Week 10 Tutorial: Fabrication studio

Supervised 3D printing and laser cutting — closing the loop from digital back to physical

3 May 2027

Before the session#

Bring a digital model or a computed decision ready to fabricate — from your tracking, rule-system or sensor work — and know whether it needs the printer or the laser cutter.

In the session#

1. Attend the lecture on 3D printing and laser cutting, then move into tutorial time. This week closes the round trip’s other digital-to- physical leg — where week 1’s scan turned matter into data, this session turns data back into matter — and the lecture’s job is to explain what each machine is actually good at before you commit a design to either one.
2. Confirm whether your digital model or computed decision needs the printer or the laser cutter. The two machines solve different problems and a design suited to one is often unusable on the other: a laser cutter cuts a 2D path through flat sheet material, so it wants a design that’s genuinely flat or built from flat pieces that fold or slot together, while a 3D printer builds up an actual solid volume layer by layer, so it wants a design that only makes sense as a 3D shape in the first place. Deciding this before you open the file with the tutor saves a session lost to redesigning on the spot.
3. Have a tutor check your file before any job starts. The fabrication lab runs supervised only, per the lab safety policy — both machines can do real harm if a file is wrong or a setting is off, so this isn’t a formality to rush through, it’s the actual gate on running anything.
4. Adjust your design for the machine’s constraint the tutor flags. 3D printing and laser cutting fail in different ways, and the point of this step is catching the failure on screen rather than discovering it after a job has already run and consumed material:
   • A laser cut needs its cut and score lines separated onto their own layers or colours, since the machine treats each differently, and needs a kerf allowance built into any slotted joint — the beam removes a sliver of material as it cuts, so a slot cut to its nominal width comes out too wide unless you’ve compensated for that loss up front.
   • A print needs enough wall thickness to hold its own shape, plus the right orientation and supports for any overhang, or it warps as it cools or collapses mid-print before the job even finishes.
5. Run the checked file on the printer or laser cutter. Stay for at least the first pass or first layer rather than walking away once the job starts — it’s the point where a wrong setting is cheapest to catch, before more time and material go into a job that was already going wrong.
6. Collect the fabricated part. Check it against the digital model before calling the job finished: does a slot actually fit the way it did on screen, does a printed wall need support material cleaned off it — the constraint you designed around in step 4 is the one you should be able to point to here as having worked.

Afterwards#

You leave with a fabricated part — the physical end of a pipeline that started with tracking, a rule system, or a sensor. Week 11’s clinic is your last chance to shore up whichever half of the toolkit this pipeline leaned on less, before the final.