PhD Student, University of Colorado Boulder
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Abstract
Human-Fabricator Interaction (HFI): Formalizing the Interaction between Human Designers and Fabricators
I present Human-Fabricator Interaction(HFI), an interaction model between human designers and fabrication machines (fabricators). HFI seeks to recast digital fabrication as an interaction between humans and fabricators, from the dominant view to see it as an interaction between humans and onscreen design tools. The community observed exciting technical advances in digital fabrication that necessitate a shift of perspective toward HFI, that offers (1) designers to participate in the entire multi-directional fabrication time-span, (2) fabricators to become more responsive, being aware of human designer’s on-the-fly interaction in this pipeline.
In the theoretical framework to formalize such advances, HFI maps out future research possibilities. It identifies four core principles of HFI—continuous, improvised, embodied, collaborative interaction, which can operate as design considerations for future fabricators design. As incremental applications, I describe the evolution of a real application that progressively moves from conventional fabrication to HFI as it applies each principle and shows how our formalism expands accordingly.
Bio
My research focuses on digital fabrication technology and computational design framework, within broad interests in the HCI domain. The primary goal is to introduce human’s organic making interaction into the computer-aided design system. While seeking the chasm between the virtual world and the real world, I hope to seamlessly interpolate an aperture from the conceptual design thinking to virtual models to physical artifacts. I define a formalism that identifies collaborative, incremental fabrication machine behaviors. I develop an algorithm and a novel interaction techniques that assign intelligence to the fabrication machine, to facilitate a live communication during the entire fabrication pipeline between humans and machines.