CAMeleon: Interactively Exploring Craft Workflows in CAD

2024-10-23

arXiv.org

AI Summary

Early implicit assumptions about materials and fabrication processes in CAD design often lead to late-stage design lock-in that is difficult to rectify. To address this, we propose a modular, extensible, interactive workflow exploration architecture that enables designers to execute, preview, and compare multiple fabrication processes in real time during CAD modeling. Methodologically, we unify empirical craft practices with academic manufacturing knowledge for the first time—via abstract workflow interfaces, CAD-model-driven process simulation, and collaborative design research. Our implementation reproduces five representative fabrication techniques, captures practices from six expert artisans, and extends three literature-based workflows. A design workshop evaluation demonstrates that the tool significantly broadens creative exploration and deepens procedural understanding of fabrication. By embedding fabrication awareness directly into the CAD environment, our approach advances co-design paradigms toward manufacturability-aware design.

Technology Category

• Cognitive Modeling & Cognitive Systems: Computational Creativity
• Humans and AI: Game Design — Procedural Content Generation & Storytelling
• Search and Optimization: Sampling/Simulation-based Search

Application Category

• User Modeling, Personalization and Recommendation: User modeling and simulation for interactive and conversational systems
• Economics, Online Markets and Human Computation: Architectures and workflows that use LLMs for crowd work
• Web Mining and Content Analysis: Web data generation and simulation

Abstract

Designers of physical objects make assumptions on the material and fabrication workflow early in the design process. Recovering from bad assumptions is hard, because the design and resulting CAD model are locked-in to those assumptions. We present CAMeleon, a software tool to interactively explore and compare fabrication workflows at the end of the design process. CAMeleon's modular architecture allows users to execute their design with different workflows, and preview results. Users can explore alternative workflows. CAMeleon's architecture is extensible with new workflows, increasing the scope of workflows available. Based on a survey of 150 fabrication workflows shared online, we implemented five fabrication representative workflows in CAMeleon. To validate CAMeleon, we collaborated with six craftspeople, replicating their workflows to gain insights into their practices. Additionally, we demonstrated CAMeleon's extensibility by implementing workflows from three research papers and reflecting on the extension process. Our design workshop (16 participants) highlights how working with CAMeleon unlocks a creative attitude of exploring workflows and opened up participants to workflows they had not previously imagined. We conclude that tools like CAMeleon have the potential to drastically expand designer's ability to experiment with new materials and fabrication workflows.

Problem

• Exploring fabrication workflows in CAD
• Overcoming locked-in design assumptions
• Extending workflow experimentation capabilities

Innovation

• Interactive CAD workflow exploration
• Modular software architecture
• Extensible fabrication workflow integration