Personal Fabrication

Abstract

While fabrication technologies have been in use in industry for several decades, expiring patents have recently allowed the technology to spill over to technology-enthusiastic "makers". The big question now is whether the technology will further progress towards consumers, which would allow the technology to scale from hundreds of thousands of users to hundreds of millions of users. Such a transition would enable consumers to use computing not just to process data, but for physical matter. This holds the promise of democratizing a whole range of fields preoccupied with physical objects, from product design to interior design, to carpentry, and to some areas of mechanical and structural engineering. It would bring massive, disruptive change to these industries and their users. We analyze similar trends in the history of computing that made the transition from industry to consumers, such as desktop publishing and home video editing, and come to the conclusion that such a transition is likely. Our analysis, however, also reveals that any transition to consumers first requires a hardware + software system that embodies the skills and expert knowledge that consumers lack: (1) hardware and materials that allow fabricating the intended objects, (2) software that embodies domain knowledge, (3) software that embodies the know-how required to operate the machinery, and (4) software that provides immediate feedback and supports interactive exploration. At the same time, sustained success will only be possible if we also consider future implications, in particular (5) sustainability and (6) intellectual property. We argue that researchers in HCI and computer graphics are well equipped for tackling these six challenges. We survey the already existing work and derive an actionable research agenda.

Dislocated Boardgames: Design Potentials for Remote Tangible Play

“…Further, with the advent of personal fabrication technologies [71], related inventions of new physical materials also emerged that can be utilized for creating new forms of interaction (e.g., shape-changing material [72], materials as sensors [73] or utilizing fabrication technology for new hybrid game approaches [74,75]).…”

Sequential Support

“…Early on in the development of 3D printing, researchers realized that building objects bottom-up, layer-by-layer comes with an inherent issue: some geometries would have nothing underneath them to hold them up. To solve this issue, researchers developed support structures to keep overhangs upright [1,9]. Early 3D printers that had only a single extruder used one material for both the model geometry and the support structures.…”

“…Our contributions include: (1) an exploration of alternative use cases of 3D printable support material in two categories: those that require controlled dissolving behavior for timing and sequencing events and those that do not need precise control and only require the support material to dissolve eventually; (2) a design interface in the form of a 3D editor plugin that facilitates designing with dissolvable support material; (3) a simulation integrated in the design interface that visualizes how the support material dissolves over time; and (4) a step-by-step procedure to characterize the simulation parameters for different environments.…”

Machina.NET: A Library for Programming and Real-Time Control of Industrial Robots

“…The Arduino open-source platform [17] stands as a great example of a system that integrates a physical sensing/actuating device with a simple and intuitive development environment, designed to introduce novice makers to electronic prototyping. Personal fabrication [18] projects such as RoMA [19] demonstrate the potential of robot integration in ad hoc design-whilemaking systems. Robotic fabrication in architecture has also seen a tremendous development in the last decade, with many architecture schools incorporating robotics as part of their curricula, and dedicated conferences promoting research in the field [20][21][22][23].…”