Thijs Roumen

Tobias Weinberg, Aaleyah Lewis, Ricardo E. Gonzalez Penuela et al.

Voice is a central element of identity. We recognize people by their voice, and we uniquely express who we are with it. For people who rely on augmentative and alternative communication~(AAC) systems, such as speech-generating devices~(SGD), the device's voice becomes an identity marker others associate with them. Yet, it is hard to find a voice that truly aligns with one's identity both linguistically and culturally. Although modern AI-generated voices can reproduce diverse accents and speaking styles, AAC users still lack accessible ways to articulate how they want an identity-aligned voice to sound like. We first conducted a survey of AAC users (across eight countries) to characterize current voice representation, finding that non-binary, transgender, and non-US-born respondents rated their current voice support identity alignment consistently lower than other respondents. To examine how AAC users respond to voices designed to reflect their cultural identity, we built a tool that elicits cultural markers through guided questions and generates personalized voice candidates for participants to hear and reflect on. After participants heard the voices, we interviewed them to examine what it means for a voice to feel culturally representative, how they interpreted voices with cultural connotations, and how these voices shaped their sense of identity and agency. Our findings show that cultural voice alignment runs deeper than accent or language alone; it touches on belonging, self-recognition, and what it means to be heard as who you are.

Ritik Batra, Martin Tamke, Tom Svilans et al.

In a circular economy for construction, reclaimed materials carry prior lives of use and go on to have post-lives in future buildings. Yet working with such materials introduces unpredictability that requires on-site improvisation, making their reuse challenging to document and scale across building lifetimes. Without documentation, the on-site adaptations that make construction with reclaimed materials possible leave collaborators, evaluators, and inheritors without the information they need to continue, assess, and reuse materials. We call the collective deviation of the physical state from the digital model through these adaptations "building drift." Through a case study, ReShelter, a reclaimed timber pavilion constructed in the forest, we develop a taxonomy for building drift that characterizes the collective deviation across building lifetimes: Tending the Site, Foraging for Fit, Interpreting the Material, Marking Measurements, and Coordinating Across Communities. To put our taxonomy for building drift into practice, we present Pentimento, a documentation tool that leverages video documentation and 3D Gaussian Splatting to spatially, temporally, and semantically represent on-site adaptations in relation to the designed model. Pentimento enables each stakeholder to navigate material histories in ways that reduce barriers to material reuse. Together, these contributions open pathways towards computational tools that support the on-site improvisation essential to construction with reclaimed materials, enabling more sustainable cycles of recovery, repair, and reuse.