Transcript

Prototyping and Fabrication | Dr. Matthew Wettergreen | TEDxRiceU

hello thank you for asking me to speak today I'm really excited to talk about two things that I spend most of my time thinking about and doing and that's prototyping and fabrication I'll attempt to explain to you what I mean by this and give you some examples and today I want to tell you a story about the place that I work on campus which i think is the most magical place on all of rice campus it's called the Austrian engineering design kitchen and at the Astron engineering design kitchen our students learn how to bend plywood without breaking it they believe that plywood sorry the cardboard is the most renewable resource we have and they learn that you can save lives by using ping pong balls at the OED k we teach a technique of problem-solving called the engineering design process and the engineering design process is a way to take very large problems and by using decision based steps and quantitative reasoning break them down in a much smaller problems but what it allows us to do is work on real-world client-based problems like this one with Pedro Pedro's unique physiology prevents him from using a wheelchair and the normal method of operating a wheelchair but he is able to push forward and so we designed him a wheelchair that allowed him to row in his wheelchair moving forward just by pushing and he uses that everyday and it gives him the mobility that he desired we also used the engineering design process for non-human projects the Houston Zoo is one of our best collaborators so this is a project that we developed for the giraffes to extend the feeding time of their daily hey to mimic the natural habitat that they live in so the engineering design process is extremely versatile and one of the tools that we have in the engineering design process is this thing called prototyping so prototyping is solving problems by creating physical objects or artifacts and there's a range of physical objects artifacts that you create in the process of prototyping it might be hastily written words on post-it notes might be detailed drawings it might be physical objects or it might be physical objects that help you move along the process of converting an idea into a manufactured object and so in the United States entrepreneurship and product design tells us that if you have an idea there's a pathway to get it onto the shelves at a store and so if you and your life want to take an idea and move it into a manufactured product it's a long path along the way you'll start with your idea you're going to move into and spend most of your time doing prototyping after you finish prototyping you might move into fabrication which would involve some experts design engineers industrial engineers but you will spend most of your time doing prototyping prototyping can neatly be broken down into three categories as ideas evolve you'll develop a low fidelity prototype then a medium fidelity prototype and then a high fidelity prototype in order to give you an example and explain what I mean by this we have some heroes that we associated with low medium and high fidelity prototyping so our first hero for low fidelity prototyping is a gentleman named MacGyver who who has ever heard of MacGyver in this room and so I'm excited to see people that were not born when the show is on television raise your hands so MacGyver got himself into preposterous situations and he got out of them just as easily with a multi tool that you can see here it's not a sonic screwdriver it's just a paperclip so he is the hero that we look to for low fidelity prototyping and on the other end and high fidelity prototype in our hero is Iron Man does anyone identify with Tony Stark does anyone think that they're a Tony Stark in line okay so who so does that mean that you here identify with MacGyver you think you're a quick problem solver all right maybe you identify with our medium fidelity heroes people who sell things on etsy these are the people that make crafts objects with their hands and they're nowhere as crafty as MacGyver but they're certainly nowhere as polished as Tony Stark now I'm going to move into some examples of prototypes that our student teams have created on the left you see a low fidelity prototype of the giraffe feeder and what I want you to what I want you to pick out is the number of pieces that are that are in this prototype and also the general quality of these pieces you've got elastic bands there's a water cooler that's been caught up there's some wood there's some PVC in the medium fidelity prototype column we've got a piece that's been created with a laser cutter some of the edges are cleaner it looks like they meant to make it look like this and then if you move into the high fidelity prototype on the right very clean lines it looks like a manufactured product almost there's even some aesthetics there's that nice diagonal line that cuts through these are perfect examples of low medium and high fidelity prototypes when you're creating low and medium and high fidelity prototypes you use different tools low fidelity prototypes are created with whatever you have around you scissors glue and tape when you create medium fidelity prototypes you're going to be using things like laser cutters and hand tools maybe some power tools and when you move into high fidelity prototyping which is almost where you would send it to a factory you might use CNC machines or injection molding low fidelity prototypes are individually unique if I asked you to solve a problem for me with the prototype you would produce something that would be individually unique if I asked you to solve it again even if you attempted to make the same prototype there would be some unique changes to that medium fidelity prototypes are a little bit closer down the line of solving the problem and so they might have some sort of similarities or some multiples might share some features high fidelity prototypes are manufactured in batches that are exactly the same but the caveat of this is that in order to manufacture high fidelity prototypes you must have some knowledge of advanced manufacturing skills and techniques so not everybody can do medium or high fidelity prototyping but everybody can do low fidelity prototype grain and in fact succeeding in low fidelity prototyping is more about practical ingenuity and creativity than it is about anything else so it doesn't matter what materials you have and it doesn't matter what tools you have it just matters that you're creatively applying those tools to solve a problem conversely success in medium and high fidelity prototyping does require access to materials and specialized training and not everybody has that access to materials or specialized training at the OED k we do have that training and those materials and so we do train our students to make things that look like this with plasma cutters and laser cutters and we get to train them in the techniques of how to fabricate something that looks almost like a finished product while they're solving a problem we use something called the prototyping library which is an example of standards of excellence of pieces and parts that you can make with a laser cutter and so we have this object that you can look at and touch like a petting zoo at the OED k which has 28 examples of things and projects you can make with a laser cutter and our students use these to learn how not just to operate a laser cutter but actually to make and solve problems using a laser cutter and as a result in my class that's called prototyping and fabrication they get to make pieces like this these are all cut out of plywood about you have never seen plywood used this way bends and moves this is the product of the midterm and I think this is very excellent work from our students and so as a product of this class as a product of the work that they do the OED k I want them to be able to prototype at multiple scales and I want them to be able to see raw material on the top of wood and of acrylic and think about what's possible that they could make from it and as a product of this class I do believe that they're able to do that but I don't want them just to see neatly stacked wood and neatly stacked acrylic and think about what they can do I want them to see any material as raw material to make anything and in fact there are places in the world where would looks like this half hazard least act and plastic looks like this discarded tubs of palm oil I had the opportunity to go to Ethiopia last year where I taught engineering design to faculty in two students there and here in Ethiopia wood looks like this and plastic looks like this but I guarantee you it is the same raw material as our students have here you can do just as much with it the market in Addis Ababa is the largest market on the continent of Africa goes on for miles and miles and it is a perfect demonstration of cradle to grave mentality objects that are used are discarded by someone else picked up by someone else and then sold back to a different person these objects are then collected melted down reshaped changed and then resold either to individuals or factories this stall here sells used paper it also sells used rocks that have been picked up sorted and put into bins to be purchased this is real recycling and these are all raw materials when I was teaching and in Ethiopia I gave the students and the faculty a design challenge that I'm going to give to you as well so this is the thought experiment on the left here is a three-wheeled taxi called a bajaj it's got a very well it's very dangerous it's basically a motorbike with three wheels with tin hand wrapped around it and it collapses in on itself when it crashes and it hits pedestrians all the time and when it does it causes compound femoral fractures so that's bone outside of the body so many accidents happen with Bajaj's that in the ER they have a code for it it's HB be hit by Bajaj so we gave a design challenge the students in the faculty to design a safer Bajaj to ping pong balls represent the driver and the passenger and I gave them these materials shown here to use to design a safer Bajaj when the Bajaj was turned upside down the ping-pong balls had to fall out just like a normal Bajaj which doesn't have seatbelts and they had 25 minutes to use these materials to create a Bajaj so take a second look at this and think about how you would build a safer bajaj here's an example of one of the transportation vehicles that were built you can see that ping-pong balls are in the center there's a yellow one and you can see that there's some wire that's been bent like a spring so it's like a shock absorber this is very unique and if the student or the student team built again they would build something completely different what you're looking at here is the physical representation of the assumptions and the idea is that the student team had about the safety of vehicles and each student team came up with something just as unique this is a range of what we saw in this challenge after they finished building we tested these for safety we strung up a zip line and we shot all of them down there was another criterion that it needed to go down the zip line within a certain amount of time because making a safer car that goes at a snail's pace is totally ineffective so we had some successes where the ping-pong ball stayed in the vehicle we also had some failure ping-pong balls fly out well what we learned here and what our students learn is that every single person is capable of prototyping you don't have to identify as an engineer you don't have to identify as an architect you don't even have to identify as a career or a position that build things for a living every single person has creative ingenuity and can build things and also everything is a raw material so again what doesn't have to look neat and stacked and acrylic doesn't have to look me in stacked milk jugs are great prototype of material there are there are prototyping materials everywhere and everybody is capable of prototyping all you need to do is find the material and you've got raw material everywhere in your house you've got ever got it everywhere in your office everything is raw material so my message to you is that if you want to be a problem solver with physical objects using prototyping assemble your own low fidelity prototype and kit from available materials duct tape is your friend source scissors and just get your hands dirty and if you think oh I can't do this oh you know why would I prototype something that I need to fix why would not just pay someone to do it I don't want you I want you to not worry about danger because I witness this on the way home from Ethiopia this is a gas line that's pressurized and it's been fixed with two straws and some duct tape terribly unsafe but it works you too can prototype take these three simple rules when you're prototyping don't worry about how it looks build it rough and build it fast your prototyping is solve a problem not to develop a product don't worry about how it looks finally focus on functional solutions that work thank you