presentacion CM Ian Campbell

Unfinished Business: Industrial Design in the Consumer-Driven Era

Ian Campbell, Yuhdi Ariadi and Matt Sinclair (both PhD students)Loughborough Design School

Loughborough Design School

Overview of Presentation

Arguments for and against consumer design

Examples of consumer customisation

Enabling consumer design

Classification of consumer involvement

Pilot study

Conclusions and future directions


As additive manufacturing technologies become cheaper and more available, consumers will customise, design and make their own products

Main Argument


As additive manufacturing technologies become cheaper and more available, consumers will customise, design and make their own products do exactly the same thing they've always done

“A small percentage of consumers may want to choose colours on their sneakers, or push and pull a few points on a NURBS surface, but your 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 which 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.”

Counter-argument


Counter counter-argument

Consumer customisation and design is already happening in many areas and is likely to increase in future

This will happen whether designers, engineers, corporations and brands like it or not


Consumer Customisation of Harley Davidson motorcyles

Examples of Consumer Customisation


Consumer Customisation of PCs

Examples of Consumer Customisation


Consumers cannot be expected to make use of highly complex “professional” computer aided design systems

Enabling Consumer Design


But they can use these: Comic Blobs and SketchUp

Enabling Consumer Design (cont.)


They can do even better with something like this: Spore Creature Creator



Not everything in the product will be designed by the consumer – there will be a central “core” around which they will manipulate the external shape



Classification of Consumer Involvement

Designer’s commitment to consumer involvement is a measure of:

consumer’s autonomy

how much autonomy the designer ‘hands over’

Consumer’s involvement in design is a measure of:

the degree of involvement in the conception, specification, design and manufacture of a product

the effectiveness of that involvement

This relationship can be plotted on a graph with consumers involvement on the vertical axis plotted against designer commitment on the horizontal axis


Consumer involvement versus designer commitment

On the left of the graph, the designer retains control of the product’s final form, and acts as an interpreter of consumer needs to arrive at a design solution

On the right of the graph, the designer gives up control over the product’s final form, and acts as a facilitator to allow the consumer to create their own design solution


Consumer involvement versus designer commitment

Consumers involvement falls into one of four categories, moving up the vertical axis

No influence on product form

Limited, indirect influence on product form

Limited, direct influence on product form

Direct, deliberate influence on product form


Mapping of existing products onto graph

Existing examples of consumer involvement were mapped onto the classification

Examples had to be accessible to consumers; academic studies, in-house trials etc. were excluded

Only three examples are given of conventionally designed products, though the majority of all products are designed this way

No ‘real world’ examples of co-designed products were identified

Some examples fall into more than one area


Examples of existing products

Nokia 7610

Materialise hearing aids

Hot rod cars

NikeID trainers

Build-a-Bear

World of Warcraft

Figureprints

Openmoko FreeRunner

Phone


A project to create a family of totally open source mobile phones, including the hardware specification and the operating system

Openmoko FreeRunner Phone


Power relationship between designer and consumer

In all design activities there is a power relationship between the designer and the consumer. This is a result of the relative importance of the designer’s opinions compared to those of the consumer.


Impact of Changed Power Relationship

Traditionally most design activity has occurred in the bottom left of the diagram

In an age of mass manufacture, where the barriers to entry to the means of production are high, design has largely been restricted to professional designers and engineersDirect Digital Manufacturing technologies (additive manufacturing, laser cutting etc.) significantly lower these barriers

Approaches to design which occur in the top right of the diagram require a new way of working from designers

An acceptance of the need to enable consumers to design their own products (if they wish)An acceptance of the need to design “products which are not finished”A recognition that this involves giving up control over the function and aesthetic of the final product


In future, the role of designers will be to design unfinished objects

Products which require unique decisions and inputs from consumers

Products which are incomplete without the consumer’s expertise

Hypothesis


It is already happening!


Pilot Study 1 – two dimensional


Personalised Input


Capturing the Data


CAD Modelling


Final Design


Pilot Study undertaken to see if Variational Consumer Design could be applied to a customised memory stick

Pilot Study 2 – three dimensional


Use of Genoform software

Genoform enables the parameters of CAD models created in SolidWorks to be encoded into a “genome”


Use of Genoform software (continued)

Values in the genome can be “mutated” (within set limits) to create an almost infinite number of variations of the model


Use of Genoform software (continued)

Certain aspects of the model can be protected from the mutation process, in this case the internal components


Original designs created within SolidWorks

Six alternative concept designs were modelled in SolidWorks and then encoded within Genoform


Variations created by Genoform

Eight participants were asked to select their preferred design which was then mutated within Genoform

Variations of the design were presented to the participant, a preferred option selected and the process repeated until they were happy with the design outcome


Some final designs


“PenCAD” enables consumers to change the design form in real-time using slider bars in Rhino/Grasshopper

Pilot Study 3 – real-time interaction


Conclusions and Future Directions

Consumer design is here and is growing

There are different types of consumer design and some will require a major change in designer attitudes

There is a tension between consumer desires to design and consumer capabilities for designing

User-friendly method(s) for capturing consumer design intent must be developed

This could take the form of a “customisation toolkit” to enable consumer design but also apply key design rules

Designers will need to create “unfinished designs” to be finished by the consumer

Thank you … any questions?

[email protected]

presentacion CM Ian Campbell

Design

Transcript of presentacion CM Ian Campbell