UP Shield: Face Shields Prototyped in Days

UPShield was our own project. In March 2020, as personal protective equipment ran short across the region, our team decided to put its design and printing capacity toward face shields for medical facilities rather than wait for a client brief.

The work started with a market review: what shields already existed, how they were built, and which of those designs could be produced at speed with materials that were still purchasable that week. Everything after that was engineering around two moving constraints — time and supply.

We ran the full printer farm at once — Creality CR-10, SeeMeCNC Artemis and Raise3D Pro2 Plus machines in parallel — and treated print capacity as a design variable rather than a fixed service. Two changes after the first prototype did most of the work.

First, we reduced the plastic bandwidth of the frame. That fit more parts on each bed, roughly doubled effective printing speed, used less material per shield and made the finished shield lighter, which the people wearing them noticed immediately. Second, we reshaped the prongs that retain the screen so a shield could be assembled and the screen swapped without fighting the frame.

Cutting the screens was the remaining bottleneck: the shield has a round-edged screen and the plastic arrives in square sheets, so edges were trimmed by hand. One of our engineers mapped the worktable with a full-size blueprint of the screen outline, which turned a measure-and-cut operation into a place-and-cut one and took most of the time out of that stage.

The development process was covered by local broadcasters and on social media while it was happening, which helped facilities that needed shields find out that they existed. Our write-up of the timeline is in how to launch a new product within a couple of weeks.