The combination of technological progress and a growing interest in design has promoted the prevalence of DIY (Do It Yourself) and craft activities. In a similar spirit, we introduce HandiMate, a platform that makes it easier to fabricate and animate electro-mechanical systems from everyday objects without technical expertise. Our goal is to encourage creativity, expressiveness and playfulness. The user can assemble their hand crafted creations with our designed joint modules and animate them via gestures. The joint modules are packaged with an actuator, a wireless communication device and a micro-controller. This modularization makes quick electro-mechanical prototyping, a matter of pressing together velcro. Animating these constructions is made intuitive and simple by a glove-based gestural controller. Our study conducted with children and adults demonstrates high level of usability (system usability score – 79.9), emergence of creative ideas and realization of these ideas in a constructive and iterative manner in less than 90 minutes. This paper describes the design goals, framework, interaction methods, sample creations and evaluations of our framework.
