This is a wide range of prototypes; this is kind of interesting.
I see 6 of them here.
Is this all of the prototypes that you made?
No, no, we had a lot more.
So this is our final product and even though this is the first one that I brought here
today in reality we had 20 or so more before this that were lower resolution that really
led us up to this point from this point on.
When we first started off we chose to work with materials that were cheap and also very
easy to manipulate.
So you mentioned paper, we also used – made prototypes out of wood and those are materials
that you can manipulate and attach and sort of combine together in a very easy fashion
and that’s great for that early stage because the questions you're trying to answer, they’re
very basic questions and you want to be able to move through them quickly.
It’s not a great idea to jump right into 3D printing prototypes because that’s a
process that takes a lot of design work on the computer and actually 3D printing it is
time consuming and an expensive process.
So when you have a lot of these earlier questions you want to answer early on in the project
you want to work with materials that are easy to work with, that are cheap, and you also
don’t want to spend too much time on your prototypes because you tend to get really
attached to them.
The early prototypes you’re just iterating quickly so you make it and you throw it away
and you make another one.
So you wouldn’t want to just jump to that process and ignore these earlier processes.
Yeah, definitely not.
If we had done that we’d probably be way further back in the timeline of this actual
project.
It’s really important in the beginning I think to kind of move quickly and to go through
iterations fast to answer these questions, these very basic questions in a timely manner
because if you just jump to this you're gonna be waiting forever for your prototype to come
out of the 3D printer and then you’re gonna find some mistake that you made that you’ll
have to go into the computer to fix and you’ll have to 3D print another one and that’s
a long time that you're gonna have to spend waiting and modifying your prototypes whereas
if that happens in the beginning when you're working with these prototypes that are made
out of paper you just throw it away and you make another one out of papers; it’s very
easy and you can do that in the same day.
So at this end these prototypes are pretty well developed and as you mentioned it takes
expensive machines and longer processes.
Down at the early end it sounds like almost something you can do in your room or in your
house; you don’t need special equipment.
Can you talk about sort of where you made these prototypes?
Yeah, so like you said a lot of earlier ones don’t require a lot of heavy machinery or
expensive equipment and so a lot of the ones made out of paper, foam cord, cardboard I
just made at home because you can do that anywhere.
You just need the material and hot glue gun or something and you’re set.
With these 3D printed prototypes, I guess take a step back with prototypes that are
made out of wood, that’s also something you can do at home but you do need some equipment
for that so I made most of the prototypes that are made out of wood here at the Product
Realization Lab in the wood shop because you need equipment like band saws, - sanders,
stuff like that.
And then definitely for the 3D printed prototypes you need a 3D printer so it’s not really
something you can do at home so you can either outsource that, send it to a company to get
it 3D printed, or what I did in this case was I used the Product Realization Lab’s
3D printer.
I bet you wish you’d kept all those paper prototypes.
Yeah.
Yes.
Why is that?
It would make a good historical record of what you’ve done.
Yeah, it makes a really good historical record of where you started and where you ended up
and it’s also kind of neat to see the progression.
Also for intellectual property purposes it’s kind of a good idea to at least document all
your prototypes so the ones that I don’t have with me here today I do have pictures
and stuff of them.