Digital fabrication technologies, everything from consumer 3D printers and laser cutters to industrial knitting machines, are changing how we build the world around us and, more importantly, who gets to build that world. In the context of healthcare, 3D printing is changing how we create assistive and medical devices at the point of care and proved to be an essential tool for producing PPE during the COVID-19 pandemic. Despite these recent successes, a more careful examination of how healthcare professionals adopt digital fabrication technologies reveals a mismatch between what design tools are made to do and what clinicians want to do. Dr. Hofmann’s research reverses our expectations of who uses design tools and who builds them by bringing clinical domain experts into the process of building digital fabrication systems.

She has conducted extensive work on digital fabrication in various healthcare contexts, teaching us how medical domain experts approach fabrication challenges.