Martijn van Tilburg gave a really wonderful talk about an iterative, DIY process. Like many of the other speakers at the conference, DIY is a side endeavor. In the presentation, Martijn gave us a great view of a project he was working on in his free time. He had been developing a CNC manufactured gender neutral doll house. He explained that instead of using other manufacturing processes, he chose CNC as a way to scale production in a translatable way. With CNC, he is able to develop his product (tool paths, material choices, and bit type) and use it anywhere there is an appropriately sized CNC machine. The emphasis of his presentation was on the iterative design process. He was trying to take the design process that is used in software and implement it into a physical product. Repeating the ideation, concepting, and testing phases was critical to this method. The idea of doing alpha and beta versions of products was pretty interesting. Starting on a small scale you could test the overall functionality of the object and move up to a larger scale to test something closer to production. The end result was a really great product!
From the other end, Intel’s Digital Health Group gave a refreshing presentation about their design process within Intel’s corporate environment. It was nice to see such an emphasis on ethnography, user research, validation and an overall focus on the true end user. This presentation was a bit different from the others in that DIY was relative. For the Digital Health Group, DIY was adapting product design techniques and thinking to a company that manufacturers products that never get sold directly to the end user.
