Personal Fabrication
Patrick Baudisch, Stefanie Mueller · 2016
Personal fabrication is an emerging research field in Human Computer Interaction and related disciplines. Within the last three years, an increasing number of papers have been published that branch out into different research directions. To maximize the impact HCI researchers can have on this emerging field, it is important to identify the grand challenges and then approach them in a focused way. In order to understand what trajectory fabrication can be expected to follow, we analyze state-of-the-art research and draw an analogy to similar trends we have seen in the history of personal computing. As a result, we identified five challenges for fabrication research: (1) material, (2) interactivity, (3) domain knowledge, (4) sustainability, and (5) intellectual property. At the end of the course, participants will have an in-depth understanding of state of the art research in personal fabrication and will be aware of open research question in the field that they might want to tackle in their future research.