Facilitating Customer Co-Design through Rapid Manufacturing

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= Research PhD by Matt Sinclair: An investigation of the feasibility of product architectures to facilitate consumer-created designs in the consumer electronics industry, using rapid manufacturing technologies as an enabler

URL of research blog at http://no-retro.com/home/about-this-site/


PhD to be awarded by Loughborough University, UK. Expected Completion date: Summer 2010


PhD SYNOPSIS

"Rapid Manufacturing (RM) is defined as the direct production of finished parts or products, most often utilising one of a number of 3D printing technologies. The Design and Mechanical Engineering departments of Loughborough University are internationally recognised for their research in this field, particularly in understanding how RM technologies will impact the product creation process.


The most important difference between rapid manufacturing technologies and traditional mass manufacturing technologies such as injection moulding is the absence of tooling. This has a number of important implications. 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.


Today’s product creation process is ideally suited to (and a consequence of) the requirement of manufacturers for small numbers of designs that can be reproduced identically in high volume. But without the need for tooling, rapid manufacturing offers the theoretical possibility that every concept can be produced. This possibility will significantly change the long-established industrial design process.


Traditionally, since products must be produced in high volume, it is inevitable that a product’s aesthetics must be appealing to many, not just to a few. Mass customisation offers the possibility of designing for niche markets, in small production runs, but it will be impossible for a designer, or even a design team, to be an expert in all these niches. Designers will therefore need to accept the necessity of inviting consumers to take part in the design process, even to design their own products. Furthermore, rapid manufacturing reduces the level of technological expertise required to design functioning parts. It is therefore likely that consumers will begin to design and produce their own products whether officially sanctioned by a brand or not.


The purpose of the traditional design process is not just to impose a uniform aesthetic however, it also refines and rejects on the basis of ergonomics, durability, integration with other products and systems, cost etc. These are all areas in which the designer’s expertise is the best tool to resolve the conflicting demands of a product brief. To make sense of the potential for multiple product variants which mass customisation offers, my hypothesis is therefore that the task of the industrial designer will in future be to create modular product architectures which define and limit the parameters of any possible design." (http://no-retro.com/home/my-phd/)


Bio

"After graduating from the Royal College of Art with a Masters Degree in Industrial Design Engineering, I joined Nokia Design in 1995. From an early stage I worked on products exclusively for the Japanese market, and it was here I first became interested in the idea of design for niche markets. Following a major research project studying youth trends in Japan, I worked with Seymour Powell on the DP 154X, which targeted urban youth culture (we also collaborated on a follow-up project which unfortunately never came to market)." (http://no-retro.com/home/about-this-site/)