Tag: design

Next: Print your furniture

In the latest issue of Dwell magazine I saw a short article on how a Dutch design firm called Freedom Of Creation is making furniture by printing it out. Three-dimensional printing is increasingly common as a tool for prototyping and design assessment, but that doesn’t go far enough to suit the folks at Freedom of Creation. They are actually printing out the final piece that gets delivered to the customer using a great big EOSINT polyamide laser sintering machine (a.k.a. the magic 3-d printer). Since the design goes directly from computer to product, no paper sketches or printouts are involved at any point. That’s just as well, because what they’re printing out, the Trabecula Table, is so complex (being modeled on the fine bone structure of bird bones) that drawing it wouldn’t be worth the trouble.

This is a good example of the future that is here but not yet widespread. At 12,500 euros, you might not jump at the chance to buy yourself a Trabecula Table. But other products, cheaper products, like this will follow soon enough.

Construction, models, and pre-fab houses

Modeling is the word for the new millennium. I don’t think people realize how powerful it is to have an accurate computer model of whatever it is you want to build. It frees you to simulate, iterate, and optimize your design in entirely new ways. Back ten or so years, aerospace geeks (that’s me) were excited about the fact that the Boeing 777 was being “built” entirely inside a CAD (computer-aided design) package. People are used to seeing blueprints, schematics, and design plans, but this was something else again. Not only was the aluminum skin being modeled, but also the wiring, the plumbing, the seats, the carpet, all of the thousands and thousands of parts large and small. This let the Boeing engineers make sure that everything would actually fit before it was assembled. The project was a great success, and every plane since then has been assembled in a computer long before any metal gets cut.

pipe-collision.gifA process that works with airplanes ought to work with buildings too, and so it does. The big difference is that the construction industry moves much more slowly than the aerospace industry. There’s less pressure to go high tech. But once contractors get used to working with CAD systems, the payoff will be huge. Here’s an article from Computerworld about this phenomenon: GM builds on 3-D model. The author follows the story of a factory that General Motors built, and it’s very much like the Boeing story above. Instead of printing out thousands of 2-D blueprints, they worked straight from the computer model. The computer tells you when two pipes are colliding. As a result, they were able to eliminate the costly delays that are endemic to the culture of construction.

Because collisions in 2-D projects are unavoidable, tradespeople try to get their work done first, Lemley says. When a collision occurs, everything stops while the drawings are reviewed. “You go through hundreds of drawings, and you call the architect, and they have to come down and bring a mechanical [drawing] down,” he says. That puts everyone else behind and results in expensive change orders. Building to the model eliminated the problem.

The GM project came in 5% under budget and 25% ahead of schedule. That adds up to real money on a $1.5 billion factory.

A process that works on big buildings ought to work on small ones too, and so it does. In the latest issue of Metropolis, I came across this article on bolt-together pre-fab housing: Bursting Out. Pre-fab housing conjures up images of shoddy workmanship, cheap materials, and bad taste. But in the future it will mean customized pre-cut panels delivered in an Ikea-like flat pack and quickly assembled on site. From the article:

The process borrowed heavily from industrial-design mass manufacturing. After hollowing out the solid model and developing a structural diagram based on the ribs, the architects ran commands to unfold the computer model, break up the surfaces into production-size triangles, label each piece and rib, and then organize them onto sheets for the laser cutter. This information was then run through String IT, a program used in furniture design, which “nests” it—calculating an optimum layout of the various shapes on the given dimensions of the plywood sheets to minimize waste—reducing the amount of plywood required by about 20 percent. At the laser cutter this file was run to produce 1,100 nonidentical plywood pieces, each cut, drilled, and etched to determine its location in the house. In January 2005 these arrived flat-packed in North Haven, where a team of 12 students from the architecture program at nearby Newcastle University was prepped for a fast-build process that the architects likened to a barn raising.

This technique is already proving useful in places, like post-Katrina New Orleans, where old-school house construction is too expensive and slow, too medieval to serve the needs of the community.

The first fruits of modeling are in narrow and specialized domains, but the real value comes when you start to integrate the efforts of multiple teams across multiple domains. It takes a long time to get everybody in the game, but the results can be stunning.

Print that plane

People are starting to get used to the fact that unmanned aircraft, or UAVs in military parlance (for unmanned air vehicle), are being used quite a lot these days, particularly in Iraq and Afghanistan. Generally it’s in a nonlethal spying mode, but the occasional UCAV makes an appearance, where C stands for Combat. What’s counterintuitive about these vehicles is that, despite their moniker, they actually require more people for a normal mission than a manned vehicle. Another interesting tidbit is that, while there is no human on board the aircraft, there is in fact a human pilot. He’s just sitting on the ground at Nellis Air Force Base outside Las Vegas, 15,000 miles from the actual plane. Which is just amazing when you think about it.

UAVs have shown great promise, the most important of which is that they can complete a mission and never ever require you to send in a rescue team to recover a downed pilot. But they suffer from some shortcomings. First of all, the generals who buy them were all combat pilots, and they don’t much like turning pilots into videogame players. Also, they currently require too much manpower to operate. But this is beginning to change, and given the capabilities of current hardware and software these days, I’m sure it will change quickly.

One indication of this change is the Polecat project recently unveiled by Lockheed Martin’s secretive Skunk Works. Polecat shows great promise by simultaneously attacking the two great problems of any new airplane: the cost of building it, and the cost of operating it. Operationally the plane will feature advanced software that more or less allows you to tell it where to go without having to pay a fancy-pants pilot to step away from the craps table. Eventually these robot planes will unionize and drive up the operational costs again, but until then, we’ll be able to fly them damn cheap (relatively speaking).

Nicer than this is the fact that this plane was designed and built from scratch in 18 months. If we are to believe this, then aviation is entering a new golden age. Typical manned aircraft these days take a good fraction of a decade to develop. I was trained as an aeronautical engineer, and this one fact more than any other made me get out of the business. Throw the man out of the plane, and everything can happen faster. Beyond not needing seats and cup-holders, Polecat was built quickly because it was literally printed out by special 3-d rapid prototyping machines. In other words, the engineer who designed the wing could, after signing off on it, simply click a button that says “Make this now.” This is where the future is headed. Initially only R&D vehicles will be built like this. Eventually, though, your own customized car will be printed at a massive car printing facility near your home. You’ll be able to pick it up the day after you order it. Assuming the robot driver lets you get in.