need-finding for personal fabricators

Andrew Lambert, Rui He, Isaac Piller, Anant Mohan

Need-finding for Personal Fabricators

Our cross-functional team of four conducted a contextual inquiry to discover and address any unfulfilled human needs in the Champaign-Urbana Fab Lab.

Our users, personal fabricators, are motivated by personal gain to complete projects requiring machinery. They work in “fab labs”.

“A Fab Lab (fabrication laboratory) is a small-scale workshop with an array of flexible computer controlled tools that cover several different length scales and various materials, with the aim to make ‘almost anything’.”

In the Fab Lab, you can...

design,1

fabricate,2

build,3

...personal projects!

For our study, we interviewed staff and visitors in the Fab Lab. We also conducted participant observation.

We noticed that kids and their parents--a target audience--were mysteriously missing.

We set up visits with kids and parents so we could understand their experience.

Parents sought an educational bonding experience with their kids. They felt intimidated though.

Kids expressed wild expectations about what they could build.

“I want to build a robot!”-Billy, age 8

Parents wanted clear expectations.

“How much does it cost?”

$“How much time

does it take?”“What materials do we need?”

“I don’t even know what to do.”

?

We began to ideate to address these needs.

Our initial top concept was a project management website to help kids and parents scope a project.

While testing our concept, we saw that projects were done on-the-fly with help from lab staff.

Instead of planning, children ran to a nearby display case to pick small projects that they wanted to work on.

As a result, the concept evolved to an online display case which conveys project possibilities to prospective visitors.

We also created guide signs to orient visitors to the physical space quickly.

Links

High fidelity mockups of DISPLAYKASE Project poster

After our recommendations, the Fab Lab’s website now sets concrete expectations for visitors.

The lab now also features guide signs.