Modular Development Platforms and Creative Ecosystems: Design & Deployment for Wide Impact Across Fields

Abstract

Physical, digital, and conceptual tools and building blocks are fundamental enablers and accelerators of humanity’s progress in technology, science, medicine, art, and even in abstract fields like mathematics, philosophy, and social sciences. Hardware development platforms present a special class of tools and building blocks, facilitating and accelerating innovation, prototyping, and research. They drastically reduce prototyping time and complexity, improve efficiency for experts, democratize access to innovation, and even inspire entirely new ideas. This research investigates how to design, develop, and deploy development platforms in ways that maximize their real-world impact potential. It focuses not only on the technical and engineering aspects, but also on the complete ecosystem a platform needs in order to have impact, including community building, engagement with users and volunteers, content strategy, online presence, publicity, deployment, feedback loops modularity, financial viability, and symbiotic relationships. A comprehensive Design & Deployment Framework is introduced as a conceptual tool for creating high-impact platforms and creative ecosystems, recognizing and fostering the positive feedback loops that sustain them and that shape their evolution and growth. This framework is applied in the development and deployment of multiple novel platform and ecosystem projects, including FlowIO, SleeveIO, and ModiStrap, as well as the ecosystem SoftRobotics.IO. Those works have benefited thousands of people around the world, providing researchers, designers, and engineers with powerful, reconfigurable, modular enabling artifacts that streamline prototyping, accelerate research, and lower barriers in fields like soft robotics, haptics, assistive technology, shape-changing interfaces, interactive arts, and more. A multitude of research, art, and engineering projects made possible by FlowIO and SoftRobotics.IO are presented, as well as over a dozen case studies showcasing how other users across disciplines have adopted, utilized, and extended these systems to advance their own creative, educational, and technical endeavors. Additionally, this thesis also investigates various deployment models for hardware and introduces a new hardware deployment model for equitable access to expensive hardware that may otherwise be financially out of reach for many users, as well as an “earned open-source” model, which preserves the essence of the traditional open-source model, while eliminating many of its pitfalls.