Instrumenting and Analyzing Fabrication Activities, Users, and Expertise

The recent proliferation of fabrication and making activities has introduced a large number of users to a variety of tools and equipment. Monitored, reactive and adaptive fabrication spaces are needed to provide personalized information, feedback and assistance to users. This paper explores the sensorization of making and fabrication activities, where the environment, tools, and users were considered to be separate entities that could be instrumented for data collection. From this exploration, we present the design of a modular system that can capture data from the varied sensors and infer contextual information. Using this system, we collected data from fourteen participants with varying levels of expertise as they performed seven representative making tasks. From the collected data, we predict which activities are being performed, which users are performing the activities, and what expertise the users have. We present several use cases of this contextual information for future interactive fabrication spaces.