Dissertation Title: 

Modular Development Platforms and Creative Ecosystems: Design & Deployment for Wide Impact Across Fields

Abstract:

The progress of human civilization is enabled by tools and building blocks – physical, digital, and conceptual. Hardware development platforms present a special class of tools and building blocks, facilitating and accelerating innovation, prototyping, and research. They drastically reduce prototyping time and complexity, improve efficiency for experts, democratize access to innovation, and even inspire entirely new ideas. This research investigates how to design, develop, and deploy development platforms in emerging fields in ways that maximize their real-world impact potential. It focuses not only on the technical and engineering aspects, but also on the complete ecosystem a platform needs in order to have impact, including community building, engagement with users and volunteers, content strategy, online presence, publicity, deployment, feedback loops and symbiotic relationships, and financial sustainability. A comprehensive Design & Deployment Framework is introduced as a conceptual tool for creating high-impact platforms and creative ecosystems, recognizing and fostering the positive feedback loops that sustain them and that shape their evolution and growth. This framework is applied in the development and deployment of multiple novel platform and ecosystem projects, including FlowIO, SleeveIO, and ModiStrap, as well as the ecosystem SoftRobotics.IO. Those works have benefited thousands of people around the world, providing researchers, designers, and engineers with powerful, reconfigurable tools that streamline prototyping, accelerate research, and lower barriers in fields like soft robotics, haptics, assistive technology, shape-changing interfaces, interactive arts, and more. A multitude of research, art, and engineering projects made possible by FlowIO and SoftRobotics.IO are presented, as well as over a dozen case studies showcasing how other users across disciplines have adopted, utilized, and extended these systems to advance their own creative, educational, and technical endeavors. Additionally, this thesis also investigates various deployment models for hardware and introduces a new deployment model called “earned open-source,” which preserves the essence of the traditional open-source model, while eliminating many of its pitfalls, and also enabling broader access to hardware that may otherwise be financially out of reach for many users.

Committee members: 

Dr. Joseph Paradiso, Professor, Responsive Environments Group, MIT Media Lab
Dr. Thrish Nanayakkara, Professor, Morph Lab, Imperial College London
Dr. Jie Qi, Founder and CEO, Chibitronics and Patent Pandas