Fostering the spread of inexpensive, sustainable manufacturing processes and equipment empowers individuals and societies to create products which solve their particular challenges. We intend to advance that idea to its next logical step, offering not just the means of production, but also the mechanisms by which this empowerment can propagate and evolve. By creating rapid-prototyping machines ...

Rapid prototyping tools empower individuals to create almost anything. Unfortunately, these tools are still far too expensive for personal ownership. The do-it-yourself community has responded with a slew of home-made rapid prototyping machines, but development times are slow because of the complexity of the necessary control system and the need to design the mechanical elements from scratch. T...

Purpose – Maxillofacial Prosthetics is faced with increasing patient numbers and cost constraints leading to the need to explore whether computer-aided techniques can increase efficiency. This need was addressed through a four-year research project that identified quality, economic, technological and clinical implications of the application of digital technologies in maxillofacial prosthetics. ...

We begin with our definition of a prototype and then discuss prototypes as design artifacts, introducing four dimensions for analyzing them. We then discuss the role of prototyping within the design process, in particular the concept of a design space, and how it is expanded and contracted by generating and selecting design ideas. The next three sections describe specific prototyping approaches...

the minimal invasive nature of lasers, with quick tissue response and healing has made them a very attractive technology in various fields of dentistry which serves as a tool to create a better result than ever before. the rapid development of lasers and their wavelengths with variety of applications on soft and hard tissues may continue to have major impact on the scope and practice in prosthe...

In order to facilitate rapid development of context-aware applications, there is a need for architectural support in the entire context processing flow, and improved programming abstractions that ease the prototyping. In this paper, a toolkit called Semantic Space, is proposed to support rapid prototyping of context-aware applications via a set of programming abstractions on context processing....

A known problem in the area of hardware/software codesign is the selection of the proper interface between the different parts of the design. This paper presents a technique which eases the selection by combining different synthesis techniques together with rapid prototyping. Application field of the technique is the design of communication systems where C and VHDL are generated from a specific...