A common complaint I get from students is that the hardware is not good enough. My response is that’s robotics: the hardware is never good enough. What I mean is that as a designer, you always have to work within limitations. Sometimes the joy is in getting a very simple robot to do amazing things.… Continue reading Paper prototyping for robotics
Author: Paul Bucci
Redesigning labs to include Reinforcement Learning
I’ve been teaching in the Cognitive Systems (https://cogsys.ubc.ca/) department for a number of years at UBC. My favourite course to teach is COGS 300: Understanding and Designing Cognitive Systems. It’s a big open-ended course, but the core lab project is building your own cognitive system by learning to make real, live robots. The students design… Continue reading Redesigning labs to include Reinforcement Learning
Wax and paper molds
When trying to develop soft silicone robots, we realized that we needed new methods for casting silicone shapes. As we got deeper into trying different casting methods, we thought: why not just build fully wax molds? But the bigger we wanted to make them, the more difficult they were to 3D print. In comes the… Continue reading Wax and paper molds
Building soft sensors into soft robots
After I finished my work on the CuddleBits, I was given a new design task: how do we get a breathing robot that can bend at the same time? As a result, I had to learn about soft robotic design and ended up developing new ways of quickly prototyping carbon black and silicone-based sensors. We… Continue reading Building soft sensors into soft robots
Canadaland Guide to Canada
I was the lead designer for Jesse Brown/Nick Zarzycki/Vicky Mochama’s Canadaland Guide to Canada.
Ubyssey Student Newspaper
I got my start doing print work at the Ubyssey Student Newspaper. Working with the then-photo editor Goh Iromoto (who I later worked for as an editor, PA, and grip), we experimented a lot with the physical paper itself. Most of the time, we had access to only one or two spot colours and had… Continue reading Ubyssey Student Newspaper
Looking for Gods and Punishment
I did consulting work for a digital humanities group, producing a python library for text processing and a visualization for the corpus. The project was to figure how far away words for the Gods were from words for punishment in ancient Chinese texts. You can view a working version of the visualization here.
Ubyssey Usable Business Cards
For this year, the editors wanted business cards they could actually do something with other than just hand them out.
Miscellaneous logo design
I designed a series of logos for different companies and people.
2012 BFA Exhibition Catalogue
In 2012, I was the lead designer for my graduating class exhibition catalogue. It was a lot of fun—they allowed me to spend the budget on a die cut cover and full gloss colour printing.