liquor, and occasional karaoke outings.

Regular meetings allowed us to resolve problems and miscommunications in minutes that would have taken days over email with a 12-hour time difference. Factory visits allowed us to see for ourselves how our potential partners treated other clients’ products and intellectual property, what assembly processes we needed to anticipate, and what their working conditions were like. Clean facilities, clear safety procedures, and a collegial relationship between line workers and engineers are, of course, an ethical issue, but at the same time, these are indicators that your product will be made with care, and that any mistakes will be reported and resolved rather than hidden.

And last but not least, maybe it’s good for us to see for ourselves how the sausage is made—to meet the people who do the (at best) boring jobs that enable us to realize our dreams, to see how much or how little plastic waste our creations generate, and to understand how our inventions really are a team effort.

Endnotes:

1. Anderson, C. Makers: The Ne w Industrial Revolution. McClelland & Stewart, 2012.

2. The Economist. The third industrial revolution (Apr. 21, 2012); http://www. economist.com/node/21553017

3. Tanenbaum, J., Williams, A., Desjardins, A., and Tanenbaum, K. Democratizing technology: Pleasure, utility and expressiveness in DI Y and maker practice.

Proc. of Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems. ACM, New York, 2013, 2603–2612.

4. Williams, A., Gibb, A., and Weekly, D.

Research with a hacker ethos: What DI Y means for tangible interaction research.

Interactions 19, 2 (Mar.–Apr. 2012), 14–19.

Amanda Williams is co-founder and CEO of Fabule Fabrications. She’s in charge of creating beautiful interactions and hardware.

Indecisively, she loves both qualitative user research and hardware design.

→ [e-mail]

Bruno Nadeau is co-founder and C TO of Fabule Fabrications, in charge of product design and software wizardry. With a degree in computation arts, he’s made some creative interactive installations and physical computing pieces.

→ [e-mail]

And you’ll need to write testing software. Along with your assembly instructions, your test plan will be one of the most important pieces of documentation you write; you should start working on it early, refining it as you refine your product. Testability can even be a consideration in your choice and placement of components: Will a line worker need to plug and unplug a connector by hand, or can they just pull a lever to automatically make a connection with a row of pins?

An important consideration in designing your test plan and equipment is to eliminate or at least minimize manual intervention. Testing identical PCBs over and over is a boring job, and workers’ attention will wander. Even simple tests that require someone to check if a light is on and confirm with “yes” or “no” can invite human error.

Putting a light sensor in the test jig will take a bit more time, but it will be time well invested.

Despite the rigors, we enjoyed the process of building our testing equipment. We tend to draw contrasts between mass manufacturing and the small-batch production that characterizes maker culture. But just as makers depend on mass-produced electronics to prototype affordably,

mass manufacturing (in Shenzhen at least) depends on small businesses that can mill customized test jigs to order. Watching our own machines take shape was, in a way, as magical as some of our breakthrough moments in the early stages of hand-prototyping our product.

CONCLUDING THOUGHTS:
IT’S ALL ABOUT
COMMUNICATION

If you’ve read this far, we can finally admit that all of the advice and anecdotes we’ve related here can be summarized in just a few concise sentences. First, document everything religiously, because you’ll be working with other people whose know-how doesn’t necessarily overlap much with yours. Second, collaborate with your manufacturers and suppliers, and respond to their capabilities. Third, though you’re still fundamentally working on a design problem, manufacturing will throw a new set of constraints at you that you will need to work with.

The underlying commonality to all
of these points is that manufacturing
a product is really an exercise in
good communication. We benefited
enormously from spending time
in Shenzhen and meeting our
manufacturing partners face to face,
complete with tea, really strong rice
One force behind the democratization of manufacturing is the increasing availability of funds
to pay for it, through crowdfunding. If you want to crowdfund a project, here are a few tips to
keep in mind:
It’s not just about the money. Crowdfunding can help you establish whether there is any
demand for what you’re making. You can even A/B test the popularity of individual features by
making them available at different reward levels. You’ll get great feedback from your backers.
And if your campaign does well, you’ll discover that journalists trend-hunt on crowdfunding sites.
Prepare. A lot. A good-quality video is highly correlated with success, and a mature,
beautiful prototype will also be a huge help. Scour successful and failed campaigns similar
to yours to research appropriate content, funding goals, and reward tiers. You should
simultaneously be developing your network, months ahead of time if possible. Build an email
list, which has relatively high conversion rates. Talk to media and decide whether you want
them to embargo the story until you launch or generate hype beforehand. When you launch,
send personalized email messages to everyone you know; your campaign’s performance on
the first day is crucial.

Be prepared to scale, or put limits on it. Set your goal higher than you think it needs to be; manufacturing can have hidden costs. Ask yourself what you’ll do if your campaign blows up: Are you using a manufacturing process that scales easily? Alternatively, you can set a hard limit on all of your reward tiers, or set them to deliver at different dates.

Be honest and transparent with your backers. If you’re new to manufacturing, you will make mistakes and encounter delays. Most people on crowdfunding sites are not looking for perfection; they’re looking to be involved in the creation of innovative products. Invite them in, and they can make your crowdfunding experience incredibly rewarding.

SO YOU WANT TO CROWDFUND…