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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