As I said in the last post, things have been pretty busy for me recently, both in my consultancy work (an on-going project which I hope to be able to show soon) and my PhD research. Last week I had my first year report assessment and passed, with the requirement for a couple of amendments, which means I’m now registered for the second year. Over the next few weeks I will edit some of the report and post parts of it here, but in the meantime I wanted to report on part of the 3rd Rapid Manufacturing Conference held here at Loughborough last month.

The previous two years conferences have focussed primarily on the engineering aspects of rapid manufacturing. Although there were again some very technical presentations this year, it also
seemed to be a definite aim of the conference to look at how these technologies are breaking out of R&D labs and getting into the hands of those exploring the design possibilities, and the societal implications, of RM. Frank Piller gave a great presentation on mass customisation and the way in which rapid manufacturing’s ability to create ‘one-off’ products is a natural extension of this. Evan Malone of Fab@Home, and Kathy Lewis of Desktop Factory both gave inspiring presentations on the way in which consumers are taking RM technologies into their own hands. But most interesting for me were the presentations of Assa Ashuach and Lionel Theodore Dean, two designers whose processes are integral to their experiments in pushing the limits of what rapid manufacturing can achieve.

Talking to Assa the night before, he was a bit concerned about how his presentation would go down with an audience primarily made up of engineers and material scientists. He needn’t have worried, most people were fascinated by the way that the technologies and materials they were responsible for developing were being used in ways they had never envisaged. Assa started by showing The AI Light, a pendant lamp which uses sensors to understand its environment, and which reacts by flexing and twisting in response to what it senses.

AI Light © Assa Ashuach

The AI Light is made in nylon using EOS’s laser sintering process. Inside each wing are two actuators, one to control bending and one to control twisting; these allow the light to perform fluid, organic transformations, rather than harsh, robotic movements. The ‘AI’ refers to the way in which the light learns from its surroundings, and allows what Assa calls “training rather than controlling”

“When you first invite it into your home, you have to let it get accustomed to its new environment. Once it is relaxed, the training can then begin. It has five senses that track changes in its environment and slowly it develops a set of behaviours that indicate a new character to each light. The user is also able to interact with the light by playing with it through sounds, light and movements. This smart structure may behave in unpredictable ways if moved to an unfamiliar space.”

AI Light © Assa Ashuach

Assa worked on the AI Light with Complex Matters, a company run by Dr Siavash Mahdavi which specialises in the design of custom materials, often using rapid manufacturing technologies. These custom materials are cellular microstructures, engineered to display different properties in different parts of a product as the application demands; for instance a material might be rigid and stiff in one direction, but soft and flexible in another. It is this kind of structure that allows the AI Light to flex.

Assa first collaborated with Complex Matters on the design of the Osteon chair, which was also shown in his presentation. Assa described the process of design in this project as “finite element analysis in reverse”: first a set of ‘ideal criteria’ were formulated, then the material structure was designed to meet those criteria.

FEA image of the Osteon chair © Assa Ashuach and Complex Matters

Internal structure detail © Assa Ashuach

The Osteon chair was again manufactured by EOS in laser sintered nylon, and can be described as a cosmetic skin stretched over an intelligent internal structure. The result is a continuous flowing curve whose form is unmistakably derived from the tools and capabilities of CAD surfacing software. But the form alone does not tell everything about this chair - one of the most interesting features is that by designing the material specifically to meet the needs of the product, the material needed to manufacture the chair was reduced by 2/3’s. This is significant in any industry where a high strength : weight ratio is required, aerospace for example, but also has implications for the design of environmentally sustainable products.

Osteon chair computer rendering © Assa Ashuach

Osteon chair © Assa Ashuach

The technique of ‘finite element analysis in reverse’ was also utilised in another furniture project, again designed in collaboration with Complex Systems. A custom designed material was developed with the aim of using the minimum volume of material possible to support a load of 120kg at a height of 40cm. Manufactured by Materialize .MGX, the AI Stool is designed to be soft in the areas which which the sitter contacts directly, but rigid in the areas which support the sitter’s weight.

Computer image of AI Stool internal structure © Assa Ashuach and Complex Matters

AI Stool © Assa Ashuach

Lionel Theodore Dean is the driving force behind Future Factories, and was one of the first designers to understand and begin to explore the ability of rapid manufacturing to produce individual, unique products. But as with Assa, the processes Lionel has developed to design these products are as interesting as the products themselves. But rather than custom designing materials and forms to meet a specific need or requirement, Future Factories’ processes introduce an element of chance, often relying on software to evolve a shape in ways that the designer cannot fully control.

Future Factories describes these processes as ‘computational design’. Lionel describes this concept in the catalogue for Digital Design Futures, an exhibition recently held with Justin Marshall of Automake at the Hub exhibition space.

Rather than creating a single discrete design solution, a meta-design is created that defines the function and character over a potentially infinite range of outcomes. The aim is to create coherent recognizable designs but with obvious differences between iterations… There is a balance to be found between freedom and control. A random element is necessary to create something unique; too random and the identity is lost.

An example how this kind of process can be implemented is the idea behind the Tuber pendant lamp. The concept was for a website which ran an animation in which the form of the lamp was continually changing, morphing from one shape to another as dictated by software which ‘evolved’ the design. At any point the customer could ‘freeze’ the animation and order the resulting product, which would then be rapid manufactured in a plaster-based composite material.

Tuber lamp design iterations © Future Factories

An interesting question was raised at the end of the presentation, regarding how much control the user should be given over the design of the Tuber lamp: had the possibility of allowing the consumer to interact with the morphing of the design been considered, rather than leave it to software? The answer was yes, it had been discussed a number of times, for example by introducing slider bars which would control different elements of the design. But for Lionel, this wasn’t about consumer-generated design: the Tuber is a ‘designer’ lamp, it comes from the creative skills of one designer, it’s just that each lamp is different.

Lionel began to see limitations in this process however, in that it relies on the manipulation of pre-existing geometry in a CAD model. As such it was only capable of ‘adjustment’, rather than fundamental change. This was addressed in a later project, ‘Holy Ghost’, which combined the notion of morphing with another process, that of ‘building block’ additions.

Holy Ghost iterations © Future Factories

Like most designers I suspect, I had seen images of the Holy Ghost chair previously. Based on Phillipe Starck’s Louis Ghost chair for Kartell, it had received a lot of press since first being shown. What I had never read about though, was the process by which the chair is designed. The back of the chair consists of a number of elements Lionel calls ‘buttons’, and the first step is to decide how many buttons will be used; a computer script then randomly places these buttons within a three dimensional ‘envelope’ which determines the shape of the back. In the second step the script ‘expands’ the buttons in a uniform manner until they touch. Finally the individual buttons expand in a non-uniform manner to take up the available space, this is what results in differently sized buttons. A series of springs link each button allowing the whole of the back to flex, and the part is manufactured in SLS nylon.

Holy Ghost © Future Factories

Future Factories’ latest project is Icon, a limited series of 100 individual titanium pendants. Lionel had experimented with jewellery pieces in the past. Initially these had been made by rapid prototyping in wax and then investment casting (the Perfactory process) but later this was changed to metal laser sintering, a more direct process.

Jewellery in conjunction with the Jewellery Industry Innovation Centre © Future Factories

This change of manufacturing process in turn required a change in design, primarily to avoid support structures which required much more hand finishing. Initially the new pendants continued to be hand polished, on the outside surface only, but later an automated process was adopted, polishing both internal and external surfaces. Since titanium cannot be soldered, the Icon pendants would be virtually impossible to produce by conventional manufacturing methods. But the Icon series also demonstrates, Lionel believes, the possibility of individualised designs which nonetheless retain an identifiable ‘meta design’. If this meta design were understood in terms of design language, it could be a powerful indication of the way in which traditional manufacturers might retain their brand image in a future where a huge increase in variation is possible.

Part of the Icon series of pendants © Future Factories

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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It’s virtually impossible to be interested in fabbing or mass customisation and not know about the cool stuff Ponoko are doing, both in enabling consumers to manufacture self designed products and in providing a marketplace for those products to be sold. And the news that they are establishing a global head office and manufacturing facility in San Francisco hopefully shows that Ponoko is already doing well enough to start expanding. I know I’m a bit late in posting about this announcement, but what I found especially interesting was the emphasis placed on the environmental benefits of this new set-up.

Ponoko has appointed Graham Hill, founder of Treehugger, to its board of advisors, and writes in its press release that

“Being able to make products on-demand, close to where people live, reduces waste and cuts down on the carbon emissions associated with transporting products to consumers. Our facilities in San Francisco mean that we’re starting to see this become a reality in the United States, and the appointment of Graham to our board of advisors is a huge endorsement of Ponoko’s vision for a more sustainable approach to the way goods are created, made and delivered.”

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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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Yesterday I made a presentation at Nokia’s Demand Supply Network Foresight seminar, held at Nokia’s global headquarters in Espoo, just outside Helsinki. The seminars are held biannually and simultaneously webcast to other locations, the idea is to introduce new thinking from outside Nokia’s areas of expertise, and to broaden the company’s perspective regarding future business environments.

The theme of the seminar was Mass Customization, and I was really lucky to be able to meet and talk with Frank Piller, who gave the keynote presentation. Also presenting were Johan Füller of The Hyve and Santtu Toivonen of Idean. My presentation talked mainly about the current state of the rapid manufacturing industry, and looked forward to ways in which consumers might utilise RM technologies to design and make their own products. The presentation itself is covered by a non-disclosure agreement right now, though I may be able to share it in future.