The Road to Ubiquitous Personal Fabrication: Modeling-Free Instead of Increasingly Simple
This paper addresses the challenge of making personal digital fabrication accessible to the general population by proposing a shift in research focus from modeling simplification to remixing and automation.
This paper argues that personal digital fabrication (DF) should shift from simplifying expert modeling tools to enabling lowest-effort workflows for remixing, drawing parallels to content creation domains like photography where remixing dominates. The authors surveyed novice-friendly DF workflows and advocate for automation, remixing, and templates to broaden DF adoption.
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.