MakeDo is a deceptively simple system for quickly and easily assembling pieces of cardboard, paper, fabric or plastic into … anything! The system includes basic connectors, as well as two different types of hinges. Also included is a special tool for cutting and poking the necessary holes in your materials. With only the tools and parts you find in the box, you can assemble structures, creatures, costumes or anything else you can dream up.

MakeDo is clearly marketed toward children, but having spent my share of time in both product design and exhibit design firms building mockups and prototypes, I can say these little snaps and hinges would be a welcome addition to the gaffers tape, hot glue, foamcore and exacto-knives of a professional model or prototype shop. Check out this quick video for a sense of what’s possible.

First, the fact that the complete interaction can be described so clearly in 40 seconds shows how novel and intuitive this little thing is. I don’t even need to describe what it does. It clearly combines form, interaction and customizability in one elegant package. It is in short – a great idea. However, while I won’t be surprised when I see something like this on a store shelf sometime soon, what struck me was the use of physical and digital prototyping tools to so completely and effectively express the idea.

The body is built with a 3D printer and the electronics are all off-the-shelf development tools such as Arduino and XBee, with the addition of an FM radio, accelerometer and speaker. None of these tools are custom and none of the technologies are opaque. In fact, all of the schematics, models and code are available on the Radioball Blog Entry. This entire project was realized by two people in a “short time” in order to serve as a “starting point for conversation about the need for richer, more spatial interactions.”

What I tend to write about are essentially tools to aid in, facilitate or speed up a traditional design process. What I find so exciting about Radioball is that an entire functional prototype was developed to describe the idea. I can write about tools that make 3D modeling easier, software to help you build walk-throughs, or electronics that you can use to aid in detailed user studies, but those are still essentially tools that aid an old-fashioned process. This thing is completely new, both in concept and execution. I can’t wait to see more projects like this and won’t hesitate to share what I find.

Now if you’ll excuse me, I need to start building my parts list for building (and maybe improving upon) my own Radioball.

Sketching in Hardware 3

Through discussion, experience and sketching we will examine the boundaries in developing physical computing: boundaries between components, between standards, between making objects and creating experiences, between cost and sustainability, between the expected and the unorthodox, and between creator and toolkit.

Sketching in Hardware is sponsored by ThingM and Tellart

The community aspect of Scratch is cool as well – because the environment is java-based, kids can upload their creations to the scratch website and comment on each other’s creations. I’m interested in seeing if the sharing aspect of scratch can elevate to the next level, where kids can complete a series of tutorials in order to learn more advanced capabilities of the system. If the satisfaction of completing a programming challenge was as satisfying as completing a level in a video game, kids’ investment in Scratch might continue beyond the academic user-testing-group and community-outreach testing environment that it no doubt was born in.

Scratch can also be controlled by a custom hardware controller, allowing kids to create projects that are controlled by a slider, button, light sensor or microphone.

Scratch Website
SEE ALSO : Lego Mindstorms NXT

GEM achieves this time-savings with the help of an easy-to-use editing tool that allows designers to select from a library of shapes, physics attributes, and other elements from a simple drop-down Windows menu. They can also type in specifics to match real-world measurements and actions. [...] Workers training with GEM software navigate just as they would a PC game, using commands and keys that correspond with on-screen movement

There is one detail in the article that stood out for me that I felt that Jana touched on but didn’t give the attention I thought it deserved: While simulation systems are in wide use in the automotive and aerospace industries, where tolerances and safety concerns demand it and budgets allow it, with this project what Siemens is really doing is developing a simulation technology for the masses. This ‘democratization of simulation’ will open up new markets in mid- and small-scale factory operations that might otherwise not have been able to afford Siemens’ services. Much of what I wrtie about on this site is ephemeral or pie-in-the-sky, but if this project bears out, it will be a great example of ’sketching’ technology enabling people to create real value on an industry-wide scale.

BusinessWeek.com : Siemens’ New Game Strategy

Some recent developments in the system are particularly exciting to me: I was exctied to see new support for Arduino, Phidgets and Wiring. The system was also on display at the 2006 Maker Faire in San Francisco, and a new hardware design (left) has been developed, which means that it lives on.

d.tools was developed at the Stanford HCI Group.

From the conference description:

Rapid prototyping of information processing devices offers a new way of creating technology for industrial design, experience design and technological creative expression. Sketching in Hardware 1 will bring together a select group of people intimately involved in this field to discuss the ideas, methods, challenges and potential of these technologies.

I’m interested to hear about what went down at the Henry Ford Museum this week. I suppose the rest of us will have to wait for the blog posts to percolate. For now, we’ll just have to look at the flickr pool and wonder.

Read More for UPDATES:

UPDATE 06/29/06 : Todd Kurt has a post on his blog with his presentation slides from his talk entitled “USB on Rails”, a proposal for circumventing the standard USB Driver infrastructure in hardware interfaces in favor of using the generalized Human Interface Device driver. The topic is over my head, but it seemed to be a call for someone to develop high-level tools to enable creators to be able to communicate in a more arbitrary fashion between hardware and software projects.

UPDATE 07/06/06 :
Make Blog has a quick wrapup of the conference, which runs down some of the quick projects that these heavy-hitters pulled off in two hours during their ‘makeathon.’

Mike Kuniavsky has some great reflections on the conference (exactly the kind of post I’ve been waiting for!)

Check out this video. It’s a concept video that ETC students produced to demonstrate applications for Dynamic Physical Rendering, an Intel-funded research effort to develop ‘programmable matter’, technology for creating self-constructing 3D objects on the fly.Watching the video, I imagine the car designers offing themselves in their garages after their work is literally squashed and warped at the whim of a CEO. Regardless, assuming that something like this will become viable in the coming decades, I am interested to see the ’software’ interface that enables you to reshape a 3D model by manipulating a physical object itself. When the corporate flunkie in the video tucks and shapes the car, how are they controlling what points on the model they are manipulating, or what tool they are using? Will a second input device be needed, or can the ‘claytronics’ hardware shape and color itself into a ‘hard’ software UI?

From an Interaction Design angle, this seems like the hardware analogue to Jeff Han’s Multi-Touch Interaction Research at MRL and other research at MIT’s Tangible Media Group and that the marriage of multi-touch and gestural interaction methods with dynamic physical rendering will open up stunning new methods of creating and shaping physical objects with human hands.

In the meantime, I wonder whether we aren’t better off just teaching people how to sculpt rather than creating advanced tools that do essentially the same thing?

I can’t say it any better than the Mindstorms FAQ:

LEGO MINDSTORMS NXT is a robotics toolset that provides endless opportunities for armchair inventors, robotics fanatics and LEGO builders ages 10 and older to build and program robots that do what they want.

Lego Mindstorms allows you to build machines using Lego’s classic TECHNIC bricks, but adds the ability to easily program your robot to respond to its own environment. You can build a robot, then using Lego’s development environment and programmable ‘brick’ microcontroller, teach it how to follow a path, avoid obstacles, pick up and move objects or any other number of actions. Lego is leveraging its fan base in developing new projects and applications for the system, and has a website set up for sharing new projects. Many schools, from high school all the way up to the top engineering schools in the world already use Mindstorms in their curriculum, so in addition to being a low-cost hardware prototyping system build on standard components, a generation of engineering students is being trained with the system and is becoming very facile with it.

The real power of Lego Mindstorms in terms of simplicity is its intuitive programming interface. Actions can be programmed in Lego’s custom graphical programming environment on a PC (Or Mac!) and beamed over bluetooth or USB connection to the brick. For advanced users, programs can also be written in Java or C. This allows rapid testing and re-development of projects, which is one of the reasons why it is so useful for education.

Examples:

This guy used Mindtstorms to build a digital camera head to take panoramic photos. Check out his VR turntable as well.

This thing solves a rubik’s cube.

And finally – a 3D Chocolate Printer