In my spare time I have been designing solutions for an R&D ‘real-time location tracking and monitoring’ technology start-up company named WiserSystems. This particular project was to create a video the company executives could use to explain their particular technology in a clear and concise manner to investors and potential clients.

In order to design and produce an effective video solution for this project, I worked closely with the company executives to fully understand their new innovative technology. At times I even provided insight on how to improve their technology to help it target and further streamline corporate warehouse environments/work processes.

Because final cost was a concern, I needed to keep things as simple as possible. I decided to use SolidWorks and PowerPoint as my base software tools to create the animations and user interface illustrations. I modeled up a warehouse fairly quickly then populated it with industrial shelving, warehouse employees, fork lift trucks, and order picker trucks. I then created an overall storyboard, reviewed it with my client, then created vignette storyboards for each major scene. After a couple revisions I rendered the final animations for each separate scene and uploaded them into my video editing software. At that point I edited down each scene to meet the timing restrictions. Finally, after the timing was satisfactory I met again with my client to discuss adding a voice-over script. After several iterations on my initially proposed script, I recorded the voice-over and sent out the final version back to the customer. This version is also presented below.

Since the initial video delivery WiserSystems has used this video on several occasions to help procure company funding, as well as promote the technology to several clientele.

CLICK THE VIDEO LINK BELOW!

 Copyright © Scott Fisher

 Copyright © Scott Fisher

This is an idea I had for a child’s night light that would sit on a dresser, or could plug into a wall. The light output intensity can be adjusted via a central knob posing as the flower’s center, and I can envision incorporating multiple color combinations for the pedals to market towards boys and girls. In addition to this younger audience however, this product could also be marketed towards an older high school/collage audience with the ‘music pulsing’ option, where the entire flower lightly pulses to the beat of background music. I could see something like this adding a neat dimension to a bathroom night light during a party.

Click on the video below to see my initial functional prototype!

If I’ve managed to capture your attention and you want to learn a little more in depth on my thought process’ going into this project, and how it was born, awesome! Keep reading!

This project was born as a present for my brother who recently returned from Afghanistan. I wanted to create something that combined music with a cool new light source that wasn’t already prevalent in the consumer market. In addition however, because it was going to be a present I also wanted to add a degree of functionality to the design. As usual, I started the process with a brainstorm session between me, my sketchbook, and my pencil.

I ended up deciding to build a ‘strobe flower’. Theoretically I could steal an auxiliary cord from some old iPod headphones, amplify the signal with a transistor, then use that amplified signal to power a series of parallel LED’s taped to light pipes, which could then be bent to my desired shape. This provided me with a ‘fun’ music interface. In addition to this, if I short circuited the transistor with a switch and potentiometer, the flower could then become a night light, with adjustable brightness intensity.

Because I’m no electronics wiz, I started the process by making an electrical prototype to ensure I could actually create what I envisioned. The following pictures illustrate this first step.

After my electrical challenge was conquered, I started in on the building portion. Because I don’t have a 3D printer in my basement, I decided to router out a series of wooden layers that would be glued together to make the final base. This was a great learning experience since I had never routered anything before.

In addition, after some thinking I realized some of my parts needed to be routed out upside-down, which presented it’s own challenges due to the relatively intricate interior portions. I ended up mapping out where the part would move relative to the machine bit to track my progress. It took a couple iterations to get the process down. Also, because I do not have access to fancy wood-working tools, I had to build a make-shift drill press to drill the light pipe openings at approximately 25 degrees off vertical to form ‘upward tilting pedals’ off the center. These are pictured below.

Once I had all the woodworking finalized, I put several layers of stain and polyurethane on the base. Then, to maintain a lighter ‘flower center,’ I opted to skip the stain for that specific part, and polyurethane the bare wood. I also used a perf board to solder the electronics into a semi-permanent layout.

Also, unfortunately my original plan to use a conventional 9V battery was foiled due to lack of space in the base. To remedy this I made my own 9V battery from three 3V coin batteries wired in series. I soldered leads onto the ends, wrapped it in tape, and VUALA! I plugged it into the original 9V battery connector soldered into my perf board.

Lastly, I took bunch of pictures of it, then put it in a box and said goodbye! It now resides at my brother’s house to this day. Cheers and many thank you’s to all our brave soldiers protecting our beloved country.

Copyright © Scott Fisher

Another chapter in my on-going quest to design all things possible is being written at the R&D technology company, WiserSystems. They are developing modules to track real-time product location, and were in need of different levels of product housing design.

For the immediate present, speed to market and product proof-of-technology demonstrations are extremely important. For this reason, a fast and simple prototype was necessary. However, any and all chances to impress future production design into the prototype was also a plus to minimize future time investments when designing rev II mass-production housings.

With this in mind I started an accelerated prototype schedule to meet all of my requirements. I started sketching up several ideas for product housings. (unfortunately these cannot be shown here to protect future WiserSystem production concepts) I then picked several forms I liked, created some assimilations of them in SolidWorkds CAD, and printed these on my 3D printer.

Once I had the physical forms in hand, I met with my client to discuss form attributes, likes and dislikes, and determine a preferred direction for future design. Then, it was back to the design lab to start modeling the first housing rev.

Given the nature and use of the early prototypes, it made the most sense to use a low volume silicone tool to cast parts in. These cast parts would ultimately be painted and glued together to form the final product. The process is illustrated below.

The final parts have a ‘WiserSystems’ cutout on the top. This is then filled with a clear resin as a post-cure process and a diffuser layer added inside the part. Once the parts are then fit together, the part logo is back-lit by a blue LED.

Copyright © Scott Fisher

This was a project to use a “found material” (from my immediate surroundings), to create an object people felt compelled to pick up with their hands, and then irresistibly keep it in continuous motion within their hands. My solution was to create an object that inspired intrigue through mystery. Because of curiosity, the user would approach the object, visually inspect it, then pick it up and work it with their hands to try and discover what the hidden truth was. In addition, I created interesting surface features and textures to increase the tactile sensation while handling the object.

When I was creating this piece, I explored several potential sources of ‘object mystery.’ The first, was visual balance. By making an object with a unique center of mass, aka an abject that balanced in a way that’s totally unexpected, I could pique the viewer’s attention. However given my ‘found material’ was a candle, I could not insert enough mass on one end without upsetting the candle’s expected visual balance.

My next take was creating intrigue through unexpected material visual properties–this attempt turned into the object illustrated above. I did this by disguising the expected waxy visual of a typical candle with a highly glossy and apparently glassy surface. However because glass figures typically have a highly refined smooth surface, i created a surface with small hills, crevices, and textures. Additionally, different layers of the melted down candle created different material ‘layers’ within the object to further mystify the audience. The following pictures provide a brief introduction to the creation process.

  Copyright © Scott Fisher

This was a project to create a biologically inspired mechanically powered movement. My initial attraction was focused around a jumping motion—something that didn’t just walk across the surface of the table in a strange way. This direction not only satisfied my curiosity and thirst to create something that could jump, it proved to be a sizeable challenge, forcing me to consider a large variety of new and interesting ways to make a jumping motion possible.

Starting with a motor and a set of gears, I took off exploring the various known jumping robots to research the current field of knowledge. I then did quite a bit of parallel research on insects, primarily the flea, grasshopper, and locust. This research led me to discover ‘Resilin,’ which is an elastomeric protein that naturally occurs in many insects. This protein is a tiny rubber-band of sorts, with a virtually limitless lifetime of uses. This amazing protein led me to make my own potential energy storage system—via dual spiral cams on the side of the grasshopper to build up a large amount of potential energy in a series of rubber bands (my mechanical grasshopper’s Resilin). Once the spiral spins to its tip, the legs disengaged from the spiral, instantly causing the rubber bands to snap the feet down, creating a repeated hopping motion with each turn of the spiral.

Because this was more a motion study and less an art form, I chose to make the ‘grasshopper’ out of clear acrylic allowing the user to inspect the inner-workings of the project. I also designed the form of the grasshopper to appear playful because large insects can otherwise easily appear distasteful, which could drive the user away from the project.

The following images are snapshots from my work process. Starting with research and ideation, these are some initial sketches I created to develop more of an understanding for the muscular structure and body movements of typical insects.

Through my research, I rapidly found myself to be most interested in the cricket/locust/grasshopper style insect. I started to catalog a large quantity of pictures capturing this specific group of insects jumping, walking, and standing. I used these to develop a simplified ‘trapezoidal insect-hopper form’ for my own creation, as illustrated below. I also used two stylized sweeps to divide the head and Pronotum from the rest of the body.

However, I quickly found the body structure of these insects has just as much importance to its motion as its muscles do. For example, one of the reasons jumping insects are capable of such large vertical leaps is the layout of their body. As illustrated below, the powerful rear legs join the body at its half-way point, which happens to be the insect’s center of gravity. This allows the insect to launch itself into the air vertically instead of completing a high powered backflip on the ground.

With these thoughts in mind, I started the development process with some initial foam core prototypes. I used these to experiment with the form, overall scale, and mechanical links to create individual working components, such as the rear legs, motor housing, and visual accessories such as the front legs and antennae.

The following pictures are small thumbnails of the larger development process. After three different iterations of designing parts in SolidWorks then constructing an acrylic laser cut version, the final version was born–yielding a working, jumping mobile mechanical creation.

As illustrated in the CAD rendering above, the final design was intended to showcase a different style acrylic for the moving components. This would promote the purpose of the device, as a study on mechanical movement, directing the user to watch the specific interactions between the mechanical components. Unfortunately however due to project time constraints I never had a chance to acquire the matte green acrylic sheets necessary for my idea.

  Copyright © Scott Fisher

 Copyright © Scott Fisher

The idea of this project was to create a working radio, that creates a new paradigm of interaction. Unfortunately, this is a realm of design which is typically neglected in today’s consumer products. In addition to this however, from my own experience, the experience of others, and several books, I have found that the best design is also one that marries form and function as well. After all, this helps tell users what the device is, and generally how it should be used. Therefore, this project was an exercise to fulfill these three portions of design, incorporating them together successfully into a final working prototype.

In this project i created a design that allows users to logically correlate their actions, with the radio effects outcome. For example, it is natural to associate an increasing volume with increasing hand height, as well as increasing and decreasing radio frequencies with a similar increasing and decreasing hand motion. With that in mind, I built this radio to read hand gestures using sonar, while incorporating a form that suggests the user should place their hands over the white circular platforms to control the radio. With this in mind, the following procedure generated the final concept illustrated above.

Because I had limited radio construction experience, my first step was to become familiar with how a radio works, and how to control it–aka, take one apart and tinker with it! Therefore, my new goal was to create a simple ‘foam core radio prototype’ using the components of a pre-existing radio. To determine what I wanted my foam core radio to accomplish, I created some initial brainstorm sketches.

After sketching several concepts, I decided to create an initial ‘tank prototype’ foam core radio–with simplified forms to expedite the process. The following picture sequence illustrates this process.

As the process pictures above show, I used a slide potentiometer to link the silver lever’s ‘up-down’ motion with volume, and also mechanically linked the rotating turret with the radio’s provided rotational potentiometer to control the frequency. I also glued a gravity switch to the silver lever inside the turret so when the user wanted to turn the radio off, they simply lowered the volume until the radio was turned off.

Now that I had more experience tinkering with radios, I set off to design my own. Once again, I began with some concept sketching.

After some deliberation I chose to pursue a motion sensing radio interface. This would allow the user to control the volume with one hand’s motion, and the radio frequency with the other. The radio would incorporate a flat ‘drum’ like form to encourage the user to naturally place their hands over the two large circular control faces. The left circle would control the volume, while the right would control frequency. To explore the effectiveness of the chosen form, I began creating a foam core prototype for use in user research.

Using the prototype constructed above, I found a majority of users presented with the prototype form place their hands over the pads relatively quickly during their initial ‘exploratory phase’ with the model. I also found users were initially confused with what the central on-off switch was portraying. It generally added an unnecessary level of complexity to the design, so I decided to get rid of it entirely. The user would simply activate the device when their hands were sensed over the control surfaces. Armed with these new findings, I started a CAD design using SolidWorks.

Once I had the CAD model completed, I began the fabrication process using both a 3D printer to print the radio shell with ABS plastic, and a laser printer to cut out the flat control surfaces to fit inside the plastic shell. Because the plastic form was still rough, there was also a long iterative string of puttying and sanding to produced a part with a smooth finish. At which point several coats of fresh paint produced a show quality finished part. The process is illustrated below.

The next step was completing the electronics. My first step was to create a working electrical prototype, which I successfully completed as illustrated below.

After this prototype, the next challenge was packaging all the electronics. After trying to manually solder all the volume/frequency LED indicator leads to each respective multiplexer output with individual wires, I quickly realized there would not be enough room for the mass of wires plus the batteries. And, as it always is, timing was knocking down the front door demanding results, so I didn’t have time to design and order a PCB to solder each LED onto in an orderly fashion, like I should have been doing in the first place.

However with every defeat comes a valuable lesson. In this case, I was reminded that although overall form, user interface, and user interaction are all useful elements to explore in the mission of increasing product value, the bread and butter engineering parts also demand equal priority towards achieving product success. I should have made time inside my development schedule for an in-depth electrical component packaging analysis, taking place concurrently with my  my stage III CAD work. This would have alerted me of the electrical component size requirements, thereby directing me to design and order a space saving PCB for the LED indicators.

This experience just further stresses the importance of a fluid marriage between engineering and design — because only then can an innovative consumer valued product be brought to life.

 Copyright © Scott Fisher

 Copyright © Scott Fisher

In this project, I led a team to completely reverse engineer the drill as illustrated below. I personally modeled the outer shell matching halves as well as the ‘additional parts,’ while my team mates modeled the internal components, as well as the drill battery.