Machine-o-Matic is my current thread of work, pushing to formalize digital fabrication workflows as computer programs. As more and more people from increasingly diverse backgrounds adopt digital fabrication tools, the existing infrastructure for controlling machines, materials, and data poses a greater and greater barrier for new use cases. Moreover, I believe it is not enough to build new user interface for these emerging use cases; we must instead allow end users to build their own interfaces. To address this, it is best to represent workflows—moving from ideas, to design files, to tool paths, to machine control, to sensor data, and back again— as programs in a language specialized for machine design and control. By doing so, we expose the most expressivity to novice users who are comfortable with a little coding, while also building a rich library of example workflows that are formalized as textual programs. We also leverage techniques from programming language research, such as verification and program synthesis, to help with real-world fabrication tasks.
Design Process
Coming soon.