The Future of Personal Fabrication

Stefanie Mueller

X-Career Development Assistant Professor in the MIT EECS Department joint with MIT Mechanical Engineering & Head of the HCI Engineering Group at MIT CSAIL

TUE. Nov 06, 2018 @ 4:30pm

Building 550, the Atrium

Abstract:

Stefanie will discuss why personal fabrication and 3D printing is such a hype right now and will provide an answer to the question if it is here to stick. For this, she will draw a parallel to the history of personal computing and discuss what made computing available to everyone and what were the key developments that enabled everyday use. Different areas will be analyzed from processing speed, to device form factors, data transfer, and the interaction model. She will show that the same developments are happening right now in this new domain of personal fabrication. With examples of research projects from her group, she will show a range of fabrication systems that move us closer to a future in which everyone will be able to design and fabricate their own objects.

Bio:

Stefanie Mueller is the X-Career Development Assistant Professor in the MIT EECS department joint with MIT Mechanical Engineering and head of the HCI Engineering Group at MIT CSAIL. Stefanie is a Forbes 30 under 30 in ‘Science’ and has received several Best Paper and Honorable Mention Awards at the ACM CHI conferences for her work on personal fabrication. She is a Co-Founder and General Co-Chair of the ACM SIGGRAPH Symposium on Computational Fabrication and the ACM SIGCHI Summer School on Computational Fabrication and Smart Matter. Stefanie has given more than 50 invited talks as an invited speaker at universities and research labs, such as MIT, Stanford, Berkeley, Harvard, CMU, Cornell, ETH, Microsoft Research, Disney Research, and Adobe Research.