Working Performatively with Interactive 3D Printing: An artistic practice utilising interactive programming for computational manufacturing and livecoding

This thesis explores the liminal space where personal computational art and design practices and mass-manufacturing technologies intersect. It focuses on what it could look and feel like to be a computationally-augmented, creative practitioner working with 3D printing in a more programmatic, interactive way. The major research contribution is the introduction of a future-looking practice of Interactive 3D Printing (I3DP).I3DP is articulated using the Cognitive Dimensions of Notations in terms of associated user activities and design trade-offs. Another contribution is the design, development, and analysis of a working I3DP system called LivePrinter. LivePrinter is evaluated through a series of qualitiative user studies and a personal computational art practice, including livecoding performances and 3D form-making

Fiction meets livecoding in a future of “smart” products

How might livecoding help users control the complex choreography of networked, “smart” gadgets? For example, how might they manage their networked refrigerators for the home that are hooked into smart energy meters, alongside weaponised home security systems linked into indicators of local and global political unrest? A future of networked sensors and computerised gadgets could potentially reduce users to passive actors in a tightly-controlled world, or give them previously unseen levels of control over their environments through livecoding. Livecoding used playfully could explore choreography of complex gestures and smart lighting systems. Product designers could livecode supply chain software to choose environmentally sound, local materials for furniture production. Scientists could disseminate research livecoded data toolkits[4]. Using the techniques of “futuring” or “scenario planning,” we will develop short outlines of stories in the genre of “design science fiction.” Structured discussions and ideation exercises led by an academic in Product Design and Interaction will challenge participants to develop provocative but plausible future scenarios that may lead to new areas of research. Provoking discussion between computer-based practitioners and product designers around how smart, networked products could and should interact with their users should spark new insight and collaboration between the two disciplines

The CyberAnthill: A Computational Sculpture

The CyberAnthill is both a generative sculpture and a Live Computational Sculpting (LCS) system that uses a 3D printer and custom software to build plastic sculptures out of layered cellular automata. As the title alludes to, the cellular automata are inspired by Langston’s Ant and the light cycle racers in the cult 1980’s science-fiction movie Tron. Instead of the normal process of printing exacting, predetermined 3D models, the 3D printer generates its plastic forms by running unpredictable computer code

Working Performatively with Interactive 3D Printing: An artistic practice utilising interactive programming for computational manufacturing and livecoding

This thesis explores the liminal space where personal computational art and design practices and mass-manufacturing technologies intersect. It focuses on what it could look and feel like to be a computationally-augmented, creative practitioner working with 3D printing in a more programmatic, interactive way. The major research contribution is the introduction of a future-looking practice of Interactive 3D Printing (I3DP).I3DP is articulated using the Cognitive Dimensions of Notations in terms of associated user activities and design trade-offs. Another contribution is the design, development, and analysis of a working I3DP system called LivePrinter. LivePrinter is evaluated through a series of qualitiative user studies and a personal computational art practice, including livecoding performances and 3D form-making

Peek: Games for Exploring the Future

Peek is a game for exploring how diversity in technology, policy, society and ecology leads to rich futures. It can be used in both teaching and general play sessions with the public. The game is a response to the disinformation prevalent in popular media, and in particular the difficulty in explaining AI and machine learning and their benefits and drawbacks to lay audiences. There is a real need to educate people about how these potentially disruptive technologies could transform society, one way or another

Space as Time. A Study in Improvisational Interactive Computational Sculpting

This paper reviews some of my work in experience based computational sculpture, using a technique which I call Interactive 3D Printing, an amalgamation of generative art, livecoding, and sculpture. I3DP draws on a rich history of iterative revision and aesthetic refinement in the computational arts. This work foregrounds the time-based experience of digitally fabricating objects by describing them using only terms for time and rhythm (beats, beats-per-minute, duration, musical notes) following Paul Klee’s observation that “space itself is a temporal concept”. It explores the liminal state between finished/unfinished objects inside a manufacturing process by incorporating the sound of the manufacturing process into the experience of its products. I discuss how this work can be understood as both an improvised livecoding performance and a work of generative art where each iteration (or “instantiation”) has the potential to self-actualise and change over time according to the intrinsic nature of both computation al and improvisational works of art

Little creatures

As the Internet becomes increasingly embodied and made physical, our relationship with it inevitably changes. The Internet has also changed our relationship with each other, particularly as an enabler for collective endeavour. A project from Evan Raskob and Fiona French has brought all of this together, in the form of group-designed, digitally-enabled beings

What Design Research Does ... : 62 Cards Highlighting the Power and Impact of UK-based Design Research in Addressing a Range of Complex Social, Economic, Cultural and Environmental Issues

Design research makes a significant contribution to the UK economy and society as a whole. Ever since the establishment of the Government Schools of Design in the nineteenth century, the UK has been widely acknowledged as an international leader in design research. Following this lead, the What Design Research Does… cards highlight the wide range of social, economic, cultural and environmental impacts that design research, funded and based in the UK, makes all over the world. The 62 cards illustrate unambiguously the positive changes that contemporary UK-based design researchers are making in many complex issues. Each What Design Research Does… card lists the challenges and issues faced by the design researchers, who they collaborated with, the research methods and approaches taken, the outcomes of the design research, what the main results and findings have been, and what impact the design research has had. In short, the What Design Research Does… cards clearly articulate the breadth of social, economic, cultural and environmental impacts that UK-based design researchers are achieving today

Filling Time, Filling Space

This paper documents the creative process of the author, a practitioner of computational art and design and an academic, during the development of their thesis on Interactive 3D Printing (I3DP). I3DP focuses on what it might look and feel like to be working as human practitioner in the new territories of the computationally-augmented creative arts, if these future artists and designers could truly work with 3D printing in a more programmatic, interactive way. The research process included the development of LivePrinter, an I3DP prototype, user studies, and associated creative outputs. These outputs form a record of experiments in computational ways of filling physical space (sculpturally), and filling time (musically)

Science Fiction and Design as World-Making

This essay discusses the evolution of two inter-disciplinary design projects that use the methods of tool-building and fiction writing in their research process. The first project discussed, Spoke, is a game for exploring critical thinking, ideation techniques, and future narratives. Each time it is played it generates new research outcomes as narratives and discussion. Beyond narratives, the second project, LivePrinter, uses tool-making as a form of future thinking and "research as design." With widespread 3D printing and robot manufacturing in use, LivePrinter explores how printing-as-performance challenges our current view of automated production’s strengths and weaknesses