Prototyping & manufacturing
rapid prototyping · FDM 3D printing · laser cutting · milling and turning · material selection · design for manufacturing · design for circularity
- Skill
- Prototyping & manufacturing
- Processes
- FDM 3D printing · laser cutting · manual milling and turning · material selection · design for manufacturing
- Learned
- Makerværket rapid prototyping lab · Green Entrepreneurship, DTU · Holistic Design of Engineering Systems, DTU · Industrial Design, DTU · six months at the LEGO Group
Prototyping is the part of a project where an argument stops being an argument, since a drawing can be discussed indefinitely while a printed part either fits or it does not, and this is the main reason I push to get something physical in front of people as early as the project allows. Furthermore I spent eighteen months running my school's rapid prototyping lab, which means a fair amount of what I know here came from teaching it to students rather than from sitting in a course.
Manufacturing I treat as part of the same skill rather than as a later stage, since the choice of process decides most of the unit cost long before anyone speaks to a supplier. Here HappyLight is the clearest case, where working through the manufacturing method per component is what brought the light pillar to 156–269 DKK per unit at 1,000 units.
Rapid prototyping and the workshop
I ran Makerværket, my school's rapid prototyping lab, from March 2022 to August 2023, instructing students in 3D printing, laser cutting and assembly, and designing 10+ original builds together with the illustrated step-by-step instructions that people actually used. This is where the habit of writing the instructions came from, since a build only I can reproduce is not really finished. Furthermore the six months at the LEGO Group's Creative Play Lab were the highest-volume prototyping I have done, where the prototypes were iterated against what I saw in testing rather than against my own judgement.
Keywords
rapid prototyping · build instructions · workshop instruction · iteration against user testing · 10+ original builds · prototype documentation
FDM 3D printing
Printing is the process I use most, and the projects differ mostly in what the printed part has to survive. Here PultMaster is the useful one, since the locating panel, pins and gears were printed and then measured in order to compare real manufacturing variation against what the tolerance scheme had assumed, while the model ship was eight separate components printed and painted by hand, and Alfred needed housings that could carry servo motors and a slider-crank platform without flexing.
Keywords
FDM 3D printing · print orientation and fit · multi-part printed assemblies · printed parts measured against tolerance · hand finishing and painting
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Two-player catapult game assembly with the slotted crank mechanism visible
PultMaster 3000
Team of 6, joint CAD, 3D prints, tolerance stack-up, testing
Tolerance-driven mechanism design
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The finished model ship, painted orange and blue with rigged masts, floating on dark water at night with architectural lighting in the background
A model ship, modelled from scratch and printed
Sole author, modelled, printed and painted in my own time
Eight components, a lofted hull, and a keel designed around the centre of mass
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Studio photo of the assembled Alfred prototype emerging from its enclosure, with a sensor-data laptop behind it
Alfred, an office companion for indoor climate
Team of 3, all CAD drawings and the mechanics
A mechatronic mouse that reacts to noise and air quality
Laser cutting
Laser cutting I use where flat stock and a tight fit are enough, and the two clearest instances are the PultMaster housing, which had to hold printed pins and gears in position, and the brewing installation for the museum caravan, where the cut parts carried nine RFID-tagged ingredient jars together with the electronics behind them. Furthermore this is one of the two processes I taught at Makerværket, which means I have also watched fairly closely where beginners go wrong with it.
Keywords
laser cutting · flat-stock construction · slot and press fits · enclosure and housing design · sheet material
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Two-player catapult game assembly with the slotted crank mechanism visible
PultMaster 3000
Team of 6, joint CAD, 3D prints, tolerance stack-up, testing
Tolerance-driven mechanism design
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Brewing pot installation glowing with coloured light and rising mist
Brew your own beer, a multisensory museum installation
Team of 6, original idea, first prototype and all the programming
Aesthetic experience design for the National Museum of Denmark
Milling and turning
Milling and turning I learned on a one-week toolshop course covering manual milling, manual lathing, calculation of cutting data, use of the drill press and safety in the shop, and the certificate is explicit that I work in the shop alongside supervising staff rather than alone. Here the tic-tac-toe set is what I made with it, where seven playing pieces were turned from brass and aluminium bar while the plates were milled from ABS, and this was a considerably more demanding exercise than a single part would have been, in that every piece has to match the others closely enough to sit in the same holes. Furthermore the reason I list machining at all is that it changes how I draw, since having stood at the machine makes it easier to see when a feature is going to be awkward or expensive to cut.
Keywords
manual milling · manual turning · cutting data calculation · drill press · toolshop safety · brass, aluminium and ABS · machining-aware design
Material selection
Material choice I have mostly run as a comparison rather than as a preference, and SkillWalls is where that was most systematic, since the reusable partition wall was assessed in Granta EduPack with life cycle thinking in order to justify the choice rather than assert it. Furthermore the modular sorting bin went to stainless steel with movable divider plates after a life cycle assessment and a weighted decision matrix, while HappyLight was built from recycled zinc drainage pipe, which was a material decision that also decided the manufacturing route.
Keywords
material selection · Granta EduPack · life cycle assessment · life cycle thinking · weighted decision matrix · recycled and reused stock
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Rendered interior view of the SkillWalls honeycomb-panel partition dividing an open-plan flat
SkillWalls - a reusable room divider
Team of 6, jointly responsible for prototyping, pitching and researching
Replacing single-use plasterboard partition walls
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Light pillar standing on grass at night, casting a warm pool of light downward and a blue zone glow upward
HappyLight
Team of 7, stakeholder mapping, interviews, data analysis
Off-grid wayfinding light for festival campsites
Design for manufacturing and cost
This is where a design either survives being made or quietly stops being affordable. Here HappyLight is the clearest case, since I worked through the manufacturing method per component, being injection moulding, stamped and welded sheet metal and minimally processed recycled pipe, with a costed bill of materials that landed the unit at 156–269 DKK at 1,000 units. Furthermore COBOD showed me the other end of the same problem, since they had sold 41 printers of which only two were identical, and that variation quietly cost R&D a seventh of its capacity, which we costed at 5.3 million DKK over five years.
Keywords
design for manufacturing · manufacturing method selection · costed bill of materials · unit cost modelling · part standardisation · variant reduction
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Light pillar standing on grass at night, casting a warm pool of light downward and a blue zone glow upward
HappyLight
Team of 7, stakeholder mapping, interviews, data analysis
Off-grid wayfinding light for festival campsites
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A COBOD BOD2 gantry 3D printer mid-build on a round concrete house, outdoors under a blue sky
COBOD
Team of 5, facilitated the process and ran stakeholder interviews
Finding the cost of a product that was never the same twice
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A wireflow diagram in Danish mapping the website's screens from the homepage through product configuration to checkout
A modular sorting bin and the service that sells it
Team of 6, ethnographic user research and the usability testing
Product and digital service designed together for 10 waste categories
Modelling, drawings and tolerancing sit under CAD & technical documentation.