The Future Digital Innovators: Empowering the Young Generation with Digital Fabrication and Making

So far, the implications of digital fabrication and making on digital innovation and the future of IS discipline and profession remain unexplored. This is where this study contributes and it does so by focusing on the perspective of the young generation, in whose hands the future of IS profession, indeed, lies. Digital technology has become intimately intertwined with our everyday life. New stakeholders take part in its development and innovation processes, including children. Calls for offering more in-depth technology knowledge for children have emerged within research on digital fabrication and the maker movement: children need to be educated to design, make, and build new technology. We critically examine existing studies on digital fabrication and making with children, in order to see what the potential of digital fabrication and making for empowering children to become digital innovators of the future is. Implications to IS research, practice, and education are presented

Volvelles, Domes and Wristbands : Embedding Digital Fabrication Within a Visitor's Trajectory of Engagement

We present the findings of an empirical design study exploring how situating digital fabrication within a souvenir-making activity can enrich an audience's encounter with cultural events and engage visitors in discussion and reflection upon their experiences. During an incremental accumulative design process, in collaboration with an arts organisation, we developed a series of fabrication activities that offered visitors the opportunity to create their own personalised souvenirs based on their experience of a cultural event. By analyzing visitors' trajectories of engagement with the event we explore three key findings: activity embedded digital fabrication engages new audiences, encourages conversation and reflection, and presents organisations with new and more playful ways to gain insights into audience experiences

Designing and making in a school context:a process model and practical insights

Abstract. Teaching 21st century skills, STEM (science, technology, engineering, mathematics) subjects and programming for children is the future in education. This thesis was inspired by the project ordered by INTERACT research unit from the University of Oulu, and the goal was to familiarize school children with programming and digital fabrication while collecting research material for INTERACT research unit. Research unit wanted a research material on a project that combines design and making in school context and utilizes University of Oulu Fab Lab. The idea was to conduct a making (digital fabrication) project with children and research it. This thesis is based on the experiences of the project and aims to answer a research question: “What kind of process model supports design and making in school context?”. This research was done using qualitative research methods. This thesis views the social aspects of people in the school system, their relationships, goals, and actions. A lot of data was collected about human beings, their experiences, and reflections. Sessions with children were video and audio recorded but also reflected by project members and children themselves. Gathered data was analyzed using content analysis. The main result of this thesis is a reflective design process model that supports design and making in the school environment. In addition to that, this thesis explain what kind of actors are involved in the process, such as children, teachers, schools, researchers, parents, university and so forth. It describes the goals that needs to be taken into account; most importantly from curriculum and teaching point of view, but also from the IT (Information Technology) point of view. This process could generate more skillful programmers, designers, makers, if this kind of design and making projects could be introduced to school environment. Thesis also enlightens the working in the school context and the pros and cons relating to it. School context is best for projects that focus more on learning goals than end results and outcomes. Results are finally analyzed in light of having digital fabrication and making part of everyday school work

Measure of Abstraction: Embodied Fabrication and the Materiality of Intimacy

This thesis presents a theoretical and practical research conducted for the last 4 years on interactive fabrication. Interactive fabrication is an emerging field and takes as a starting point with the numerical control of digital fabrication machines, modulated with parameters of interactivity. 

I approach digital fabrication as an ambiguous technology in the ways it articulates the digital with the material, the shapeless with the finite, the abstract with the concrete. As the realm of digital fabrication expands into mainstream culture and maverick machines rise again, there is an opportunity to tamper with expectations of precision and proficiency. Interactivity is the modus operandi for such experimentation: embracing time, latency, distance and the “decor of everyday life” as conditions. Personal data such as emails, text messages or sleeping data can turn into parameters of control of a CNC-machine, supplanting the typical predetermined file. This is the premise for a human-machine companionship or ‘embodied fabrication’. 3 art projects, Twipology, Rabota and Streamline have been prototyped to enact these possibilities. The fabricated outcomes move beyond functional or ornamental categories, inspiring a mutating and odd materiality, one of intimacy. These objects are objects of a third kind, “born witness” of a moment of interaction with the material world. This thesis is an ‘undisciplinary’ endeavor, proposing a research method involving art, design, ontology and HCI considerations