Co-creation through digital fabrication technology: A systematic literature review

Abstract

Abstract

Co-creation is one of the popular methods for designing nowadays. Similarly, digital fabrication technology (DFT) is commonly used in all design research, education, and manufacturing industries. DFT is considered an effective way to make prototypes of any design due to usage of multiple types of tools. DFT is mostly used in various fabrication spaces like fab labs and makerspaces. Therefore, using DFT in makerspaces to materialize a design using co-creation is apparently a desired scenario for making prototypes of design ideas. Previous research points towards the use of design thinking model while making designs in makerspaces using DFT. However, there is a gap of a systematic literature review that gives us a holistic view on co-creation methods used for designing artifacts using DFT. Such a literature review will also give a better understanding of the relationship between the fields of co-creation and DFT. Therefore, in this paper, we conduct a systematic literature review on the topic of co-creation using DFT in makerspaces. To achieve this objective, a search was performed for relevant articles in three major databases and identified 92 articles. A systematic review methodology was used for screening. Overall, 21 articles were found relevant. The results show that collaboration and co-design types of co-creations are popular in the literature of makerspace and DFT. Future recommendations are also provided to extend this research work.