UC Santa Barbara

Digital fabrication is a rich space for creative production. Many computational tools, including those that support automation, precision, generativity, and parameterization, have been developed to support creativity in fabrication. Emerging digital fabrication tools hold the potential to further expand practices and experiences in digital fabrication, by facilitating more fluid, interactive, and experiential forms of making, in ways that may resemble tools for dynamic digital drawing or real-time audiovisual performance.

However, digital fabrication involves physical materials that introduce constraints that are not present in creative processes involving strictly digital media. For example, creative digital fabrication practices are constrained by the substantial fabrication times that are required. New technologies, tools, and workflows that circumvent such challenges could enable new forms of making, and expand expressive opportunities for creation, by allowing makers to engage more fluidly and interactively with machines and with physical media.

This dissertation investigates this emerging space of opportunity through three key questions: (1) How do current digital fabrication workflows support or constrain aspects of efficiency, iteration, interaction, and expression? (2) How do fabrication modalities with different timescales shape the experience and outcomes of making? (3) How can shorter fabrication timescales be supported given the time constraints of digital fabrication, especially additive digital fabrication? These questions correlate, sequentially, to the three main chapters of this dissertation.

A first part of the PhD research applies qualitative research methods in examining and analyzing digital fabrication workflows used by professional designers. This analysis characterizes the ways that digital fabrication practitioners apply their knowledge of materials, develop custom software, and leverage incomplete design representations to realize creative and commercially viable products. The analysis highlights the ways that expertise with materials and machine processes are applied in expressive practices that yield feasible products, and how designing viable customizable products influences decisions about geometry, materials, and manufacturing processes, while accounting for costs, effort, and marketability.

The next part of the thesis applies autobiographical research methods in order to investigate how unconventional digital fabrication workflows can facilitate interactive making processes. This research highlights the potential for custom software to integrate digital fabrication with real-time interaction. The results demonstrate how shared human and computer control of fabrication processes can expand opportunities for creative expression, and how constraints of time scale impact the development of digital fabrication workflows for interactive art.

Motivated by such opportunities, and the temporal constraints arising in conventional 3D printing processes, the third part of this dissertation presents a novel additive digital fabrication system, the Liquid-Crystal Printer (LCP), that leverages supercooled liquid solutions to enable rapid 3D fabrication. This printing process is based on the deposition and rapid crystallization of supercooled sodium acetate trihydrate solution. The results illustrate how the parameters of this process provide unique opportunities for controlling the attributes and aesthetics of 3D printed artifacts.

This dissertation contributes new knowledge and methods that highlight the influence of process constraints, including timescales for digital fabrication, on workflows used by professionals designers and artists, and the works they create. It also highlights the potential for new processes and interactive techniques that can leverage emerging technologies for rapid fabrication, and demonstrates the expressive opportunities that such systems can provide.