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Hand and Machine Lab wins 2 awards at CHI conference

May 15, 2025

photo: members of the Hand and Machine lab with their awards.

Members of the Hand and Machine Lab housed in the Department of Computer Science at The University of New Mexico brought home two awards for papers they presented at the Association for Computing Machinery Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI), held in Yokohama, Japan.

CHI is the premier conference in the field of human-computer interaction. The team received two Honorable Mention Best Paper Awards, an honor bestowed upon just 5% of papers submitted to the conference.

Among the two papers was one exploring the results and impacts of a two-year experimental clay residency for Native American ceramic artists. The paper titled “American Indian Pottery and Clay 3D Printing: An Exploration of Opportunities and Risks in Professional Practice,” was written by Monica Silva Lovato, an artist from San Felipe and Santo Domingo Pueblos, Jeff Suina, an artist from Cochiti Pueblo, Jared Tso, an artist from the Navajo Nation, Alexis Kaminsky, an independent researcher, Camila Friedman-Gerlicz, a visiting researcher in the Hand and Machine Lab, and Leah Buechley, director of the Hand and Machine Lab.

The paper describes the results of the artist residency program held in the Hand and Machine Lab, in which three professional American Indian potters experimented with the use of clay 3D printing in their practice. Throughout the residency, artists navigated the opportunities and risks involved in blending 3D printing with Pueblo pottery.

The other paper honored at the conference explored how a new material and 3D printing workflow, called ColdGlass, allows users to create glass items ranging from earrings to sculptures and functional vessels. Titled “ColdGlass: Full-Color Desktop 3D Printing in Glass,” the paper outlines a recipe for a 3D printable glass paste, software and hardware that enable the 3D printing, and a firing schedule for sintering printed parts into solid glass. It was written by Friedman-Gerlicz, Jaime Gould, a Computer Science Ph.D. student, and Fiona Bell, a postdoctoral fellow in the lab.

This isn’t the first time the Hand and Machine Lab has returned from CHI with honors. Last year, the team won honorable mention in the juried and People’s Choice categories for their interactive demo, “Demonstrating New Materials, Software, and Hardware from the Hand and Machine Lab.”

Learn more about the work at Hand and Machine Lab on Instagram or the lab website.