Conference Paper

Barriers to Using, Customizing, and Printing 3D Designs on Thingiverse

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Date

2016

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Source

Proceedings of the 2016 ACM International Conference on Supporting Group Work

Publisher

Association for Computing Machinery

Abstract

Thingiverse is the largest 3D design-sharing online community with millions of users. Thingiverse provides a low-barrier-to-entry for exploring 3D printing as users can quickly download premade 3D designs and ask design-specific questions. In this paper, we investigate users' activities on Thingiverse and their conversations by using quantitative and qualitative analyses. Our findings shed light on various barriers in using, customizing, and printing premade 3D designs. The results suggest that although Thingiverse plays a key role in helping users get started with basic 3D printing, there are many opportunities to streamline the design-download-customize-print workflows. In particular, opportunities exist for designers to provide richer metadata, clarifications, and expert tips to help users succeed in printing objects and customizing existing 3D designs.

Description

Alcock, Celena; Hudson, Nathaniel; Chilana, Parmit K. (2016): Barriers to Using, Customizing, and Printing 3D Designs on Thingiverse. Proceedings of the 2016 ACM International Conference on Supporting Group Work. DOI: 10.1145/2957276.2957301. Association for Computing Machinery. pp. 195–199. Sanibel Island, Florida, USA

Keywords

3d printing, thingiverse, design discussions, 3d communities

Citation

DOI

10.1145/2957276.2957301

URI

URI

https://dl.eusset.eu/handle/20.500.12015/4457

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GROUP 2016

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Referenced By

Number of citations to item: 40

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Please note: Providing information about citations is only possible thanks to to the open metadata APIs provided by crossref.org and opencitations.net. These lists may be incomplete due to unavailable citation data.source: opencitations.net, crossref.org