June SandCHI Meeting *New Location* Topic: UX and 3D Printing

"From 3D Printing and Personal Fabrication to Personal Design: Users as Makers". Come hear about UX and 3D prototyping from the head of the Media Computing Group of a German university!

In the homes of bleeding-edge tinkerers around the world, a revolution is happening that, as many predict, will overshadow the PC and internet revolutions that began with home computers in the... [read more]

"From 3D Printing and Personal Fabrication to Personal Design: Users as Makers". Come hear about UX and 3D prototyping from the head of the Media Computing Group of a German university!

In the homes of bleeding-edge tinkerers around the world, a revolution is happening that, as many predict, will overshadow the PC and internet revolutions that began with home computers in the 70's: Personal Fabrication. Sub-$1000 3D printers are a reality, and other computer-controlled digital fabrication tools such as lasercutters are close behind. Research labs are printing anything from molecules to entire houses, and Fab Labs around the world are introducing the public to the possibilities and dangers of this new era in production.

On the one hand, these tools are bringing exciting changes to the way we teach HCI and UI design: Instead of merely creating on-screen prototypes in Flash, our students are now able to rapidly create actual, working hardware prototypes with little effort, driving home the message that successful interactive products today require software UI design and hardware form factor design to go hand in hand. On the other hand, it is still largely unclear how users at home should create those 3D models to print or otherwise fabricate on their desktop factory of the near future - a major challenge that calls for radically new approaches, paradigms and interaction techniques for what I call "Personal Design", before we'll arrive at something like the MacPaint of Digital Fabrication.

Speaker bio:
Jan heads the Media Computing Group at RWTH Aachen University in Germany, after holding faculty positions at ETH Zurich and Stanford University. He's interested in user interfaces for smart environments, ubiquitous, wearable and physical computing, personal fabrication and rapid prototyping, interactive exhibits, and time-based media such as audio and video. His group is Germany's best-published research group in terms of archival publications at CHI, and he established Germany's first Fab Lab in 2009. In his spare time, he enjoys creating interactive electronic gadgets and playing jazz piano. This summer, he is on sabbatical at UCSD, and can be found athttp://hci.ucsd.edu/people/409.

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