Flower Jelly Printer: Slit Injection Printing for Parametrically Designed Flower Jelly

Authors: Mako Miyatake, Koya Narumi, Yuji Sekiya, Yoshihiro Kawahara
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1145/3411764.3445346 (Open Access)
Conference: The 2021 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI2021)

Abstract:
Flower jellies, a delicate dessert in which a flower-shaped jelly floats inside another clear jelly, fascinate people with both their beauty and elaborate construction. In efforts to simplify the challenging fabrication and enrich the design space of this dessert, we present Flower Jelly Printer: a printing device and design software for digitally fabricating flower jellies. Our design software lets users play with parameters and preview the resulting forms until achieving their desired shapes. We also developed slit injection printing that directly injects colored jelly into a base jelly, and shared several design examples to show the breadth of design possibilities. Finally, the user study with novice and experienced users demonstrates that our system benefits creators of all experience levels by iterative design and precise fabrication. We hope to enable more people to design and create their own flower jellies while expanding access and the design space for digitally fabricated foods.