2025 Research Speaker Series
Blair Subbaraman
PhD Candidate, Human Centered Design & Engineering
THURSDAY, OCTOBER 30
4:30 – 5:20 p.m.
Sieg Building, room 134
Automation for Insight
Digital fabrication promises to bring the benefits of programming to the physical world. Domain experts are adopting and adapting digital fabrication machines to automate scientific workflows, manufacture products, and more. Yet, computer-controlled machines like 3D printers remain extremely difficult to customize and control in new ways. This talk will present tools that support emerging practices with machines and emerging communities of practice around machines. Designing new workflows is just the first step–documenting and distributing these physical-digital workflows is critical to support repeatability, replicability, and broad uptake. Using examples across art and science, I will present tools that make authoring physical processes more like authoring code: a dynamic mode of creative inquiry for insight and expression.
About the presenter
Blair explores machine automation as a creative medium. He is a PhD Candidate at the University of Washington where he works in the Machine Agency.
The HCDE Research Speaker Series is hosted Thursdays in Autumn Quarter by the Department of Human Centered Design & Engineering at the University of Washington. Presentations are open to the public.