Forming Shapes to Bodies: Design for Manufacturing in the Prosthetic Instruments Ian Hattwick Input Devices and Music Interaction Lab Center for Interdisciplinary Research in Music Media and Technology McGill University, Montreal Canada ian.hattwick@mail.mcgill.ca Joseph Malloch Input Devices and Music Interaction Lab Center for Interdisciplinary Research in Music Media and Technology McGill University, Montreal Canada joseph.malloch@mail.mcgill.ca Marcelo M. Wanderley Input Devices and Music Interaction Lab Center for Interdisciplinary Research in Music Media and Technology McGill University, Montreal Canada marcelo.wanderley@mcgill.ca ABSTRACT Moving new DMIs from the research lab to professional artistic contexts places new demands on both their design and manufacturing. Through a discussion of the Prosthetic Instruments, a family of digital musical instruments we de- signed for use in an interactive dance performance, we dis- cuss four different approaches to manufacturing – artisanal, building block, rapid prototyping, and industrial. We dis- cuss our use of these different approaches as we strove to reconcile the many conflicting constraints placed upon the instruments’ design due to their use as hypothetical pros- thetic extensions to dancers’ bodies, as aesthetic objects, and as instruments used in a professional touring context. Experiences and lessons learned during the design and man- ufacturing process are discussed in relation both to these manufacturing approaches as well as to Bill Buxton’s con- cept of artist-spec design. Keywords DMI, digital fabrication, manufacturing, dance 1. INTRODUCTION The Prosthetic Instruments are a family of digital musi- cal instruments (DMIs) designed to be used for interactive dance performance [1]. The Visor, Ribs, and Spine are able to be worn as attachments to the body and can also be detached and manipulated as handheld instruments. They were developed during an interdisciplinary research project whose participants were Sean Ferguson and Marcelo Wan- derley at McGill University and Isabelle van Grimde and her dance company Van Grimde Corps Secrets. The instruments were created to be used within a pro- fessional artistic context, including a series of high-profile performances. This placed numerous demands on the de- sign of the instruments – they needed to be durable, usable by technical staff with no specialized training, mechanically and electronically dependable, and also created in sufficient quantities so as to provide backup systems in case of emer- gency. These demands are unusual for instruments created Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. To copy otherwise, to republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. NIME’14, June 30 – July 03, 2014, Goldsmiths, University of London, UK. Copyright remains with the author(s). Figure 1: Violinist Marjolain Lambert plays the Ribs on dancer Sophie Breton. Photo by Michael Slobodian. within the NIME community, and the Prosthetic Instru- ments provide an example of approaches to design and man- ufacturing suitable for small-scale manufacturing and pro- fessional artistic use. This paper will discuss the Prosthetic Instruments’ me- chanical and electronic construction as well as discuss de- sign challenges and approaches. A more general overview of the instrument’s development and design philosophy is available in [1]. The instruments’ electronics draw from previous research projects conducted in our lab, the Input Devices and Music Interaction lab, and as much as possi- ble earlier work was reutilized. However, over the course of development nearly every aspect of the electronics was modified and updated. The mechanical construction of the instruments evolved from hand-crafted early prototypes to small-scale production utilizing digital manufacturing tech- niques. Working closely with dancers provided both our primary constraint and a unique design opportunity. Forming the instruments to complement the dancers’ bodies was one of Proceedings of the International Conference on New Interfaces for Musical Expression 443