It is amazing how much you can learn from the process of prototyping a new product. The experience of transmuting a concept from your imagination into a real world physical product is invaluable. It is even more profound when you are paying cold, hard, cash money, for everything along the way. No credit cards or debt of any kind has been used at any point during this process. I struggle to find the words, and the best way I can describe the feeling is to simply say I feel smarter now. Once you know the process, and how your mental concept relates and translates to the real, physical world, your capacity to produce something of quality increases dramatically.
You learn the true cost of research and development. You get familiar with the process of sourcing raw materials, recruiting, working with specialists, and skilled technicians. You learn the jargon, vernacular, expectations, standards, and the generally accepted practices and workflow. But you also learn what people need to actually help you accomplish your objective.
Showing up unprepared, without the proper materials properly prepared, doesn’t do anyone any good. You need to be prepared. If you are working with computer files, they need to be correctly formatted. If you are working with physical materials and machine equipment, you need to make sure you have the appropriate materials for the machines you’re working with. It is a relatively steep learning curve, and I’m only now beginning to feel comfortable with where I stand.
The January week I spend in Hong Kong earlier this year, was a milestone in many ways. Many things came together.
My first destination was a co-working space called “Maker Hive”, located in the Kennedy Town district. I arrived with my USB stick, ready to start cutting, but was unprepared. I’m such a genius that it never occurred to me lasers might have specific requirements you must respect in order for them to work properly. All my files were in Blender, but their system was configured for Adobe Illustrator. I’d never used Adobe Illustrator. Thus, my conundrum - how do I port blender files over to Adobe illustrator without compromising precision?
I wasn’t disappointed, but a little overwhelmed. I was on the clock, with just 4 days to get it done before the return flight to mainland China. At my current level, I could knock it out in under an hour. But in January I knew nothing about anything. I spent all night just trying to make it work, and the progress was painfully slow.
The feeling was a bit frantic. YouTube is awash in tutorials, but I couldn’t find specifically what I needed, largely because I didn’t even know what to look for. This highlights my earlier point about knowing the jargon and vernacular. Lacking those things, you can’t even ask good questions, which is the starting point of all expertise.
Ultimately I did my best chopping a schematic together using basic lines and shapes, but I still remember the process I went through, and it was an extremely poor quality work flow. That being said, for all its’ problems, it did eventually got the job done after many hours of trial and error.
I returned to the Kennedy Town “Maker Hive”, but the laser technician was out sick, and so I was thrown through yet another loop of trying to find an alternative location. On the edge of the mainland’ downtown, just across the street from the Diamond Hill subway station, I visited another place called “Make Centre”. They took the files and a short while later I had my prototype. It wasn’t exactly what I had in mind. The sizing seemed a bit off, and my choice of color didn’t feel right. I went back to the office to work on a redesign using the insights I gained from the process.
The redesign came out much better than the first draft. The colors worked better, the wood looked better when plain, and I was able to get a full set of boards. We finally had a proper prototype. We could finally start putting our game to the test and figuring out the game play. Five months later, it’s impossible to quantify how much progress has been made. But I will try to break it down in tomorrow’s post.
