By Sarah Murray
Published: June 16 2010 01:02 | Last updated: June 16 2010 01:02
Launching an athlete-endorsed sports shoe on the US market used to be a long process. Designs on paper would be sent to Asia, a local manufacturer would create a mock-up and ship it back to the US for the athlete to endorse. Changes to the design would then be sent back and forth and it might be months before the shoe would appear on store shelves.
Digital technology has changed all that. A shoe would now be designed on a screen and a physical mock-up would be created using a three-dimensional printer, painted up in the appropriate colours and couriered to the athlete for approval.
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“That’s now a two-week process,” says Joan Lockhart, vice-president of marketing at SensAble Technologies, which develops 3D touch-enabled technology for the design of consumer, medical and industrial products.
“Athletic footwear is a fashion industry where there used to be two seasons a year. Now there are seven – and that’s an incredibly rapid pace of design enhancement.”
The way “rapid prototype 3D printers” work is by building a physical object one layer at a time using data fed to them by a computer. While they may take several hours to print out a full object in three dimensions, this is far less than is needed to construct most physical prototypes.
“Designing and developing products with 3D technology makes a difference to companies.
“It allows new levels of consumer interaction to be established, enabling earlier feedback, reducing product risks and speeding development cycles,” says Peter Bambridge of Dassault Systèmes’ consumer and retail business in the northern Europe, Middle East and Africa (Emea) region.
“If a picture is worth a thousand words, a 3D model is worth a million.”
However, accelerating the speed of execution is not the only way 3D and other digital tools are changing the way products are designed and manufactured. Computerisation also radically cuts the waste generated during the design-to-production cycle.
“If you think about a physical prototype, it’s scrap, and companies throw it away at the end of the process,” says Michael Bloor, North American chief operating officer for ESI, which provides digital simulation software for prototyping and manufacturing processes. “Simulating the manufacturing processes for components, parts and products reduces scrap.”
When this principle is applied to buildings, the reduction in waste becomes significant. The construction industry, which has been known for over-use of materials, is now able to assess more accurately what will be needed for each project.
Many more of the parts of a building can be pre-fabricated offsite, which also cuts waste, and by making laser scans of the existing site, companies can recycle more of the demolished materials.
“You can get a better understanding of the amounts of materials that are required for construction,” says Richard Scott-Smith, an engineer and design tools manager at Atkins, the engineering design services provider. “Fewer errors are made and so there’s less need for rework in both the design and construction.”
In addition, computer-based modelling gives architects a clearer picture of how to design buildings that consume less energy, since they can simulate the impact of natural light and heat on the building at different times of day and in different seasons.
This helps architects make greater use of natural light and introduce elements such as natural shading, which reduces the need for air-conditioning.
For example, Autodesk, the 2D and 3D design, engineering and entertainment software company, makes Ecotect analysis software, which helps architects simulate a building’s performance in the context of its environment, including calculating the amount of daylight present when the sun is at different positions throughout the day.
“It allows you to produce a conceptual model that provides instant feedback as to the thermal performance of that building,” says Pete Baxter, Autodesk senior director for Northern Europe.
“If you increase thermal overhangs and natural shading [in the virtual design], it gives you feedback on the resulting comfort level in the building.”
While helping to limit environmental damage and reduce consumption of resources, IT tools are also affecting the bottom line, cutting costs from the process of producing and refining new products and allowing companies to reduce wasted materials.
For HTC, a Swedish industrial floor maintenance equipment manufacturer, the savings associated with using technology in the design process were considerable.
A single physical prototype for HTC’s machines costs $500,000 to make, and at one time the company needed to produce up to five of them for every new product being developed.
Using digital prototyping technology from Autodesk, HTC has been able to build products based on a single physical prototype. “And that prototype was so close to the original requirement that they could sell it,” says Mr Baxter. “So there’s massive cost and time savings.”
Meanwhile, digital design supports the increasingly global nature of complex engineering assets such as chemical plants and power stations, allowing real-time engineering data to be shared between all the contractors working on the project.
“Those organisations have their own disciplines and geographies,” says Mat Truche-Gordon, senior vice-president of business strategy at Aveva, the engineering software group.
“So it’s crucial for the primary contractor to be able to organise the information between the multiple disciplines and the multiple contractors during that design phase.”
In the engineering industry, lasergrammetry – surveying by 3D laser scanner – allows a virtual “walk through” of every aspect of a plant to be conducted remotely. The system captures visual details of an object such as a pump and links them to information about its specifications, sources of spare parts and maintenance procedures, as well as its real-time performance and service history.
Yet, if a piece of industrial infrastructure is a complex ecosystem, so is the human body. The challenge for the healthcare industry is designing products that fit inside a human body. Now, using body scans and digital design technology, medical device manufacturers can customise implants such as hip replacements to individual patients.
“In the past, if you needed a hip implant, you could pick from small, medium or large,” says Ms Lockhart. “Now we’re making patient-specific implants.”
In the consumer products sector, companies armed with digital technology can make greater use of feedback from customers in the design of their goods.
The ability to experience designs before they are manufactured through visualisation software and rapid prototyping 3D printers means physical objects can be refined, enhanced and tested in focus groups at a far earlier stage in the process.
Digital design technology brings together visualisation, simulation and analysis, says Autodesk’s Mr Baxter. “That allows the design team to make informed decisions at the conceptual stage and continually refine the design through all stages of the process.”
This leads to more accurate designs and products that can respond more closely to the demands of the market.
As with the example of the sports shoes, this has important implications for consumer products manufacturers, for whom innovation, time to market and ability to respond swiftly to changing consumer demand are critical.
However, Olof Schybergson, founder and chief executive of Fjord, a digital design agency, sounds a note of caution. The sheer speed at which technology allows designs to become reality, he argues, can lead to companies spending insufficient time thinking through a new product.
“Analytical tools are not the answer to everything,” he says. “They could help you build a better functioning building, but it might have been a bad idea to put a building in that area in the first place.”
In their haste to get new products to market, the ability to create new forms with complex structures using new materials can lead manufacturers to sidestep the processes not based on technology.
“This can lead to the wrong design being marketed,” says Mike Paton, an expert in technology and innovation at PA Consulting Group. “The tools must be used as part of a concurrent development and evaluation process.”
Yet, if the speed of design now possible means that companies need to do more research before rushing into the development of new products, digital technology also creates a level playing field, allowing smaller companies to innovate as rapidly as larger ones.
“Today, the ability of a company to push back the boundaries is based on the processing power of the computer on their desk,” says Mr Baxter.
“Cloud computing makes access to processing power easier, and that means all companies can do many hundreds of iterations of a design to optimise the product,” he says.
With processing power in their hands, far greater numbers of companies will be able to enter the design market.
For established players that can only mean one thing – the emergence of a far more competitive business landscape.
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