Hybrid fabrication
How can we bring human skill back into the fabrication process
“A hand is not simply a part of the body, but the expression and continuation of a thought which must be captured and conveyed. “
by Honoré de Balzac
The rise of technology and artificial intelligence takes over many human tasks. This sounds good, but it could make people lose many connections with the real world.
The human body equips lots of dexterous skill which embodies a wealth of physical understanding and could help us react to the material world. However, in 21 century, most of the advanced digital fabrication tools proposed to leverage computer power and machine to replace human force, especially the human brain and hands. With the automated machine, we can make labor and fabrication more efficient, but it also means we seldom use our hands to engage with making the process. The idea of automation decreases the opportunities for people to engage with materials. Why is this a problem, then?
When interacting with the material, hands are the extension of our brain. When people craft, eyes, hand, brain, and mind will become a closed circuit, and that haptic experience is beyond language. However, when people start using the computer, it creates distance between maker and objects and breaks this circuit. Once we let the computer do everything for us, we lose the chance to experience the process. For fields like product design, this could mean a problem when we design things that live in the real world without knowing their real-world properties. Nowadays, many design students don’t have to go through the sculpting training; they learn how to design model in CAD software, and finally print it out with the 3D printer. In this scenario, designers rely on the modeling simulation; they lose track of the real-life situation, detach with the material, texture, and how the geometry shape was constructed.
So how can we respond to this problem? Researchers proposed the “hybrid workflow” to leverage the very unique and best part of humans to complement the computer-based design and machine fabrication. The innovative workflow explores the duality between hand and machine through practice. These workflows combine the expressivity and intuition of human skill with the scalability and precision of the machine. The chart below could represent the notion of hybrid fabrication
There are several steps could think of when laying out the hybrid workflow:
1.
Define the task and find out what is the fundamental material processes performed by the tool. Think of what kind of perception processes required by a human user? That information could help with determining the role of human and machine in the task. We can take plaster sculpting as an example. When shaping the plaster, people use all kinds of trowels to profile the plaster surface, scraping the soft plaster when it is wet or carving when it already hard.
2.
Hybrid human-digital processes. Measure and simulate the natural processes of the craftsmanship, collecting those data to generate design prompts algorithmically. For example, capture the human movement through motion capture or depth camera, and string those digital data to CAD software. Once the information flow was set, designers could analyze the data and generate the design. In terms of plaster sculpting, we can use motion capture camera to track human’s movement, digitalize those dexterous skill and muscle memories in the sculpting process. Algorithmic transformations can be applied to measurements of human gesture, even if based on non-physical principles such as arbitrary scaling.
3.
Material considerations. How do the specific physical properties constrain the working process? The plaster has limited curing time profile, which constraint the workability, sequence of workflow, and scale. At the same time, designers could look into the physical transformations which could utilize material properties in expressive ways. Multiple fabrication processes can provide opportunities to simplified the digital transformations, for instance, vacuum forming, molding.
4.
Design the interaction between human and the system. Besides producing the fine product, the experience bring by the hybrid workflow is also essential. The human center and enjoyable environment could encourage the user, and moreover, let user rapidly explore the ideas, refining the concept in several interactions.
However, there are some limitations to this workflow. To sense human motion in real-time, machines work best with repetitive gestures, which are often related to utilizing hand tools. They have a harder time to capture and understand freehand techniques because of the complexity of movement and context-dependent factors. The machine may not have the ability to analyze this nuanced body movement at this moment.
This hybrid workflow adding human’s dexterous skill and workmanship into the traditional fabrication process, and breaks the duality of human and machine. The machine is such a powerful working partner. They can think fast, move fast, and can process tons of information which the human can never process. But human also processes much knowledge that the machine cannot replicate. Therefore, if humans’ situated actions could add come the play and compensate for the machine’s limitation, the hybrid fabrication could have its value.
