Human-Scale Personal Fabrication

Building large structures from small elements, creating life-size animated creatures, or making contraptions that we can ride on have almost certainly been everyone's childhood dreams. However, researchers and practitioners of personal fabrication have been mainly focusing on creating objects that fit into a human palm, also called “hand-size” objects. The reason behind this is not only because of the size limitation of consumer-grade fabrication machinery but also because of the very long printing time and high material costs of large-scale prototypes. To overcome these limitations, I combine 3D printed hubs and ready-made objects, such as plastic bottles, as well as welding steel rods into a certain type of node-link structures called “trusses”. However, the actual challenge behind my work is not only about achieving the size, but ensuring that the resulting large structures withstand the orders of magnitude larger forces than their hand-sized counterparts. Designing such structures requires substantial engineering know-how that users of personal fabrication equipment, such as makers, typically do not possess. By providing the lacking engineering know-how, my three end-to-end software systems TrussFab, TrussFormer, and Trusscillator enable non-experts to build such human-scale static, kinetic, and human-powered dynamic devices, such as pavilions, large-scale animatronic devices, and playground equipment. These systems achieve this by allowing users to focus on high-level design aspects, such as shape, animation, or riding experience, while abstracting away the underlying technicalities of forces, inertia, eigenfrequencies, etc. To help building the designs, the software generates the connector pieces and assembly instructions. With this body of work, I aim at democratizing engineering that enables individuals to design and fabricate large-scale objects and mechanisms that involve human-scale forces.