Pro2booth - Capturing Physical Prototypes
Prototyping consists of a range of methods across both physical and digital domains. Through the product development process, a selection of different methods are used from each domain. Designs therefore transition multiple times from the virtual domain to the physical and vice versa. As well as each transition having a cost associated with it, there is also the risk that key design knowledge can be lost. Product development can therefore be improved by minimising this transition cost and optimising knowledge capture. This requires i) understanding what a physical prototype is and, ii) developing environments for capturing physical prototypes themselves.
Understanding what constitutes a physical prototype is enabled by a taxonomy of physical prototypes. This considers a prototype in terms of its purpose, structure and measured properties and can be considered an exhaustive categorisation of prototypes.
Key element of this taxonomy are applied in Pro2booth – a prototype capture environment. Building on Protobooth from TrollLabs @ NTNU, it permits the capture of a virtual or physical prototype along with its associated design rationale and insights that it provides to the product development process. Its incorporation into the design process provides minimum disruption, provides real-time insights for design reviews and captures critical information that details why the product is the way it is, preventing re-work and future design mistakes. Pro2booth’s inputs and outputs are shown to the right
Pro2booth Lite – a version for capturing prototypes anywhere – was launched for this year’s IDEA challenge where it was used to successfully capture over 250 prototypes in a 4 day design sprint. An excerpt of the Pro2booth dashboard is shown in the picture at the top of the page.
Once prototypes are captured through a project, it is possible to undertake analysis on them and create visualisations. These enable a design team to keep track of prototypes that have been made, their contribution to the design process and represent an important log of how a product results being the way that it is. Some sample visualisations can be seen in pictures below. Whilst these are still images, the networks themself are interactive and can be explored in 3D space!
The next steps for Pro2booth include completion and integration of the physical rig that enables the automated capture and upload of pictures of prototypes to the platform.
People
Mark Goudswaard
Research Associate
James Gopsill
Senior Research Fellow
Lorenzo Giunta
Research Associate
Lee Kent
Research Engineer
Blog Posts
21st Century Prototyping exhibit at ICED 2023
Setting the stage to show the community our technical capabilities and upcoming research, this week the 21CP team exhibited a range of demos at the ICED 2023 conference! We had three sets of demos up and running for attendees to try: Design in VR: Aman led the charge with a demo showing the different ways […]
IDEA challenge 2023
The IDEA challenge returned in May 2023 for its third iteration! This time it was hosted by the University of Zagreb and building on the success of the the challenge’s first two iterations was set to be bigger and better than ever! The challenge saw teams working fully virtually to develop a CubeSat satellite that […]
21st Century Prototyping at the ProSquared Network+ Launch
This week Chris and the team joined the launch event for the new ProSquared Network on the Democratisation of Digital Devices. This 5-year network aims to connect industry and academia to find new ways to overcome production barriers at lower volumes, by making design, prototyping, and manufacture faster and more efficient. Doing so will be […]
Revisiting prototyping in 2020: A snapshot of practice in UK Design Companies
Prototyping is an indispensable activity in the product development process but what does prototyping practice in industry look like? In this video we take a ‘snapshot’ of prototyping practice from 5 companies to see how practice has evolved and understand what the characteristics of industrial practices are. This work was presented at the International Conference […]
The IDEA Challenge 2021
The IDEA (International Design Engineering Annual) Challenge just completed its first iteration! Inspired by current events, this year’s participants competed to develop a novel vaccine transport system to aid in the distribution of vaccines across rural Colombia. Fourteen participants from across four institutions participated. Over the course of four days, the groups worked hard to […]
How are prototypes fungible?
Prototyping constitutes a wide range of methods spanning both physical and digital domains, each with their respective benefits and drawbacks. Different methods are used in the product development process (PDP) to generate knowledge about both the problem and design solution. A key ingredient to successful product development is ensuring that the right knowledge about the product is […]
Research internship investigating BCI applications in engineering design
Written by Louise Larsson Summary of project and intended outcomes In my individual research project this term I investigated potential alternative user interfaces for computer-aided design, CAD, software and brain-computer interfaces in particular. That is looking into the prospects of making designing more intuitive and accessible by introducing brain control to the design process in […]
DCC 2020 – Poster Presentation (Presented by 8-bit Harry!)
Harry today presented his poster titled “Investigating strategies for mass property replication in 3D printed prototypes” at DCC2020 – virtually, of course, given the world we now live in! The poster aims to introduce the use of variable infill for the purpose of replicating mass properties between as-designed and as-fabricated parts when using rapid prototyping. […]
Design 2020
We would like to thank the organisers of Design 2020 for a fantastic virtual conference, with four papers presented by member of the group: A FRAMING OF DESIGN AS PATHWAYS BETWEEN PHYSICAL, VIRTUAL AND COGNITIVE MODELS presented by David, DEMOCRATISING DESIGN THROUGH SURROGATE MODEL CONVOLUTIONAL NEURAL NETWORKS OF COMPUTER AIDED DESIGN REPOSITORIES and CO-WORD GRAPHS […]