SBIR Phase I: Sketch-based interaction for designing for laser cutters

The innovation of sketch-based interaction for agile manufacturing substantially lowers the barrier to entry for novice engineers and designers. Low-cost rapid prototyping hardware -- 3-D printers and laser cutters -- offers tremendous educational potential, enabling students to personally design, engineer, and build complex artifacts. This potential can only be realized if students have modeling tools that facilitate such exploration. Unfortunately current design software is hard to learn and use and its graphical interface and feature set is poorly suited to exploratory prototyping. These problems impose a barrier: faced with baffling interfaces many students wrongly "learn" that engineering design is beyond their capabilities. This novel interaction paradigm aims to remove this barrier by allowing learners to sketch what they want to make, quickly and precisely. The Sketch It, Make It software will provide a paper-like interface where designers create CAD drawings while retaining the creative and cognitive advantages of freehand sketching. Combining sketch recognition and constraint management in a tablet computer, freehand drawing could provide a powerful, seamless interface to digital fabrication. This project will determine whether a tablet computer can support a freehand drawing interface and whether it supports student fabrication projects; and it will develop an architecture for sketch-based design tools. The broader/commercial impact: The market for rapid fabrication -- laser cutters and 3-D printers -- is growing rapidly in both formal and informal education. As schools, fab labs and eventually individuals acquire hardware, students and other users will find that the software to operate this machinery is unwieldy and complicated. The proposed software tools address a critical customer need: make it easy to design for rapid fabrication. More generally, the proposed innovative interaction paradigm has broad application in commercial software in any domain where people sketch or make diagrams. Rapid fabrication gives students opportunities to learn design by doing it. Making design accessible to all empowers citizens to play active roles in engineering their world. By sidestepping barriers that standard CAD tools impose, Sketch It, Make It enables students to design and make things they otherwise could not have made. Students learn that engineering design and fabrication is fun, useful, and (most importantly) that they can do it. The underlying innovation --integrating recognition with constraint management -- if widely adopted, can transform human-computer interaction. After thirty years of mouse-driven interfaces, tablet computers demand new forms of interaction. Through Sketch It, Make It we may learn to think differently about interacting with computers.