Demonstrating FEDT: Supporting Characterization Experiments in Fabrication Research

Recent fabrication research across HCI and graphics shows an incredible diversity of work, much of which features characterization experiments. However, performance and reporting of these experiments are wildly inconsistent, not only reducing transparency that reassures reviewers and readers of a project's rigour but also challenging a technique's replicability by future researchers. We propose building a domain-specific language (FEDT: Fabrication Experiment Design Tool) which can express a wide variety of such characterization experiments, and which can be extended to many different machines. This language is sufficiently expressive to describe many types of experiments (3D printing, lasercutting, post-processing), including ones which require human intervention in their steps. We replicate classic fabrication experiments in FEDT to demonstrate its flexibility and discuss the importance and applicability of domain-specific languages and tools to Open Science.