Making Fabrication Real

Abstract

Low-cost, easy-to-use 3D printers have promised to empower everyday users with the ability to fabricate physical objects of their own design. While these printers specialize in building objects from scratch, they are innately oblivious to the real world in which the printed objects will be situated and in use. In my thesis research, I develop fabrication techniques with tool integration to enable users to expressively specify how a design can be attached to, augment, adapt, support, or otherwise function with existing real world objects. In this paper, I describe projects to date as well as ongoing work that explores this space of research.