Interactive Design Tools for the Maker Movement

Speaker: Bjoern Hartmann
Affiliation: UC Berkeley

Abstract:  The Maker Movement has led to a resurgence in interest how the artifacts in our world are designed, engineered and fabricated. It has led to new approaches for teaching art and engineering; new methods for creating artifacts for personal use; and new models for launching hardware products. It is enabled by a confluence of new technologies like digital fabrication and a sharing ethos built around online tutorials and open source design files.  My group’s research focuses on supporting the growing ranks of amateur designers and engineers in the Maker Movement.  A crucial missing building block is appropriate design tools that enable Makers to translate their intent into appropriate machine instructions – whether code or 3D prints. Makers’ expertise and work practices differ significantly from those of professional engineers – a reality that design tools have to reflect.  I will present research that enables Makers and designers to rapidly prototype, fabricate and program interactive products. Making headway in this area involves working in both hardware and software. Our group creates new physical fabrication hardware such as augmented power tools and custom CNC machines; new design software to make existing digital fabrication tools more useful; software platforms for the type of connected IoT devices many Makers are creating; and debugging tools for working at the intersection of hardware and software. We also create expertise sharing tools that lower the cost and increase the quality of online tutorials and videos through which knowledge is disseminated in this community.

Our work on these tools is motivated by the daily experience of teaching and building in the Jacobs Institute for Design Innovation – a 24,000 sq ft space for 21st-century design education that opened in 2015. I will give an overview of institute activities and projects, and how they inform our research agenda.

Biography:  Bjoern Hartmann is an Associate Professor in EECS at UC Berkeley, where he also serves as the faculty director of the new Jacobs Institute for Design Innovation. His in human-computer interaction has received numerous Best Paper Awards, a Sloan Fellowship, an Okawa Research Award and an NSF CAREER Award. He received both the Diane S. McEntyre Award and the Jim and Donna Gray Faculty Award for Excellence in Teaching. He completed his PhD in Computer Science at Stanford University in 2009, and received degrees in Digital Media Design, Communication, and Computer and Information Science from the University of Pennsylvania in 2002. Before academia, he had a previous career as the owner of an independent record label and as a traveling DJ.

For more information, contact Prof. Mani Srivastava (mbs@ucla.edu)

Date/Time:
Date(s) - Nov 13, 2017
12:30 pm - 1:30 pm

Location:
EE-IV Shannon Room #54-134
420 Westwood Plaza - 5th Flr., Los Angeles CA 90095