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

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.

(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.

Sketches are ‘pulled’ to create solids © 3dvia.com

What can’t be done is create an extrude along a curved path (ie sweep), and there’s certainly none of the surfacing commands designers see as standard. The FAQ’s claim that future versions of Shape will extend its capabilities to the creation of any forms; exactly what this means remains to be seen, but it’s probably fair to assume that Frank Gehry will still be using Catia for the foreseeable future.

Given the obvious limitations of 3DVia Shape, most designers would reject out of hand its usefulness as a design or modelling tool. But as I have argued before, for consumers who don’t have the time or interest needed to learn a high end CAD package, tools such as these can be invaluable in enabling them to at least do something, rather than wait for someone else to create their design or invention. What’s more, people who have never been told that one approach is wrong, or that certain tools shouldn’t be used, tend to be more open about trying something just to see if it’s possible, and more satisfied with the results. It hasn’t taken long for some non-architectural models to start appearing on the 3DVia community site; it will be interesting to see what people are most interested in modelling as the new tools become available.

Truck cab ‘remixed’ in 3DVia Shape by dswavely, based on an original model by rguyen © 3dvia.com

The other free component of the 3DVia suite is Printscreen. This works almost exactly like the printscreen function in Windows (or like Grab in OSX), except it captures 3D data, rather than a 2D image. In this respect it is similar to OGLE, except that Printscreen will capture DirectX data as well as OpenGL. The software will capture any 3D data, independent of the application that is generating it. And although there may sometimes be a need to screen grab a very lightweight version of a CAD model, I imagine for most people that will mean characters or objects from games.

Character from Capcom’s Lost Planet: Extreme Condition, captured using 3DVia Printscreen by Kiffla3D

The same model shown in wireframe view. © uncertain (is it Capcom or 3dvia.com?)

This is where things start to get interesting, because the copyright to the design of these characters is quite clearly by the games companies which create or publish them. In the case of the Lost Planet models, Capcom make it very clear where ownership lies in the standard copyright blurb at the bottom of the game’s website:

Character Wayne by © Lee Byung Hung / BH Entertainment Co. Ltd, © CAPCOM Co. Ltd. 2006, 2007 ALL RIGHTS RESERVED. CAPCOM and the Capcom logo are registered trademarks of CAPCOM Co. Ltd. Lost Planet is a trademark of CAPCOM Co. Ltd.

So what Dassault Systèmes have done is made a technology available which enables someone to breach the copyright of another company. They’ve then allowed that copyrighted material to be hosted on a community site which they own, from which anyone can freely download the 3D file of the Lost Planet character. But perhaps most interestingly, the site encourages users to reuse, modify, and repost models which other users have posted (3DVia call this “remixing”).

In the past games companies have been more open than most in allowing fans to interfere with copyrighted material. Many games nowadays include software developers kits, and deliberately write code in more readily accessible languages or even on Excel spreadsheets so that almost anyone can tweak certain characteristics of the game. Modders freely discuss the minutiae of their successful techniques on boards hosted by the games companies themselves, and some of the best mods are even incorporated into patches or future releases. This strikes me as something different though, because up until now that copyrighted material, although modified, has remained within the domain of the company that created it.

Santa Invasion. A mod for Medieval II: Total War © the Magyar Mod team

So if someone wants to make a mod for Medieval II: Total War which changes the power of longbows, or even create an army of marauding Santa Claus and snowmen, it still requires a copy of the game in order to be played. Whereas now it would presumably be possible to grab 3D models from Lost Planet, and use them to create a mod for Medieval II. And whilst this kind of cross fertilisation has been done before, Warhammer mods for Civilization III for example, this software makes it much easier for those with no expertise in games design to create exact replicas of characters.

Units for the Warhammer mod for Civilization III, created by aaglo

If this were only about games, I might be tempted to say that it wasn’t a big issue, that this is just a further development of the kind of mods which games fans have been creating for years. But it’s already moved out of games and into the domains of companies who are much more willing to use the law to enforce their IPR. Unlike the Google SketchUp community site, which will only host SketchUp created models, the 3DVia forum will accept models in any of the formats which Shape supports - this includes .3ds, .3dxml and .stl. This means models created in more sophisticated software, potentially even the cloud data from a real product which has been scanned, can be made freely available to anyone that wants to download it. A quick glance through the 3DVia model library shows many models which possibly infringe copyright: Ducati, Virgin Atlantic, Batman, Porsche, Canon, Herman Miller, Apple, and a lot more.

Smart car created by jeanudert using 3D Studio 3.0, available for free download from 3dvia.com

The same model shown in cloud point format © uncertain, again

3DVia’s terms and conditions state that Dassault Systèmes respect copyright and IPR, and will investigate and remove infringing material, possibly banning those who post it. But I suspect this is currently a reactive, rather than proactive position - if someone complains they will investigate. And right now those brands mentioned above have probably decided it would do their image far more harm than good to get this material taken down. But if I’m right in some of the assumptions behind my research, this position is likely to change in future. As internet broadband speeds increase, so will the sophistication and complexity of the 3D files that brands use to promote their products. These models may appear on a company’s own website, or inside Second Life, or perhaps as product placement inside games. But however they are manifested, software such as 3DVia Printscreen will allow them to be copied, after which they can be manipulated, modified and then distributed. After which it’s relatively easy to use 3D printers to turn those models into real parts. I haven’t seen any evidence that the marketing departments responsible for these initiatives understand that this kind of scenario is on the horizon. Personally, I can’t wait…

Sony Ericsson phone in Metal Gear Solid 4 © Konami

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.

Bearing in mind I used to work for Nokia, I guess it’s inevitable that I follow what’s going on in the mobile phone world closer than most. But in the last couple of months I’ve seen a few things that are particularly relevant to my research, so this post will look at some of the issues involved with the customisation of mobile phones.

The first deliberately customisable phone was the Nokia 5110. Few people are aware that the initial reason for the 5110’s changeable cover was nothing to do with offering consumers choice though, rather it was an early attempt to employ just in time manufacturing in response to customer demand. Joseph Pine writes in Mass Customization about how just in time (JIT) strategies have often led to companies embracing mass customisation without necessarily realising it at the time.

Nokia 5110 with user changeable cover © Nokia

The 5110 wasn’t the first phone with coloured covers that Nokia offered, however at that early stage the company hadn’t developed its expertise in spotting and understanding trends, and so colour prediction was largely based on intuition. In the past this had led to certain models which were sold out in one particular colour, whilst the same model in another colour sat unsold in warehouses. The thinking behind the 5110 was that a huge reduction in inventory costs could be achieved if it was plastic covers that went unsold, rather than complete phones.

I’m not sure who first realised the opportunity an easily changeable cover offered in terms of the way a phone could be marketed, but I know that it didn’t meet with universal approval. Many of Nokia’s designers, myself included, thought that offering choice in this way was a sign that the company didn’t really know what its customer’s wanted (and in a way we were right). What no-one predicted was the way that the ‘Xpress-On’ covers would take off - the 5110 quickly became Nokia’s best selling phone and for a while almost every phone the company offered had usable changeable covers. But in addition, it spawned a massive industry of third party manufacturers, such that at one point it seemed you couldn’t walk down the main street of any city in the world without noticing the opportunity to change the way your phone looked.

Covers for the 5110, only one of these is an official Nokia cover

The popularity of the user changeable cover seems to be long past its peak now. None of Nokia’s current models offer Xpress-On covers as far as I can tell, and this seems to be the same amongst most other manufacturers. I think there’s probably a few reasons, the main one being that it’s just the inevitable way that trends come and go. And the increasingly disposable nature of mobile phones, particularly when they’re sold as part of a pay-monthly plan which often allow a free upgrade every year, means changing the colour of the cover is no longer such a big deal. But this doesn’t mean there isn’t still a demand for some form of customisation.

One current trend in terms of customisation is the use of crystals to decorate products. Swarovski is currently running a competition where users are invited to either design or decorate a watch; though the competition is due to end this month, so the link may be out-dated soon. (As a side note, it’s interesting that the competition is being run under the name of a Swarovski sub-brand - Signity - I guess Swarovski is worried that its brand name could be damaged by its entry to the ‘lower end’ of the market). This trend has also shown itself in the mobile phone market, with companies such as Bling My Thing offering customised, (Swarovski) crystal encrusted phones.

Customised Apple iPhone © Bling My Thing

Glueing crystals to the body of a mobile phone may be an unconventional jewellery technique, and it’s undoubtedly time consuming. But for those who want a more traditional approach when looking to customise their high-tech products, there are a number of companies who can offer their services. Goldstriker specialise in metal plating using materials such as gold, rose gold and platinum, and offer their services on products as diverse as zippo lighters, golf balls and alloy rims.

Customised LG KE850 Prada edition © Goldstriker

As well as customising products such as the Apple iPhone and many of Nokia’s models, Goldstriker also offer customised versions of the Prada special edition for LG, and the Armani special edition for Samsung. I find these especially interesting, because LG and Samsung have obviously partnered with these brands in order to buy a sense of exclusivity, the kind a high end fashion label can offer but which a mass market consumer electronics company cannot. And yet Goldstriker (and presumably their customers) have decided that Prada and Armani didn’t do the job well enough, and indeed that they can improve on it. I don’t imagine there is a viable business which involves taking suits or dresses from Prada or Armani and ‘improving’ them (though I’m happy to be proved wrong if anyone can point me to this). So what does this say about these kind of collaborations? Who ‘owns’ the product, Prada or LG? And are both brands really gaining?

Customised Blackberry Pearl © Amosu

But if Goldstriker’s offerings don’t advertise your wealth sufficiently, you can flaunt the success of your taste by-pass operation with a phone from Amosu. For £45 000 you can buy one of only 20 gold and diamond encrusted Blackberry Pearls. What I find most bewildering here is that what Amosu do is no different to Bling My Thing, in that there is no attempt to change the basic product. The keys and window are the same plastic parts you get on a standard Blackberry, they just have diamonds next to them. But who imagines that diamonds and plastic are a quality combination? Where is the skill, or even the pride in doing something well?

What the examples I’ve mentioned so far have in common is that although they allow the consumer to customise their phone, there is little opportunity for the user to do any more than choose from an extended menu of aesthetic options. Bling My Thing sells kits of crystals to allow consumers to customise their own products, but doesn’t show any examples. But Crystal Iced, another company which will cover your phone in Swarovski crystals, also offers bespoke customisations to the customer’s own design. Still, this is the kind of thing that’s been around for a long time in Japan, which itself is a development of the kind of customisation I saw in Harajuku in 1998 - individual designs airbrushed onto phone covers, often being done in nail salons. Jan Chipchase, a researcher at Nokia who’s lived in Tokyo for a long time, has made a number of reports on user-customised phones in Japan, personal shrines as he calls them, including one study which revealed personalisation on the inside of the back cover

Back covers of Japanese phones, © Jan Chipchase / Nokia

“Unless the back cover was removed from the phone no-one else would see or would know the photo was there so my assumption is that the photos were for personal consumption, or at the owner’s discretion for sharing with someone else. A number of the photos appeared quite intimate - a couple hugging, a child, friends doing things in privacy of a photo booth.”

What I particularly like about this observation is the way it upsets many of the perceived wisdoms about why people customise products, ie that it’s all about wanting to demonstrate how creative or unique they are. Doubtless this applies to many people, but these examples show there can also be much more private reasons.

Chipchase’s research may have played some part in one of Nokia’s more interesting experiments with customisation, the 3200. This model allowed the user to place templates under the clear plastic front and back covers, allowing the design to be seen from the outside. It came with 3 designs, as well as 10 blank templates onto which the user could print their own design; there was also a template cutter available as an optional accessory.

Nokia 3200 © Nokia

I’m not exactly sure why the 3200 failed as a concept, although on phone review sites it seems to have been criticised for the quality of the camera and display, which implies the customisable aspect wasn’t a significant USP for users. I’d also be interested to know if there were any attempts to build a community around the phone - a place where users could post their designs and download others. All in all I think it’s a shame Nokia abandoned the idea so readily, particularly as the concept of user-customisable phones seems to be gaining interest.

Easy Tiles phone concept

The Easy Tiles phone concept, designed by Tzu-Fu Wang, was receiving a lot of attention a few weeks ago. Despite being decidedly lo-tech, most commenters seemed to understand the rationale behind a phone who’s appearance could be easily changed. Maybe more practical concerns would have been raised if the concept was actually a viable product, but it would be interesting to see how the same commenters would react to some of the designs Leonardo Bonanni has created for the TuxPhone project.

TuxPhone covers © Leonardo Bonanni

TuxPhone is a project to develop an open source GSM/GPRS mobile phone. Though the prototype is crude, it is able to make and receive calls. More interesting from my point of view though, is the thinking behind Bonanni’s concepts for the phone’s covers. In the same open source spirit as the main project, the idea is that the instructions for making the covers should be downloadable, and the covers themselves should be easy to fabricate and modify using relatively crude tools and materials such as wood, aluminium and fabric. My favourite concept though, much better than the Easy Tiles phone, is a cover made from Lego. Bonanni released the design for this on the Lego Factory site, such that anyone could order the bricks required and download the instructions easily. (This also started me wondering whether Lego Factory should be added to the list of simple software which consumers might someday use in the place of CAD.)

Lego TuxPhone cover © Leonardo Bonanni

In the same spirit as the TuxPhone project, OpenMoko from Taiwan first made the software of their Neo 1973 phone freely available, and then in March this year released the CAD files for the product. The files are available as STEP, IGES or native ProE under a Creative Commons Share Alike license: you can change them anyway you like as long as you acknowledge OpenMoko as the original creator and license your creations in the same way.

Neo 1973 CAD model © OpenMoko

It will be really interesting to see the results of this CAD model being released. The complexity of the model means it’s definitely aimed at developers with design and engineering resources, rather than the consumer. On the other hand the product has obviously been designed with customisation as a high priority, from the basic concept of a touch screen interface, which reduces the complexity needed to design a keymat (as well as offering much more scope for UI customisation) to the relatively simple shape and somewhat over-engineered construction, which will make the product more durable. The hole through the bottom of the phone is also interesting: it gives the product a distinctive look, but also implies there is a lot of space to increase the board size and add custom chips and functionality.

Neo 1973 © OpenMoko

Finally I want to end this post with another phone that was getting a lot of attention a few weeks ago, a Nokia N70 customised and quickly labelled the Buddha phone. I’ve read on some sites that this phone is gold plated, though others have said it is painted which seems more likely looking at the finish. The intricacy of the markings is quite amazing, whether they’ve been masked and then spray painted, or something else, it shows a lot of skill. Yes, to my eyes it’s incredibly kitsch, but that’s what’s so interesting because as a professional designer I would never come up with something like this.

Customised Nokia N70 Buddhist Phone

When talking to other designers about the future of mass customisation, the reaction is often one of dismay, or disbelief, that consumers with no taste will be able to design and make their own products. To which my first response is that designers themselves are pretty capable of designing tasteless objects. But regardless, the point is that whether designers (and companies or brands) like it or not, this kind of thing is going to be increasingly common. It doesn’t matter whether most people think the Buddha phone is tasteless or kitsch or crass, what matters is that one person though it was a good idea, and that person went to a huge amount of time and effort to create a unique product. This is only going to get easier as rapid manufacturing technologies bring production close to the consumer. Think of the OpenMoko project, consumer-friendly CAD software and a high quality 3D printer, and then imagine how many Buddha phones might appear.

Customised Nokia N70 Buddhist Phone

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

PingMag is a dual-language (japanese-english) online magazine design based in Tokyo. It recently ran an interview I made with Brendan Walker, an ex-aeronautical engineer whose company Aerial specialises in the creation of ‘thrilling experiences’. The published article was changed slightly from the one I submitted, so here it is as originally intended:

Jo riding the Tristar

Do you remember how, as a child, some jobs seemed so cool you couldn’t believe people got paid to do them? Like working in a chocolate factory or as a test driver for Ferrari? I was reminded of that when I first met Brendan Walker, who started his career designing jet fighters but now works with some of the world’s top theme parks, designing future rides I talked to Brendan, who New Scientist dubbed the “Thrill Engineer,” about home-made fireworks, his fascination with aircraft crashes, and the difference between being thrilled and being frightened.

Yes, the home-made fireworks, I think they got me my first job as an apprentice at British Aerospace! Everyone else in the interview was talking about the differences in performance of various aircraft engines, whereas I spent the whole time describing how I built three-stage rockets by taking fireworks apart and rebuilding them. Maybe that should have been a warning, because I wasn’t really suited to doing computational fluid analysis. I got frustrated at how long it took to design a plane, typically it can be 20 years, which is why and left and went to study Industrial Design at the Royal College of Art.

When I applied I had a fairly standard idea of what ID was, but whilst I was studying I was tutored by Tony Dunne, who messed my head up a bit by convincing me that industrial design can be about experiment and performance. So when I left the RCA, although I did some ID work, I was already tending towards art projects, particularly large-scale kinetic and electromechanical sculptures. And I quickly realised that what really interested me was observing how people reacted to the work. I was getting excited by watching other people watching what I had created. At the same time I’d been reading about these guys in Australia whose hobby was climbing the Sydney Harbour bridge illegally, and I started to realise that everyone experiences products in different ways, often in ways the designer never intends or predicts. So my work began to move towards investigating the psychology of how people experience objects.

Was that to do with the genetics of people who are thrill-seekers?

Partly, but that was already a well trodden route. It might be interesting to know that 5% of people have a defect in the D4DR gene which means they have to go to greater extremes to find their thrills, but it doesn’t help you design better products. So rather than take that approach, I began looking at how people created experiences which were thrilling for themselves.

Deathslide at the Airphoria 2 performance

And how did you do that?

Well, basically I gatecrashed online discussion groups where people were talking about thrills. I started by taking random words, adding “thrill” to them, and entering them into Google to find out who was talking about these things. I remember “tennis + thrill” and “cooking + thrill” were two of them. I made about 50 interviews, ranging from one woman who was crotcheting her own wedding dress, to a man who was secretly a transvestite, with all these people talking about what made the experiences thrilling. And amazingly, I found that there were almost always some common features: for example a thrilling experience has to have an element of visceral stimulation, it has to have elements of power and control (whether being in control or out of control), and there is often a sense of being valued, of how you think others perceive you.

So is there an over-riding definition of thrill?

Yes, I think so. I think that we experience thrill as a reward for the perseverance of human life. So obviously there’s an evolutionary driver - we evolved a sense of thrill because it helps us escape danger. But in modern life things have become confused, we’re rarely in real danger, so we have to invent artificial situations in order to experience that reward. Extreme sports are quite obviously a replacement for running away from a lion, but it also becomes very psychologically complex with experiences such as bondage or other fetishes. It sounds a bit of a cliché, but actually I believe that we go looking for thrills because that’s when we have the greatest sense of being alive

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Self portrait in an air disaster

Tell me about the “Walker Thrill Factor”

Okay, well, having made all these interviews I was starting to wonder, what the fuck have I done?! I’m meant to be a designer and I’ve spent the last six moths coming up with a definition of thrill! I had reams and reams of paper of transcripted interviews, but where did I go from there? And then one day I was out running with my dogs and I had a kind of Eureka moment, I realised you could think of thrill the way I’d been taught to think in engineering. What I mean is that components of pleasure and arousal can be defined mathematically in relation to each other. That led to a hypothesis, a formula where thrill is defined in terms of the amount of pleasure and arousal and the rate at which each one changes. And that’s the Walker Thrill Factor.

It’s not actually been proved, but it’s not been disproved either. And it’s become really valuable because now in my work, if I’m designing a rollercoaster for example, I can decide to reduce a person’s arousal whilst keeping their pleasure high, in readiness for the next increase in stimulation. I can talk with other people about why certain elements are placed at certain points in a ride, and we can discuss them from a shared understanding rather than just intuition or gut feeling.

The Walker Thrill Factor was first published in The Taxonomy of Thrill

Okay, so you’d come up with a definition of thrill and an equation to explain it; how did you get people to take you seriously when you didn’t have any actual experience designing rollercoasters?

Around the time I published “The Taxonomy of Thrill” I was also designing some interactive exhibits for the Wellcome Wing at the Science Museum in London, and they picked up on the mathematical element of my work. To be honest I hadn’t intended it to be a rigorous piece of scientific research, it was more like a rule of thumb I could use in designing interesting experiences.

Interactive exhibits at the Wellcome Wing © Science Museum, London

But I suppose everyone has heard of the phrase “thrill factor,” and there was me somewhat naively claiming to know what it was. Because up until then, rollercoasters had been designed with a mixture of intuition and experience to choreograph the ride - how does a barrel roll follow a drop etc - and g-force calculations. That can be done very accurately using computer simulations to calculate changes from positive to negative g, but it only tells you how arousing the ride is, it can’t calculate the pleasure. So the Science Museum was interested to create some experiments where we measured arousal and pleasure, which would validate the hypothesis. That led to the first Thrill Laboratory, which got a lot of press and TV attention.

Miami Trip, Thrill Laboratory 1; Oblivion, Thrill Laboratory 2

At the same time I also approached Tussaud Studios, who designed rides for Alton Towers, and managed to get a meeting with Simon Opie who was the general manager. It was actually really scary, because in “The Taxonomy of Thrill” I had talked about my work in terms of scripting and choreography. Simon Opie was from a theatre background - he had worked on productions for the Royal Shakespeare Company - so if anyone would be able to destroy my ideas it would be him! He gave me a real grilling, but at the end of the meeting he ordered 13 books to give to his creative directors, so I realised I had done okay. That led to a contract with Tussaud Studios where I led a team looking at future attractions, 5 - 10 years in the future. The project went well so I was invited to become a permanent consultant, and when Tussauds were bought out by Merlin to become the world’s second biggest theme park group I became a consultant for all their brands: Alton Towers, Legoland, Sea Life, London Dungeon etc. Within that work I bring a certain viewpoint and expertise, a methodology for understanding how to make their attractions more thrilling. And I’ve also taken that to other companies such as Disneyland Paris, where I’ve done similar work.

Brendan adjusts a rider’s monitoring equipment, Thrill Laboratory 2

So are you actually sitting down drawing, designing rollercoasters then?

These days I am, yes. In the beginning my work was more conceptual, strategic. But recently I’ve been getting jobs where I do have to design or choreograph the ride. I’m not designing what a particular ride might look like, its more like creating storyboards of the way a ride will feel. In fact I was watching some Alfred Hitchcock DVD’s and in the extras features it showed some of the storyboards. They weren’t that well drawn, but really communicated how a scene should progress and how tension and excitement would build or drop off. That’s what I’m trying to achieve.

Storyboard images from Alfred Hitchcock’s Psycho © Universal

Hitchcock is known as the master of suspense, is there a difference between something that’s thrilling and something that’s exciting?

Well in dictionary terms the differences are very subtle. But by my definition, thrill has high levels of both arousal and pleasure, whereas fright has high levels of arousal but low levels of pleasure - in terms of pleasure fright is exactly opposite to thrill. What’s interesting though, is lets say in a horror film, the tension and fright is unpleasurable, but from that low point the pleasure has to increase to get back to “normal.” It’s the release from fright which people find thrilling.

I know that you still continue to do artistic projects. Why are these important when you’re being paid to do commercial projects?

It’s the opportunity for experimentation I suppose. The last performance piece I did, at the Shunt Lounge in London, was part of an ongoing piece called Airphoria, which was inspired by a Korean Air crash in Epping Forest, East London.

Installation, from the Airphoria 1 exhibition

I know there’s no way a theme park is ever going to commission a ride based on an air disaster. But when you call something art the limits change, and the audience is generally much more open to things which would be classified as bad taste if they were pure entertainment. Especially in smaller, contemporary galleries, the audience is already on the fringes of what is commercially acceptable. So in this latest piece I was interested in eye witness accounts of the crash, where people had described seeing a fireball coming down out of the sky and being fascinated and excited by it. Only when they found out it was an airplane crash did they become reluctant to talk about their feelings.

From the Airphoria 1 exhibition

It’s strange though isn’t it, that it’s okay to make a film about an aircrash, which people will go to see for entertainment. But it’s not acceptable to be entertained in other ways.

That’s right, and in Airphoria I’ve been interested in the possibility of recreating a visceral experience, a sense of thrill and euphoria which draws on the event of a plane crash before the feelings of guilt about those feelings emerges. What’s also interesting about the Korea Air crash was that the forest was a nature reserve, and a lot of deer and other animals died, so the next stage of Airphoria is to create mechanical fantasy sculptures which are hybrids of animal and aircraft, and imagine how survivors of a crash would feel about meeting those mechanical creatures.

Hybrid of animal and aircraft

There’s also a really strange coincidence where previously in Epping Forest there had been an old fairground. In the First World War it had been converted to a barracks, and a German plane dropped a bomb which destroyed the fairground and killed a number of soldiers. There’s already an association between entertainment, aircraft and death at that site, and that’s an association which an art audience wants to know more about, whereas a family on a day out at a theme park would probably just find it a bit sick!

Drop From the Sky, proposal for a theme park ride

So does the artistic work ever cross over into the commercial side of things?

It can do yes. The art practise informs the design, it allows me to try things out and see what works, and occasionally take elements and use them in my commercial practise. But in future I could maybe imagine a film about a plane crash, and a theme park wanting to build a ride whose marketing tied in with the film. If it happened, I would definitely want to be the one who designed it!

Backwards, proposal for a theme park ride

Thanks Brendan, I’m sure we’re all glad you’re designing rollercoasters rather than aircraft now! If you want to be part of Brendan’s future research, you can visit Chromo11 and tell about your own thrilling experiences

All images © Brendan Walker unless otherwise stated.

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.

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.

Surly Steamroller in NYC Velo

When I made a rendering it just didn’t seem right though:

So the next thought was to try the complete reverse, ie a totally white frame:

Mercian offer two types of white paint: white enamel and white pearl; I’ve gone for the pearl. For this to work, it relies on sourcing black components rather than silver for the hubs, spokes, headset, seat post etc. As you can see from the rendering I’ve not made any choice about the type of bars yet. Although I’ve not ordered it yet, the seat will be a Fizik Arione Wing Flex. Fizik allow the customer to customise the colours of the saddle, and this model offers the most customisation opportunities. With the white colour scheme, my saddle will look like this:

I tried out one other colour scheme before I made the decision, which was suggested by a friend as well as being one I’d noticed on Fixed Gear Gallery.

To be honest though, even though I like it as a colour scheme I can’t really see myself riding it. So it’s the white that I’ve gone for. Next stage of the project will be ordering the hubs and building up the wheels…

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: