Craft-Inspired Digital Fabrication: A Study of Interactive Robotic Clay Carving

Digital fabrication workflow is typically linear that starts from ideating a design form via 3d-modelling or programming, later ends fabricating this predetermined design form. In this linear workflow, design ideation must finish before making/fabrication begins. As a result, designers often miss the opportunity to design with material affordances, such as discovering and incorporating intricate material expressions that can only emerge through an enactive and embodied process of making. Knowing that such process of making forms the cornerstone of craft, this study investigates how digital fabrication can gain craft-like qualities by allowing material expressions to be gradually discovered and mastered. We thus developed an interactive fabrication system by integrating force feedback into a robotic clay carving process. Real-time force feedback allows improvisational control of carving actions by manually interacting with the robotic end effector on-the-fly. Accordingly, carved clay expressions are continuously modified during fabrication. Our results demonstrate that this approach allows intricate material expressions to serendipitously appear, which in turn inspire new design ideas to form and gradually develop. Our contributions include: 1) a new enactive and embodied interaction modality that continuously regenerates a self-similar fabrication action sequence so that its design space can be gradually learned; 2) a craft-inspired digital fabrication workflow that supports on-the-fly design ideation by sequentially sketching, isolating, and composing an intricate material expression; and 3) a collection of critical considerations that propose how our findings could help integrate more improvisation, serendipity, and reflection in digital fabrication.