Unto This Last is a furniture studio and workshop, based on two sites in London. Its name comes from the title of a book by John Ruskin, published in 1862, in which he advocated a return to localised, craftsman/artisan workshops as an antidote to the conditions which industrialisation had imposed on much of Britain’s working class. As a fore-runner of William Morris and the Arts and Crafts Movement, Ruskin’s thoughts were influential, but the rising standard of living which mass manufacturing brought to the West meant that his pleas were ultimately seen as anachronistic. But according to Olivier Geoffrey, founder of Unto This Last, CNC machining and on-demand manufacturing open up possibilities for the craftsman in the community which may yet see Ruskin’s vision realised.

D Chair © Unto This Last

For the last month or so I have been teaching on the MA Industrial Design course at Central St Martins in London, on a project titled “manufacturing and consumption futures”. The project  is intended to encourage students to research the opportunities which new production methods allow for more personalised products, to propose and refine a system of their own, and ultimately to prototype the system itself. I hope to show some of the outcomes in a later post, but as part of the research for the project students were invited to Unto This Last’s Brick Lane workshop, to look around and to quiz Olivier about his philosophy.

Facet Sideboard © Unto This Last

Olivier began by explaining how, if you’re engaged in design, you’re inevitably bound up in the distribution systems of the products you’re designing. A designer working at Ikea, for example, doesn’t design flat pack furniture just for the sake of it, or even because it’s part of the Ikea brand experience. Flat pack systems allow customers to transport their purchases home from the store and then assemble the furniture themselves, which is crucial for keeping costs down. Whereas a designer working for Cassina knows that the assembly and transportation costs will be tied up in the price the furniture, and can therefore rely on skilled craftsmen using specialised tools to build a piece of furniture, rather than an untrained consumer with an allen key.

Honeycomb Shelves © Unto This Last

Unto This Last’s designs are similarly a reflection and a result of distribution systems and logistics. A customer who visits the store can see some examples of the products on sale, but with the exception of a few small gift items, no products are held in stock, instead they are manufactured to order. This reduces the costs of storage and inventory, whilst also allowing the company to carry more than 2000 items its catalogue. Orders are made in-store and delivered pre-assembled, and because the furniture is shipped direct from the store it means packaging is also greatly reduced. In this way, by using digital manufacturing processes and some of the techniques recognisable from other mass customisation initiatives, Unto This Last can offer custom-made furniture at close to mass-production prices.

Nurbs Coffee Table © Unto This Last

Unto This Last uses laminated birch ply for all its products. Clearly the material has properties, both visual and functional, which many designers in the past have found interesting, and it would probably be naive to suggest that the only reason for using the material is its fit within Unto This Last’s distribution chain. Nonetheless, it is remarkably suitable for helping Olivier realise his vision. To begin with plywood is very dimensionally stable, and has uniform properties in all directions (unlike natural timbers, where grain and knots affect the strength and shape of the material). It also doesn’t shrink. This means that parts can be machined on a CNC router with a high degree of accuracy (typically Unto This Last manufacture to tolerances of 0.1mm); such precision also simplifies the process of assembling the finished furniture piece – less finishing is required, and glue dries under the natural pressure of the fit, without the need for clamping. Using laminates also allows Unto This Last to effectively design its own materials – both workshops (in Brick Lane and Battersea) have presses for applying ’standard’ veneers of oak, walnut, maple and a melamine coated surface, as well as allowing experimentation with bespoke surfaces such as fabric, leather and paper.

The CNC router used at Unto This Last’s Brick Lane workshop

The use of birch ply laminates undoubtedly plays a part in the consumer acceptance of this way of working – because the material is relatively uniform it means a customer can be confident that the piece of furniture delivered to them will be virtually identical to the one they saw on display. But the material also has a significant impact on the both the designs of Unto This Last’s furniture, and the process of design which leads to them. Parts are designed which anticipate the requirements of production, they incorporate tapers, chamfers, clearances etc which can be machined rather than relying on a furniture maker to create joints and fixtures by hand. Design elements which are proven to work on one product are reused in new products, and so a vocabulary, both technical and aesthetic, has built up. All of Unto This Last’s products are built in Solidworks, and by using equation driven parameters a design can easily be modified such that changing one dimension will cause all other critical dimensions to update. The company has also put a significant amount of effort into developing custom API’s to calculate the most efficient way of laying out parts before they are machined.

Pierre, a designer at Unto This Last, demonstrates a CAD model of a table

How the constituent parts of a fully assembled piece of furniture are machined turns out to be a significant issue for Unto This Last. Not only does it make sense to save costs by wasting as little of a laminated sheet as possible, businesses in London have to pay per kg of waste, which provides another incentive to make efficient use of each sheet. Typically the workshop will take two weeks worth of orders, computer software then creates a ‘cutting map’ for each sheet of laminate required. Where it’s not possible to use an area of the sheet for furniture that has been ordered, smaller gift items are incorporated into the cutting map to fill up the empty space. Again this demonstrates how Unto This Last are almost obsessive in the use of digital technologies to refine the manufacturing process; this is the key difference, Olivier explained, to more expensive furniture makers where a significant amount of cost is tied up in waste and poorly optimized logistics.

Tea-Light Candle Holders © Unto This Last

Certainly the concept of a craft workshop in the centre of a city, enabled by digital technologies, where customers can see and hear and smell custom furniture being made, seems to have struck a chord: 40% of customers come from the recommendations of past clients, and a further 40% are people who just happen to see the store and are interested enough to look in. But Unto This Last goes against the flow of most mass customisation enterprises, which tend to be impersonal and usually offer no contact with the designer, and where cost reductions are achieved by off-shoring to faceless factories rather than opening an atelier in the middle of London. Just how successful Unto This Last is at realising Ruskin’s vision remains to be seen, but we’d have more interesting cities, and more interested customers, if it showed the way for others to follow.

Thanks to Olivier and Pierre for their time, and Ben Hughes for arranging the visit.

Detail of Tapered Ply Table © Unto This Last

I recently received a mail from Alex Mamalyha, web community manager for i.materialise, announcing the launch of a new service from Materialise NV. i.materialise is a rapid manufacturing service aimed at designers, and the beta site gives a good idea of the way the service will work. Obviously there are many web-based rapid manufacturing services these days, and the announcement of a new one is a fairly regular occurrence which I usually just ignore. But given the extent to which Materialise have supported and encouraged designers’ use of RM technologies through their .MGX initiative, I thought this was one service that deserved further investigation.

The ‘manifesto’ of i.materialise claims the service makes “3D printing as easy as printing on paper”. Obviously such claims owe more to hyperbole than fact, but the i.materialise interface is presented in a relatively simple and obvious way. A workspace in the centre of the screen visualises the model once it is uploaded, and a number of drop-down menus to the right give the choice of materials, surface finishes etc.

To test the service, I used a model I made previously for Nina Pirhonen, a Finnish designer and creator of the PomPom character and series of books. The model was originally created in Solidworks, but in order to upload it to the i.materialise site it first needed to be converted to .stl format.

3D model of PomPom © Nina Pirhonen

It’s here that some of the limitations of the i.materialise service first begin to show. Whether it’s to simplify the operation, or because limits don’t in fact exist, there’s no information regarding maximum file sizes or number of triangles/polygons. This is fairly basic information that anyone, designer or not, with the skill to create a 3D CAD model will want to know, since it has a fundamental effect on the quality of the manufactured model, and most CAD packages allow the quality of the .stl file to be easily determined. In this instance I used a relatively coarse setting, giving a triangle count of 20,024, and a file size of 1,001,284 bytes. I also imported the file into Rhino in order to export as .3ds, .obj and .wrl formats.

Exported .stl model of PomPom © Nina Pirhonen

Uploading the file is easy – click the upload button and choose your file – and quick; a 1.5Mb .3ds file took about 20 seconds to upload, with a further 8 seconds for the i.materialise software to analyse the file. Exactly what the analysis involves isn’t clear, but I assume the model is being checked to ensure it’s a closed volume. No errors or warnings were given about the model, which suggests it isn’t being checked in terms of the feasibility of it actually being made – the ears, arms and feet/ground of this model would definitely throw up problems, particularly in some of the more fragile material options. Once the model is uploaded it appears in the workspace of the user interface, and can be viewed from different angles.

i.materialise interface © Materialise NV (click for larger image)

Another limitation of the interface is that there’s no option to change the build orientation of the model. Since most rapid manufacturing technologies have different resolutions in their horizontal plane and vertical axis, this can be an important choice, affecting which surfaces have the smoothest finish. For a service aimed at designers it’s definitely an option I would expect to see.

On the right hand side of the interface there are a choice of materials, including ABS, polycarbonate and polyamide, alumide, and multicolour composite. As different materials are chosen the price automatically updates, along with the surface finishing options. Most materials can be painted and some can be mechanically smoothed (similar to tumble polishing). There’s also an extensive ‘library’ of information about materials and manufacturing techniques.

Multicolour Composite material properties © Materialise NV (click for larger image)

Given the nature of the model I was testing the service with, I was particularly interested in the multicolour composite option. Materialise use a Z Corp Spectrum Z510 for this process, which prints at 600 x 540 dpi. The problem was that, as far as I could tell there is no way to specify the colour of the surfaces. Usually Z Corp Spectrum printers use VRML files, but when I uploaded in this format (the system accepts and recognises .wrl files, even though they are not listed as a usable file type) no colour information was retained. The same was true when I tried an .obj file. Looking around the site and through the FAQ’s didn’t give any clues as to what file formats I should be using or whether this option is functional, but obviously this is something that needs to be fixed before the service comes out of beta testing.

All in all, I’m not really sure what to make of the i.materialise site and service. It’s stated explicitly that the service is aimed at designers, though it’s not made clear whether that means just design professionals or includes consumer-designers. Either way, for those with the experience and skill to create their own 3D models it seems a bit simplistic. There’s none of the control you get setting up a model for printing yourself, particularly deciding what orientation the parts should be printed. To be fair it’s possible to contact i.materialise direct, but then the service becomes little different to using a local RP/RM shop (although admittedly, the range of materials and processes is much greater than most shops are able to offer). And of course it should be kept in mind that the site is still in beta testing, the whole point of which is to iron out the glitches. In this respect at least, i.materialise have done a good job – the UI is easy to understand and the whole process of uploading a file, choosing a material and ordering is easy to follow.

Finally, one tantalising option, which isn’t possible to review but which is suggested in the FAQ’s, is the future possibility of ordering some of the .MGX designs. Quite how this will work is unclear – will it simply be possible to choose from a catalogue and hit ‘print’, or will it be possible to modify the design? But this is obviously one area where the i.materialise service can offer something unique, over and above similar web-based services or a local RM shop.

Update: Since posting this article I have swapped a few emails with Alex Mamalyha; my questions and his answers are reproduced below:

1. Is there a maximum file size, and is there a limit to the number of triangles or polygons in a model?
2. How are colours specified when choosing the multi-colour composite option (using the Z-Corp Spectrum printer)?
3. Will you attempt to make any model, or will you advise if an uploaded model is unsuitable?
4. What is your returns policy?

Finally, I noticed that it’s possible to upload a VRML (.wrl) file and the system will recognise it, but this isn’t listed in the ’supported formats’ list.

1. There is no limitation on the file size or number of triangles in the model.
2. Colors should be stored within the uploaded file, so if you choose Z-Corp we will print it in color (I realize it is a bit confusing since the preview generated images are in single color, but we will improve that bit shortly).
3. We did some testing with Blender users. If the uploaded file is not suitable for printing we will fix it ourselves, unless it requires severe design changes (after all we don’t want to print cube when the person is ordering sphere) in which case we will contact the designer and explain what has to be changed. We will not attempt to print something that is not printable. Additionally, we are developing plug-ins for major CAD programs that will provide designers with the info on problems with the file before they even upload it.
4. Once we print and ship the model, it cannot be return for obvious reasons (usually it’s one of a kind design)

About VRML support. We are still in a pretty early BETA and some info may not be consistent in all parts of the website, but we will do our best to provide support for a number of different file types.

Are there plans to add functionality which would allow the designer to choose the orientation of the part in the build chamber? Or maybe make it clearer which is the Z-axis so the part can be oriented in the modelling application?

We are working on functionality, so that preview window on the website will allow designers to rotate the model, rather than have screenshot generated (as it does now). It does not matter how the file is located during the upload process, we have support engineers, who check all incoming files and position them, we don’t expect people to know how the model should be oriented for printing purposes.

I recently got back from a trip to New York, having been there during ICFF and all the design week activities surrounding it. I was somewhat surprised at how little rapid manufactured furniture there was within the main show (unless you count laser cutting, which was impossible to avoid and demonstrated little that wasn’t being done five years ago), but outside .MGX was again showing it’s new collection at Moss, this year entitled E-volution. I should say straight off that the curation of this exhibition isn’t particularly clear: some of the pieces on display are from previous collections, and not everything in the new collection is on show. Nonetheless, it occurred to me whilst walking round that the designers and pieces involved fall into three distinct categories of the exploration of design for rapid manufacture.

.MGX by Materialise © Moss

It’s worth making clear at this point that when I say ‘design’ I mean the kind of design that .MGX promote and specialise in. The kind of design that’s sometimes called “Design with a capital D”; the kind of design which non-designers usually associate with the word and which some designers dislike because they feel it misrepresents what design ‘really’ is. This is design whose reason for existence is spectacle, whose aim is to make people take notice through initial observation rather than through extended use. Normally I would say there’s too much of this kind of design, and much of it is rubbish. But Materialise has a clear objective, which is to push the boundaries of rapid manufacturing and showcase what the technologies are capable of. If the result is more designers and manufacturers understanding what RM technologies can achieve, then that’s a good thing.

.MGX by Materialise © Moss

The first category is best termed Design as an Exploration of Production. This category is the largest in terms of the number of .MGX products it contains, and is made up of products whose central interest is an exploration of what rapid manufacturing technologies can produce, which conventional technologies cannot. It is typified by complex detailing on both the interior and exterior of the product, geometries which would be impossible to achieve were any form of tooling required.

Fugu vase by Hani Rashid © .MGX

Many .MGX lights fall into this category. Being able to design and manufacture an internal space of great complexity allows the designer to play with the way in which light escapes from a volume, as well as the shadows it creates.

Tulip lamp by Peter Jansen © .MGX

A further branch of the Design as an Exploration of Production category continues the idea of manufacturing what would conventionally be ‘impossible’ forms, but reduces the complexity to much purer geometries. Bathsheba Grossman has worked with Jiri Evenhuis to up date an earlier version of the Torus lamp, in which two simple donut forms interconect. Another example from Freedom of Creation (of which Evenhuis is a partner,) though not produced through .MGX and thus not on show, the Rollercoaster bowl.

Rollercoaster bowl by Janne Kyttänen © Freedom of Creation

The second category is what I call Design as an Exploration of Craft. The main use of rapid manufacturing in this category is as an enabler of actually getting an object produced, an object which would otherwise be too expensive, or require too high a level of expertise, to be manufactured. It doesn’t necessarily mean that only one object is ever produced, more that, even if the production volume never rises above one, the design is still a success. In many ways, it’s possible to see more evidence of this kind of design in past .MGX products than in the newest collection – it seems the ability to create one-off pieces is no longer the wonder it once was. The Damned lampshade by Luc Merx is from 2007, but was on show at Moss, and exemplifies this category.

The Damned Lampshade by Luc Merx © .MGX

The lampshade clearly refers to classical images of the fall of the damned, such as those of Gustav Doré in Dante’s Divine Comedy. It’s about as far removed from what’s usually considered to be ‘good design’ as it’s possible to get, and it’s difficult to imagine it would ever have been made if rapid manufacturing did not exist. Merx refers to the complexity of 18th Century carved ivory furniture as an influence, a craft which is highly skilled and nowadays virtually obsolete (not to mention, largely illegal). The .MGX website describes how selective laser sintering technology allows this intricacy of form, but this lampshade is not an exploration of that intricacy. Rather it takes the capability for granted, and uses it to explore a very personal vision of the designer. In a similar way, though more whimsically perhaps, Dan Yeffet’s Forbidden Fruit bowl is a take on original sin, as well as a pre-emptor of Shapeways Creator service.

Forbidden Fruit bowl by Dan Yeffet © .MGX

The final category I have termed Design as an Exploration of Design. Here the end product may display traits from either of the first two categories, however the most important thing is the way the designer uses the capabilities of rapid manufacturing to explore new ways of designing. I have written previously about Assa Ashuach’s AI stool, on show at Moss, and the way it was designed using a kind of ‘reverse’ finite element analysis to determine where the stool should be rigid and where it should flex in order to create the minimum possible volume of material. In one sense it can be argued that the designer didn’t design the AI stool, Assuach designed the process, and the process designed the stool.

AI stool © Assa Ashuach

A similar notion, i.e. a design process in which the designer does not control the final outcome of the design, is apparent in the Root chair by Sulan Kolatan and William MacDonald. Based on traditional Asian furniture in which tree roots are shaped to create individually unique pieces of furniture, each Root chair is digitally ‘grown’ within variable parameters. There is little information in the show about exactly how this is done, but this investigation of an ‘evolving’ family of forms is something also being explored by Lars Spuybroek’s MyLight (included in the show at Moss), as well as Lionel Theodore Dean of Future Factories.

Root chair by Sulan Kolatan and William MacDonald © .MGX

As well as the Torus lamp with Jiri Evenhuis, Bathsheba Grossman is also showing the Gyroid lamp. Grossman is well known as an early exponent of rapid manufacturing technologies which she uses to make mathematical sculptures. Her background as both a mathematician and artist lead to the creation of sculptural forms driven by equation and geometry in which the personality of the designer determines the meta-design but is strangely removed from the symmetrical, repeating details. According to .MGX

In nature, the gyroid is found when two immiscible fluids are forced to occupy the same space. These fluids interpenetrate but do not dissolve together. The same is true for the Gyroid.MGX which divides the 3D space it occupies into two regions. These regions are identical, interlocking, and yet remain completely distinct from each other.

Gyroid lamp by Bathsheba Grossman © .MGX

These three design explorations encapsulate the types of creativity rapid manufacturing is facilitating amongst some designers today. They don’t just relate to the work produced by Materialse .MGX, they are also able to accommodate, for example, Front’s Sketch Furniture and Future Factories Ghost chair. In time new areas can open up, but if you can think of examples today which don’t fit, I’d be interestd to hear.

Shapeways, the consumer-oriented digital manufacturing service, has received a lot of positive press since it was recently spun out of Philips Lifestyle Incubator. Originally in closed beta testing limited to 500 participants (though this seems to have been relaxed – I had no problems registering), Shapeways allows users to upload designs and receive a quote for the model’s manufacture in a number of different materials. Accepted file formats include .stl, .dae and .x3d, and the maximum file size is 64Mb which seems pretty huge – I very rarely create a full assembly in .stl which is even half that size. However the maximum number of polygons is 250,000 (due apparently to the processing time and the need to display models on computers without high-end graphics cards), and the problem of a model not being accepted occurs quite frequently in the Shapeways forums. But given that Shapeways is still in beta it seems to be working well, and the enthusiasm with which it has been received by some users is encouraging for those of us who argue that there’s a demand from consumers for the ability to design and manufacture their own products.

Nonetheless, one of the requirements for using Shapeways is a knowledge of CAD in order to output a 3D model in one of the formats mentioned above. As I have argued previously, knowledge of CAD is the gateway to manufacture (assuming we are not talking about craft production), and without that knowledge it doesn’t matter how easy it is to upload and pay for a model to be produced, it’s not going to be embraced by consumers without the time or interest to learn a 3D modelling program. This is one of the strengths of Ponoko, whose laser-cutting manufacturing method allows users to supply files in .eps format from 2D drawing programs which far more people are familiar with. But it seems Shapeways are attempting to address this issue with the launch of their Creator service.

Light Poem lamp © Shapeways

Essentially, the Creator service allows users to customise the shape of a pre-designed object. Currently only one product is available, what Shapeways calls the Light Poem lamp, which is based on Philips’ Imageo LED lamps; this in itself is an interesting approach, since it could be thought of as an early instance of a manufacturer encouraging the consumer modification of its products. Creator runs as a Javascript application, and on opening the Light Poem model the user is presented with a 3D model of the lamp, with a default text of “the quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog”. The lamp is customised by changing the text, and by choosing from a number of fonts.

Default Creator Light Poem configuration © Shapeways
Click image to view full size

The first thing I noticed when running Creator was how crude and unpolished it looks. This may be due to the beta status of the project, but the rectangular boxes and non-anti aliased text give it a distinctly un-Web 2.0 feeling. The model can only be rotated using the arrow navigation symbols, rather than left click and drag with a mouse, and although a mouse wheel will zoom in and out, the model ‘freezes’ if you get too close, which then requires the view to be reset. Worst of all in my opinion, clicking ‘Help’ takes you to a web page which contains no articles relating to Creator.

The first stage in customising the lamp is to create your own text, which is typed in the box at the top right of the screen. Although the model updates quickly to show how your text translates to the 3D object, I immediately became frustrated by the limitations placed on the text that can be used. To begin with, only upper case and numerals are allowed – lower case and punctuation won’t work. ‘Foreign’ letters and those which use accents are similarly prohibited, and whilst the text editor will accept spaces, it won’t allow carriage returns. I can understand the probable reasons for this: one of the manufacturing problems is trying to ensure the structural integrity of the product, and lower case letters with their ascenders and descenders would make this difficult. Punctuation would cause similar difficulties – a full stop or comma has a lot of surrounding space which might weaken the structure – though it is harder to understand why accented letters are not allowed, particularly as this pretty much limits the appeal to only those who want to write in English. In short, without punctuation and the ability to start a new line, what is written never feels like poetry, more like a slogan.

Creator warns if the model is likely to be structurally problematic © Shapeways

The choice of fonts is relatively limited, there are five, but the inclusion of Gill Sans means you can start to subvert things a bit. Without serifs, ‘1′ appears as a block when written, thus the model below:

Light Poem from a pattern of ‘1’s in the default font
Click image to view full size

changes dramatically when the font is changed to Gill Sans:

Light Poem from a pattern of ‘1’s in Gill Sans
Click image to view full size

Having decided on the text, the next stage is to decide the ‘Wrapping Style’ – is the text horizontal or spiralled? This is a fairly simple choice, but again it demonstrates how the Creator service has been poorly implemented. In some instances, swapping from spiral to horizontal, or vice versa, will create problems where a structurally sound object in one configuration becomes unsound in another (as gaps appear, or letters hang in mid-air). To fix this means going back a step, when it would have been perfectly simple to include the wrapping style choice in the first step, along with the choice of font. This is particularly annoying if you continue to the third stage – choosing the material – and then decide you want to change a word or the font, because stage one will have been frozen; the only option is to exit the application and restart it. And this is even more frustrating when you realise that actually there is no choice of material, all that’s on offer is ‘white, strong and flexible’.

Text can be oriented in a spiral or a set of rings
Click image to view full size

If this sounds like harsh criticism that is unfortunate, because I would very much like to see this initiative succeed – if nothing else it will make some of the central arguments of my thesis easier to sustain! And if these are issues which beta testing is intended to highlight, then it could be they will be attended to quickly. But I find it difficult to understand why the Creator service looks and performs poorly, when the Shapeways site in general has none of these problems. The Creator is intended for those with no 3D modelling skills, and who likely have no experience of rapid manufacturing; it seems to me these are exactly the people who will be put off by a frustrating user experience. A bit more time spent polishing the user interface might have highlighted and resolved these concerns earlier.

One of the issues I am continually running into in the course of my research is that of brand image, and how manufacturers might try to protect or control their brand in a future where consumers can manipulate and control a product’s form. And it’s easy to demonstrate what brands might be up against using Creator. First of all, what does a manufacturer define as an acceptable product?

Light Poem profanity
Click image to view full size

Nike gained a fair amount of unwanted publicity when MIT student Jonah Peretti tried to order a pair of NikeID trainers with “Sweat Shop” stitched on the heel, a lesson they apparently learned as it is now impossible to specify “Sweat” (”Shop” is okay), along with profanities and, apparently, words from gang culture. The schoolboy in me was happy to discover that Creator has no such filters, and will allow you to design a lamp with as much swearing or offensiveness as you like. Whether Shapeways would actually make a product to such a specification is another question. In a reply to a forum question about X-rated designs, Joris Peels who is Shapeways community manager suggests such models would be okay, provided they were not publicly shared, but I could imagine this attitude might change if a media campaign were started of the type that the internet seems to attract. Then imagine a future where it is possible to custom design sex toys or replica hand guns, and it seems inevitable that Shapeways or other services will have to employ a significant degree of censorship.

The second question, of course, concerns copyright. Shapeways terms and conditions make no reference to copyright infringement, though apparently a legal framework around the service is being drafted. I have little doubt that copyright infringement will be prohibited, but this is obviously easier to spot in some instances than others, and I wonder who would bear responsibility in cases where copyright was infringed? Or more bluntly, who would be sued – the customer who has paid for the object, or Shapeways who have profited from selling it? Perhaps Prince, who seems to have an aversion to anyone using his work, would take offence to a Light Poem lamp which used the lyrics to “Let’s Go Crazy”. In which case, judging by past behaviour (YouTube, Ebay), he would go after the ‘host’ rather than the customer.

Light Poem from the lyrics to “Let’s Go Crazy” © Prince, reproduced under the provision of “Fair Use”
Click image to view full size

For other examples of user customisation of a product’s form, visit Zapfab and FluidForms.

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. 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

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.

Second is an opinion piece entitled ‘Home Manufacturing in the Future‘ by Terry Wohlers, author of the annual Wohler’s Report into the state of the rapid prototyping / rapid manufacturing industry. Wohler’s view is that the future won’t see consumers printing products (or parts of products) at home because a) it’s cheaper to go buy a new product, b) the printer won’t be capable of using the right materials and c) the 3D data will be too complex to create or download. Instead, Wohlers believes, home manfacturing will see the rise of ‘mini factories’, in which start up businesses are able to build low-risk manufacturing plants in their basements or garages.

The example Wohlers uses is perhaps prejudicial to his argument: a toaster, which isn’t likely to be an item consumers see as highly desirable in terms of customisation, and which requires high performance plastics to withstand the heat. But primarily my problem with this viewpoint is that while it may actually be right, it’s for the wrong reasons. Home fabrication will fail to take off if the quality of product it’s possible to produce doesn’t match that of other manufacturing methods. That may be quality in a production sense, but also quality from a design, engineering or branding perspective. And even if that’s the case, it doesn’t exclude the possibility of consumers designing or customising based on existing products, and using these local factories purely as service providers to supply their bespoke parts.

Still on the theme of rapid manufacturing, July 9th and 10th sees the third International Rapid Manufacturing conference at Loughborough University. Speakers include Frank Piller on the theme of ‘Making Mass Customisation Work’; Dr Ian Campbell, who is my PhD supervisor, and whose presentation is entitled ‘Design for Rapid Manufacturing in an SME Environment’; and Lionel Dean of Future Factories, who’ll be discussing ‘the business issues surrounding the use of RM in design led consumer products.’

If you’re an industrial designer the chances are you’ll know of the Core77 website. A couple of weeks ago someone asked a question on the Core77 forum regarding ‘Personal fabrication and how it will impact ID‘, which sparked an interesting discussion. By which I mean the reaction of some of those posting was interesting: although the comments became a little less hostile as the discussion progressed, the overall tone was almost entirely negative. Here’s a few examples of the opinions expressed:

“A small percentage of consumers may want to choose colors on their sneakers, or push and pull a few points on a nurb surface for a cell phone, but you comment comes off as pretty ignorant as to what design actually is.”

“The rapid protoyping machine in many ways is no different than the hot glue gun, it allows crafters to excercise their wimsy and their perspective, some of wich is good, most horrid.”

“Myspace is a perfect example of what happens when you put design into the hands of everyone. A huge percentage of the pages on myspace are unusable/unreadable. Personal fabrication will be no different… on balance… a big, ugly mess.”

“you might be able to “design” a 1/2 decent product (brick, rock, ashtray) but can you spec, prototype, debug, and the rest of the whole list…nope didtn think so unless its in the ashtray world.”

It’s hardly surprising that practising designers believe themselves able to design better products that untrained consumers. But what I wasn’t necessarily expecting was the barely concealed contempt with which designers regarded those consumers’ attempts at creativity. These are, after all, the same consumers who are buying the results of those designers’ work; what does it say of a designer’s skill if products are selling to creatively illiterate users?

The other thing I found interesting was the refusal of some (though not all) to acknowledge that these technologies might change the way designers worked. I’ve always believed that it’s essential for designers to analyse and understand trends that will affect future society, but a number of posters seemed unwilling even to contemplate change in their own profession. Is the comment below a well considered opinion or just the hope that this is how things will be?

“Designers are not going anywhere and given the complexity of modern objects from footwear to gadgets, i don’t expect RP or other technology having any effect on democratizing design to a point where “everyone is a designer”.

Finally, on a somewhat lighter note, M&M’s have just launched an updated version of their custom candy service. It’s now possible to upload images, which a ‘graphic specialist’ will tweak in order to create an image which will print well on the small sweets. There’s not too many examples yet, but the My M&M’s service continues to be the best example I know of how customisation can add value to low cost items.

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.”

In the original plan for my PhD I proposed to look at some of the environmental implications of rapid manufacturing. Unfortunately it’s one of the parts which has been shaved off as I focussed the research and got to grips with exactly what I’d taken on; indeed I’ve no doubt that there’s a whole PhD waiting for someone who’s interested in this area. But it’s still an issue I’m interested in, and up until now the positive possibilities of local manufacturing facilities isn’t something that had occurred to me.

The first, somewhat obvious reaction to the notion of consumer-oriented manufacturing is that it has to be a bad thing environmentally. If the means of production are brought closer to the end user, both physically and in terms of when manufacture occurs in relation to sale, production becomes easier and cheaper and so it’s necessarily valued less. As more things are produced, correspondingly more things will be discarded.

There are a number of reasons to question whether this will necessarily be the case though. The first, which seems to be talked about increasingly, is the possibility of using recyclable materials in the rapid manufacturing process. 3D printers such as those from Z Corp already recycle unused material within the machine, but in theory the part itself could be made from materials which can later be recycled, in the same way that conventional plastics or metals are recycled today. However this seems to me to be something of a false argument: whilst recycling discarded waste is a good thing, it’s undoubtedly better not to produce the waste in the first place. As such, arguing that recyclable materials will lead to more environmentally sustainable practices just avoids the issue of whether rapid manufacturing will lead to shorter life cycles for products.

A better argument to my mind, is that whilst some parts of a product might be discarded more often, other parts will be discarded less. In the consumer electronics field where my work is concentrating, consumers will replace products for three reasons – to gain access to new technology, for fashion, or because the product is broken. Where a consumer is replacing a product because they want the newest technology, rapid manufacturing may not have an answer, but in the other two circumstances it may in fact lead to a reduction in waste.

Reuters recently reported on a phenomenon it called ‘Urban Mining’ – recovering precious metals from the circuit boards of electronic waste, which has become increasingly lucrative as the price of gold, silver and copper has risen. According to the Yokohama Metal Co Ltd, a recycling firm quoted by Reuters:

A tonne of ore from a gold mine produces just 5 grams (0.18 ounce) of gold on average, whereas a tonne of discarded mobile phones can yield 150 grams (5.3 ounce) or more.

Scrap metal from discarded electronics products © Thomson Reuters

It’s an almost universal complaint that these days phones have too much functionality, a complaint that’s backed up by a report I remember seeing which showed that 80% of a typical phone’s features are used once or less by its owner. And yet still we’re seduced by the look of the latest model. Imagine if instead of replacing the entire phone you could change the entire look and feel by adding new covers, or other parts. The old ones might be thrown away, but the guts of the product, the technology which contains the lead, cadmium, arsenic and mercury which are poisoning poorer regions of the world, would instead be retained.

A similar argument applies when it comes to products which are broken. Although it’s obviously annoying when a product breaks, the vast majority of certain kinds of consumer electronics (mobile phones, MP3 players, laptops, DVD players) are discarded long before they wear out. The exceptions tend to be those products where for whatever reason fashion plays less of a role in purchase decisions (refrigerators, vacuum cleaners, microwave ovens etc), and so it somehow becomes okay to hang onto them for longer. But even here, it’s rarely that the whole product is broken; the problem is that as a product gets older, the chance that the manufacturer continues to support it by making spare parts decreases. It can even be that repairing the product is more expensive (and almost certainly more hassle) than buying a new one – in the UK, Dyson vacuum cleaners are one of the few household products people take for repair. Undoubtedly this is partly due to the initial high cost of the machine relative to other cleaners, but it’s also encouraged by a five year warranty, together with Dyson’s commitment to continue manufacturing spare parts for all machines back to the first model made in 1993. In future, rapid manufacturing might further encourage products to be repaired rather than discarded, if for example Dyson only needed to make the 3D files for spare parts available for download, rather than keep inventory of old stock. Consumers might print spare parts themselves, or visit repair shops where parts could be printed and fitted the same day.

Dyson DC02 vacuum cleaner from 1995 © Dyson

There’s one final reason why rapid manufacturing may not lead to an increase in waste. In her PhD thesis, Ruth Mugge looked at reasons why people become attached to products, and why some products more than others. She argues that one way consumers develop an emotional attachment is through an involvement in the product’s design, or through customising the product during ownership. A product in which a consumer has invested time, thought and creativity becomes more valuable to that person, and consequently they are less likely to discard or replace it.

This brings us back to Ponoko again. Because in enabling people to design and manufacture their own products, it’s difficult to imagine those products are then discarded with as little consideration as something bought off the shelf. Even those who visit Ponoko just to buy designs that someone else has created are able to engage with the product’s story, and the designer behind it, in a way that is impossible in a normal purchasing experience. I’m still a long way from being convinced that rapid manufacturing will be good for the environment, but I’m starting to see why it might at least be better than the conventional methods of manufacture we have now.

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.

Autodesk AliasStudio, image from Diseno-art.com

Typically CAD software requires a substantial investment in time in order to gain even a basic expertise. With the first professional CAD package I learned, I-Deas (since bought out by Siemens and renamed NX), I reckon it took three years before I felt I was driving the CAD, rather than the CAD influencing the kind of designs I created. Writing about this in ‘Fab’, Neil Gershenfeld notes that “there’s been no compelling reason to make engineering software easy to use; these programs have been written by engineers, for engineers, who make a career out of using one of them.” There’s a reason for the complexity of course, designing and engineering a high technology product is a complex task, and the design of a passenger aircraft was no easier for the average person to understand before CAD software was invented. Nonetheless it’s true that for non-experts, just looking at the UI of a CAD software package such as AliasStudio is intimidating, with its seemingly endless icons and drop down menus.

Whenever reading about CAD software aimed at consumers (whether in theory or actual software products), the word I always come across is ‘intuitive’. The assumption is that anyone not trained in CAD requires software which is easy to use. To my mind this doesn’t really have any value though – saying you want software which is intuitive is like saying you want a car that looks nice. Who is ever going to ask for the alternative: “I want a car that looks rubbish” or “I want software which is difficult to understand.” In any case, intuition doesn’t necessarily mean ‘immediately understandable’, intuition also comes with practice and familiarity. What’s really being asked for is a reduction in complexity.

Cosmic Blobs © Dassault Systemes

Cosmic Blobs, made by Dassault Systemes (who also make Solidworks and Catia) is a perfect illustration of this. When I first tried to use Cosmic Blobs I found it far from intuitive, despite being aimed at children. The lack of drop down menus, no right mouse button clicks and no tool-tips meant I was totally lost as to where to start. Having spoken to a couple of people whose kids have tried Cosmic Blobs, this is also the reaction of computer literate children who are used to a typical Windows interface. But after a few minutes playing around, you start to get the hang of it. Essentially modelling consists of choosing from a few primitives, adding or subtracting them from one another, and pushing or pulling on a surface to deform it. There’s no surfacing commands, no way to analyse curvature continuity, no assembly environment and no finite element analysis. The software becomes usable to a novice because the choice of commands is so limited. Cosmic Blobs isn’t simple because you intuitively understand how it works, it’s simple because it doesn’t take long to find out what everything does.

SketchUp © Google

Of course, the downside of reducing the complexity by reducing functionality is that the capabilities of the software are necessarily reduced. This is obvious when considering another consumer oriented CAD package, Google SketchUp. SketchUp can be downloaded and used for free, and was initially envisaged as an architectural modelling package. Increasingly though, it is being used to model furniture and products. SketchUp uses a combination of solids and surfaces, which it calls faces. Faces can only ever be planar, this means that not only is SketchUp functionally easier to master than a typical CAD package, it is also conceptually easier to grasp (understanding G2 – G4 surface continuity is something most designers struggle with at some point). Of course the kinds of products which can be modelled in SketchUp cannot have the sophistication of surfacing as products modelled in Alias, Solidworks, Catia etc. But they can, and are, being modelled by people not trained as designers, who don’t have the time to master professional CAD even if they have the inclination. An ‘unsophisticated’ tool that works (for them) is better than a sophisticated one which does not.

Alternative design concepts produced using Genoform © Genometri

Stripped down alternatives to professional CAD software are not the only possibility however. I have written before about Genoform iterative design software, which works as a plug-in for Solidworks. It’s primarily intended as a tool for designers, to explore design alternatives based on a number of fixed and variable parameters. So in the example shown above, the designer has chosen a certain size of display, and decided that under the display are three buttons, with another input area below those buttons. On the right hand side are a headset jack and some kind of sliding button. The software has then generated a number of designs, and will keep generating designs up to a maximum of 10,000 variants. But it’s possible to imagine a similar system available to consumers rather than designers. The designer would still decide which parameters are fixed and which are changeable, but the consumer would decide how many variants to generate. The requirement is then no longer for a consumer to learn any kind of CAD, but simply to be able to make a decision about which option they like best.

Spore © Electronic Arts Inc.

I’d like to finish this post by talking about Spore, a computer game by Will Wright (Sim City, The Sims) which is due out later this year. Games have had a significant influence on the computer industry in the past, pushing the limits of hardware as well as experimenting with input devices and UI’s. With Spore it could be that games also influence the computer aided design process. Without going into the full scope of the game, an important part of Spore is the creature editor, shown above. Players can first set the traits of their creature (strength, speed, carnivorous tendencies etc), and then build the creature from a kit of parts. Not having played the game it’s difficult to know exactly how the editor works, but my understanding from reading about it is that the editor has built in intelligence. So if your creature has two legs, the editor knows they should be right and left, rather than both left; it knows that hands go on the end of arms and eyes go on the head etc. It’s not a big jump to imagine this idea of ‘guided design’ being applied to products, such that consumers are prevented from making bad decisions.

The software examples above work in different ways, and would expect different inputs and levels of expertise from consumers. What they have in common is the implication for industrial designers. It’s my belief, and part of my PhD’s hypothesis, that in future the designer’s role will be to define which parameters of any product are fixed, and limit or control which parameters can be changed by the consumer. I’m sure I will be returning to this subject often in the future

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.

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.

Because of the absence of tooling, rapid manufacturing dramatically reduces the costs involved in producing a part or product. A rapid manufacturing machine doesn’t care whether it’s making 100 identical parts or 100 unique parts; with rapid manufacturing variety comes “for free.” But there is still the issue of the skills required to design the part in the first place.

To understand the complexities involved in designing a part which is to be mass manufactured, it’s useful to look at some of the design requirements of a typical mass manufacturing technology such as injection moulding. (Much of the following is taken from two papers: ‘Implications on design of rapid manufacturing’¹ and ‘Impact of Rapid Manufacturing on Design for Manufacture for Injection Moulding’²). Some of the rules an industrial designer and mechanical design engineer will need to incorporate in a part’s design include:

- Minimisation of features in non line-of-draw faces to reduce complexity and cost
- Minimisation of re-entrant features (ie undercuts) to reduce complexity and cost
- Uniform wall thicknesses to avoid stresses and weaknesses
- Avoidance of sharp corners to prevent stresses and weaknesses
- Avoidance of weld lines to prevent stresses, weaknesses and visual defects
- Avoidance of visible witness lines to prevent visual defects
- Avoidance of sink marks to prevent visual defects
- Avoidance of ejector pin marks to prevent visual defects
- Avoidance of flashing at the tool’s parting line to prevent visual defects
- Siting of gating / sprue points on non-visual surfaces to prevent visual defects
- Design of wall thicknesses, ribs, bosses etc to provide a structurally sound part

Although the designer will be considering issues such as yield, cycle time, cost etc, essentially these design rules are aimed at achieving three things: that the part can be removed from the tool once it’s been moulded, that the part doesn’t break in use, and that the part looks acceptable to the consumer. Now look at which of the rules apply to a tool-less rapid manufacturing technology:

– Minimisation of features in non line-of-draw faces to reduce complexity and cost
- Minimisation of re-entrant features (ie undercuts) to reduce complexity and cost
- Uniform wall thicknesses to avoid stresses and weaknesses
- Avoidance of sharp corners to prevent stresses and weaknesses
- Avoidance of weld lines to prevent stresses, weaknesses and visual defects
- Avoidance of visible witness lines to prevent visual defects
- Avoidance of sink marks to prevent visual defects
- Avoidance of ejector pin marks to prevent visual defects
- Avoidance of flashing at the tool’s parting line to prevent visual defects
- Siting of gating / sprue points on non-visual surfaces to prevent visual defects
- Design of wall thicknesses, ribs, bosses etc to provide a structurally sound part

Obviously the part or product still needs to work and not break under normal conditions of use. But none of the rules which govern how a plastic part is moulded from molten material, and which ensure the part has visual and structural integrity, apply any longer. This will make it much easier for designers and consumers alike to design products: most industrial designers will have experienced how just three degrees of draft can have a profound influence on the fit of internal components or the way surfaces transition from one plane to another. And this new manufacturing mindset will open up huge possibilities in terms of aesthetic design: not having to consider a part’s removal from a tool allows the kinds of complexities being investigated by the likes of Freedom of Creation.

© Freedom of Creation

This is not to say there aren’t new rules. For example 3D printers often manufacture parts at different resolutions in each of their three axes – this requires skill in understanding which surfaces are visually most important. Those technologies which utilise a support structure during a part’s construction will in most circumstances require the structure to be removed, meaning enclosed (ie hollow) volumes must be avoided. But as the performance of RM technologies improves, and as software is developed which accounts for these requirements, they are likely to become less of an issue. Rapid manufacturing thus removes two of the biggest hurdles to any person or company which wants to manufacture a product: cost and complexity.

1. Hague, R; Campbell, R.I. and Dickens, P. (2003) ‘Implications on design of rapid manufacturing’ in Proceedings of the Institute of Mechanical Engineers, Part C, Journal of Mechanical Engineering Science, 217(1), pages 25-302.

2. Mansour, S. and Hague, R. (2003) ‘Impact of Rapid Manufacturing on Design for Manufacture for Injection Moulding’ in Proceedings of the Institute of Mechanical Engineers, Part B, Journal of Mechanical Engineering Science 217(4), pages 453-461