May 12, 2023
Megan Hofmann of Northeastern University

Optimizing Medical Making: Applications of Generative Design for Fabrication in Healthcare Settings

Digital fabrication technologies, everything from consumer 3D printers and laser cutters to industrial knitting machines, are changing the way we build the world around us and, more importantly, who gets to build that world. In the context of healthcare, 3D printing is changing how we create assistive and medical devices at the point-of-care and proved to be an essential tool for producing PPE during the COVID-19 pandemic. Despite these recent successes, a more careful examination of how healthcare professionals are adopting digital fabrication technologies reveals a mismatch between what design tools are made to do and what clinicians want to do. This research reverses our expectations of who uses design tools and who builds them by bringing clinical domain experts into the process of building digital fabrication systems.

This talk summarizes extensive work on digital fabrication in a variety of healthcare contexts and what we have learned about how medical domain experts approach fabrication challenges. Next, we discuss three design systems developed to better meet the needs of non-technical domain experts. First, a compiler for machine knitting creates new opportunities to support automated textile design. Second, a framework for object-oriented 3D modeling supports collaborative design reuse and verification. Third, an optimization toolkit helps programmers and domain experts collaboratively build generative design tools in novel domains. Each of these systems presents opportunities to change how we build in the context of healthcare, accessibility for people with disabilities, and design tools for sustainable textile manufacturing.

About the speaker:
Megan Hofmann is an Assistant Professor of Computer Science and Mechanical Engineering at the Khoury College of Computer Sciences at Northeastern University where she directs the Accessible Creative Technologies (ACT) Lab. She is a leading accessibility and fabrication researcher and her work on the emerging area of Medical Making, the application of digital fabrication in healthcare, has won multiple best-paper awards at ACM-CHI and ASSETS and the 2022 SIGCHI Outstanding Dissertation award. Additionally, she is a leader in the burgeoning field of Automatic Machine Knitting. Megan received her PhD in Human-Computer Interaction from Carnegie Mellon University in 2022