GlassIO: Long-Term In-Home Study of Hybrid Craft Through Interactive Stained Glass

Hybrid crafts blend traditional materials with embedded interactivity, yet everyday use of such artefacts remains underexplored. This paper contributes the study of lived experience with high-fidelity hybrid craft artefacts (made with interactive stained glass), following an initial study with 11 practitioners. We conducted three co-design sessions with nine end-users to create bespoke crafted artefacts deployed across three households for three weeks each, supported by user diaries and interviews. Our findings reveal how participants developed habitual patterns (placement, timing, relocation), emotional attachments, and disengagement needs, perceiving the artefacts as warm, expressive, and socially meaningful, distinguishing hybrid crafts from screen-based or smart devices. We offer design recommendations for leveraging artistic and pictorial qualities, supporting routine-based interaction and emotional connection, and designing for placement flexibility and spatial legibility. This work marks a shift from practitioner-only explorations of hybrid crafts toward user-centred in-the-wild understanding of how these artefacts function as lived-with technologies.