Abdullah Muhammad

Abdullah Muhammad is a PhD candidate in Human Computer Interaction at Patrick Baudisch's lab at Hasso Plattner Institute in Potsdam, Germany. Abdullah received his Masters of Science from Kyung Hee University, South Korea in 2018 and a Bachelors in Electrical Engineering from National University of Science and Technology (NUST), Pakistan in 2012, as well as work experience in the telecommunications industry. During his Masters, Abdullah published on drone-based haptics interfaces. In his PhD research, Abdullah focuses on personal fabrication, and more specifically on laser cutting. His mission is to speed up the design and assembly of 3D models by an order of magnitude, to allow designers to perform the entire design-prototype/fabricate-evaluate cycle within the timeframe of a meeting. Abdullah publishes his research as full papers at ACM CHI and ACM UIST and he has served on the ACM program committees for ACM UIST and ACM DIS.

Talk Title: What is so rapid about prototyping anyway?

The term rapid prototyping was coined in the late 80s and commonly makes reference to the use of 3D printers, milling machines, and laser cutters as means to speed up the creative process in industrial design.

But is rapid prototyping really rapid? And is it even prototyping?

When taking the idea of rapid prototyping seriously, the fabrication steps find themselves embedded into a series of other creative activities, such as design sessions, brainstorming sessions, and critique sessions, all of which commonly take place on a 1min to 1h scale, often with multiple people involved. And this is where today's fabrication technology fails: Design/fabrication/assembly takes too long, the meeting is over, and everyone goes home. By the time a new date is found and everyone reconvenes, the flow has been interrupted, and the creative process comes slows down to a crawl. At this point, the actual speed of the fabrication step is of little importance and might as well take a week or whenever the next meeting takes place.

In this talk, I will challenge this traditional notion of rapid prototyping. I will try to convince you that (1) in order to make fabrication technology a serious contender for creative process, we need to eliminate the interruption, meaning: fabricate not between meetings, but within a meeting. And I will try to convince you that (2) doing so is possible, i.e., we can indeed fabricate within the time frame of a meeting. 

Picking laser cutting as my weapon of choice, I will lay out the core idea of a fast fabrication process and analyze its timing to identify bottlenecks (spoiler: they are all in assembly). I will then aggregate designs, techniques, and algorithms from my most recent 4 CHI/UIST papers into a process that allows prototyping even human-scale objects (I will show a 4' piece of furniture) in an hour session--including designing, fabricating, and assembling--before anyone leaves the meeting.

I will complete my talk by zooming out to the bigger picture of "design for manufacturing and assembly" and how it could—and I would argue should—form the basis of a more encompassing notion of fabrication and rapid prototyping.

Location: Morphing Matter Lab, Etcheverry Hall 5149, 2521 Hearst Ave, Berkeley, CA