David A. Mellis, High-Low Tech, MIT Media Lab

Do-It-Your(Cell)f Phone: exploring the limits of DIY electronics


Wooden case w/ flexure buttons

Second generation circuit board

Making a call
 

Master's Thesis
Case studies in the digital fabrication of open-source consumer electronic products.

Digital fabrication allows us to treat the designs of products as a kind of source code: files that can be freely shared, modified, and produced. These case studies combine traditional electronic circuit boards and components (a mature digital fabrication process) with laser-cut or 3D printed materials. They demonstrate multiple possibilities for individual customizations both pre- and post-fabrication, as well as a variety of potential production and distribution processes and scales.

Thesis Document [PDF] >>
Thesis Blog >>

Teaching (Spring 2012): MAS.S63: Design for DIY Manufacturing

About Me

I'm a first year PhD student in Leah Buechley's group, High-Low Tech, at the MIT Media Lab. My research interest is the relationship between digital information and physical objects, applied to manufacturing, electronics, and programming. I want to create tools and examples that help people to design, build, and program electronic devices.

Before coming to the Media Lab, I earned a master's in interaction design at the Interaction Design Institute Ivrea (Italy) and taught at the Copenhagen Institute of Interaction Design (Denmark). I'm one of the creators of Arduino, an open-source hardware and software platform for electronic prototyping.

Other Projects

Support for programming ATtiny microcontrollers with Arduino. (more)

Library for simple playback of audio samples with Arduino. (more)

TinyProgrammer: an easy-to-use circuit board for programming low-cost microcontrollers (more)

FabISP: a DIY circuit for programming microcontrollers. (more)

Lego Designer: computationally generated, vinyl-cut decals for decorating Lego bricks (more)

Modular, laser-cut, press-fit wooden toy cars (more)

Publications

David A. Mellis and Leah Buechley. 2012. Case studies in the personal fabrication of electronic products. In Proceedings of the Designing Interactive Systems Conference (DIS '12). ACM, New York, NY, USA, 268-277.

David Mellis and Leah Buechley. 2012. Collaboration in open-source hardware: third-party variations on the arduino duemilanove. In Proceedings of the ACM 2012 conference on Computer Supported Cooperative Work (CSCW '12).

David A. Mellis and Leah Buechley. 2011. Scaffolding Creativity with Open-Source Hardware. In Proceedings of the eighth internal conference on Creativity and Cognition 2011 (C&C '11).

David A. Mellis, Dana Gordon, and Leah Buechley. 2011. Fab FM: the design, making, and modification of an open-source electronic product. In Proceedings of the fifth international conference on Tangible, embedded, and embodied interaction (TEI '11).

Leah Buechley, David Mellis, Hannah Perner-Wilson, Emily Lovell, and Bonifaz Kaufmann. Living wall: programmable wallpaper for interactive spaces. In Proceedings of the international conference on Multimedia (MM '10).

Eric Rosenbaum, Evelyn Eastmond, and David Mellis. 2010. Empowering programmability for tangibles. In Proceedings of the fourth international conference on Tangible, embedded, and embodied interaction (TEI '10).

Mellis, D. A., Banzi, M., Cuartielles, D., and Igoe, T. 2007. Arduino: An open electronics prototyping platform. In Proceedings of the Conference on Human Factors in Computing (alt.chi) (CHI’07). ACM, New York.

J. Cassell, M. Ananny, A. Basu, T. Bickmore, P. Chong, D. Mellis, K. Ryokai, J. Smith, H. Vilhjálmsson, and H. Yan. 2000. Shared reality: physical collaboration with a virtual peer. In CHI '00 extended abstracts on Human factors in computing systems (CHI EA '00).

Links

Classes:
Design for Empowerment
How to Make (almost) Anything

Blog: dam.mellis.org
Photos: flickr.com/photos/mellis/
Thoughts: twitter.com/mellis

Email: mellis@media.mit.edu

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