The Future of Computer Use in Product Design.pdf

Sener, B. and Wormald, P. (2001) “The Future of Computer Use in Product Design” Proceedings of CADE 2001 - Computers in Art and Design Education: “Digital Creativity Crossing the Border“, p.358-363, 9-12 April 2001, Glasgow, Scotland ISBN 0 901904 82 1 CADE 2001 Digital Creativity: Crossing the Border 358 The Future of Computer Use in Product Design Bahar Sener Paul Wormald Department of Design and Technology Loughborough University, England B.Senerlboro.ac.uk Abstract: This paper discusses research carried out as part of an ongoing PhD project into the use of CAD by industrial designers. The early research has been based on literature searching and face-to- face interviews carried out with postgraduate design students and practising design professionals. The aims of the interviews were; to investigate issues surrounding creativity and computer aided design (CAD); to explore the capability of current CAD systems for supporting design activity; and to identify user expectations in the near future. A significant outcome of this early part of the study is the identification of industrial designers future expectations for CAD systems that would give relevant technological and practical directions in the field of computer support for industrial design. 1. Introduction The development of CAD systems has undergone rapid development in the last twenty years. A major transformation in the media used by industrial designers to assist them in carrying out the design process has been witnessed with the use of computer. The first use of computer drawing techniques, as a simple computer-aided drawing board, was in the 1960s, and it was only in the 1980s that the working practices of designers in many industries was gradually transformed.1, 2 Since the introduction of computers into the field of design, the CAD industry has also come a long way with continuous improvements to the user interface. When computers were first used for industrial design, designers tended to use software originally intended for engineering.3, 4 Although there is an overlap between these disciplines, there are also significant differences in their expectations. For example, for the balance of their work engineers are more likely to use a CAD system to help them rapidly develop and document very precise definition of objects5 whereas industrial designers rely on experimenting with different views of the object,3 and to build and visualise free forms and organic shapes. Until the late 1980s CAD, in the industrial design context, effectively meant the computerisation of technical drawing.6 In parallel to the development of CAD systems, in order to answer industrial designers particular needs, Computer Aided Industrial Design (CAID) software was developed. The CAD industry has grown and changed in terms of the computer hardware utilised, the software technology employed and the impact of CAD on design and manufacturing organisations. Towards the end of the 1980s CAID packages that would enable the whole design process to be computerised, such as Alias, 3 were introduced to the market. Today, the effects of computer-based technological advances are widespread and that they have brought computers into design studios with an ever-increasing role in design activities. CAD is now 1 Black, I. (1990). Design Methodologies in a New Generation of CAD. CAD/CAM 1990 Conference Proceedings. 27-29 March 1990, Nec Birmingham, The Strathclyde Institute. pp. 402-412. 2 Jones, Tim (1997) New Product Development, Oxford: Butterworth-Heinemann. 3 McCullagh, K. (1996) 3D computer modelling in Industrial design. Co-Design Journal. 07.08.09(1996):28-35. 4 Hirschtick, J. (2000) The Future of CAD. MCAD-Productive Solutions for mechanical Engineers and Designers. 20(03):2. 5 Loosschilder, G. (1997) A picture tells a thousand words. The Design Journal. 0(1)41-57. 6 Cardaci, Kitty (1992) CAID: A Tool for the Flexible Organisation, Design Management Journal (Reprint), 3(2). Sener, B. and Wormald, P. (2001) “The Future of Computer Use in Product Design” Proceedings of CADE 2001 - Computers in Art and Design Education: “Digital Creativity Crossing the Border“, p.358-363, 9-12 April 2001, Glasgow, Scotland ISBN 0 901904 82 1 CADE 2001 Digital Creativity: Crossing the Border 359 applied through the various aspects of the design and manufacturing processes.7 Industrial design companies and manufacturing companies are designing and evaluating their products using several CAD tools. Nevertheless, the range of tools that can be used by industrial designers in all stages of design, from original idea to final product, is still limited. This is because of the current suite of CAD tools is relatively new and has been designed for either high profit margin based markets such as computer animation or large markets such as mechanical engineering.3, 8 When investigating the evolution of CAID tools, one of the main issues concerns recognising the industrial designers needs and the nature of their work before integrating CAD into the design process. This research aims to add to the debate through the findings of a PhD research programme. The main goal of the research is to achieve relevant technological and practical directions in the field of computer support for industrial design. 2. Literature review This section introduces the findings of the literature review undertaken as part of the study. Early research for the study has focused on searching literature in the area the use of computers in the process of the design of mass manufactured products. As computer technology has been changing very quickly the literature review is limited to the last two decades in order to find out state-of-the-art. The main sources of recent information were journal articles plus documents collected from the Internet and exhibitions visited. The literature review resulted in a number of repeated issues. These issues can be sorted into broader themes as follows: - creativity with computers, - data compatibility with other software and hardware, - communication and teamworking, - cost issues. 2.1 Creativity with computers Creativity is frequently considered to be the most important aspect in design. However, designers can never be completely independent of their tools, and the use of CAD has a number of implications for the products concerned.7 The research is looking at the creative use of CAD tools at the stage of product modelling rather than looking at creativity. In this context, creativity is the connected with series of activities that designers do in order to produce the most interesting and pleasant concepts for new products. It is concerned with the issues that allow designers; to experiment freely with such features as colour, surface finish, overall dimensions, product graphics,3 to generate forms very quickly, to keep records and so on, without fear of loosing the original concept. Recent CAD software gives designers the previously unavailable ability to deal with complex surfaces thereby, potentially, allowing them the opportunity to become more creative in their design.2 This potential of CAD is not an attribute of the system alone; it requires both a significant level of user skill and a number of design parameters to be in place before its significant use as a creative tool in the design process.9 Nevertheless, today, manufacturing industry is aware of several CAD systems that aim to provide a support role in the early stages of design, such as Alias Studio Tools.10 7 Zeitoun, Jean (1993) “CAD and the conception of objects.” In Jocelyn de Noblet, eds. Industrial Design reflection of a century. Paris, pp 373-380. 8 De S, A.G. and Rix, J. (2000) “Virtual prototyping: The Integration of Design and Virtual Reality.” In P. Brunet, C. Hoffmann and D. Roller eds. CAD Tools and Algorithms for Product Design. Berlin, London: Springer. 9 Warburton, N. (1996) A Heuristic Model for Digitally Integrated Design. Co-Design Journal. 07.08.09(1996):24-27. 10 Alias Studio Tools (2000) Accessed via WWW http:/ (23 September 2000). Sener, B. and Wormald, P. (2001) “The Future of Computer Use in Product Design” Proceedings of CADE 2001 - Computers in Art and Design Education: “Digital Creativity Crossing the Border“, p.358-363, 9-12 April 2001, Glasgow, Scotland ISBN 0 901904 82 1 CADE 2001 Digital Creativity: Crossing the Border 360 2.2 Data compatibility with other software and hardware There is a large number of CAD applications which store and use data, such as product geometry, and material attributes of the CAD model, in different ways. A high proportion of companies operate some sort of CAD system, such as AutoDesks AutoCAD or IBMs CATIA, running on different platforms ranging from PC and Apple Macintosh to Silicon Graphics and Hewlett-Packard UNIX workstations.2 However, most CAD packages from different vendors do not communicate with each other and model data cannot be shared directly.3 Today, in order to support different phases of the new product development process a wide variety of CAD software has been developed and introduced to the market. Consequently, the current data exchange formats are not able to serve all this variety of software and the data exchange problem still exists. 2.3 Communication and team working Industrial designers increasingly work in multidisciplinary teams which often consist of people inside their workplace and sometimes people contributing to projects from outside. When the teams goals are to maximise product quality and minimise development time and costs, 3 the need for high quality and efficient communication becomes essential. When the different segments of the design team, which can be located in different places, need to work on different parts of the same project, effective software enabling appropriate communication becomes essential. Although accesses to the Internet and video conferencing technology already assist designers to communicate design data in different continents, improvements can always be made. 2.4 Cost issues Although CAD systems have become much more cost effective then before,11 most of them are still regarded as high-priced to buy and upgrade, especially by the design divisions of small companies. The literature review has resulted in some preliminary conclusions and given an overview of the issues involved in the integration of computers in design. However, it was decided that more recent data about the current issues needed to be gathered by talking to the CAD users who take part in product development. Consequently, it was planned to arrange face-to-face interviews with these people. 3. Interviews and questionnaire with designers After the review of previous literature it was decided to talk to current CAD users in order to gather more up-to-date and focused information about their needs. A series of research questions was drawn up in order to provide direction to the brief. These questions concerned the strengths and weaknesses of the computer hardware and software as experienced by users, the expectations of those users on the topics of functionality and input/output options, and the identification of user expectations over the next five years. A questionnaire was designed to answer these questions. Face-to-face interviews with eight practising professional designers were carried out, as well as nineteen interviews with postgraduate design students. The aims of the interviews were to investigate creativity and the use of CAD; to explore the capability of current CAD systems to support design activity; and to identify user expectations in the near future. The interviews were conducted over four months with professional designers from multinational design companies plus ergonomists, engineers and designers. The postgraduate design students were all from Coventry University. Since the interviewees were chosen from different professionals involved in the design process they were using a variety of software applications in different phases of the design process. However, the majority of postgraduate design students were using Wavefront software from Alias. 11 Woolner, M., Adams, B. and Polletti, H. (1996) Computer technology in designer maker practices. Co-Design Journal. 07.08.09(1996):10-14. Sener, B. and Wormald, P. (2001) “The Future of Computer Use in Product Design” Proceedings of CADE 2001 - Computers in Art and Design Education: “Digital Creativity Crossing the Border“, p.358-363, 9-12 April 2001, Glasgow, Scotland ISBN 0 901904 82 1 CADE 2001 Digital Creativity: Crossing the Border 361 The interview questionnaire is not included in this paper due to the insufficient space. It was structured under four main sections: (1) Personal and company details, (2) The design process, (3) Computers, and (4) Future expectations, each with relevant questions reflecting the main themes of the investigation. Since the questionnaire was designed for practising designers some modifications were made after piloting, in order to make the questions more relevant to the student interviewees. Otherwise, the questionnaire was same for all participants. In this study qualitative research methods were selected in order to generate data rich in detail and embedded in a research context. The qualitative data was obtained by tape recordings during the interviews, and they were then evaluated. A number of repeated issues emerged, and these were sorted into broader themes. 4. Discussion The basis of this discussion is formed by the major points which arose from the interviews. From the findings of the interviews, the main issues can be categorised as; problems with computer graphical interface and usability, problems with data input devices, data compatibility with other software and hardware, and cost. Since data compatibility and cost issues are common results with the literature review, only problems with computer graphical interface and usability, and data input devices are discussed. Although the interview findings mostly reflect the postgraduate students attitudes towards the future use of CAD tools in industrial design, the questionnaire provided interesting answers that would help identify the extent of future expectations for CAD systems that industrial designers have. The research showed that the current spectrum of computer-modelling systems does not provide sufficient support for creativity. The results from the questionnaire have been used to generate the following wish list. 1. Computer graphical interface and usability; The major issue was how complicated software is to learn and use. Software should be: - easy to find what tool to use for which purpose, - easy to locate the tool, - easy to create complex shapes, - easy to remember which level of modelling is being used. It is important to consider the user-interaction dimensions of computer software. When working on a CAD system, the user should be able to concentrate on the creative design aspects of a CAD task instead of paying attention to the interaction with the computer. Incorrect and complex user interfaces may result in the misuse of the software, undermine customer understanding and acceptance, and increase the learning period. Even though some CAD systems have been promoted as easy-to-use with improved interfaces, the majority of interviewees (19 out of 28) had problems with interface and usability. They would like to have less complicated CAD software that they can learn in a much shorter time without having difficulty getting familiar with the interface. 2. Data input (devices); The major issue was how to produce life-like model. Life-like modelling can be achieved by: - shaping the object by hand, - interaction with the model - sculpting the model, - touching / feeling / holding the model, - moving around the model. It was noted that nearly all interviewees imagine a CAD system which enables them to shape the object by hand, interact with the model by touching, feeling and holding it as in real life. With the advent of recent simulation technology input and the output devices have attained a rich variety. In simulation technology, mainly known as Virtual Reality (VR), an artificial environment is created with computer hardware and software, and presented to the user in such a way that it appears and feels like a real environment in real time. Some new systems, named haptic systems, have been recently introduced in Sener, B. and Wormald, P. (2001) “The Future of Computer Use in Product Design” Proceedings of CADE 2001 - Computers in Art and Design Education: “Digital Creativity Crossing the Border“, p.358-363, 9-12 April 2001, Glasgow, Scotland ISBN 0 901904 82 1 CADE 2001 Digital Creativity: Crossing the Border 362 order to join visual interaction together with the simulation of physical interaction.12 Nevertheless, these tools have not yet been significantly introduced as a 3D modelling tool in industrial design. 5. Conclusions and future research From the preliminary results of this research it is possible that the scope of future research lies in new data input devices and/or systems, and 3D computer graphical interfaces. Having established what the future needs of current computer users in design are, research will focus on more precise and life-like 3D modelling with computer. Proposals for software, graphical interface or new input devices are possible results from future research. Issues which influence future research can be summarised below. The outcome of the literature review indicated that current manufacturing industry trends show demand for reducing the development costs and time while at the same time improving innovation, product quality and reacting quickly to new customers needs. 8 This means that a modern product development process needs to adapt itself to rapidly changing requirements. This would be achieved by integrating new technologies into the ear