From Shop Floor to Software : industrial design

A soft-skinned car?

Leslie_Gordon — Thu, 12 Mar 2009 14:14:00 GMT

"Let the material do the talking" is one of the ideas behind GINA, BMW's concept sports car. Instead of a metal body, it has one made from stretchable material. Thus, designers don't have to worry about, say, smooth continuity between the wheel wells and the body -- the material naturally takes care of a flow. Also, the car's headlights act and look like human eyes, blinking open and shut as needed. GINA stands for something like "Geomety shape functions In N Adaptations." http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kTYiEkQYhWY

SolidWorks World 2009 -- Day 1 & 2

Leslie_Gordon — Tue, 10 Feb 2009 15:22:00 GMT

According to CEO Jeff Ray, over 4,000 people are attending the SolidWorks World 2009 event being held in Orlando, Florida over the next few days. Although times are tough, that is not evident at this show. Attendees are upbeat and the theme "innovation" predominates. The Great Depression spawned nylon, car radios, and everyone's favorite -- SPAM. Today's big problems can be addressed by yet more innovative designs. Take for example modern windmills, which came out of a need for sustainable energy. Many people don't want them in their back yards and the devices are expensive. Still in the concept phase is a 3 to 4-ft tall windmill that would fit on a house rooftop and generate enough energy for the house. Another problem: many people in the world lack access to safe drinking water. A company has invented a device that bombards drinking water with UV light, cleaning the water without the use of chemicals or chlorine. Fifty of the devices are currently being deployed near N.Y.C., enough to fill the Empire State Bldg. eight times a day with water.

Sir Richard Branson spoke on the first day. For a guy worth billions of dollars, he is quite personable, humble, and has a wicked sense of humor. He has started another company -- Virgin Galactic Airways -- because he thinks commercial space aviation will become a reality. His suggestions for combatting a tough economy:

-- Expand out of it instead of contracting. If you can afford to, continue to innovate.
-- Before just laying people off explore the alternatives such as job sharing. There might be employees who would really appreciate only having to work a few days a week such as ones with small children.

Branson says America is quite protectionist, which translates to anti-innovative. "We must get rid of all the barriers in the world," he says. He is a big fan of Obama.

Day Two, Jon Hirshtick, the former CEO of SolidWorks, spoke on what he says will be the technologies most important in affecting CAD in the future:

-- Touch and motion UIs. A lot of industrial designers already use Wacon Tablets, like a big computerized drawcuesing pad that imports Photoshop files, and draw directly on them.
-- CAD will become a hardware business again in that more and more users will be using hardware specifically designed for CAD such as the 3D mouse.
-- Online applications will get even more prevelant. Already have an application on SolidWorks Labs (labs.solidworks.com) to create 2D drawings which can be accessed by many devices including cell phones.
-- Video gaming technology will get increasingly prevelant in CAD. Features such as ambient occlusion are already in CAD that have been borrowed from video games. Many graphic gards now have more transistors on them than CPUs.
-- 3D printing will become a key part of the design process and be used iteratively.

Other speakers mentioned how industrial design uses "styling cues" from other areas of society to get ideas for designs. Industrial designers choose a "form language" they are interested in for different products.

Check out smoothon.com for material that lets you rapidly mold things using, say, a 3D printed mold.

BoardCAD.com is a free download for making surface models for things like surfboards.

More than just user-centric, design nowadays must be desire-centric. This even applies to machine design which can borrow techniques from consumer design.

Old DWG, New BIM?

Leslie_Gordon — Tue, 02 Dec 2008 16:01:00 GMT

CAD at the Venetian Resort

Autodesk is again hosting its annual Autodesk University (AU) event at the Venetian Resort in Las Vegas. It's still pretty early, so things haven't yet geared up. The developer must have sympathy for those of us who travel a distance to get here and thus are still reeling from jetlag -- the keynote speech from CEO Carl Bass is not slated to start until around
10 am! Most similar venues have attendees getting up around 7 am.

Anyway, I absolutely love the Venetian Resort, especially the fake "Venice" that comprises a series of fancy shops and resturants, a real canal full of real water, and gondoliers dressed in the traditional red and white striped shirts. Some of my collegues hate Las Vegas because it is so sleazy. I don't gamble but I love the neon lights and the glitter. But you can sense a heart of darkness: I've been told that there are shops where desperate gamblers can pawn their cars, recreational vehicles, and even home mortgages.

Old DWG, New BIM

At the registration area is a large board that attendees can use to post their idea on how to get a more sustainable

world. Ideas: Share our vehicles, Go local; Turn off the lights; Build digitally; Use solar wind and energy. And -- my favorite -- "Old .DWG, new BIM." BIM is a big buzz in architectural circles lately. It stands for Building Information Modeling and is said to be a term that was coined by Autodesk to mean "3D, object-oriented, AEC-specific CAD." Of course, DWG is the traditional drawing format. Can you teach an old DWG new tricks, er, that is to be a BIM?

Ideas on Innovation

Tom Kelly, co-founder of design company IDEO spoke at this morning's keynote session. He says, design is not superficial, it is strategic. It creates value. It can make the difference between love and hate. If you wanna' innovate, you have to design. Now you have to out-innovate the rest of the world. It is like the Red Queen effect from Alice in Wonderland. We are running, but we are not getting anywhere. So you have to run twice as fast. What if we are first, or perhaps the best? IDEO designs: From the Apple mouse to helping the Red Cross redesign the experience of donating blood.

What works in innovation and what doesn't? His book: The Ten Faces of Innovation. Learn from other people's failures. His mistake: The human brain can handle only 7 bits of information at a time. So don't talk about the 10 top faces.... talk about the 2:

Designs used to be driven by specifications and technical challenges. The Anthropologist would go to lakes and streams and come and tell us about it. This is a source of innovation. The act of discover is in seeing with new eyes. In the process of developing expertise, most designers start filtering out new experiences. Vuga de -- the opposite of deja vu. Start to ask questions differently. For example, Oral B wanted to innovate around kid's toothbrushes. IDEO started with anthropology -- every toothbrush in the world had the implicit assumption that kids' toothbrushes should be a small version of their parents. Kids actually hold toothbrushes differently and needed big, squishy toothbrushes. Had best selling toothbrush in the world for 18 months until others caught up.

Next is the Experience Architect. He thinks about the total experience the customer has. Good book -- The Experience Economy.

For example making a birthday cake:

Commodity way -- Mom goes out and buys stuff to make a birthday cake. Cheap, but a lot of work and a lot of risk.

Product way -- Betty Crocker makes the batter. More expensive, but saves a lot of time.

Service level -- Go to a bakery and buy a ready-made cake that squirts the kid's name on it. No risk. Expensive

Chuckie Cheeses -- Terrible in many ways except you can be a hero for your kids that day if you pay big bucks for a Chuckie Cheese party. Parents are willing to pay almost anything. No risk.

How to get an idea: Find an opportunity hidden in plain sight. For instance, the Westin Hotel and its Heavenly Bed. No one else had thought to design around the businessmen who flies in late, goes to bed and goes to work early (not around the spa and pool crowd).

Use simplicity as a tool. The simpler as the better. Aspire to the "wet-nap interface" of moist towelettes. Just tear open and use.

New trends to check out -- "algorithimic design," and biomimicry

COFES 2008

Leslie_Gordon — Sun, 13 Apr 2008 00:13:00 GMT

Attending the COFES 2008 (Congress on the Future of Engineering Software) conference has been a nice surprise. For one thing, the event is being held at the beautiful Scottsdale Plaza Resort near Phoenix, Arizona. Think bright blue skies, hot sunny days, and unusual fauna such as the bottle brush tree, which has what looks like thousand of red, bristly bottle brushes hanging from its branches.

For another thing, the event is way more intellectually oriented than are most trade shows. That sounds boring, but is in fact, quite inspiring. Here are a few of the things I have seen and heard, in no particular order: Karl Ulrich from the Wharton School of the Univ. of Pennsylvania gave a talk that could have easily been titled: Quantifying innovation. He qualifies extreme innovation as something that makes a lot of $$ and gave the example of the Oral B toothbrush, which has the largest market share in the world of any toothbrush. The company used what is called a "tournament structure" to come up with the best design: designers generated hundreds of ideas; the company made models of the best 50 and tested them with consumers. Out of this came the best five. The company tested these thoroughly in the lab using mirrors to watch participants brush their teeth from every angle. The winner was the now widely known brush with a co-molded handle.

Pixar used the same method to pick a movie to make. The company got 500 one-sentence pitches and out of these picked the best, "A hot-rod racecar gets waylaid in the desert and finds the meaning of friend and family." This resulted in the movie Cars. He also says tournaments are not always needed. A good example is the problem, "What should a roof beam look like in engineering software?" This problem and others like it only take one or two passes to solve. Ulrich says Six Sigma is the wrong logic for innovation because it aims to produce the same thing the same way every time. Instead, it is better to think of innovation statistically using the tournament framework to:

-- Take more draws from a larger distribution
--Shift the mean of the quality of ideas upwards
--Increase the variance in the qualities
--Increase accuracy in evaluating opportunities

In one case, this method produced a money-making idea from an Indian doctor -- that of brokering "medical tourism" for semi-elective surgery.

Coming soon: A new RP format that replaces STL

Visual cues speak volumes

Leslie_Gordon — Wed, 15 Aug 2007 09:53:00 GMT

New, so-called direct manufacturing methods will soon let individuals make products at home using high-tech, smaller versions of industrial equipment. Smaller tool and die shops are now using laser sintering machines, previously the province only of large manufacturers, to "print" or build 3D parts directly from CAD models. Rust Belt methods are left in the dust as companies increasingly scramble to distinguish themselves from competitors. Design thus plays a more sophisticated role in developing products that will sell. In fact, the cover of a recent magazine* states, "Design drives spending, saving, and desire." Top better understand the subtleties of design, MACHINE DESIGN magazine now includes a monthly column covering topics on Industrial Design. Due to print soon, one column will report how "shape speaks a language that is understood on an instinctual level." In other words, visual cues speak volumes.

..........Innovative design might be a matter of targeting the primal brain?