Protobooth: gathering and analyzing data on prototyping in early-stage engineering design projects by digitally capturing physical prototypes

Abstract

Aiming to help researchers capture output from the early stages of engineering design projects, this article presents a new research tool for digitally capturing physical prototypes. The motivation for this work is to collect observations that can aid in understanding prototyping in the early stages of engineering design projects, and this article investigates if and how digital capture of physical prototypes can be used for this purpose. Early-stage prototypes are usually rough and of low fidelity and are thus often discarded or substantially modified through the projects. Hence, retrospective access to prototypes is a challenge when trying to gather accurate empirical data. To capture the prototypes developed through the early stages of a project, a new research tool has been developed for capturing prototypes through multi-view images, along with metadata describing by whom, why, when, and where the prototypes were captured. Over the course of 17 months, this research tool has been used to capture more than 800 physical prototypes from 76 individual users across many projects. In this article, one project is shown in detail to demonstrate how this capturing system can gather empirical data for enriching engineering design project cases that focus on prototyping for concept generation. The authors also analyze the metadata provided by the system to give understanding into prototyping patterns in the projects. Lastly, through enabling digital capture of large quantities of data, the research tool presents the foundations for training artificial intelligence-based predictors and classifiers that can be used for analysis in engineering design research.

A Comparison of Structured Light Scanning and Photogrammetry for the Digitisation of Physical Prototypes

“…As such, attempts have been made to aid the process of revision control during a prototyping process through the development of tools for capturing digital representations of each iteration of a prototype. Work in this area has, to date, focussed on capturing 2D images of prototypes to produce a 'snapshot' of each iteration (Barhoush et al, 2019;Erichsen et al, 2020). Whilst 2D representations can certainly provide an indication of a physical artefact's design, their efficacy in communicating the intricacies of each iteration is limited by their inability to capture and convey the detailed geometry of a physical artefact.…”

Pro2Booth: Towards an Improved Tool for Capturing Prototypes and the Prototyping Process

“…On presenting an RFID card to a reader mounted on Protobooth, the cameras would automatically snap two photos, one for each camera mounted on the booth. Erichsen et al (2021) further improved the booth design by increasing the number of cameras used to capture prototypes to seven. Figure 1 shows the updated version of Protobooth developed by Erichsen et al (2021).…”

Novice Designers' Use of Partitioning Strategies to Navigate the Prototyping Process

“…However, it does not indicate what an actual prototyping process looks like in detail. The visualisation of concrete prototyping processes shows that these are more complex, branched, and intertwined than it appears from the PfX framework (Erichsen et al, 2020;. The prototyping process is defined by the goals and restrictions coming from the overarching product development process.…”