[OH Updates] user-based innovation?

[Leah Buechley]

Sure!  There's a decent synopsis (along w/ several other user innovation LilyPad examples) in the last 1/2 of this paper: 

Buechley, L. and Hill, B. M. 2010. LilyPad in the Wild: How Hardware’s Long Tail is Supporting New Engineering and Design Communities. In Proceedings of Designing Interactive Systems (DIS), Aarhus, Denmark, 199-207.
link: http://hlt.media.mit.edu/publications/buechley_DIS_10.pdf

A brief synopsis (fr. paper):

Kate Hartman and Rob Faludi developed still another kind of extension. Like Maruin Donneaud, they made use of the OSH board files to design a component that wasn’t yet part of the LilyPad kit, a wireless XBee radio. However they envisioned it being used in both their own projects and in educational settings:

“Human bodies don't like to be tethered, so most projects that involve sharing body data require some sort of wireless component...The main reason we developed the Lilypad XBee was because we repeatedly saw students strapping XBees on breadboards into their clothing and we knew there must be a better way.”

Figure 8. Kate Hartman and Rob Faludiʼs LilyPad XBee, a LilyPad for wireless communication.

The left image in Figure 8 shows the initial version of the LilyPad XBee sewn into a wrist-band.

Because their focus included an educational/outreach component, these designers weren’t content to produce just one or two boards for their own designs. They saw their addition as an important improvement to the LilyPad kit and wanted their boards to be widely available. In November of 2008, after some collaborative re-designing undertaken by all of the stakeholders, the LilyPad XBee was released as an official part of the LilyPad Arduino kit. This official version can be seen in the right-hand image in Figure 8.

I bet Rob & Kate would also be happy to chat.

cheers,
Leah

On Nov 12, 2011, at 4:30 PM, Catarina Mota wrote:

> Thanks Leah! Can you share any info on how the project was developed, i.e. what prompted Kate and Rob to design it, how it went from idea to design to manufacturing, etc.?
> 
> I'm also mentioning botanicalls on my thesis and already got the story of how it came to be from Tom Igoe :)
> 
> On Sat, Nov 12, 2011 at 4:11 PM, Leah Buechley <buechley at gmail.com> wrote:
> The LilyPad XBee by Kate Hartmann & Rob Faludi is another nice one.
> 
> On Nov 12, 2011, at 3:00 PM, Catarina Mota wrote:
> 
> > These are perfect examples, thanks Phil and Windell!
> >
> > On Sat, Nov 12, 2011 at 2:41 PM, Windell H. Oskay <windell at oskay.net> wrote:
> >
> > On Nov 12, 2011, at 10:44 AM, Catarina Mota wrote:
> >
> > > Hi all,
> > >
> > > I'm writing a phd dissertation on open source hardware and digital fabrication and I'm currently working on a section about user-based innovation. One recent and exemplary case was the kinect hacking, but unfortunately that's not open source hardware. So I was wondering if anyone on this list knows of and cares to share situations in which a user's contributions (hacks, mods, derivatives) were so useful that you ended up incorporating them into your products?
> >
> > Here's one of ours:
> >
> >  A user's hardware hack to our Peggy 2 kit  ( http://www.planetclegg.com/projects/QC-Peggy.html ) was so useful that we ended up building it as an option into the next rev of the board.
> >
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