Daniel Ashbrook, PhD

Description

This idea is appropriate for a MSc thesis.

The 7GUIs benchmarks for GUI programming 📔 defines seven challenges, progressing in complexity, to benchmark GUI toolkits. While the point of 7GUIs is to evaluate the usability of programming language/GUI frameworks, this project asks: what would a set of benchmarks tasks for designing interactive fabricated objects (FabIOs are a new class of device) look like?

I think a fundamental difference here is that most GUI frameworks aim to be general-purpose, so you can program a calculator, a navigation system, a game, a spreadsheet, or an airline booking system. But—at least thus far—FabIO-style research projects don’t aim to do that. They tend to be much more focused on specific mechanical techniques for enabling particular kinds of interaction (see The Design Space of 3D Printable Interactivity 📔, Primitive input tasks for physical objects, Primitive output tasks for physical objects).

Questions to discuss

• Techniques vs tools?
• How to evaluate? 7GUIs uses Cognitive Dimensions of Notation

Possible starting points

• Learn about research in interactive fabrication [2], [3]
• Find existing 3D-printing benchmarks
  • Quality & calibration
    • Benchy: basic test for overhangs etc
    • Torture toaster: print-in-place mechanisms; tests for overhangs, bed adhesion, stringing

References

1. Kiss, Eugen. 2014. “Comparison of Object-Oriented and Functional Programming for GUI Development.” archive.org
2. The Design Space of 3D Printable Interactivity 📔
3. MIT HCI Engineering group’s Personal Fabrication Research database page