Making things with hands, machines, and computation

In this project, we worked on simplifying the complex process of programming modern knitting machines, which are capable of producing intricate textile products. Typically, programming these machines demands expert knowledge, but we developed a long short-term memory (LSTM) based deep learning model to address this. Our model generates low-level code for novel knitting patterns based on high-level style specifications. Instead of using image-based approaches, we described knitting instructions as...

Metamaterial are of increasing interest to the scientists and designers. We report a group of new configurations of mechanical metamaterial that exhibits auxeticity.An auxetic material is a material that exhibits a Negative Poisson’s Ratio (NPR). Unlike conventional materials, when an auxetic material is stretched (or compressed) in one direction, instead of becoming thinner (or thicker), it becomes thicker (or thinner) in perpendicular directions.This project describes a group of auxetic-inspired...

Digital machine knitting is a highly programmable manufacturing process that has been utilized to produce apparel, accessories, and footwear. Our research presents three classes of textile sensors exploiting the resistive, piezoresistive, and capacitive properties of various textile structures enabled by machine knitting with conductive yarn.

Usually, when people go to a factory, they want to produce something that has been well-planned and has clear economic value. Instead, we wanted to bring the spirit of a lab to the factory: What if we could collaborate with its workers, directly prototyping and trying out ideas on the very machines that are used for production? What if curiosity were our only pressure point?

My wildest experience...

Air is one the most abundant resources on earth. By adding computation ability to air, we can create new types of materials that enable us to design robots that are soft, furniture that is adaptive, clothing that is intelligent and art pieces that are breathing.

Most of the soft lithography research focuses on elaborated molding-casting process. I'm intrigued by how to make origami structure with inflatables with various cheap materials. I developed a universal bending mechanism that creates programmable shape-changing behaviors with paper, plastics and fabrics. With the rest of the team, we developed a software tool that generates this bending mechanism for a given geometry, simulates its transformation, and exports the compound geometry as digital fabrication...

In nature, hair has numerous functions for providing warmth, adhesion, locomotion, sensing and a sense of touch. It also has well known aesthetic qualities. This work presents a computational method for the 3D printing of hair structures. It allows us to design and generate hair geometry at 50 micrometer resolution and assign various functionalities to the hair. The ability to fabricate customized hair structures enables us to create super fine surface texture, mechanical adhesion, new passive actuators...

bioLogic is growing living actuators and synthesizing responsive bio-skin in the era where bio is the new interface. We are imagining a world where actuators and sensors can be grown rather than manufactured, being derived from nature as opposed to engineered in factories.

This works introduces layer jamming as an enabling technology for designing deformable, stiffness-tunable, thin sheet interfaces. Interfaces that exhibit tunable stiffness properties can yield dynamic haptic feedback and shape deformation capabilities. In comparison to the particle jamming, layer jamming allows for constructing thin and lightweight form factors of an interface. We propose five layer structure designs and an approach which composites multiple materials to control the deformability...

This project presents PneUI, an enabling technology to build shape-changing interfaces through pneumatically-actuated soft composite materials. The composite materials integrate the capabilities of both input sensing and active shape output. This is enabled by the composites’ multi-layer structures with different mechanical or electrical properties. The shape changing states are computationally controllable through pneumatics and pre-defined structure. We explore the design space of PneUI through...

As a non-English native speaker, I am very interested in what are the rules when people write English poetry. I wrote a quick program to analyze types of word and count the syllable in each line of a poem.

Inspired by the idea of synthetic and naturally evolved system from Casey Reas, The collection of computational art work “pentagon();” explores the digital organic aesthetics that emerges from computation.

DaDa Box is an interactive storytelling object. It adopts the idea of “Collage” from Dadaism, a cultural movement in 1910s, allows a person to generate stories by a simple tangible action: shaking. When the box is shaken, a story contained inside switches its order randomly by sentence, and starts playing to the listener.

The project “Jing Hua” is an interactive system sought to bridge the natural environment and virtual aesthetics with help of a tangible object.