Hey there! Just a quick post here, thought I'd get the world up to speed on our current efforts. 

We've been working up a storm adding some finishing touches to the Wood Up product, touches such as packaging, graphics, and, well, finish. It's funny how "real" and solid a prototype can feel, right up to the point where it's time to put it into the hands of a customer. Then, suddenly and with great clarity, you can see all the ways in which it's just not quite polished yet.  

Here's a pile of them, in various stages of evolution:

We actually made a bunch of dummies, with no pickup element inside, for the purpose of experimenting with issues of strain relief (like, "How hard can we yank on this cable before it pulls out of the housing?" for instance) and graphics (like, "How will the user know which side to put against the instrument?" for instance). One example of the latter is what you see penciled onto the nearest prototype in this image.

Anyway, there they are! More progress updates to follow soon.

-Adan

We've just returned from attending a fantastic event, a symposium on the topic of "High Performance Craft." The event was hosted by the architecture department in the College of Built Environments of the University of Washington, and as such was slanted somewhat more toward architecture than  product development. Still, however, each presentation resonated very deeply.

It turns out that everything we've ever tried to do with our product development and fab services work could be considered high performance craft, even though we hadn't heard that descriptive phrase until this symposium. One definition, though by no means the only one, of this is to say that we "use care, ingenuity, and enthusiasm to create things of beauty." That came from Richard Green, a structural engineer who spoke about his work with structural glass systems. As descriptions of our process go, it's pretty spot-on.

It seemed like a great topic for kicking off our new Log of Works here on the Akerworks inc. website. It's a thrilling re-invigoration we've been provided by this excellent event.