Unmaking: Enabling and celebrating the creative material of failure, destruction, decay, and deformation

Abstract

The access and growing ubiquity of digital fabrication has ushered in a celebration of creativity and making. However, the focus is of-ten on the resulting static artifact or the creative process and tools to design it.We envision a post-making process that extends past these fnal static objects-not just in their making but in their unmaking. By drawing from artistic movements such as Auto-Destructive Art, intentionally inverting well-established engineering principles of structurally sound designs, and safely misusing unstable materials, we demonstrate an important extension to making - unmaking. In this paper, we provide designers with a new vocabulary of unmak-ing operations within standard 3D modeling tools.We demonstrate how such designs can be realized using a novel multi-material 3D printing process. Finally, we detail how unmaking allows designs.