Building new software tools for professional digital fabrication requires that HCI researchers understand domain-specific materials and fabrication workflows to ensure software operations align with professional manufacturing requirements. To bridge the research-practice divide, we adopt a practice-driven software development methodology for digital fabrication in an artist-in-residence program. In our method, HCI researchers and craft professionals collaboratively develop software tools over three months. We piloted our methodology through two consecutive computational ceramics residencies with five professional craftspeople. The teams produced five novel software tools for clay 3D printing and hundreds of ceramic artifacts. We provide a detailed description of our methodology through artist and HCI researcher accounts and an analysis of the integration of software ideation, implementation, and debugging with professional art and craft production. Our work demonstrates a systematic mechanism for achieving meaningful digital fabrication software contributions with mutual benefit for artists and researchers.

Clay 3D printing provides the benefits of digital fabrication automation and reconfigurability through a method that evokes manual clay coiling. Existing design technologies for clay 3D printing reflect the general 3D printing workflow in which solid forms are designed in CAD and then converted into a toolpath. In contrast, in hand-coiling, form is determined by the actions taken by the artist’s hands through space in response to the material. We theorized that an action-oriented approach for clay 3D printing could allow creators to design digital fabrication toolpaths that reflect clay material properties. We present CoilCAM, a domain-specific CAM programming system that supports the integrated generation of parametric forms and surface textures through mathematically defined toolpath operations. We developed CoilCAM in collaboration with ceramics professionals and evaluated CoilCAM’s relevance to manual ceramics by reinterpreting hand-made ceramic vessels. This process revealed the importance of iterative variation and embodied experience in action-oriented workflows.