Research and Exploration
Plotter Crafts
Plotter Crafts is an independent project exploring how to bring handcrafted-ness to digital fabrication tools. In this short exploration, I prototyped and ideated upon this.
Premise
Digital tooling and traditional crafts have a clear gap in how the human touch persists and integrates with the process of building. Let’s build some explorations into what this means.
Research & Sensemaking
Two key questions started off this project: How might our interactions affect the experience of making things with machines? And how might our interactions become more practice-based, soft, and intuitive?
Plotter Explorations
I built a rudimentary brachiograph to do a series of 3 experiments to test against one another. Through three interaction paths, I attempted to draw the same drawing (this window).
One— a path of interaction like many we are used to, sending a file and plotting that file. it was the most repeatable process but created a static attitude that the machine either did or did not do its job.
Two— driving the plotter with a keyboard (WASD) was the most familiar, with little questions. The user was pretty excited to try multiple times and needed no instruction.
And Three— using gestural methods to drive the plotter- the most foreign which cased mild anxiety for the person unfamiliar to the process. This process though was the most engaging despite no instructions and was the only process that resulted in explicit celebration (!!)
References