A couple of weeks ago the Industrial Designers Society of America (IDSA) held their annual conference in Portland with a theme of DIY Design, threat or opportunity. I was invited to speak at the conference and I gave a talk around the” 10 square foot factory”. During this talk I described lessons learned in software design and prototyping that I applied to the small scale manufacturing of real products.
Software development does not require a lot of overhead, investment or people in order to create a competitive product of high quality. With small scale manufacturing tools becoming more widely available, the creation of real products starts to enjoy the same bootstrapping benefits.
Last year I set out on an experiment to see whether it is possible to design, prototype and manufacture profitable products in small runs, without sacrificing any of the quality you get with mass manufacturing. And without it becoming a one-off craft product either.
My desire to do this started about 5 years ago, when my daughter was born. I had this idea for a modular playhouse where you can rearrange the rooms and roofs and build different unique structures. I created designs for this and my father was willing to build this.
The end result looked great,…for something that was built by hand. However I was somewhat disappointed that we could not accomplish the same quality that one might get with mass produced products.
After all, this is what I am used to in software UX design. We, as designers and developers, can create something of high quality with just a small group of people with the tools that are widely available. Also, a simple software product, for example an iPhone application, can be of the same quality as a more complex application, such as Microsoft Office. This still isn’t possible in the development of physical products; you either can have one product that is crafted or prototyped in a very expensive manner. Or you can get a large run of the product in high quality. This is cheaper per product, but more expensive as an investment.
Small run manufacturing tools are becoming more widely available and affordable. For example, entry-level laser cutting, 3d printing or CNC routing machines are now offered for under $10,000. There are also many online services available were you can submit your design and they will either, laser cut, 3d print, or CNC it and ship it anywhere.
Last year I decide to buy a small Shopbot CNC router to experiment with. Besides the fact that this allowed me to make high quality single run products, this also introduced another aspect that I was used to in software design; you are always dealing with a real product, no matter where you are in the development process.
In software, when a product gets developed it runs through a couple of different phases; design, programming and testing. A complex software product might go through a couple of these cycles.
Throughout the development all the code that is being written is assembled and built into an in-between software product. The interesting aspect is that this in-between product is not a model or prototype, but the real product, just not in its final state yet. This allows you to evaluate your product on a daily basis and adjust the design, or send it to your customers as an alpha or beta to gather feedback.
At some point the product is in a good enough state to be sold to customers. This is sometimes called “going gold”. From this point on copies will be made of this final product.
My CNC machine allows me to iterate in a similar manner. I can create real versions of the product as I am designing it and test both the appeal and construction. Once I decide the product is good enough, I can start making copies.
The end result of this first experiment is the Toideloi Stackhouse.
The Stackhouse is a modern, multi-functional and expandable playhouse. It consists of individual rooms and roofs that can be stacked and arranged in multiple different ways. For example you can arrange it into single houses, a castle of a sky scraper. The Stackhouse does not require any fasteners and consists entirely of Eastern European birch plywood. The Stackhouse can be manufactured on a 10 square feet CNC router and it can easily scale to more and/or larger machines.
You can find more information on this website; www.toideloi.com.