Valkyrie Savage

Digital fabrication research within HCI has generated powerful new techniques, tools, and systems, enabling lay users to create novel application devices. Yet many of these contributions remain confined to academic publications or lab prototypes. This workshop asks how fabrication research can make an impact beyond the paper. We will examine motivations for dissemination, strategies employed, and lessons learned from both successes and failures. Through two invited keynotes and interactive ideation activities, we will chart pathways by which fabrication research reaches the real world. The outcome will be a set of shared notes and insights, documenting practices that help researchers extend the reach of their work.

We introduce Rhapso, a 3D printing system designed to embed a diverse range of continuous fiber materials within 3D objects during the printing process. This approach enables integrating properties like tensile strength, force storage and transmission, or aesthetic and tactile characteristics, directly into low-cost thermoplastic 3D prints. These functional objects can have intricate actuation, self-assembly, and sensing capabilities with little to no manual intervention. To achieve this, we modify a low-cost Fused Filament Fabrication (FFF) 3D printer, adding a stepper motor-controlled fiber spool mechanism on a gear ring above the print bed. In addition to hardware, we provide parsing software for precise fiber placement, which generates G-code for printer operation. To illustrate the versatility of our system, we present applications that showcase its extensive design potential. Additionally, we offer comprehensive documentation and open designs, empowering others to replicate our system and explore its possibilities.

Recent fabrication research across HCI and graphics shows an incredible diversity of work, much of which features characterization experiments. However, performance and reporting of these experiments are wildly inconsistent, not only reducing transparency that reassures reviewers and readers of a project’s rigour but also challenging a technique’s replicability by future researchers. We propose building a domain-specific language (FEDT: Fabrication Experiment Design Tool) which can express a wide variety of such characterization experiments, and which can be extended to many different machines. This language is sufficiently expressive to describe many types of experiments (3D printing, lasercutting, post-processing), including ones which require human intervention in their steps. We replicate classic fabrication experiments in FEDT to demonstrate its flexibility and discuss the importance and applicability of domain-specific languages and tools to Open Science.