Carrying on from the previous posts concerning D.I.Y. design, this entry looks at my attempts at using Cosmic Blobs to create a new design for a computer mouse. It’s far shorter than the posts dealing with SketchUp, because frankly it became apparent very quickly that there was no way Cosmic Blobs was capable of the kind of modelling needed to create a functioning consumer product. Nonetheless there are some interesting concepts behind some of the tools which could certainly be interesting for anyone considering the design of ‘consumer-CAD’ software.

Cosmic Blobs was a software package aimed specifically at children (though I’ve not been able to find anywhere that states what ages that was meant to include), developed by Dassault Systemes. Unfortunately it’s no longer available (although copies sometimes appear on Ebay), having been discontinued in 2007; this means there is no longer any support and none of the official documentation and tutorials are available. It also means that, despite being unlike any CAD software you’ll have ever seen before, the user interface already looks old. You’ll need Windows XP to run it (at least, it wouldn’t work on my machine with Vista installed), but it felt very sluggish to me.

Cosmic Blobs Lab Rat Edition © Dassault Systemes

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I recently gave a presentation at the TCT Live event (organised by Time Compression Technologies magazine) in Birmingham, UK. Below are the individual slides with my annotated notes, you can also download the presentation by following this link. You can click on each slide to open a larger image. Please note that although this presentation is covered by the Creative Commons licence at the bottom of this page, actual images contained within the presentation may be subject to copyright.

What I want to talk about today is a subject which makes up a significant part of my PhD research.

The PhD is based on two premises.

Firstly that as digital fabrication technologies become cheaper and easier to access, consumers (ie non-engineers and designers) will use them.

And secondly that this will happen whether designers, and others, like it or not.

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The third post in this series describes how the final design of the mouse was modelled and some of the problems encountered. Before talking about these problems however, I should state that to a considerable extent they constitute an unfair criticism. I’m well aware that the task I’ve attempted in this exercise is one that SketchUp isn’t intended, designed or advertised as being able to do. Nonetheless, I think that by describing the software’s limitations, the magnitude of the task that would face a consumer-designer, using software tools such as SketchUp, is better appreciated. It also makes clearer what the specification and design of a software tool aimed at consumers should be.

The final task in the design stage of the exercise (detailed in the previous post) was to create accurate sketches based on the minimum volume models, which were used as underlays. These drawings were then scanned and imported into SketchUp to act as templates. It was at this point, right at the beginning of the modelling phase, that SketchUp’s limitations began to show, because there is no way to choose which plane to import images into, they all come into the ground (XY) plane. That means that if you have a number of elevations, e.g. front, side, top etc, most will need to be rotated into place. But the image is treated as an object, you can only pick a corner or edge, which means aligning what you’ve actually drawn (rather than the edge of what you scanned) in each elevation has to be done by eye. It’s not a big gripe, but it kind of sets the tone for what’s to come.

The basic profile of the mouse, constructed using imported sketches as a template (click for larger image)

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The second part of this series of posts describes the process of designing a new mouse to be modelled in SketchUp. Although I’m dividing the exercise of learning, designing and modelling into three posts, the reality was that the three were intricately intertwined. Learning SketchUp was an ongoing process right up to the end of the exercise, when trials had to be made to determine the best method of exporting the model to the Objet Connex500 machine which was used to produce the part. The limitations of the software also had a profound effect on the actual design concept, which changed and developed as I started to understand the capabilities of SketchUp better. For a significant part of the design phase there was also a continuous back-and-forth ‘conversation’ between my paper-based sketch designs and the computer-based CAD model designs, as concepts were tested to determine whether their modelling within SketchUp was actually possible.

Before I start, I should say something about the way in which the design phase was conducted. Because this research forms part of my PhD, the design work that I do will be looked at and interrogated in a way that’s very different to the way it’s used in my professional work. I very rarely allow clients to see my ‘raw’ sketches for example, and where I do they will have been edited and put into a ‘logical’ presentation. As a rule clients aren’t particularly bothered about all the experiments and dead-ends that form part of the design process; they want to know about proposal and the thinking behind it. In an academic research context though, the requirements of what’s generally known as practice based research are different. One of the hardest things I’ve had to come to terms with during this stage of the PhD is that, central to the viability of practice-based design research as a methodology, is the understanding that a PhD is granted on the basis of the quality of research, rather than the quality of design. That’s not to say that any design work undertaken can be of sub-standard quality, but rather that it has to be planned, undertaken, documented and analysed with the same degree of rigour employed by more conventional methodologies. This conscientiousness is probably the fundamental difference between practice-based design research and the practice of design itself, where intuition, tacit knowledge and undocumented approaches are common, not to mention the use of primarily visual, rather than written, forms of communication.

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As I said at the beginning of the series of posts on D.I.Y. Reverse Engineering, this part of my research is looking at how feasible it is for a consumer, using currently available technology and software, to design and manufacture their own products. Reverse engineering an existing product is necessary to provide the foundation for this design and manufacture to happen, but what’s more important is looking at the opportunities and obstacles consumers currently face. And so the next few posts will talk about the issues involved in designing and manufacturing a custom-designed mouse, using Google’s free SketchUp modelling software.

The ways in which the design and digital manufacture of products by consumers could revolutionise traditional manufacturing has been widely predicted, Marshall Burns and James Howison for example, predicted the “Napsterization of manufacturing”¹ in 2001, and Evan Malone and Hod Lipson (developers of the Fab@Home system) have described additive manufacturing as having “the potential to transform human civilization.”² However, whilst the hardware and services which might enable consumer fabbing have been in development for some time, the processes by which consumers might conceive and design ‘fabbable’ products have tended to be assumed or glossed over. Neil Gershenfeld for example, writing in Fab about how a novice might use modelling clay to prototype a design, describes a process in which the clay shapes would be 3D scanned and imported to a CAD software environment:

“they can then be manipulated like any other object: scaled larger and smaller, bent around a surface, or merged with other components by Boolean operations. The resulting model can then be output on a fabrication tool such as a 3D printer or an NC mill, effectively converting the clay into plastic or steel, with enhancements added through the CAD editing.” (pp.130-131)

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