Invention, intellectual property and income

Week 17 - Documentation

This week I must develop a plan for dissemination of my final project.

Dissemination Plan

Searching for templates and to create a dissemination plan I found a guide from Dan Richards-Doran that will help to do it.

Image taken from: Develop your research dissemination plan in seven simple steps

The first thing to do is to know what a dissemination plan is. In simple words, a dissemination plan is a presentation of the results and importance of your project. For my final project, I'm doing a robotic hand that will play a piano song. The purpose of the project is for more entertaining reasons rather than trying to solve a problem, so it focused for personal use.

Based on the seven steps here I present my research dissemination plan.

1. Objective. What do you want to achieve?

I want to design and build a robot hand with moving finger that can play a piano song. The idea is to use manufacturing techniques such as 3d printing and computer controlled cutting to make the parts.

2. Audience. Who do you want to reach?

The project is intended for fun and entertaining purposes so I'm aiming for an open audience, mainly for those oriented in technology and music lovers. I believe that soul of the project is making something hard so it can do something as easy as to press piano keys, but with a little bit of rhythm.

3. Situation. What is the broader context of your research?

In my opinion, my project is far from having social or ethical issues. The scope of the project doesn't represent any problematic behaviors, because it is doing something nice, like playing music, in a very unpractical (and artistically not very well), but that applies to a set of rules for the academy project. Everyone I tell what my project does loves the idea and would like to see a robot hand trying to play the piano.

4. Messaging. What will you say?

My keywords are robot and piano, therefor I named my project Pianonator. I think it is fun, because it associates what people usually think about robots watching movies like Terminator and something inoffensive as playing piano. So, I thought about a story where Pianonator, a robot, would tell his story about everyone being afraid of him taking their jobs, but what he has always wanted is to play piano.

5. Strategy. What's your overall approach?

My approach is simple, let the robot play the piano. In my case, I believe that the best approach of sharing my work is setting a demonstration of the results.

6. Tactics. How will you deliver your strategy?

The main activity for delivering the results of my project is sharing content of Pianonator playing songs through social media. There are no intentions to monetize the content, so I'm not planning to have presentation costs for it.

7. Evaluate. How will you measure success?

I will measure the success of the project based on a simple question: Is it capable of playing a song? If the robot hand is able of playing a piano song, I will consider that the project was successful.

There are future opportunities for Pianonator. One of them is within the scope of the project. Right now, Pianonator consists of one fixed hand that moves four fingers. A second phase can be mounting a second hand and having 10 fingers, just like a human hand. A third phase could be adding another degree of freedom so that the hands could move along all the piano keys. I also would like to have not just Pianonator, but the whole band as well, like Guitarnator, Bassnator, etc…

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This work is under Licencia Creative Commons Atribución-NoComercial 4.0 Internacional.