From Digital Form to Finished Jewelry: Additive Manufacturing, Craft, and Wear

A digitally modeled ornament can retain its intended shape in a rendering yet lose an essential feature during fabrication or finishing. This critical narrative review examines how such downstream requirements influence jewelry design, drawing on fifteen journal articles published between 2020 and 2026. The selected work includes computational and rule-based design cases, scan-fitted settings, polymer and precious-metal processes, craft comparisons, and studies of materials and user preferences. These sources examine different objects: proposed forms, test features, manufactured parts, finished examples, and reported preferences. Their comparison shows that the choice of production route affects more than dimensional feasibility. Support access, polishing, assembly, and setting can require changes to surface, clearance, or proportion that also alter the design's visual and tactile character. Research on successful fabrication provides a firmer basis for these observations than the available evidence on sustained wear, repair, or environmental performance. The article therefore treats finishing conditions as part of form development and proposes a concise way to record design decisions as an object moves from model to use. Comparisons of functionally equivalent finished pieces, followed through wear, would better establish where digital complexity adds value to jewelry.