This paper examines how students' ideas evolve into physical prototypes within a digital fabrication design course. Examining the materials used, customization approaches, iterations, and team dynamics of 26 student projects reveals interplays between ideas, available tools, materials and constraints. Findings show the predominance of techniques, design preferences, concept refinement, and teamwork challenges. The implications highlight the value of hands-on iteration for alignment with reality and the need to support collaboration skills alongside technical prototype development.

Digital fabrication laboratories play a role as an educational environment in which different learning activities incorporate advanced technological developments. Digital fabrication design education often involves exploratory and scaffolded processes of materialising ideas into products. However, FabLabs poses multiple challenges for pedagogy and design learning. Based on a large-scale digital fabrication course in a higher education institution, we examine whether teamwork carried out in a digital fabrication environment improves creativity. Furthermore, we analyse if teamwork affects self-assessment of learning activities involving building tangible artefacts. Finally, we examine whether the type of produced prototype affects the team's overall performance. The results allow for digital fabrication design education recommendations, including interventions intended for improving the creativity of the outcomes, team performance, and learning of different digital fabrication issues.

Prototyping is an essential activity in the early stages of product development. This activity can provide insight into the learning process that takes place during the implementation of an idea. It can also help to improve the design of a product. This information and the process are useful in design education as they can be used to enhance students' ability to prototype their ideas and develop creative solutions. To observe the activity of prototype development, we conducted a study on students participating in a 7-week course: Principles of Digital Fabrication. During the course, eight teams made prototypes and shared their weekly developments via internet blog posts. The posts contained prototype pictures, descriptions of their ideas, and reflections on activities. The blog documentation of the prototypes developed by the students was done without the researchers' intervention, providing essential data or research. Based on a review of other methods of capturing the prototype development process, we compare existing documentation tools with the method used in the case study and outline the practices and tools related to the effective documentation of prototyping activity.

The early (pre-requirement) stages of product development can provide relevant insights into the creative design process. At these stages, the communication of ideas during the prototyping process can serve as a rich source for information. In this paper, we attempt to document physical prototypes generated during the design process. We describe the design and preliminary testing of Protobooth Oulu: a system that can be used for documenting the process of prototyping products through capturing process output 'snapshots' in time at the early stages of product development. Our primary motivation is to facilitate documentation and reflection from an educational perspective. We tested the system during a course on digital fabrication in a FabLab environment, where ten teams documented their coursework over the course of six weeks. Managing to capture prototypes over time, analysis of the captured data showed evolution and major changes in the prototypes. Such data can be used for understanding the process of prototyping and consequently provide means to improve prototype and overall creative performance. We outline a future Protobooth system in terms of functionality.

This paper introduces new research that seeks to develop low-cost, high quality, mass customizable building assembly systems that provide visually rich design variations for housing or other small structures. The building systems are intended to be tailored for particular cultures and communities by incorporating vernacular decorative design into the assembly design. Two complementary research areas are brought together in this work: shape grammars and digital fabrication. The visual, aesthetic aspects of the research are explored through shape grammars. The physical design and manufacturing aspects are explored through advanced digital design and fabrication technologies, and in particular, build on recent work on monomaterial assemblies with interlocking components that can be fabricated with computer numerical control machines and assembled easily by hand. The long-term objective of this research is the development of formal, visual–physical grammars with rules that generate complete computer-assisted design/computer-assisted manufacturing data for fabrication of full-scale components for assembly design variations. This paper reports on the first phase of this research: pilot studies for prototype assembly systems that incorporate vernacular languages from different parts of the world. The results of these studies are very promising, and demonstrate a spectrum of strategies for embedding visual properties in structural systems. Important next steps in this research are outlined. If successful, this work will lead to new solutions for low-cost, easily manufactured housing, which is especially critical in developing countries and for postdisaster environments. These new housing solutions will not only provide shelter but also support important cultural values through the integration of familiar visual design features. Beyond the specific context of housing and building assemblies, the research has the potential to impact the design and manufacture of designed artifacts on many scales and in many domains, especially in domains where visual aesthetics need to be considered jointly with physical, structural, or material requirements, and where design customization and variation is important.