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Digital fabrication machines extend human creativity by enabling us to precisely manipulate the material world according to complex designs. Digital/physical creativity involves navigating relationships between digital design representations, physical processes, and emergent material behavior. Our interaction with this dynamic system is largely mediated by software tools, leading me to ask: How can software tools support digital/physical creativity?
This dissertation presents a series of four projects which I use to answer this question. To ground my work in current practice, I begin by studying an community of artist practitioners on #PlotterTwitter. I find that these artists rely on small, flexible tools that enable them to quickly iterate between digital designs and material outcomes. This insight informs development of three systems with which I contribute demonstrations of different strategies software tools can use to support digital/physical iteration.
First, I build Dynamic Toolchains, a live dataflow environment which demonstrates how extensible infrastructure can support end-user construction of feedback loops integrating diverse data representations, machines, and materials. Next, I build two versions of KnitScape, a design and simulation tool for knitting. The first shows how lightweight simulation can support development of intuition about emergent material behavior by enabling rapid exploration of unintuitive digital/physical relationships. The second shows how composable primitive elements enable this intuition to be applied to the creation of more complex designs. Together, these three systems serve as examples of three kinds of digital/physical creativity support: exploration of workflows, materials, and designs.
More generally, each of these systems supports an approach to making I identify as swatching, a ubiquitous creative strategy in which small artifacts are made to reason about creative processes. I propose the term “swatchiness” to capture how well software tools facilitate small artifact iteration. I argue that swatchiness is a highly desirable quality in software tools which support digital/physical creativity, and I use insights gained from my empirical and systems work to synthesize and contribute four “Principles of Swatchiness” which developers can use to consider swatchiness in future tools: rapid insight, tinkerability, targeted support, and multimodal exploration. I argue that it is critical to build highly swatchy tools for digital/physical creativity because they will not only help us make more things today, but also help us imagine what we could make tomorrow.