Abstract
Personal fabrication tools, such as 3D printers, are on the way of enabling a future in which non-technical users will be able to create custom objects. While the hardware is now affordable and the number of people who own a 3D printer is increasing, only few create new 3D models. Most users download models from a 3D model database and after downloading fabricate them on their 3D printers. At most, users adjust a few parameters of the model, such as changing its color or browsing between predetermined shape options.
I argue that personal fabrication has the potential for more: Instead of only consuming existing content, I envision a future in which non-technical users will create objects only trained experts can create today. While there are many open challenges for human-computer interaction, such as abstracting away the necessary domain and machine knowledge, I focus on improving the interaction model underlying current personal fabrication devices.
In this article, I illustrate why today’s interaction model for personal fabrication tools is not suitable for non-technical users. For this, I draw an analogy to the development of the user interface in personal computing and show how solutions developed by human-computer interaction researchers over the last decades can be applied to this new domain. I analyze the challenges when creating interactive systems for personal fabrication and describe six research prototypes I built to overcome these challenges. I discuss the limitations of these systems and conclude with an overview of recent advancements in personal fabrication that will allow us to go beyond what is possible today.
About the author
Prof. Dr. Stefanie Mueller obtained her PhD from the Hasso Plattner Institute under the guidance of Prof. Dr. Patrick Baudisch. She is currently an assistant professor in the MIT Electrical Engineering and Computer Science department, joint with MIT Mechanical Engineering, and a member of the MIT Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (MIT CSAIL). Stefanie’s work has been published at the premier venues for Human-Computer Interaction ACM CHI and ACM UIST and has received several Best Paper and Honorable Mention Awards. Stefanie is also serving on the ACM CHI and UIST program committees as an associate chair. In addition, Stefanie has been an invited speaker at universities and research labs, such as MIT, Stanford, Berkeley, Harvard, CMU, Cornell, UW, ETH, Microsoft Research, Disney Research, and Adobe Research.
References
1. Baudisch, P. and Mueller, S. “Personal Fabrication”, Foundations and Trends® in Human–Computer Interaction: (2017), vol. 10: no. 3–4, pp. 165–293.10.1561/1100000055Search in Google Scholar
2. Beyer, D., Gurevich, S., Mueller, S., Chen, H.-T., Baudisch, P. Platener: Low-Fidelity Fabrication of 3D Objects by Substituting 3D Print with Laser-Cut Plates. In Proceedings of the 33rd Annual ACM Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI ’15), 1799–1806.Search in Google Scholar
3. Ceruzzi, P. A history of modern computing. In The MIT Press, 2nd edition (2003).Search in Google Scholar
4. Csikszentmihalyi, M. Flow: The psychology of optimal experience. In Harper Perennial Modern Classics (2008).Search in Google Scholar
5. Follmer, S., Carr, D., Lovell, E., Hiroshi, I. “CopyCAD: Remixing Physical Objects with Copy and Paste from the Real World”. In Adjunct Proceedings of the 23nd Annual ACM Symposium on User Interface Software and Technology (UIST ’10), 381–382.Search in Google Scholar
6. Grudin, J. A moving target-the evolution of human-computer interaction. In Human-Computer Interaction Handbook, 3rd Edition, Taylor and Francis (2012).10.1201/b11963-ch-101Search in Google Scholar
7. Mueller, S. and Baudisch, P. Low-Fidelity Fabrication: Speeding up Design Iteration of 3D Objects“. In Proceedings of the 33rd Annual ACM Conference Extended Abstracts on Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI EA ’15), 327–330.Search in Google Scholar
8. Mueller, S., Im, S., Guerevich, S., Teibrich, A., Pfisterer, L., Guimbetiere, F., Baudisch, P. WirePrint: Fast 3D Printed Previews. In Proceedings of the 27th annual ACM symposium on User interface software and technology (UIST ’14), 273–280.Search in Google Scholar
9. Mueller, S., Lopes, P., Baudisch, P. “Interactive Construction: Interactive Fabrication of Functioning Mechanical Devices”. In Proceedings of the 25th Annual ACM Symposium on User Interface Software and Technology (UIST ’12), 599–606.Search in Google Scholar
10. Mueller, S., Mohr, T., Guenther, K., Frohnhofen, J., Baudisch, P. “faBrickation: Fast 3D Printing of Functioning Objects by Integrating Construction Kit Building Blocks”. In Proceedings of the 32nd Annual ACM Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI’14), 3827–3834.Search in Google Scholar
11. Mueller, S., Seufert, A., Peng, H., Kovacs, R., Reuss, K., Wollowski, T., Guimbetiere, F., Baudisch, P. Tightly Coupled Interactive Fabrication: Bringing the ability to explore a design space into personal fabrication. submitted to TOCHI 2018.Search in Google Scholar
12. Schmidt, R., Ratto, M. Design-to-Fabricate: Maker Hard- ware Requires Maker Software. In IEEE Computer Graphics and Applications (2013), vol. 33, issue 6, pp. 26–34.10.1109/MCG.2013.90Search in Google Scholar PubMed
13. Shneiderman, B. “Direct Manipulation: A Step Beyond Programming Languages”. In Computer (1983), vol. 16, issue 8, pp. 57–69.10.1109/MC.1983.1654471Search in Google Scholar
14. Shneiderman, B. The future of interactive systems and the emergence of direct manipulation. In Proceedings of the NYU Symposium on User Interfaces on Human Factors and Interactive Computer Systems (1984), 1–28.Search in Google Scholar
15. Willis, K. D. D., Xu, C., Wu, J. K., Levin, G., Gross, M. D. “Interactive Fabrication: New Interfaces for Digital Fabrication”. In Proceedings of the fifth International Conference on Tangible, Embedded, and Embodied Interaction (TEI ’11), 69–72.Search in Google Scholar
16. Wohlers Associates. Wohlers Report: 3D Printing and Additive Manufacturing State of the Industry. Annual Worldwide Progress Report, 2017.Search in Google Scholar
Article note
The dissertation of Dr. Stefanie Mueller has been awarded by the GI dissertation Award 2016.
© 2018 Walter de Gruyter GmbH, Berlin/Boston
