Machine Agency

3D Printers Don’t Fix Themselves

We study how practitioners maintain their FFF 3D printers in the home and find that maintenance is core to our participants' printing practice.

Paper

Forking a Sketch

We pair network analysis with qualitative techniques to capture high-level patterns and meaningful details about how creative coders remix sketches.

Paper

Doufu, Rice Wine, and 面饼

We investigate how to support the connections between precision and cultural knowledge in cooking.

Paper Presentation

Imprimer

We show how to use computational notebooks to unlock new ways of working with CNC mills.

Paper Code Teaser Presentation

Pathways to Open-Source Hardware for Laboratory Automation

Bringing together a community of scientists to collaborate on ways of sharing, vetting, and maintaining open source hardware for science and engineering research.

Website NSF Award

Verso

Exploratory digital fabrication often involves low-level machine programming, to which Verso adds within-code GUIs and expressive toolpath visualization.

Paper

example use of automation in community biolabs to create images using bacteria.

Studying Community Biolabs

From a qualitative study of community biolabs, we discuss how members are creating new approaches to laboratory biology with implications for systems that support non-traditional settings for scientific practice.

Paper Teaser Presentation

collage of unconventional 3D prints created with our system.

p5.fab

A system for controlling digital fabrication machines from the creative coding environment p5.js, informed by insights into 3D printing practice.

Paper Teaser Presentation Code

Direct control of a machine (right) from Rhino/Grasshopper (left)

Interactive Digital Fabrication Machine Control Directly Within a CAD Environment

Enabling control of digital fabrication machines from a Computer-Aided Design (CAD) environment, including interactive control of toolpath geometry as well as machine parameters such as speed, acceleration, or jerk.

Paper

Taxon

A language that encodes machines, workflows, and rules of thumb as programs. Taxon applies the safety and extensibility of programming to hands-on making.

Paper Short Talk Long Talk Code

Studying #PlotterTwitter

We conducted a qualitative study of #PlotterTwitter and found that makers champion creative exploration of materials over a predictable series of steps.

Paper Video

collage of student projects from online digital fabrication courses

Teaching Digital Fabrication Online

Through interviews, we found that learning with hobbyist equipment and online social networks could emulate using industrial equipment in shared workshops.

Paper Video