Master Chao: Chinese virtuouso flat-pattern designer

Andrew "bunnie" Huang — the guy who broke the Xbox and founded Chumby — has a great blog post today about Master Chao, a middle-aged Chinese man who has helped design thousands of everyday products that fill your gadget bag and home. Master Chao's gift is in creating flat patterns for sewing into three dimensional shapes, something that is insanely hard to model well on computers. I heard bunnie give a talk on Chinese manufacturing process last June, and his lyrical description of Master Chao's virtuoso performance has stayed with me.

It turns out there are still things where Craft, and I use it with a capital "C" here, matters-it's where CAD tools haven't brought about the ability to simulate out our mistakes before we build them. The creation of a flat pattern for textile goods is a good example of a process that requires a Craftsman. A flat pattern is the set of 2-D shapes used to guide the cutting of fabrics. These 2-D shapes are cut, folded and sewn into a complex 3-D shape. Mapping the projection of an arbitrary 3-D shape onto a 2-D surface with minimal waste area between the pieces is hard enough; the fact that the material stretches and distorts, sometimes in an anisotropic fashion, and the fact that sewing requires ample tolerances for good yields makes it a difficult problem to automate. On the chumby, we add another level of complexity, because we sew a piece of leather onto a soft plastic frame. As you sew the leather on, the frame will distort slightly and stretch the leather out, creating a sewing bias dependent upon the direction and rate of sewing. This force is captured in the seams and contributes to the final shape of the device. I challenge someone to make a computer simulation tool that can accurately capture those forces and predict how a device will look at the end of the day.

Yet, somehow, Master Chao's proficiency in the art of pattern making enables him to very quickly, and in very few iterations, create and tweak a pattern that compensates for all of this. It's astounding how clever and how insightful the results can be. And really, the point of this particular post is to introduce you to a person whose old-world skills — absent computers, all done with cardboard, scissors and pencils — has likely played a role in the production of something that you have used or benefited from in the course of your life.