Making It Work Is the Work: Engineering Maturity as Epistemic Work
We contribute some reflections on our attempts to progress HCIxFabrication research from the lab to the market in a short paper "Making It Work Is the Work" (to be discussed at the RealFab'26 workshop at CHI 2026 in Barcelona). This is work with my colleagues Danny Leen, Stig Konings, and Raf Ramakers at the Digital Future Lab (UHasselt – Flanders Make).
Many fabrication systems we build in HCI research work well as prototypes but are hard to reuse or transfer beyond the original publication. We think a key reason is that the knowledge needed for transfer; how a system behaves across different materials, machines, and users, often does not exist yet at publication time, because the engineering work that would produce it is not something we typically value or reward.
In this paper we try to reframe that engineering effort as knowledge-producing work in its own right. We propose six dimensions we call Fab-ilities (buildability, executability, reliability, maintainability, transferability, scalability) as a simple vocabulary for talking about what a fabrication contribution has established and what remains open.
We also look back at five of our own projects that we tried to push toward market-ready products: JigFab (project page), StoryStick++, Silicone Devices, LamiFold, and PaperPulse. We describe how our attempts at commercialization, spin-offs, and market exploration ran into gaps between what we had published and what was actually needed.
The paper is available as HTML and PDF.
Citation
@inproceedings{leen-realfab26,
author = {Leen, Danny and Konings, Stig and Ramakers, Raf and Luyten, Kris},
title = {Making It Work Is the Work: Engineering Maturity as Epistemic Work},
booktitle = {Proceedings of From Papers to the Real World: Making Fabrication
Research Matter, a {CHI'2026} Workshop},
series = {RealFab'26},
year = {2026},
location = {Barcelona, Spain},
publisher = {ACM}
}