Crowdfunding Backer Patented My Project
I never thought about patents much. I just wanted to make stuff and share it with others. Then one day someone else patented my work.
It all began back in 2011, when I had just started grad school. For a class project, my collaborators Natalie Freed, Adam Setapen and I created the Telescrapbooks, two wirelessly-connected scrapbooks that use electronic sticker modules called I/O stickers—sensors, switches, LEDs, motors and speakers—as a way for anyone to build their own custom interactive interfaces.
A couple years later in January 2013, after Natalie and Adam had graduated and I continued on as a PhD student, my collaborator bunnie took a group of us students to Shenzhen, China to learn about its unique hardware manufacturing ecosystem. There we visited the factories to learn how we could collaborate with manufacturers to scale up our research.
While on the trip, bunnie and I started prototyping a method for manufacturing the electronic sticker modules using flexible printed circuit boards and conductive adhesive. And we were happy to find a process that actually worked!
