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The ability to easily create embroidered lace textile objects that can be manipulated in structured ways, i.e., metamaterials, could enable a variety of applications from interactive tactile graphics to physical therapy devices. However, while machine embroidery has been used to create sensors and digitally enhanced fabrics, its use for creating metamaterials is an understudied area. This article reviews recent advances in metamaterial textiles and conducts a design space exploration of metamaterial freestanding lace embroidery. We demonstrate that freestanding lace embroidery can be used to create out-of-plane kirigami and auxetic effects. We provide examples of applications of these effects to create a variety of prototypes and demonstrations. 

Storage, organizing, and decorating are important aspects of home design. Buying commercial items for many of these tasks, this can be costly, and reuse is more sustainable. An alternative is a “home hack,” i.e., a functional assembly constructed from existing household items. However, coming up with such hacks requires combining objects to make a physically valid design, which might be difficult to test if they are large, require nailing or screwing to the wall, or if the designer has mobility limitations. We present a design and visualization system, FabHacks, for cre- ating workable functional assemblies. The system is based on a new solver-aided domain-specific language (S-DSL) called FabHaL. By analyzing existing home hacks shared online, we create a design abstraction for connecting household items using predefined con- nection types. We also provide a UI for designing hack assemblies that fulfill a given specification. FabHacks leverages a physics-based solver that finds the expected physical configuration of an assembly design. Our validation includes a user study with our UI, which shows that users can easily create assemblies and explore a range of designs. 

Reducing the environmental footprint of electronics and computing devices requires new tools that empower designers to make informed decisions about sustainability during the design process itself. This is not possible with current tools for life cycle assessment (LCA) which require substantial domain expertise and time to evaluate the numerous chips and other components that make up a device. We observe first that informed decision-making does not require absolute metrics and can instead be done by comparing designs. Second, we can use domain-specific heuristics to perform these comparisons. We combine these insights to develop DeltaLCA, an open-source interactive design tool that addresses the dual challenges of automating life cycle inventory generation and data availability by performing comparative analyses of electronics designs. Users can upload standard design files from Electronic Design Automation (EDA) software and the tool will guide them through determining which one has greater carbon footprints. DeltaLCA leverages electronics-specific LCA datasets and heuristics and tries to automatically rank the two designs, prompting users to provide additional information only when necessary. We show through case studies DeltaLCA achieves the same result as evaluating full LCAs, and that it accelerates LCA comparisons from eight expert-hours to a single click for devices with ~30 components, and 15 minutes for more complex devices with ~100 components.