Tuesday, January 10, 2023, 10am

The past few decades have seen an explosion in techniques and applications for computational fabrication. Research has expanded the range of computationally-fabricable media to include everything from traditional metal, wood, and plastic, to reshapable clay and wax, to edible materials, to living cells  and self-actuating polymers; it has enabled broadly accessible fabrication in many media by improving inexpensive, DIY hardware and designing for novice users. These are not just outcomes that would have been tedious to produce without computation: they are outcomes that may not have even been imagined.

However, tools for working with computational fabrication processes have typically approached them as production tools, with fabrication support software focused on refining the user's vision, e.g. through viability checks, optimization, and visualizations to help the user understand how the output will be and adjust accordingly to be increasingly in line with what they imagined. This presupposes that the user knows what they want to make, which itself presupposes that the user knows what kinds of things are possible and how their options align with their preferences.

In contrast, creativity is frequently understood as an interactive/cyclic process which typically has phases of both narrowing and broadening the space of possible outcomes. By focusing on refinement of an implicitly predetermined goal, computational fabrication tooling neglects users who want these kinds of atypical or ongoing engagement with a medium. In this work, we investigate interactive computational fabrication systems to support creativity across creative modes, explicitly including "broadening" processes.

In Person and Zoom Participation. See announcement.

Event Type: Thesis Proposals
Room Number: In Person and Remote - ET
Building: ASA Conference Room, Gates Hillman 6115 and Zoom
Speaker's Name: LEA ALBAUGH
Speaker Website: lea.zone
Speaker's Professional Title: Ph.D. Student, Human-Computer Interaction Institute, Carnegie Mellon University
Talk Title: Narrowing & Broadening: Tactics to Support Creative Exploration in Computational Fabrication
For More Information: lea@andrew.cmu.edu
Affiliations: Human-Computer Interaction Institute (HCII)
Organization(s): SCS