Research at scale
By Stephanie Strom
A six-week summer course in Shenzhen gave students a unique experience in bringing their research into a manufacturing environment
Every summer from 2013 through 2019, students from the Media Lab traveled to Shenzhen, China to try their hand at transforming projects they’d painstakingly prototyped in labs into high-quality, mass-manufactured products ready to deploy in the real world. Known as Hacking Manufacturing or Research at Scale, the six-week course allowed students to gain experience in and exposure to the realities of deploying their research outside of an academic institution.
“As a Silicon Valley of hardware and manufacturing, Shenzhen has one of the world’s highest concentrations of factories across many industries,” explained Irmandy Wicaksono, a research assistant in the Lab’s Responsive Environments group who participated in the program last year. “This unique ecosystem gave us access to diverse knowledge, tools, and raw materials.”
In the first iteration of the course, students arrived in Shenzhen with a project that needed scale to progress. A participant in the program might have, say, designed a sensor while at the Media Lab but need 100 sensors to make a project work. In Shenzhen, she would go to 10 or so factories, learning how they made printed circuit boards, or PCBs or did injection modeling to produce parts. At the same time, experienced factory workers would offer feedback about how she might best scale up production of the parts needed to take a project from the lab to commercial production.
The 2.0 version of the program, which commenced in 2017, gave participating students the opportunity to hack the manufacturing process to achieve their goals. “Instead of having a specific project in mind, we went into factories to learn their processes and thinking and then considers whether we could have a process in a novel way to come up with new research directions,” said Jifei Ou, who recently received his doctoral degree from the Lab. “We started seeing the factory more as a place to do academic research instead of just a place to get something manufactured at scale.”
This modified approach gave students the opportunity to learn from the knowledge and experience of the technicians working within a factory, a perfect illustration of the Lab’s commitment to drawing on wide and diverse expertise to further innovation.
One of Ou’s favorite outcomes of the Hacking Manufacturing program was a project on paper electronics that Jie Qi, then a doctoral student at the Lab, brought with her when she participated in the program in 2017. On that trip, students visited a factory making flexible circuitry and also went to a book-binding factory, where innovative adhesives were used. Could those adhesives be used to make a backing for the flexible circuits, Qi wondered.
That question led to the establishment of Chibitronics, a company Qi leads that was spun out of the Media Lab. Among the educational tools that the company sells is a kit that uses “circuit stickers,” paper electronics with adhesive backings, to teach circuits. Other products make use of the same tools to help students create art works.
“It was successfully scaled up into an entrepreneurial thing, and that happened because of the research done in Shenzhen,” Ou said.
Wicaksono, whose research at the Lab centers on flexible-stretchable electronics and interactive textiles, said that getting a chance to better understand the fundamentals of machine knitting needed to produce digital textiles helped him put greater customization into fabric patterns and clothing for his projects.
He also gained negotiating skills by dealing with the team at a PCB and knitting factory for exceptions in their manufacturing processes and guidelines that enabled him to improve and miniaturize his prototype. “It required many discussions and trials and errors, but in the end, we managed to introduce new materials and methods that are unusual into some of the fabrication steps,” Wicaksono said.
Ken Nakagaki, an interaction design researcher pursuing a PhD in the Tangible Media group, also found that interacting directly with the factories was valuable to his research. “One of the most important things I learned,” he said, “is that building trust and relationships with the factories boosted my research speed. Importantly, this trip was not just about getting experience working with factories for a month, but more about making connections and relationships with the factories as a first step to enable factory-aided prototyping research.” He came to Shenzhen with a 3D-printed prototype for a modular robotic interface, and a goal to “scale down” its size, and “scale up” the number of modules through mass manufacturing. By the end of the trip, “I was able to build a prototype that turned out to be much smaller and more robust than the one I made in the Lab.” After the trip, Nakagaki wrote a two-part post (in Japanese) about the experience: Part 1, and Part 2.
Judith Amores, a PhD student in the Fluid Interfaces group, took the prototype of a wearable device that uses biometric information collected from the body to trigger scents to Shenzhen. The device, called Essence, can be controlled through a smartphone to vary the intensity and frequency of the released scent based on heart rate, brain activity, sleep patterns, and contextual data.
Amores said her main goal for the trip was to produce a set of prototypes that she could deploy in people’s homes, unlike existing olfactometers and scent devices used by scientists, which can only be used in hospitals or research facilities because of the clunkiness of the equipment.
Nonetheless, the Essence prototype had many different parts, which complicated mass manufacturing, particularly in the short amount of time that Amores had in Shenzhen. There were communications challenges, as most workers in the factories did not speak English, and the casing of the device had to be changed. Writing up a bill of materials that listed all the components needed — custom cotton filters for fragrances, bottles, piezoelectronics, cable threads, and dozens and dozens of other things — was a new experience, too.
“There were uncountable pitfalls that have been a huge learning experience and that made me realize how hard it is to make a product ready for manufacture, especially when designing a prototype like Essence that can be worn in so many different ways,” Amores said.
A week before the program ended, for example, she found something wrong in the assembly of the PCBs, so they were not received until she was back at the Media Lab. And a problem with a customized transformer on the PCBs meant she and her colleagues had to replace them with new ones sent from China, a process that involved painstakingly unsoldering the flawed transformers.
“It took more time than expected, but we have successfully deployed the prototypes in more than 50 homes,” Amores said. “And in spite of the setbacks and extra work required, we are one step closer to making these prototypes potential mass-manufactured products.”
The Hacking Manufacturing program would not have been possible without the generous assistance of Andrew “bunnie” Huang and director’s fellow Gavin Zhao, who passed away in August 2019.
Additional reading:
Manufacturing in Shenzhen
My Shenzhen Experience
Hacking in a Factory
This post was originally published on the Media Lab website.
