Right now I’m writing up the first year report for my PhD - good for organising my thoughts and getting some arguments into a coherent state, but not so good in terms of allowing time to write here. So in the absence of a proper post, here are some stories that have interested me in the last few weeks.

First of all, Spore has released it’s Creature Creator in advance of the full release of the game in early September, available as a trial version or for purchase. I’ve talked about Spore previously for the way it will introduce consumers to 3D design tools, as well as indicating a direction CAD software might take to simplify and guide the user through the creation of a product. But what’s also interesting is that the creatures being created by users now will be used in the game when it’s launched. In other words, the players of the game are creating the content of the game, and what’s more some of them (those who buy the full version of the Creature Creator) are paying for the privilege. It’s another example of the degree to which consumers are willing to engage with a brand’s product creation process if the experience is compelling. There’s a good discussion about the Creature Creator at Product Design Forums, plus a YouTube movie which shows how to design your own creature.

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(Thanks go to Duann Scott for bringing this to my attention. You can read his thoughts over at the Ponoko blog).

3DVia is a suite of software tools from Dassault Systèmes, makers of Solidworks and Catia. And whilst it includes 3DVia MP - an authoring platform for games content, and 3DVia Composer - a product documentation package (both of which have to be paid for), what’s really of interest to me are the two free-to-use programs: 3DVia Shape and 3DVia Printscreen. Looked at together with Cosmic Blobs and CB Model Pro, it seems like Dassault Systèmes are pushing hard to be front-runners in the entry-level 3D modelling software market.

3DVia Shape is an online modelling application. What’s most striking on first viewing the demo video is how similar Shape is to Google SketchUp, from the way forms are sketched and then transformed into 3D objects, to the fact that the demo, and most of the sample models created so far, are buildings. Essentially both programs work with extruded forms. 2D sketches are drawn on planar surfaces, and then pulled a certain distance to either create new solids or divide / cut existing ones.

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So far I have looked at ways in which rapid manufacturing technologies might become available to consumers, and the reasons why product design for rapid manufacturing is easier than for mass manufacturing. In the final part of this extended post I want to address the only other remaining hurdle to consumers designing and manufacturing their own products: the tools they will use to design with.

Consumer co-design, sometimes called co-creation, is a topic that’s been written about at length by design researchers. At it’s purest it involves the end user, or typical representatives of end users, entering the design process and creating products or services as part of a design team. In practice though, co-design is often little more than an enhanced customer research exercise. End users might be asked about their needs and desires, encouraged to offer suggestions, and even invited to critique proposed solutions. But there is no doubt it is the designers who are expert, and who make the final decision.

As a designer myself, I confess I find it difficult to break free of this mindset - surely my training and experience mean I am able to understand what a market of consumers will want better than an individual consumer themself might? But the point is, what I think will end up being irrelevant if consumers are able to design their own products. Why should a consumer care that I think their product is crass or crude, if it’s exactly what they want, and they’ve made it? At the moment though, I have one trick up my sleeve - I can use CAD, to design a product and to communicate that design to the means of production, in a way that no non-designer can. All the time designers and design engineers can monopolise the expertise needed to create CAD data, consumer created products will not happen.

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If all goes to plan it should be about five weeks until the frame and forks are ready, which is why I set today as the deadline by which I had to decide what colour the frame will be painted. Because I’ve gone for a lugless construction there’s no possibility of accent colours, so this should have been a relatively easy decision. On the other hand it’s a bike that I hope will last me a long time, and since this is a bespoke item it’s one which I want to reflect my personality to some extent, certainly more than an off-the-shelf model.

Although it might seem a bit backwards, one of the things driving my decision was that I’d already ordered a set of Velocity Deep V rims in orange. I’d seen these rims on a Surly Steamroller in NYC Velo last year, and my first thoughts were to copy the colour scheme but with orange rims instead of red.

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In the previous post I outlined some of the current developments in rapid manufacturing, and what lessons could be learned from the consumer adoption of technologies in the past. Access to a technology is only part of the picture though; if these technologies are to be used by consumers it requires that non-experts are able to design products and supply data to rapid manufacturing machines in a form that the machines understand. So in this part I will look at why the design rules which apply to rapid manufacturing makes it easier to design products.

One of the common features of mass manufacturing processes is that the means of production require substantial initial investment, however once in place the cost of manufacturing a single part or product (relative to the initial investment) is negligible. It is therefore a basic principle of mass manufacturing that as the number of parts produced increases, the cost of production of each individual part decreases. This inevitably leads to uniformity, since even small design changes require significant reinvestment in tooling. To get a return on the investment in the tooling, the number of parts produced must typically be in the tens or even hundreds of thousands. This makes manufacturing one-off or batch volume products virtually impossible without reverting to craft-like technologies.

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