PhD defence by Carlos Eduardo Tejada

Title

Print-And-Play Fabrication

Summary

In recent years, it has become increasingly accessible to create interactive applications on screen-based devices. Contrary to this ease, and despite their numerous benefits, creating tangible interactive devices is a task reserved for experts, requiring extensive knowledge on electronics, and manual assemblies. While digital fabrication equipment holds promise to alleviate this situation, the majority of research exploring this avenue still present significant barriers for non-experts, and other-domain experts to construct tangible devices, often requiring assembly of electronic circuits and printed parts, prohibitive fabrication pipelines, or intricate calibration of machine learning models. This thesis introduces Print-and-Play Fabrication: a digital fabrication paradigm where tangible interactive devices are printed, rather than assembled. By embedding interior structures inside three-dimensional models that leverage distinct properties of fluid behavior, this thesis presents a variety of techniques to construct tangible devices that can sense, process, and respond to user’s interactions without requiring assembly of parts, circuits, or calibration of machine learning models. Chapter 2 provides an overview of the fabrication of tangible devices literature through the lens of Print-and-Play Fabrication. This chapter highlights the post-print activities required to enable each of the efforts in the literature, and reflects on the status of the field. Chapters 3 and 4 introduce two novel techniques for constructing tangible devices that can sense user’s interactions. AirTouch uses basic principles of fluid behavior to enable the construction of touch-sensing devices, capable of detecting interactions in up to 12 locations, with an accuracy of up to 98%. Blowhole builds on this concept by employing principles of acoustic resonance to construct tangible devices that can detect where they are gently blown on. Blowhole-enabled devices can enable up to seven interactive locations, with an accuracy of up to 98%. Conversely, in Chapter 6 I introduce a technique to encapsulate logic computation into 3D-printed objects. Inspired by concepts from the Cold War era, I embed structures capable of representing basic logic operations using interacting jets of air into three-dimensional models. AirLogic takes the form of a toolkit, enabling non-expert designers to add a variety of input, logic processing, and output mechanisms to three-dimensional models. Continuing, Chapter 5 describes a toolkit for fabricating objects capable of changing their physical shape using pneumatic actuation. MorpheesPlug introduces a design environment, a set of pneumatically actuated widgets, and a control module that, in tandem, enable non[1]experts to construct devices capable of changing their physical shape in order to provide output. Last, I conclude with reflections on the status of Print-and-Play Fabrication, and possible directions for future work.

Assessment Committee

Professor, Irina Shlovski (Head of Committee, DIKU UCPH) 

Associate Professor, Eve Hoggan, University of Aarhus, Denmark

Associate Professor, Anne Roudat, University of Bristol, United Kingdom

Academic supervisor

Associate Professor, Daniel Ashbrook, University of Copenhagen, Denmark

Moderator for this defence will be

Assistant Professor, Joanna Bergström, University of Copenhagen, Denmark

The defence will be held both physically and online via Zoom.

For a digital copy of the thesis, please go to: https://di.ku.dk/english/research/phd/.