Chibitronics in the Wild: Engaging New Communities in Creating Technology with Paper Electronics
Name
paper252.pdf
Description
Published version
Size
1.97 MB
Format
Adobe PDF
Checksum (MD5)
eafad813e72f9feff11b4e71432cca20
Author(s)
Qi, Jie
Buechley, Leah
Huang, Andrew "bunnie"
Ng, Patricia
Cross, Sean
Paradiso, Joseph A
Date Issued
April 2018
Journal
Proceedings of the 2018 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems
Publisher
ACM Press
Citation
Qi, Jie et al. "Chibitronics in the Wild: Engaging New Communities in Creating Technology with Paper Electronics." Proceedings of the 2018 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems, April 2018, Montreal, Canada, ACM Press, April 2018. © 2018 Association for Computing Machinery
Version
Final published version
Abstract
We share a study on the public adoption the Chibitronics circuit sticker toolkit, an open source, commercially available hardware toolkit for learning and creating electronics on paper. We examine sales data over a twoand-a-half-year period from November 2013, when the kit was launched commercially, to June 2016. We also look at publicly available project documentation from users during this period. We find that the Chibitronics user community confounds norms for traditional technology-making communities, especially in gender demographics. We explore the artifacts and types of documentation produced by users to learn about the various backgrounds, values, and goals of subcommunities, which includes educators, Makers, and crafters. In particular, we focus on artifacts from the craft community as a surprising and distinctive subset of technology creators. The diversity in public engagement shows how paper electronics tools like Chibitronics can be an effective approach for engaging new and broader audiences to participate in technology creation.
MIT Department
Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Media Laboratory
Terms of Use
Creative Commons Attribution Share Alike 4.0 International
Persistent DSpace Link
DOI of Published Version
https://doi.org/10.1145/3173574.3173826
