Protopiper
Protopiper is a hand-held fabrication device that allows people to sketch room-sized objects, such as furniture or statues, at actual scale. The key idea behind Protopiper is that it forms adhesive tape into tubes as its main building material, rather than extruded plastic or photopolymer lines. Since the resulting tubes are hollow they offer excellent strength-to-weight ratio, thus scale well to large structures.
This is a way for me to help create creations which you can experience by standing within them!
[youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=beRA4sIjxa8 ]
Harshit Agrawal, Udayan Umapathi, Robert Kovacs, Johannes Frohnhofen,
Hsiang-Ting Chen, Stefanie Mueller, Patrick Baudisch
In Proceedings of UIST ’15
[PDF]
Some of the Press Coverage-
Gizmodo
Core77
FastCoDesign
3ders among others.
This is the device:
Here are some of the outputs from the Protopiper:
Workshop with School Children
I conducted a workshop with school students in Amsterdam. I have been curious about how Protopiper could be device for letting children express through it and also explore structural design with it. It was really interesting to see the children get used to the material and figure out their ways of carrying out construction from their device. It was a group of 4 students- making it also interesting to see the group dynamics come into picture and shape conversations around the device.
I was invited by a Netherlands based organization called Kleinkunstig that offers workshops to school children around different maker practices. The overall result was very satisfying, and the organization itself wants to build more protopipers and give more regular workshops! More cool stuff to be protopiped from children coming up!
Here are a few pictures:
First, the instructors getting a feel of what it is like to play with Protopiper
The instructor, then, telling the students how to work with the device.
Here, the children using it to build something cool!
Final output
Here’s some images from brainstorming sessions: