PhD Thesis Proposal: Lea Albaugh, "Narrowing & Broadening: Tactics to Support Creative Exploration in Computational Fabrication"
Speaker
Lea Albaugh
When
-
Where
GHC 6115 & remotely via Zoom (see email announcement)
Description
"Narrowing & Broadening: Tactics to Support Creative Exploration in Computational Fabrication"
In Person in Gates 6115*
*Please note: community transmission levels of covid are currently High in Allegheny County, and I would love at least the option to present without a mask, so I request that in-person attendees either wear a mask (CMU affiliates can get them for free on campus!) or sit in the back half of the room.
Committee:
Scott Hudson
Jessica Hammer
Lining Yao
Mark Gross (University of Colorado, Boulder)
Abstract:
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.
Document: https://drive.google.com/file/d/1cqufrshQ88Vaq7uU7kGrQ5RII-GGz4xI/view
Host
Queenie Kravitz