A system supporting analysis of prototyping in Fab Lab education

Abstract

Digital Fabrication Laboratory (Fab Lab) is an educational workshop that is open and easily accessible for personal fabrication. This workshop is equipped with tools for various aspects of technological materialization. In Fab Labs, makers and educators struggle to have proper documentation of their design process. Means for quick documentation are essential for supporting users’ iterative prototyping, as well as analysis and reflection on design activities. This thesis aims to provide a solution to the lack of proper tools for documentation and reflection on design stages in the Fab Lab educational context.

To this aim, different interconnected systems for supporting analysis of prototyping in the Fab Lab are developed. These include a mobile-enabled client-server architecture and a web-based administrative dashboard for supporting managing and analysis of annotated visual data of prototype designs in Fab Lab. Concerning the supporting analysis, the focus is to establish an easy to use documentation tool, which comprises of a mobile application and a web administrator for better Fab Lab educational experience.

This thesis demonstrates the theoretical part of the lo-fi design, evaluation, implementation of Restful Web Services and implementation of the mobile-enabled system for properly documenting prototyping stages and an admin control panel.

A usability testing was conducted for the developed mobile application and the web application. The purpose was to understand users’ feedback on the usability of the prototypes and the features in the applications that users find useful or the features that are required to be added or improved. The majority of the participants find the application useful.