The Road to Ubiquitous Personal Fabrication: Modeling-Free Instead of Increasingly Simple

TL;DR

This paper advocates shifting personal digital fabrication towards low-effort remixing and automation, moving away from complex modeling to enable mass adoption similar to personal computing.

Contribution

It identifies two main approaches for novice-friendly fabrication workflows and argues for focusing on remixing, templates, and automation to broaden user inclusion.

Findings

Two approaches: simplifying expert tools and enriching non-modeling tools

Remixing is the dominant content creation method in related domains

Shift towards automation and templates can democratize fabrication

Abstract

The tools for personal digital fabrication (DF) are on the verge of reaching mass-adoption beyond technology enthusiasts, empowering consumers to fabricate personalized artifacts. We argue that to achieve similar outreach and impact as personal computing, personal fabrication research may have to venture beyond ever-simpler interfaces for creation, toward lowest-effort workflows for remixing. We surveyed novice-friendly DF workflows from the perspective of HCI. Through this survey, we found two distinct approaches for this challenge: 1) simplifying expert modeling tools (AutoCAD $\to$ Tinkercad) and 2) enriching tools not involving primitive-based modeling with powerful customization (e.g., Thingiverse). Drawing parallel to content creation domains such as photography, we argue that the bulk of content is created via remixing (2). In this article, we argue that to be able to include the majority of the population in DF, research should embrace omission of workflow steps, shifting toward automation, remixing, and templates, instead of modeling from the ground up.