Interactive Tools for Collaborative Digital Fabrication

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Designers create prototypes and artifacts in fabrication spaces, where they gather with communities and collaborators to share access to fabrication equipment and expertise. However, designers may not be collocated with their collaborators or their collaborators' prototypes — while designers can remotely communicate, they cannot remotely access physical objects or share their embodied expertise. Distributed collaboration tools have yet to catch up to the reality of hands-on design practice — the goal is to build a physical product, but many challenges emerge during physical fabrication and testing, beyond the scope of digital design documents. Complex physical interactions are necessary to understand these challenges and perform collaborative design and fabrication, particularly in real-world evaluation, physical debugging assemblies, and fabrication setup. Tomorrow's remote collaboration tools need to take into account our complex interactions with physical objects. ******How can new collaboration tools help designers discuss physical prototypes with remote mentors or co-workers? My research in human-computer interaction will address how we should create new interactive experiences that support remote collaboration around physical fabrication. My research team will contribute knowledge to our field by embodying our hypotheses about collaboration tools in software artifacts. We will develop theoretical frameworks on the role of collaboration tools based on qualitative observations and interviews with collaborating designers. We will then design and evaluate our software artifacts in lab-based user studies and in field tests that focus on challenges in distributed collaborative fabrication. ******This research takes advantage of current momentum behind digital fabrication, and examines how end-user fabrication and customization will change in the face of online communities and global collaboration. It can assist in both non-professional and professional remote collaboration settings. This includes situations where expertise is evenly distributed among collaborators, or where fabrication expertise may be located in a major metropolitan area, yet fabrication machinery may be located in remote sites (e.g., oil fields, the International Space Station).