Digital Sketching and Haptic Sketch Modelling during Product Design and Development

During the professional practice of industrial design, digital methods are used extensively to support the generation, development and specification of creative three dimensional (3D) form. Despite the increasing capabilities of digital methods, the distinctive nuances of current practice continue to require the use of non-digital methods, particularly during the highly creative concept generation activities. This paper reports on a research project that combined emerging and established digital design technologies to define an approach for total Digital Industrial Design (DID) that employed only digital methods (e.g. no pens/paper) with no post-process finishing (e.g. smoothing/painting of rapid prototype parts). To evaluate this theoretical approach, action research was employed in which all phases of DID were used to design two stylistic variations of a consumer product with data collection using a diary through the design process and coded analysis of outcomes. The paper concludes that DID has the greatest potential for change and benefit during the concept generation phase, where haptic feedback modelling and monochrome 3D printing have the capacity to replicate some of the qualities of tactile form-giving that is associated with workshop-based sketch modelling by hand. When integrated with photorealistic visualisation, low fidelity appearance models have the potential to reduce design timescales. To maximise impact, the case study was translated into in a web-based resource (http://www.lboro.ac.uk/microsites/lds/did/) to facilitate understanding of the process and designed outcomes from DID