Exploring and Understanding the Role of Workshop Environments in Personal Fabrication Processes

Growing interest in personal fabrication has resulted in many ways to ideate, design, and prototype, in addition to studies of who a maker is and the challenges they face. Less attention, however, has focused on the role of the environment in fabrication processes. By understanding how interactions with tools, fixtures, materials, and spaces shape workflows, we can better determine how to design the next generation of workshops, design tools, and fabrication equipment to support personal fabrication activities. To build this understanding, site visits and interviews at local makerspaces, fabrication studios, and workshops were conducted. These visits uncovered the rich practices and roadblocks generated by workshops today. The observations identified the importance of spatial layouts, territoriality and occupant agency, distributed knowledge, and organizational flux, among others, to design and fabrication processes. These observations were further synthesized into one possible direction for such spaces: hybrid workshops (i.e., environments that can leverage computation and responsive architecture to enhance a maker's ability to design and fabricate). This work identifies how such spaces could harness the rich practices and eliminate the challenges found with workshops today and discusses the technical innovations and philosophical questions that hybrid workshops will pose to the future of personal fabrication.