Ephemeral Fabrication: Exploring a Ubiquitous Fabrication Scenario of Low-Effort, In-Situ Creation of Short-Lived Physical Artifacts

TL;DR

This paper explores the concept of Ephemeral Fabrication, where users create temporary, low-effort physical artifacts in situ, enabled by emerging wearable fabrication technologies, raising questions about sustainability and societal implications.

Contribution

It introduces the EF scenario, presents a body-worn fabrication device prototype, and critically reflects on its potential impacts and sustainability challenges.

Findings

EF enables quick, in-situ creation of short-lived artifacts.

Speculative design highlights both benefits and risks of EF.

Sustainability should be integrated into fabrication interactions.

Abstract

Personal fabrication empowers users to create objects increasingly easier and faster. This continuous decrease in effort evokes a speculative scenario of Ephemeral Fabrication (EF), enabled and amplified by emerging paradigms of mobile, wearable, or even body-integrated fabrication. EF yields fast, temporary, in-situ solutions for everyday problems (e.g., creating a protective skin, affixing a phone). Users solely create those, since the required effort is negligible. We present and critically reflect on the EF scenario, by exploring current trends in research and building a body-worn fabrication device. EF is a plausible extrapolation of current developments, entailing both positive (e.g., accessibility) and negative implications (e.g., unsustainability). Using speculative design methodology to question the trajectory of personal fabrication, we argue that to avert the aftermath of such futures, topics like sustainability can not remain an afterthought, but rather be situated in interactions themselves: through embedded constraints, conscious material choice, and constructive embedding of ephemerality.