Primary objects: developing a new type of furniture for the early elementary classroom

The traditional North American elementary classroom is dominated by traditional passive furniture. With the continual use of the traditional typologies of desks and chairs, the classroom furniture fails to challenge the student's development and engage the imagination of the users. As research shows that children learn most through movement, emotions, and exploration, the passive furniture hinders a well-rounded learning experience. In this study, the approach for designing new furniture that fosters a sense of creativity, independence, and active learning is not only guided by the researcher's experiences, but also involves insight from elementary students and teachers. This thesis investigation used a participatory approach to enable the examination of the current activities and interactions occurring within the first and second grade classroom. Using the characteristics of middle childhood, the third teacher theory, and affordance, the researcher developed a line of furniture for active learning that enables the students to shape their learning environment and experience. The resulting classroom furniture provides for intimate interactions, physical activity, social development, and personal customization

ShapeMOD: Macro Operation Discovery for 3D Shape Programs

A popular way to create detailed yet easily controllable 3D shapes is via procedural modeling, i.e. generating geometry using programs. Such programs consist of a series of instructions along with their associated parameter values. To fully realize the benefits of this representation, a shape program should be compact and only expose degrees of freedom that allow for meaningful manipulation of output geometry. One way to achieve this goal is to design higher-level macro operators that, when executed, expand into a series of commands from the base shape modeling language. However, manually authoring such macros, much like shape programs themselves, is difficult and largely restricted to domain experts. In this paper, we present ShapeMOD, an algorithm for automatically discovering macros that are useful across large datasets of 3D shape programs. ShapeMOD operates on shape programs expressed in an imperative, statement-based language. It is designed to discover macros that make programs more compact by minimizing the number of function calls and free parameters required to represent an input shape collection. We run ShapeMOD on multiple collections of programs expressed in a domain-specific language for 3D shape structures. We show that it automatically discovers a concise set of macros that abstract out common structural and parametric patterns that generalize over large shape collections. We also demonstrate that the macros found by ShapeMOD improve performance on downstream tasks including shape generative modeling and inferring programs from point clouds. Finally, we conduct a user study that indicates that ShapeMOD's discovered macros make interactive shape editing more efficient

FABRICating FORM: generating three-dimensional upholstery amid experiments in process driven design

As an artist and designer, I created works of art by actively researching, reflecting, experimenting, and producing projects which embodied theories, methods and processes of both practices. Additionally, my work utilized research from numerous disciplines, which include art, craft, furniture, fashion, graphics, mathematics, and architecture. I strived for the user/viewer to experience not only a physical connection with my designs, but to also have an emotional engagement with them. My research aimed to enhance the image of the upholstery trade by examining the design possibilities of the craft. Much of my process extended apparel fabric manipulation techniques to the upholstery and structural systems of furniture in order to reveal the potential of transferring the methods from fashion to furnishings. The techniques informed the design process through the introduction of alternative approaches to upholstery manipulation, sewing, and patterning. The method helped to transform two-dimensional flat upholstered surfaces into three-dimensional upholstered forms. I categorized my early experimental works as one-of-a-kind. However, I explored streamlining my processes of making in order to investigate other methods of construction. Additionally, I researched how fusing furniture design and traditional millinery processes allowed for small batch reproductions of my works. Ultimately, my approach gravitated toward balancing handcrafted techniques with digital methods of fabrication

Fab forms: customizable objects for fabrication with validity and geometry caching

We address the problem of allowing casual users to customize parametric models while maintaining their valid state as 3D-printable functional objects. We define Fab Form as any design representation that lends itself to interactive customization by a novice user, while remaining valid and manufacturable. We propose a method to achieve these Fab Form requirements for general parametric designs tagged with a general set of automated validity tests and a small number of parameters exposed to the casual user. Our solution separates Fab Form evaluation into a precomputation stage and a runtime stage. Parts of the geometry and design validity (such as manufacturability) are evaluated and stored in the precomputation stage by adaptively sampling the design space. At runtime the remainder of the evaluation is performed. This allows interactive navigation in the valid regions of the design space using an automatically generated Web user interface (UI). We evaluate our approach by converting several parametric models into corresponding Fab Forms.National Science Foundation (U.S.) (Grant 1138967