DUB Seminar will be conducted using Zoom, via an invitation distributed to the DUB mailing list. Participants who are logged into Zoom using a UW account will be directly admitted, and participants who are not logged in to a UW account will be admitted using a Zoom waiting room.
Digital fabrication technologies, everything from consumer 3D printers and laser cutters up to industrial knitting machines, are changing the way we build the world around us and, more importantly, who gets to build that world. In the context of healthcare, 3D printing is changing how we create assistive and medical devices at the point-of-care and proved to be an essential tool for producing PPE during the COVID-19 pandemic. Despite these recent successes, a more careful examination of how healthcare professionals are adopting digital fabrication technologies reveals a mismatch between what design tools are made to do and what clinicians want to do. My research reverses our expectations of who uses design tools and who builds them by bringing clinical domain experts into the process of building digital fabrication systems.
In this talk, I will summarize my extensive work on digital fabrication in a variety of healthcare contexts and what we have learned about how medical domain experts approach fabrication challenges. Next, I will discuss three design systems I’ve developed to better meet the needs of non-technical domain experts. First, I present a compiler for machine knitting that creates new opportunities to support automated textile design. Second, I discuss a framework for object-oriented 3D modeling as a way of supporting collaborative design reuse and verification. Third, I present my most recent work on helping programmers and domain experts collaboratively build generative design tools in novel domains. Finally, I will present current and future applications of these systems in the context of healthcare, accessibility for people with disabilities, and design tools for sustainable textile manufacturing.
This seminar is co-organized with UW CREATE.
Megan Hofmann will be starting as an Assistant Professor of Computer Science and Mechanical Engineering at the Khoury School of Computer Science at Northeastern University in the fall of 2022. Currently, she is a PhD Candidate at the Human Computer Interaction Institute at Carnegie Mellon University advised by Scott Hudson and Jennifer Mankoff. She has spent the majority of her PhD in Seattle working closely with the Make4All lab. She is a Siebel Fellow, an NSF Fellow, and a Center for Machine Learning and Health Fellow. Megan’s research has been published at top HCI conferences such as CHI, UIST, ASSETS, and CSCW and her work on the emerging area of Medical Making has won multiple awards at ACM-CHI and Assets.