The Utility Research Lab, directed by Michael Rivera, invents and investigates digital fabrication technology, tools and techniques that empower people to create things. We develop hardware, software and materials with a purpose—to advance science and engineering while positively impacting people, society and the environment. More information about the lab can be found on the lab website linked below. For inquiries, please email utilityresearchlab@gmail.com.
Lab Director
Associated Researchers
Alumni
Publications
Eldy S. Lazaro Vasquez, Mirela Alistar, Laura Devendorf, and Michael L. Rivera. 2024. Desktop Biofibers Spinning: An Open-Source Machine for Exploring Biobased Fibers and Their Application Towards Sustainable Smart Textile Design. In: Proceedings of the CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI ’24), (Honolulu, HI, May 11–16, 2024).
S. Sandra Bae, Takanori Fujiwara, Anders Ynnerman, Ellen Yi-Luen Do, Michael L. Rivera, Danielle Albers Szafir. 2023. "A Computational Design Pipeline to Fabricate Sensing Network Physicalizations". In: IEEE Transactions on Visualization and Computer Graphics (October 2023).
Michael L. Rivera, S. Sandra Bae, Scott E. Hudson. 2023. “Designing a Sustainable Material for 3D Printing with Spent Coffee Grounds”. In: Designing Interactive Systems Conference (DIS ’23) (Pittsburgh, PA, July 10–14, 2023).
Krithik Ranjan, Peter Gyory, Michael L. Rivera, Ellen Yi-Luen Do. 2023. “Cartoonimator: A Low-cost, Paper-based Animation Kit for Computational Thinking”. In: Proceedings of the 22nd Annual ACM Interaction Design and Children Conference (IDC '23) (Chicago, IL, June 19-23, 2023).