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The Quadrato Utility Knife is CNC machined brass. Quadrato Retractable Knife By Jason Morris - Designer I've been designing products as a consulting industrial designer for about 20 years now. And here’s what I’ve learned: many good designs never make it to the market. And even if a good design does gets through; a company has to guess how many hundreds of thousands to manufacture, with the hope that they will sell them all. But today, two things have changed the whole system. One is crowdfunding, like Kickstarter , allowing you to decide which designs you want to support. Second is affordable rapid prototyping manufacturing. Where I can get parts made, with CNC or 3D printing in low quantities, on demand, in just a few weeks. So from the designer, to the customer, directly. No massive tooling costs, no middle-managers mucking things up, and no over-production.  Useful for daily tasks The common retractable utility knife is very useful, you probably have one...

The Western Washington University Industrial Design Senior Exhibition was held at TEAGUE, Seattle, June 2016. The theme was  to design a  chair, table and wine glass for a  romantic encounter. Design by Adam Boroughs. Design by Leah Cohen-Sapida Design by Leah Cohen-Sapida Design by Geoffrey Henkel Design by Geoffrey Henkel Kayley King Design by Kayley King Design by Gary Liljebeck Glass, water and concrete. Design by Jolee Nebert. Design by Ashkon Nima. The chair seating surface was 3D printed. Design by Tom Olson. Steel, glass and fabric. Posters from each designer. Design by Nolan Shinn. Wood, concrete and steel. Design by Zak Basher. Wood, brass, aluminum and resin. Design by Dan Taylor. Aluminum and wood.

The Potential of 3D Printing for Industrial Design FDM Perfume bottle by Molly Purdin 2007. Re-mixed industrial design Just as musicians can upload tracks of their music files for the public to download and re-mix, the same could happen for industrial design. In fact it already happens today in the form of modifications to cars. Users buy variations of wheels, bumpers, lights, and other car parts to suit their own style. A future example might be a software program from Motorola that allows one to create a unique mobile phone design. It could provide options for shape, configuration, button layout, size, graphics and color. These options would be displayed as three-dimensional rendering on-screen before one decides to press “print.” FDM Lamp with personal soundwave topology by Michele Kiss Open-source Industrial Design Open-source software, such as the Firefox browser, is being constantly revised and updated by various software coders around the world. These changes a...

The Disadvantages of Personal Fabrication 3D printed graffiti piece by Yale Wolf Abuse What if people use desktop manufacturing to make weapons or products to hurt others? As with any tool, it could be used for malevolent purposes. This capability, combined with the ease of internet file transfer could mean the simple creation of destructive devices. Intellectual property protection problems How does this affect patent protection when a design could be easily copied just as a music file can be copied today? Does it devalue the work of the designer? How can 3D data files be protected, or only allowed to be fabricated a limited number of times? Here is where coordination with software developers and programmers will be necessary. Cost Part cost is much higher than a mass-produced part, so the value of the part must be justified. This is not a process for everyday commodity objects. It only is feasible for applications that utilize its inherent advantages. This gap...

What are the advantages to using desktop manufacturing as a production process? No tooling costs or lead-time Once a design is complete as 3D digital data, it’s ready to be produced. There are no enormous tooling costs of several thousand dollars, and no tooling lead-times of several months. Just upload it to a rapid prototyping service on the Internet, and get it back in a couple of days. On-demand manufacturing This method could completely re-order the sequence of product development and manufacturing. Now one can design it, sell it, and then make it. The common method of product development is to mass manufacture a product and then try to sell them. But if there are no tooling-costs to absorb and each product can be quickly made one at a time, one only then needs to make just enough to satisfy demand. This means less waste, less overstock, and less overproduction. The end of marketing as we know it Marketing is based on the goal of understanding the customer so that only th...

Here's a preview of a paper that I'm working on right now... (note: I have since finished two versions of this paper and it was published in the ICSID/IDSA International Education Conference Proceedings 2007 and the book Shaping the Future? The 9th International Conference on Engineering and Product Design Education.  You can read the finished paper PDF here. ) A revolution in manufacturing may be coming sooner than we expect, and it could change industrial design dramatically . Eventually, it is predicted one will be able to fabricate a product in the home, just as one can print out a color document today. It’s called personal fabrication1 or desktop manufacturing. How will this affect the profession of industrial design? Does it empower industrial designers or does it make every person a designer? With the creative insights of design students, this paper explores the possibilities and implications of this coming paradigm shift. What is personal fabrication? Rap...