Special Issue on Augmented Prototyping and Fabrication for Advanced Product Design and Manufacturing (original) (raw)

Being the Machine: Reconfiguring Agency and Control in Hybrid Fabrication

This paper details the design and evaluation of Being the Machine, a portable digital fabrication system that places digital fabrication activity outside of the traditional fab lab environment. Being the Machine invites people to (re)consider materials found in their everyday and personal environment as part of the fabrication activity. We expand the design space involving hybrid (physical-digital) fabrication by describing how our system draws from art to support critical and reflective modes of making. In interaction with our system, participants distributed control between human and machine actors to support their preferred mode of making. These patterns reveal new opportunities and challenges for future hybrid fabrication systems, and suggest that designing for qualities of experience, like meditation and reflection, could support meaningful making experiences for many different kinds of makers.

Digital Design and Fabrication Technologies Topromote Values of Human Well-Being

2020

Nowadays, thanks to technological development and knowledge, digital design has assumed a fundamental role in building human's well-being. No longer a mere functional element, today it is an interdisciplinary tool par excellence in the construction of new forms of relationship between human and his vital context. The process of design is subject of many studies in the field of psychology or social science or technologies. Its wealth is based on its complexity and the variety of operating conditions that include during its progress. This paper studies how it is possible for digital design and fabrication technologies to promote human well-being with the aim of responding to the needs of every human being, understood first as a person and not as an anonymous user. With the great development of technology, digital design and robotics are gaining potential to be explored in the merging process of digital fabrication. An investigation on computer aided integrated design and productio...

A critical systems position on augmented prototyping systems for industrial design

2007

In order to assess usability and impact of new Augmented Reality based prototyping technologies in industrial design engineering, we are carrying out a multiple case study. We focus on shortcomings in current (physical) prototypes and bottlenecks in the design process, which might present to cues for new Augmented Prototyping technologies. However, tracking and categorizing these bottlenecks is difficult, attention has to be given on the complete scope of prototyping use and its value towards design. A method was devised to capture bottlenecks in concept uttering, based on Critical Systems Thinking; identifying functionalist, interpretive, emancipatory, postmodern views tunes the researcher's view to uses of advanced prototyping means that have impact on the complete design process.

FLOWMORPH Exploring the human-material interaction in digitally augmented craftsmanship

CAADRIA, 2019

It has been proposed that, after the internet age, we are now entering a new era of the '/Augmented Age/' (King, 2016). Physician Michio Kaku imagined the future of architects will be relying heavily on Augmented Reality technology (Kaku, 2015). Augmented reality technology is not a new technology and has been evolving rapidly. In the last three years, the technology has been applied in mainstream consumer devices (Coppens, 2017). This opened up possibilities in every aspect of our daily lives and it is expected that this will have a great impact on every field of consumer's technology in near future, including design and fabrication. What is the future of design and making? What kind of new digital fabrication paradigm will emerge from inevitable technological development? What kind of impact will this have on the built environment and industry? FlowMorph is a research project developed in the Bartlett School of Architecture, B-Pro AD with the collaboration of the authors and students as a 12 month MArch programme, we developed a unique design project trying to answer these questions which will be introduced in this paper.

Design Cognition Shift from Craftsman to Digital Maker

CAADRIA, 2015

The process of design and fabrication involves a complex cognitive activity, in which the human brain is part of a larger cognitive system that encompasses brain, body, tool, material and environment. In this system the cognition resides in the interaction of all these elements one with another in different stages of a design and making activity. This paper investigates the intermediary role of digital fabrication machines in changing the discourse of design cognition in relation to the action of making, inquiring into the diverging path from traditional craftwork. This research is shaped around the concept of transparent machine tools for an interactive participation in the process of design-making, shaping a human-machine interaction to unify the design and fabrication process.

Vizor, Facilitating Cyber-physical Workflows in Prefabrication through Augmented Reality

CAADRIA proceedings

This research presents Vizor, a software framework to facilitate Human Robot Collaboration (HRC) in fabrication using Augmented Reality (AR), specifically within the environment of high Level of Automation (LoA) prefabrication for the AEC industry. The framework supports skill set extensions of fabrication setups via the integration of human craft and automation through AR and improves the accessibility and adaptability of these fabrication setups. It features a Grasshopper plugin for low-barrier-to-entry prototyping and an integrated HoloLens application for operation. The tool is demonstrated through three use case examples and validated in a proof-of-concept case study involving a craftsperson and a 14-Axis robotic setup, which demonstrates a novel interactive task-sharing process. Vizor opens new opportunities to extend robotic prefabrication with craftspeople who are skilled yet untrained in robotic control and provides greater access to tools for prototyping HRC workflows.

Making Things for People: An Iterative Design Procedure Informed by Human Behaviour

Technology inevitably evolves and develops rapidly in the modern era, industries and professions continue to strive in integrating, adapting and utilising these advancements to improve, optimise and improve the process of design to manufacture to the user experience. Although disruptive at first causing a reluctance of technological adoption within a workplace and ultimately progression of an industry, the eventual impact and benefits noticeably outweigh the initial time and cost within industry adoption, adaptation and development. Architecture and design is not immune to this phenomenon; from computational 2D and 3D modeling, BIM and cloud based data to physical prototyping with 3D printing, laser cutting and automated CNC routing, these are a few select examples that has forced the industry of design to rethink processes, possibilities and realistic opportunities where none existed prior. One such system that fits into this category is the advent of Virtual Reality and Augmente...

Human-Scale Personal Fabrication

The Adjunct Publication of the 34th Annual ACM Symposium on User Interface Software and Technology

Building large structures from small elements, creating life-size animated creatures, or making contraptions that we can ride on have almost certainly been everyone's childhood dreams. However, researchers and practitioners of personal fabrication have been mainly focusing on creating objects that ft into a human palm, also called "hand-size" objects. The reason behind this is not only because of the size limitation of consumer-grade fabrication machinery but also because of the very long printing time and high material costs of large-scale prototypes. To overcome these limitations, I combine 3D printed hubs and ready-made objects, such as plastic bottles, as well as welding steel rods into a certain type of node-link structures called "trusses". However, the actual challenge behind my work is not only about achieving the size, but ensuring that the resulting large structures withstand the orders of magnitude larger forces than their hand-sized counterparts. Designing such structures requires substantial engineering know-how that users of personal fabrication equipment, such as makers, typically do not possess. By providing the lacking engineering know-how, my three end-to-end software systems Truss-Fab, TrussFormer, and Trusscillator enable non-experts to build such human-scale static, kinetic, and human-powered dynamic devices, such as pavilions, large-scale animatronic devices, and playground equipment. These systems achieve this by allowing users to focus on high-level design aspects, such as shape, animation, or riding experience, while abstracting away the underlying technicalities of forces, inertia, eigenfrequencies, etc. To help building the designs, the software generates the connector pieces and assembly instructions. With this body of work, I aim at democratizing engineering that enables individuals to design and fabricate large-scale objects and mechanisms that involve human-scale forces. CCS CONCEPTS • Human-centered computing → Human computer interaction (HCI); Interactive systems and tools..