Democratic and Sustainable Personal Design and Fabrication through In-situ Co-Design and Previsualization

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Digital fabrication devices like 3D printers or CNC mills are becoming increasingly affordable and are seeing growing adoption across various types of technology enthusiasts. Manufacturing unique, highly personalized physical artifacts is within reach for a wide range of end-users: textiles, furniture, tools, art pieces, or toys can be tailored to fit unique requirements and fabricated. While the manufacturing capabilities are steadily improving, more progress is required in making the means for fabrication genuinely approachable and used by a variety of end-users. To achieve this adoption, it is necessary to research, develop, and evaluate the design tools of the future, which will make the interaction with fabrication devices not only more usable, but also inherently sustainable and genuinely useful for the general population. The status quo is grounded in a set of issues: personal fabrication technology demands learning and usage effort, offers little design support to end users, functions almost exclusively ex-situ (away from the location of use), and demands that users iterate their designs digitally and physically, leading to wasted effort and material. With this research project, we aim to contribute novel approaches that address these inherent issues. We focus on a set of highly relevant usage contexts and use cases where the widespread adoption of personal fabrication is bound to have a meaningful and positive impact: 1) hobbyist and artistic activities, where personal fabrication can augment expression and creativity, 2) repairs, where personal fabrication can support sustainable use of devices, and 3) highly individual design, where personal fabrication can allow any user to fulfill any requirement for a physical object. We focus on 3 core objectives that we consider through the lens of the aforementioned use cases: 1) the development of in-situ interactions to enable users to design for the fabrication of physical artifacts, 2) enabling early evaluation of designs prior to fabrication, and 3) the development of guidelines for emerging design tools, with respect to both interaction design and societal impact. We approach these objectives through an initial investigation of user requirements, followed by developing and evaluating design tools focused on in-situ tangible design, in-situ parametric design, and in-situ repairs. We will then aggregate the functionalities of the tools into a multipurpose design environment that serves the aforementioned use cases and address the fundamental challenges faced by personal fabrication. These developments are accompanied by the development of interaction design guidelines for approachable, sustainable, and democratized personal fabrication. With this research project, we will advance the state of the art regarding how we interact with and design for personal fabrication devices to democratize and embed them sustainably and meaningfully in everyday life.