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Seagrass meadows are twice as effective as forests at capturing and storing carbon, but human activities have caused them to gradually disappear over the last few decades. We take a nature-centered design approach on contextual inquiry and collaborative designs methods to consolidate knowledge from marine and material sciences to industrial design. This pictorial documents a dialogue between designers and scientists to co-create an ecological intervention using digital fabrication for manufacturing morphing ceramics for seagrass meadow restoration. 

material science and digital fabrication to create shape-changing and dynamic interfaces. In this workshop, participants will investigate ways in whichMMtools can effectively support building STEM learning toolkits for novice learners from diverse backgrounds. Participants will engage in hands-on activities designing and simulating water-triggered morphing artifacts using a software design tool and fabricating them with low-cost materials. This workshop aims to collectively explore creative opportunities and barriers o introducing emerging STEM concepts and skills to novice learners. We hope to ideate frameworks for designing educational toolkits which leverage the accessible nature of morphing beads, democratizing a process that would typically require advanced material synthesis and specialized lab settings. Designers, educators, learning scientists, and researchers are welcome to join us in brainstorming ways to develop toolkits to support creative exploration in education with MM. 

Hydrogels are versatile morphing materials that have recently been adopted for creating shape-changing interfaces. However, most shape-changing interfaces require advanced material synthesis, specialized lab settings for fabrication, and technical knowledge is needed to simulate their morphing behavior. To replicate such structures, these factors become a barrier for makers. Therefore, to democratize the creation of hydrogel-based morphing artifacts and to extend their design space in HCI, we propose a water-triggered morphing mechanism that utilizes the distance between adjacent hydrogel beads adhered on a thin substrate to control their bending angle. This paper describes the bending angle quantification experiments for creating a simulator, the process of developing a computational tool along with its user-friendly workflow and demonstrates kirigami and branch-based artifacts built with the tool. Using our method, anyone can easily design and fabricate custom morphing structures. 

From providing nutrition to facilitating social exchanges, food plays an essential role in our daily lives and cultures. In HCI, we are interested in using food as an interaction medium and a context of personal fabrication. Yet, the design space of available food printing methods is limited to shapes with minimal overhangs and materials that have a paste-like consistency. In this work, we seek to expand this design space by adapting support bath-assisted printing to the food context. The bath scaffolds the embedded materials and preserves shapes during the printing processes, enabling us to create freeform food with fluid-like materials. We provide users guidelines for choosing the appropriate support bath type and processing methods depending on the printing material's properties. A design tool suite and application examples, including confectionery arts, 4D printed food, and edible displays are also offered to demonstrate the enabled interaction design space. 

Morphing structures are often engineered with stresses introduced into a flat sheet by leveraging structural anisotropy or compositional heterogeneity. Here, we identify a simple and universal diffusion-based mechanism to enable a transient morphing effect in structures with parametric surface grooves, which can be realized with a single material and fabricated using low-cost manufacturing methods (e.g., stamping, molding, and casting). We demonstrate from quantitative experiments and multiphysics simulations that parametric surface grooving can induce temporary asynchronous swelling or deswelling and can transform flat objects into designed, three-dimensional shapes. By tuning the grooving pattern, we can achieve both zero (e.g., helices) and nonzero (e.g., saddles) Gaussian curvature geometries. This mechanism allows us to demonstrate approaches that could improve the efficiency of certain food manufacturing processes and facilitate the sustainable packaging of food, for instance, by creating morphing pasta that can be flat-packed to reduce the air space in the packaging.