unmaking

celebrating the creative material of destruction



The access and growing ubiquity of digital fabrication has ushered in a celebration of creativity and “making.” However, the focus is often on the resulting static artifact or the creative process and tools to design it. We envision a post-making process that extends past these final static objects – not just in their making but in their “unmaking.” By drawing from artistic movements such as Auto-Destructive Art, intentionally inverting well-established engineering principles of structurally sound designs, and safely misusing unstable materials, we demonstrate an important extension to making – unmaking. Unmaking is an emerging topic of interest in multiple sub-communities of HCI – including digital fabrication, critical design, and STS – that intersects with issues of sustainability, reusability, and more-than-human design. It is the central topic of a CHI2022 workshop, an upcoming CHI2024 workshop, and a TOCHI Special Issue.

My interest in unmaking in particular is in creating the materials combinations, fabrication workflows, and software tools so that designers may build in unmaking effects during the time of conception for their designs. In our CHI2021 paper, we provide designers with a new vocabulary of unmaking operations within standard 3D modeling tools.

Proposed vocabulary for unmaking operations.

We demonstrate how such designs can be realized using a novel multi-material 3D printing process. For our exemplar workflow, we implement splitting and bulging operations in PLA objects by selectively printing chambers of thermally expanding microspheres.

Thermally expanding microspheres expand to over 60x their original volume when exposed to heat.
Microspheres printed alongside PLA in an FDM 3D printer.

After printing, objects appear to be normal 3D-printed PLA objects, but upon exposure to heat, they split or bulge as the designer intended.

Example splitting and bulging in response to heat.

We also created a custom Blender plug-in that allows designers to visualize splitting and bulging effects when designing objects to print. The plugin automatically modifies the model to include chambers of microspheres, and a custom slicer generates the appropriate gcode for the 3D printer.

Unmaking software tool.

With other materials – such as those that dissolve in water, rust, or can be consumed by organic matter – and other fabrication strategies – such as intentionally printing weak layers or building in internal structures that allow two chemical reagents to combine when the object is handled in a certain way – many more unmaking effects are possible.

More unmaking effects with different materials and fabrication strategies.

publications

  1. CHI
    Unmaking@CHI: Concretizing the Material and Epistemological Practices of Unmaking in HCI
    Samar Sabie, Katherine W. Song, Tapan Parikh, Steven J. Jackson, Eric Paulos, Kristina Lindström, Åsa Ståhl, Dina Sabie, Kristina Andersen, and Ron Wakkary
    In CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems Extended Abstracts (Workshop), 2022
  2. CHI
    Sustainable Unmaking: Designing for Biodegradation, Decay, and Disassembly
    Katherine W. Song, Fiona Bell, Himani Deshpande, Ilan Mandel, Tiffany Wun, Mirela Alistar, Leah Buechley, Wendy Ju, Jeeeun Kim, Eric Paulos, Samar Sabie, and Ron Wakkary
    In CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems Extended Abstracts (Workshop), 2024
  3. CHI
    Unmaking: Enabling and Celebrating the Creative Material of Failure, Destruction, Decay, and Deformation
    Katherine W. Song and Eric Paulos
    In Proceedings of the 2021 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems, 2021