Paper: Ruojia Sun, Ryosuke Onose, Margaret Dunne, Andrea Ling, Amanda Denham, and Hsin-Liu (Cindy) Kao. 2020. Weaving a Second Skin: Exploring Opportunities for Crafting On-Skin Interfaces Through Weaving. Proceedings of the 2020 ACM Designing Interactive Systems Conference. Association for Computing Machinery, New York, NY, USA, 365–377. DOI:https://doi.org/10.1145/3357236.3395548
Do you have any conflict of interest in reviewing this paper? A “conflict of interest” is defined as follows:
No.
Expertise. Provide your expertise in the topic area of this paper.
2 – Passing Knowledge
Summary. Please summarize what you believe are the paper’s main contributions to the field of soft robotics.
This paper proposes to integrate weaving and soft circuitry in the textile structure for creating on-skin interfaces. Through the process of research and design the paper presents a fabrication method, WovenSkin, that supports a wide range of different materials and textile structures. The proposed method and fabrication results can support more complex circuit topologies and offer possibilities of customization for on-skin interfaces.
Strengths and Weaknesses. What are the main strengths and weaknesses of this work? Does the paper have strengths in originality and novelty?
This paper features a coherent structure that includes material research, design experiments, fabrication tests, and workshop and user studies. While the field of HCI and wearable has explored various explorations on soft sensors and interfaces, most of the explorations are changing textiles externally, and have fairly limited choices on color and graphic customization. The weaving fabrication method that this paper proposes provides a novel approach of changing the textile structure, which allows the circuitries to be more complex.
Soundness. Are the ideas, algorithms, results or studies technologically/methodologically sound?
According to the Weaving Process Overview section in the paper, the used materials, tools and structure are carefully selected based on the design spaces elected through research. Material tests show that the team has found a suitable thin material as the supporting basis, and in Functional Dimensions the paper shows that the application tests are well executed. However, the paper does not show particular diagrams for the material tests, other than showing a comparison table of adhesion hours of the material, and also lacks showing any diagrams of performances of the application tests.
Related Work. Does the paper adequately describe related and prior work?
This paper shows the influences of previous researches of the HCI and wearable communities, and provided comparison of their approach of soft interface fabrication to those researches. The paper outlines the existing methods of fabrication, and argues about their limitations on application and customization, as a support for the proposal of their approach.
Presentation. Is the paper well organized, well written and clearly presented?
The paper is very well organized with comprehensive sections showing the process of background research, design choices, material testings, and additional sections of workshop and user study feedback. The chosen images and diagrams clearly explain the research and design process, and the presentation of the fabrication tests.
Suggestions. Do you have suggestions for improving this paper?
It would be helpful if the paper shows more insights on the tests (besides adhesiveness) that lead the team choosing the basis material. Diagrams that record the performances of the interface designs (soft sensors and actuator tests) to show the successfulness of the application.
Does the paper have enough originality and importance to merit publication? Is the paper relevant to the field?
The proposed fabrication method is original and offers an innovative approach to the field of soft sensor and interface design and application. Thus it is relevant to the field.
Overall Rating.
5 – Definite accept: I would argue strongly for accepting this paper.