Reframing failure, individual problem solving, and access to technology are signature themes of the “maker movement” -- which has accrued interest from designers, hackers, and all sorts of makers over the past decade. This movement paved the way for the emergence of grass roots, commercial, and university makerspaces across the globe. In particular, university makerspaces have become a significant resource to students taking courses that require the creation of tangible prototypes.&nbsp;While research investigating a student’s experience prototyping in a makerspace is growing rapidly, not much has been done to investigate the student prototyping experience in exclusively virtual settings. The goal of this study is to identify trends in the virtual prototyping experience with intentions of informing university instructors, makerspace facilitators, and even students of where to anticipate struggles and frustration with the virtual prototyping experience.This study investigates the virtual prototyping experience for 17 undergraduate students, of diverse academic disciplines, at an R1 university in the United States. Specifically, these students were enrolled in a design course that requires the creation of a functional (tangible) and experiential (tangible or virtual) prototype. A requirement of the functional prototypes, as defined by the course instructors, was to use the virtual makerspace program, offered by the university, to manufacture a tangible prototype. Students were instructed to submit designs to be fabricated using at least one of the following tools: laser cutter, metal cutter, 3D printer, and vinyl cutter. The experiential prototypes could be either tangible (created using the virtual makerspace program or supplies found at home) or virtual (such as electronic wireframes).&nbsp;&nbsp;The method used to document the student experience was informed by the critical incident technique and one of its modern derivatives, journey mapping. Each student was prompted to create two journey maps by defining and qualitatively assessing a minimum of 5 steps in their path to creating the functional and experiential prototypes. In addition, each student was asked to provide a written explanation for the assessment of each step in their prototype journey.&nbsp;&nbsp;After collecting the journey maps created by the students, researchers looked for patterns in the journey’s of the students based on gender, academic discipline (Engineering, Letter &amp; Science, and Other), and project preference.&nbsp;Results from this study suggests that the functional prototyping experience is more volatile than the experiential prototyping experience. For example, the aggregate journey map for the functional prototype experience shows more points of inflection than the aggregate journey map for the experiential prototype. On the other hand, the functional prototype experience was much more consistent for students across gender, academic discipline, and project preference than it was for the experiential prototype.&nbsp;A valuable next step for investigating the virtual prototyping experience might include comparing the success of the prototype to each student’s assessment of their prototyping experience. This comparison would offer a frame of reference for understanding how the student experience impacts the success of the prototype.

Journey Mapping the Virtual Prototyping Experience

Paper Proceedings: https://asmedigitalcollection.asme.org/IMECE/IMECE2021/volume/85543

ASME 2021 International Mechanical Engineering Congress and Exposition (IMECE2021)

Supporting the need among researchers worldwide for additional online and multimedia content, ASME now offers the ASME Conference Video Collection. This platform will collect and provide long-term access to conference presentation videos, encompassing all technology areas within ASME's technical conference and events program. About 30,000-40,000 engineers across all mechanical engineering and related disciplines participate in ASME conferences each year. This includes authors of approximately 6,000 to 8,000 technical papers published by ASME, the majority of whom also submit video presentations for our virtual conferences. The video collection will be available as an add-on to existing product packages or as a separate subscription.