Plot-spaces: 3D-fabricated objects to think with

“you build something so that you can think with that thing” – Sara Hendren, “Now It Springs Up!” undefended / undefeated, 21 May 2025.

Since summer 2024 I have been using my university’s two makerlabs (the uCreate Studio in the UoE library and the EFI Makerspace) to experiment with representing spatiality in literary texts whose complex geographical, spatial and scalar qualities resist straightforward cartographic or geometric conventions. After some prototyping, I came up with objects to which I’ve given the name plot-spaces: three sides of a cube with text inscribed on the inside faces, and from one of whose faces a curve is, in CAD-speak, “lofted” out in order to represent a quality in a literary text which changes over time, such as the scale of entities referred to in a poem. (The awkwardness of trying to describe them in words compared to how easy they are to understand when you hold one in your hand is entirely apropos.) I designed them in Autodesk Fusion 360 and have been printing them at various sizes on Prusa and Bambu printers, as well as milling one in aluminium on a Penta machine. The name is something of a playful nod to Bakhtin’s concept of the chronotope, in which temporality and spatiality are intrinsically connected.
Designing and, eventually, fabricating the plot-spaces has been both generative and surprisingly restorative. In the bureaucratised university, it’s astonishing to me that maker labs exist as spaces that somehow escape the logics driving the rest of the institution. Just being in one - working on my laptop while waiting for a print to finish, or babysitting the milling machine in case something jams or jumps away from where it should be - while the printers hum and the machines whirr and people whittle and chatter and set the embroidery machine going and tend to the resin printer is restful.
I am giving a paper on plot-spaces and their provocative materiality at the 2025 ACH conference; this builds on work I presented at the 2023 annual DH conference on plotting space and scale in Emily Dickinson. If you’d like to try making your own plot-space, you can find a tutorial here.

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