Mixed Reality Fabrication challenges the conventional focus on automation and precision in digital fabrication, instead advocating for approaches that bridge the gap between digital design and the wide tolerances, improvisation and non-uniform materials common to traditional craft practices.

This book promotes a humanist philosophy of technology, emphasizing the value of human labour, craft traditions, and local adaptation while revealing opportunities for reduced documentation complexity, accelerated knowledge transfer, waste reduction, and increased design freedom. Making by hand in mixed reality opens up a broad space of designs characterized by stochasticity, formed curves, networks and field conditions that would otherwise be impractical to draw and build.

Several case-study projects from the scale of sculptural pieces to small pavilions illustrate how working within immersive mixed reality environments can empower skilled craftspeople to realize complex digital designs through subjective interpretation of simple digital models, and demonstrates the potential of mixed reality to reshape the relationship between designing and making.