FW-HTF-P: Upskilling Craftspeople to Prepare for the Future of End-user Driven Manufacturing

Texas A&M Engineering Experiment Station, College Station TX

Investigators

Abstract

This Future of Work at the Human-Technology Frontier Planning (FW-HTF-P) grant will focus on a preliminary study to gather information on challenges and opportunities for promoting craftspeople to participate in the future manufacturing workforce. It also contributes to an integrative research framework with stakeholders in crafts to push forward the frontier technology. This project will build a multi-disciplinary team to create new knowledge in three diverse areas that advance impacts on end-user fabrication, human-computer interaction, culture and learning, and social psychology. Through this planning grant, the team aims to characterize the craft end-users, their challenges, barriers, and opportunity to serve as the future manufacturing workforce at home given the technology and proper training that the research will result in. It will promote a new research framework and validation that collaborations between researchers and practitioners in crafts can push science and technology forward. The iterative technology development process identifies technologies that challenge existing patterns of workers and society, by reflecting the real-world needs and barriers of craftspeople at various levels and adapting current craft practices. This project builds a team across several disciplines to establish the foundational knowledge and build metrics to measure the success of end-user manufacturing. The team will identify consumer-caring product properties through in-the-wild surveys, in addition to the partnership with the Houston Center for Craft to reach professional craftspeople who are affiliated with the center, identifying customization needs, ideal workflows, and critical design parameters that need to be supported through end-user software tool for custom 3D printing. The project will result in a preliminary understanding of the interplay between material response and processing parameters (e.g., printing speed, material layout, etc.) in 3D printed object’s stiffness and strength, to computationally customize them in composite polymers using accessible machines and materials. This research will reshape the manufacturing pipeline through novel techniques and end-user support tools in which the end-user specifies custom needs and individual end-user manufacturers can process them to produce personalized products. This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.