“Document-while-doing”

Maker and DIY communities are constantly sharing tutorials, projects documentation, as well as design sketches and model files. Producing documentation of good quality has its challenges, one of them being the amount of time needed to generate it. In this paper, we present a software tool that assists makers and hobbyists in creating reports and tutorials of their projects on-the-go, that is, at the same time they are working on them. A mobile phone application allows taking pictures, grouping them and annotating them with text and audio. All the material collected during the making activity is automatically stored online and presented in a website created for the project. The maker can later modify this site by means of adding additional text, reordering the pictures, or including extra multimedia content or design files. This tool is specially tailored to the documentation needs of the Fab Lab network.