howdy! this is our talk, HowDIY: towards meta-design tools for anyone to 3D print anywhere.
3D printing has a huge potential future impact from helping build accessibility applications
to helping communities when they suddenly need to produce many things on short notice
as we saw during the early days of the covid pandemic. 3D printing usually involves three
different steps 1) obtaining a 3d file or a design for fabrication. 2) Converting that
to machine specific code usually with a program called a slicer,
and then 3) uploading that code to a printer to create the fabricated object.
And many applications have been emerging to make 3d printing easier for many more novice users from
CAD to programs that use things like 3d scanning and AI assistance to build printable files.
But, 3d printing is not What You See Is What You Get, where it takes a lot of broader embodied and
sense-making processes to know what's printable, whether it's the costs associated or the
trade-offs, it takes a lot of time working with 3D printers to understand all of this. For example,
to the right there's this comb where the thin walls to the right are thinner than the resolution
or printer so some slicing programs unless you tell them otherwise will skip those walls entirely
and not print them. This could be very confusing for newer users, so we're looking at mainly a 3D
Printing services where users can upload a file, select different configurations, and then have
items shipped to them without ever actually having to touch a 3D printer itself. But, in
the background there's automated assistants that help them check printability and different costs.
And, humans that after ordering can sort of check through that as well as well as consult with the
humans if needed. So, We saw parallels to Fischer et al's meta-design framework where users such as
passive consumers that just use 3D printed goods, power-users that use 3d printers to create their
own things, to meta-designers that build the things that power users use, all work together
in cultural participation - working together to build new tools, build new processes, ways of
participating and changing the way 3D can be done and and making it more accessible for everyone.
They break down meta-design in three levels which we relate to 3D printing here. Designing Design
such as the customizer app here: you can enter in different parameters and have a printable
file generated without ever having to learn actual like CAD. And then Designing Together
which instead of looking at how people get certain initial foothold looks at how people collaborate,
which in 3D printing is often done in physical and virtual places such as makerspaces, fablabs,
online services. And lastly Designing the "in-between" where users participate in
larger communities whether it be in person or online in different social media forms
such as the 3d printing website thingiverse where there's millions of designs you can upload and
download for 3D printing for free. We talked about 3D printing and meta-design. Next we talk about
studies - content analysis and social media analysis focusing on 3D printing services
and next we look how to combine the two in a probe - a 3D printing website HowDIY introducing anyone
to 3D printing, and then talk about the evaluation of HowDIY and conclusions in future work.
We looked at 36 different online 3D printing services, coding all the different features
that are made apparent at least for the automated forms where you can upload a 3D file
and send it to them without talking to humans directly and identify keyboards each website. We
also scraped comments from thingiverse, reddit, and 3D Printing StackExchange mentioning these
services and did an open coding of a subset of these comments until we converged and then
validated our code book on a sample of another set of comments. Focusing on three different levels,
we saw that these services help people verify printable ideas and you start in 3d
printing without having to use 3D printers - with many mentioned using them without
using these services without actually touching a 3D printer. But, these interfaces oftentimes are
inconsistent in how they ask for certain things and assumed a certain level of expertise in 3d
Printing, using terms that aren't easily known to everyone. Second level - design together
these services often provided ways of talking with the services either by attaching notes to an
order or through chat boxes and provided ways of checking printability and quoting different costs
and supporting collaboration as a whole. But, there's always a lack of transparency
of how they'd help you collaborate or what these automated assistants would be checking for online.
Lastly, for designing the "in-between" these websites oftentimes gave affordances for
sharing different printing configurations, but we didn't really see much evidence of
these being shared in these open forums and that many users of these websites
were unsure if they received a failure back if there was an issue of the service itself
printing it wrong or if it was designed to upload it was wrong so that was pretty ambiguous to them.
To help introduce anyone to 3D printing and to build a website to help anyone understand 3D
printing, we interviewed five experience meeting practitioners most of which worked at local
printing services asking them first to generate cards about the concepts needed, and then sorting
them into how they'd imagine those concepts being arranged in a website. So generally two layouts:
one is an infinite scroll organization where all the features are on one page and stuff was sorted
in different order depending on the priority and the other was a wizard-like organization where
users answer questions and create a profile which then certain different learning pathways open up
for them. We've made a hybrid layout based on this, the previous studies, as well as levels
of meta-design. So, when visiting HowDIY users enter a single text blurb based on their interests
and then they're presented many different questions which the answers relate to different
levels of meta-design. So first of all, looking at "what to print" or "designing design", users
get into a query or receive recommendations based on their interests with some millions of different
designs off thingiverse, not only broken down by top results, but for categories such as here where
books could be talking about furniture relating to books or tools to help with reading in general.
Hovering over a design shows how to print. Clicking on it shows the metadata for a
given design - showing different images with a 3D file viewer, so they can view the 3d file before
downloading it or sending it to the service make sure it's exactly what they want want to print.
And then below, there's also guides about how to modify and how to print in different locations
with automatically generated price estimates. For each of these different options as well
as recommendations based on this particular design's both visual and textual features.
Next, another level is designing the "in-between" or "how to print". This is
presented as a library with many different online web resources so clicking on different
subcategories shows a textual blurb describing this area of 3D printing
and many different websites such as youtube videos or other websites relating to the subject areas
Next is Design Together or "Where to Print" where users can see how would I print a local service,
how would i print online, or how would I print it with my own printer. And all these different
aspects are interrelated so going to "what to print" shows different options and clicking
on "consult with a nearby shop" will go back to "where to print" and give you these textual
fields you enter to explain your design intent so you're not just sending just the 3D file to
the service but are actually establishing a better common ground saying this is exactly
what i plan to print, this is what i plan to use it for, this is where i plan to use it.
Every page on this website also has a closed-domain question answer system
from social media comments related to 3D printing so they can ask any question that's not answered
by the "how to print" page. So, we evaluated howdy with a "in the wild" study with 22 newcomers to 3D
printing first giving a questionnaire, and then giving them access to HowDIY, and then two weeks
later give me another questionnaire with some interviews. So, the system is generally usable
and the creativity support index was good as well being highly correlated with usability. And,
in general, [HowDIY] supported the aspects of creativity that users value when learning 3D
printing. So, with the three levels. Designing Design: CAD is not required many users say okay
I don't need CAD to 3D print, but they still also want to be able to modify designs they see.
So, designing together: users want to collaborate but sometimes lack the confidence to talk with
the services themselves, but they say the online services are nice because they can
print what they want without judgment. And we saw different ways of communicating with
services where some users say okay this picture of my broken cooler how do i fix it with a 3D
print, and the service is able to respond saying okay this is how you design and test
something for this purpose. And, designing the "in-between" half did not generally know the steps
of 3D printing before the study, but afterwards almost all showed knowledge of these three steps
and it demystified the process of 3D printing for them so that way they get a better
foothold towards communicating with others about 3D printing. So, in the future,
3D Printing technologies could help empower greater expression allowing people to modify
without having to learn all the details of CAD. [3DP Technologies can] Help them integrate
systems like HowDIY directly into the 3D Printing hardware as well as people's environment and
software that they might use normally. In addition, these meta-design tools should
help encourage collaboration - help people get an initial foothold talking with services
because it's pretty difficult without help. So we presented a framework for 3D printing technologies
related to Meta-Design. And then, people learn 3D printing while using online services,
and that systems like HowDIY can help guide people to this style of learning.
Intelligent tools, systems, and services can greatly broaden participation in 3D printing.
Thank you