The Next Age of Design:
Better Looking Products Through Technology

Changes in tools ultimately created shift from functional to aesthetic design

By Al Lopez, Business Manager, Alias|Wavefront

How do you like those sexy, wrap-around sunglasses you just bought? What about the smooth, palm-fitting feel of your cell phone? The flowing surfaces and organic shapes you see in these and hundreds of other products now coming on the market are made possible through software tools that offer designers the freedom to experiment with organic shapes and forms, while building aesthetically-pleasing, manufacturable models.

Oddzon Toys Vortex Repeater by Alchemy Design

A designer's world is all about function and aesthetics. While function is well served by traditional mechanical engineering software, aesthetics have been limited in CAD/CAM systems that constrain the ability to build freeform organic designs.

Round is beautiful

CAID (Computer-Aided Industrial Design) software is based on NURBS (Non-Uniform Rational B-Splines), a mathematical representation of curves and surfaces that allow a model to be manipulated with much more freedom and flexibility than a solids-modeling based CAD system. Freeform surfacing tools can provide designers with the ability to create organic shapes, thus giving the designer greater artistic control over the modeling process.

Herman Miller Levity Workstation by Holbrook Design

The open-ended nature of freeform surfacing tools allows designers to experiment with shape and form almost entirely without restrictions, an ideal environment for the creative process. Designers working with CAID systems say it's like taking a voyage of discovery. Where they start and where they end can be dramatically different and whether by chance, intuition or intent, the process allows them to pursue a finer design.

Holbrook Design, known for its work on Herman Miller office furniture, uses Studio software from Alias|Wavefront, Toronto, Ontario, at the first stage of a project rather than beginning with hand sketching. Richard Holbrook, principal and founder of the firm, says he can do this because Studio understands the designer's point of view. He calls it a very intuitive tool, in sync with the way the creative process works. It lets him explore unlimited iterations of a concept without recreating steps each time.

Diagnosing the design

While the ideal design process is open and unconstrained, there's not much point in creating a concept that cannot be manufactured. With NURBS-based modeling a designer can do both, because the software creates a 3D model that has all the precision and accuracy needed for the engineering process. Surface evaluation tools can be used to check for continuity breaks between surface edges, as well as give a visual representation of the surface quality.

Gray Holland of Alchemy Design says the accurate surfaces and realistic modeling characteristics he gets with a CAID system help insure that his design will hold true through manufacturing. It's how he makes sure his designers never fall in love with a lie. The models they create are clean and tight enough to go to stereo lithography very quickly, sometimes in 48 hours. In some cases the SLA prototypes are so good he can dispense with CNC prototypes, saving thousands of dollars.

Try looking at it this way

The highly realistic visualization achieved by CAID tools also contributes to today's better looking products. For instance, a design can be rotated and viewed from different angles with multiple light sources. Or designers can experiment with different textures. Try it out in chrome. If they don't like that, they can quickly change it to blue matte plastic. To see how the design moves, a designer can add some animation to show exploded views of the product assembly, or create an animation to show the functionality of the design.

In fact, the visualization tools in CAID systems can make designs look so realistic that it is hard to tell whether they are real or rendered. At Lunar Design, Jeff Hoefer says they often create photorealistic models, then place the models in a digital photograph or artificial background in order to show a product in its natural environment. Lunar also uses Studio renderings for research and market testing. For a new toothbrush for Oral-B Laboratories, a computer-generated design was even used in TV ads and on packaging before the actual product was manufactured.

Interaction with engineering systems

Some designs, such as sunglasses or a toothbrush, have a fairly simple structure so they can be created in a CAID system and go straight through to manufacturing, speeding up the production process. On the other hand, when a product requires an internal support structure, it needs to be analyzed by a CAD system so that engineers can determine where to add ribs, bosses or mounting brackets.

Oral B Toothbrush by Lunar Design

Because the CAID system creates 3D models, the files can be exported and dropped into CAD formats such as Pro/Engineer or Solidworks, which engineers will use to add the new parts. The data translates reliably so there's no risk that the original design will need to be altered. As Hoefer says, if we can create the part in Studio, we know the design will hold true downstream in engineering and manufacturing.

The process works in reverse equally well. If engineering data is imported into a CAID system, a shell or external surface can be designed right on top of the engineering criteria.

Better living through CAID

The newest development in Studio lets designers integrate 2D paint and sketch functions with 3D rendering and animation, bringing even greater flexibility to the process of creating variations from a single idea. For example, a designer wants to experiment with differently shaped buttons for a cell phone concept. The cell phone is already rendered. Instead of taking the time to model and re-render the design with different buttons, the button iterations can be painted on separate layers. This allows the designer to switch between layers to review different button design concepts in a very short time.

Whether designs move directly to tooling and manufacturing, or make a pass through engineering, one key way a CAID system helps designers create more aesthetic and functional products is through its high level of design integrity. When a designer creates an elegant, sculpted concept, the emotional level that went into the first sketch is preserved and reflected in the final product.

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