FEDT: Supporting Experiment Design and Execution in HCI Fabrication Research
summary
FEDT is an openly available tool that encodes fabrication experiments as an embedded Python DSL, letting researchers generate flowcharts, produce artifacts like G-code and CSVs, and run procedures with design and execute modes. The team models 42 experiments from 10 papers, captures human–machine handoffs, supports loops, randomness, and object tracking, and finds four common error types when comparing models to papers. FEDT successfully executes end-to-end replications (a laser‑cut Circwood case and a 3D‑printer GID case).
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chapters (10)
- 0:00Introduction to FEDT
- 0:23Challenges in fabrication research
- 1:47Defining the fabrication workflow
- 3:10Workflow variations and contributions
- 4:54Introducing FIT tool design
- 6:38FIT features and execution
- 7:41Evaluating FIT with real experiments
- 9:26Researchers' reflections and errors
- 10:28Future work and community call
- 10:48Closing and Q&A
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