ReFabricator: Integrating Everyday Objects for Digital Fabrication

Since current digital fabrication relies on 3D printer very much, there are several concerns such as printing cost (i.e., both financial and temporal cost) and sometimes too homogeneous impression with plastic filament. To address and solve the problem, we propose ReFabricator, a computational fabrication tool integrating everyday objects into digital fabrication. ReFabrication is a concept of fabrication, mixing the idea of Reuse and Digital Fabrication, which aims to fabricate new functional shape with ready made products, effectively utilizing its behavior. As a system prototype, we have implemented a design tool which enables users to gather up every day objects and reassemble them to another functional shape with taking advantages of both analog and digital fabrication. In particular, the system calculates the optimized positional relationship among objects, and generates joint objects to bond the objects together in order to achieve a certain shape.