting it to this domain by generating a synthetic dataset.Um Agente Conversacional visa ter conversas com utilizadores, focando-se no comportamento e nas respostas naturais. Estes podem ser, no entanto, extremamente complexos. São várias as partes que os constituem, os fluxos possíveis e os pedidos que o utilizador pode fazer. Assim, a verificação de comportamento é essencial, especialmente se usada em um contexto de produção, pois o comportamento errado pode ter grandes consequências. No entanto, o desenvolvimento de um Task Bot robusto e de comportamento correto não deve prejudicar a pesquisa e deve permitir a melhoria contínua das soluções. Portanto, testagem manual de um sistema tão complexo depara-se com vários limites, seja na extensão do teste ou no consumo de tempo do trabalho dos developers. Assim, propomos também o desenvolvimento de uma ferramenta para testes automáticos, com uma frente de teste muito mais ampla, para estes sistemas sofisticados. Apresentamos uma solução que aproveita a repetição e a simulação de conversas anteriores para gerar conversas sintéticas. Isso permite reduzir o tempo gasto na verificação de qualidade e permite melhor adaptação a mudanças. Uma parte fundamental de um agente conversacional é o retriever. Esta é a componente responsável pela obtenção de informação relevante. Nos assistentes que têm como objetivo a orientação de tarefas, o retriever não deve restringir o comportamento do utilizador, ao omitir tarefas que possam ser relevantes. No entanto, obter uma correspondência perfeita de informações com o pedido do utilizador é árduo, pois pode haver uma infinidade de formas que o utilizador pode formular o seu pedido pretendendo o mesmo objetivo. Para ultrupassar este problema, utilizamos um algoritmo de retrieval semântico, adaptando-o ao domínio em questão através da geração de um conjunto de dados sintético

The role of re-appropriation in open design : a case study on how openness in higher education for industrial design engineering can trigger global discussions on the theme of urban gardening

This case study explores the opportunities for students of Industrial Design Engineering to engage with direct and indirect stakeholders by making their design process and results into open-ended Designed Solutions. The reported case study involved 47 students during a two-weeks intensive course on the topic of urban gardening. Observations were collected during three distinctive phases: the co-design phase, the creation of an Open Design and the sharing of these design solutions on the online platform Instructables.com. The open sharing of local solutions triggered more global discussions, based on several types of feedbacks: from simple questions to reference to existing works and from suggestions to critiques. Also some examples of re-appropriation of the designed solutions were reported. These feedbacks show the possibilities for students to have a global vision on their local solutions, confronting them with a wider and more diverse audience. The case study shows on the other hand the difficulty in keeping students engaged in this global discussion, considering how after a few weeks the online discussions dropped to an almost complete silence. It is also impossible with such online platforms to follow the re-appropriation cycles, losing the possibility of exploring the new local context were the replication / modification of the designed product occurred. The course’s focus on Open Design is interesting both under the design and educational points of view. It implies a deep change in the teaching approach and learning attitude of students, allowing unknown peers to take part of the design process and fostering a global discussion starting from unique and local solutions

A sustainable design fiction: Green practices

In this article, we argue that an approach informed by practice theory coupled with design fiction provides useful insights into the role of interaction design with respect to environmental sustainability.We argue that a practice-oriented approach can help interaction designers step away from models of individual behavior and studies of artifacts towards seeing sustainable behaviors as part of multidimensional and interrelated practices and practice elements. We analyze two previously conducted studies. The first study of everyday repair focuses on how people repair their broken objects. The second study of green-DIY examines how green enthusiasts facilitate their practices of making sustainable DIY (do-it-yourself ) projects. We describe the practices of everyday repairers and green enthusiasts in terms of materials, competences, and meanings, and the interrelations among those elements, using the framework of Shove et al. [2012]. We argue that understanding the dynamics of practice and their unique configurations is a starting point to redefine the roles of sustainable interaction design (SID). We propose that designers design towards resources and tools in ways that reflect on the challenges of intelligibility of their design interventions in practices. In addition to considering SID in the light of practice theories, we reveal how design fictions are readily incorporated into green practices in ways that transform those practices and hold implications for transformations of design as well. We bring forward opportunities for designers to co-design with DIY enthusiasts, targeted as practitioners in their own right, designing toward or within a design fiction. As a result, we conclude with the possibility for sustainable interaction designers to become practice-oriented designers who design with transparent open strategies and accessible materials and competences