Past, Present, and Future of Product Design exhibit at the Autodesk Gallery
Autodesk serves a variety of industries:
- AEC — Architecture, Engineering, and Construction
- MFG — Manufacturing
- ENI — Engineering, Natural Resources, and Infrastructure
- M&E — Media and Entertainment (including art)
The Autodesk Gallery at One Market in San Francisco celebrates design — the process of taking a great idea and turning it into a reality. With more than 20 different exhibits regularly on display that showcase the innovative work of Autodesk customers, the gallery illustrates the role technology plays in great design and engineering. I am one of about 80 gallery ambassadors. As I have mentioned before, we chose the job title "ambassador" instead of "docent," because the correct way to address an ambassador is "your excellency" yet this never happens.
In December, I mentioned that the gallery was getting some new exhibits — ones that had returned from Paris and/or Las Vegas. Many It's Alive in the Lab readers have not been to the Autodesk Gallery in San Francisco. If you are an Autodesk customer in one of the industries we serve or not a customer at all, there is definitely something in the gallery for you to see. In a series of four blog articles, I thought would highlight gallery exhibits that are related to a specific industry. This second post is for the manufacturing industry. Here are the exhibits:
RKS Rocks Electric Guitar Design | The open body structure of the RKS guitar allows body shells and ribs to be changed to suit diverse preferences for color, finish, materials, shape, and even sound. RKS used AliasStudio for sketching and surfacing to create customized bodies that feature no flat surfaces. |
MagicWheels Wheelchair | Though manual wheelchair design has been the same for the past 150 years, this wheelchair features a gearing mechanism, like a 10-speed bicycle, that makes it easier for users to go up hill. As just one example where Autodesk strives to be a great, good, and important company, Autodesk Inventor was used in the design and validation of the wheelchair. |
Lightweight, High-Performance Airplane Engine | The engine is approximately one-third as heavy as engines of similar power (note carbon fiber casing) and runs on aviation fuel, automotive gasoline, or bio fuel. ADEPT Aeromotive (team of 3 in South Africa) used simulation and analysis software to optimize their design to bring it to market faster and more cost effectively. |
Brokk Builds Small to Demolish the Competition | Brokk is a leading supplier of demolition equipment to the building, process, and nuclear industries where remote-controlled robots go where it is too dangerous for humans to do the work. By using Autodesk Inventor to combine their mechanical and electrical designs into a single digital model, Brokk was able to cut the number of physical prototypes they needed in half and reduced their time to market by about a third. |
Bespoke Innovations | Bespoke Innovations creates customized artificial limbs with superior performance and personalized styling to turn an emotional liability (loss of limb) into an emotional asset ("that's a cool leg"). Bespoke Innovations uses Inventor and 3ds Max as part of a scan-modify-3Dprint process to create limbs specifically tailored to each individual. |
Cobra Ice Axe | The Black Diamond exhibit tells a "build a better mouse trap" story for climbing equipment to go up and down mountains based on computer aided design and physical prototyping. Alias Studio was used to design the shape to result in something that is both visually appealing as well as optimally functional. |
Cooking Clean | The BioLite HomeStove consumes 50% less wood than traditional cook fires, reduces smoke emissions by 95%, and can convert heat to electricity so it can recharge cell phones, LED lights, and other devices via a USB port. Autodesk Simulation CFD and other simulation software helped BioLite engineers evaluate the relative design decisions, reduce the number of physical prototypes required, and avoid overbuilding – helping the team save both time and money. |
Ferrari World Design Contest | Ferrari held a contest to challenge students to design the super car of the future: super light, super-fast, ecologically responsible, and technically superior. Hongik University of Seoul Korea used Alias Automotive, Alias Surface, Maya, Showcase, and Sketchbook Professional to create their winning entry. |
The Past, Present, and Future of Product Design | Nike co-founder, Bill Bowerman, was inspired by the pattern of his breakfast waffles to design a running shoe bottom that would maximize the performance of his University of Oregon track team. In partnership with Autodesk, Nike studies how bodies work and what stimulates performance (e.g., Kobe Bryant breaking down needs into performance goals which in turn map to parts of a shoe) as part of designing athletic apparel including shoes. |
Soccket: A Ball of Energy | Designed for poverty-stricken areas of the world that do not have access to electricity, children kick the SOCCKET soccer ball around for 30 minutes, and it stores enough energy to power an LED reading light for 3 hours. A member of Autodesk's Clean Tech Partner Program, Unchartered Play used Inventor to redesign the energy harnessing mechanism after testing showed the original design was prone to breakage. |
Illuminating Possibility | Since 2.6 billion people in the world don't have access to reliable electricity, d.light created durable (internal circuitry is protected from dust and insects) rechargeable plastic lights that provide up to 12 hours of light. Autodesk modeling software, like Inventor, and simulation, like Simulation Moldflow or Simulation DFM, allow designers to evaluate their designs even before the first physical prototypes are ever built. |
Freedom to Move | In the developing world, over 9 million people are in need of prosthetics, so D-Rev: Design Revolution is piloting a plastic knee joint in India that only costs $13. Autodesk modeling software, like Inventor, and simulation, like Simulation Moldflow or Simulation DFM, allow designers to evaluate various materials for the construction of mechanical devices – including prosthetics. |
Embrace the Future | Unsatisfied that 450 low-birth-weight and premature babies die each hour, many in developing countries, Stanford students developed a low-cost (only $200) incubating blanket for newborns. Autodesk provides its software free to students as part of our Educational programs. |
Making Sanitation Safe | Since 70% of people in Sub-Saharan Africa don't have access to modern sanitation, IDEO.org piloted a sanitation system in Ghana that can help prevent the spread of cholera. Mechanical designs created by software such as Autodesk Inventor can be considered in the overall context in which they will be used. |
Mercedes-Benz BIOME Car | The concept is that the Symbiosis vehicle would be built from BioFibre, grown in the Mercedes-Benz Nursery through proprietary DNA, that collects energy from the sun and stores it in chemical bonds. Although most car manufacturers use Alias Automotive or Alias Surfacing, Mercedes-Benz used Autodesk Maya to pattern the shape of the vehicle after skeletal systems found in biology. |
Mixed Reality Interface | The Kommerz MRI device, developed by an architect who found it impossible to navigate his designs using a mouse and keyboard, can be used to realistically view an automobile before it is even built. Autodesk ShowMotion software accurately reproduces real-life colors - even details like metallic flakes embedded in automobile paint. |
LEGOLAND Mega Model | Playing with LEGOs has been the initial inspiration for many of today's architects and engineers, and the dinosaur mega model (62,500 bricks) is a replica from the LEGOLAND theme park that helps spur the imagination. The LEGO Group designs initial brick shapes using Maya, feeds that into a proprietary brick builder application, and then uses AutoCAD to create plans for LEGO exhibit construction. |
Mirra Chair | The Mirra chair from Herman Miller reflects a "cradle to cradle" philosophy in that it is made of 50% recyclable materials and 96% of it can be recycled. Autodesk has selected the Mirra Chair as its standard for offices going forward. |
Digitally Fabricated Jewelry | Nervous System uses generative design, based on patterns and processes of nature, to create jewelry that would be difficult to fabricate with any process other than 3D printing. To help advance the 3D printing industry, Autodesk is providing free open-source software to drive 3D printers, called Spark, and making a 3D printer, called Ember, where we also share the schematics for the hardware. |
Power Play | Makers of the Soccket Soccer Ball, Unchartered Play has developed a jump rope that collects and stores energy that can be used to charge a smart phone or other device. Unchartered Play is part of the Autodesk Cleantech Partner Program that provides qualified companies with access to up to $150,000 worth of Digital Prototyping software for free. |
They don't make them like they used to. | The new approach to manufacturing features mass customization, where personalized objects can be fabricated using additive manufacturing techniques, at about the same cost as the traditional process where every item was exactly the same because a mold was used. Autodesk software spans the entire IMAGINE, DESIGN, CREATE process to allow anyone (professionals and non-professionals alike) to make their ideas real. |
Rapid Prototyping | Rapid prototyping leverages the ability of a 3D printer to "print" a working 3D model faster and cost effectively as compared to building physical prototypes. Autodesk applications like AutoCAD, Inventor, and Revit have been tuned to generate printable 3D models. |
Art Robotique Hybride | Combining traditional artist materials with the latest technology allows this robotic arm to accept crowd-sourced commands and paint with better-than-human-hand precision. Autodesk is working to bring robotic technology to the industries of architecture, engineering, construction, infrastructure, manufacturing, and media and entertainment. |
Vicous cycle | A cascade of gears, starting at 30 revolutions per second and reducing to 1.3 years for a single revolution, produces enough torque to lift the Empire State Building and the Statue of Liberty together. Based on an existing art installation by Arthur Ganson ("Machine with Concrete"), Autodesk and Exploratorium collaborated to use interconnected gears to illustrate the unseen but powerful presence and force of time. |
FARO Laser ScanArm | Much like a radar gun, the device has an arm with a fixed endpoint and can determine the position of an object by shooting a laser beam and measuring the time it takes to bounce back to capture 19,200 points per second. Autodesk applications like AutoCAD work with the "point clouds" that are created using laser scan technology that are used to create models of existing buildings and objects. |
Stunning simplexity | French designer Ora-ïto became famous by using 3D design software to create faux products for famous brands such as Louis Vitton, Apple, and Nike that were so convincing, consumers clamored to buy them. Ora-ïto now has his own line of design products, christened with the first name of his family members, designed with Autodesk 3D software. |
Real-time 3D Capture and Analysis | By combining low-cost hardware with easy to use software, anyone can visualize themselves in a wind tunnel. Autodesk Flow Design, which started out on Autodesk Labs as Project Falcon, is easy to use computational fluid dynamics software. |
Manufacturing also includes BioNano — Biological Sciences and Nano Technology.
Bio Computation and Next Generation Aerospace | Airbus used cloud computers to generate and evaluate thousands of possible structures, designed using synthetic biology and principles from architecture, for their concept plane that depicts travel in 2050. Autodesk continues to offer desktop applications, packaged into suites, but also offers cloud-based services that can leverage the connectivity of the internet and apply more than one computer to a problem — particularly in the areas of analysis, simulation, and collaboration. |
Digital Tools in Life Sciences | Former CEO, Carol Bartz, used to say "If God didn't make it, one of our customers did." but that line is being blurred as scientists work with DNA origami to create personalized medicine and self-assembling buildings. Based on what we have learned by supplying software to other industries, Autodesk supplies special-purpose software, such as CADnano, to assist those working in life sciences. |
So whether you're a manufacturing aficionado or not, come check out exhibits, old and new, at the Autodesk Gallery at One Market in San Francisco. There is plenty to see. This blog article highlighted only the manufacturing-oriented ones. The gallery is open to the public on Wednesdays and Fridays from 10:00 am to 5:00 pm. There is a guided tour on Wednesdays at 12:30 pm. Visit us.
Exhibitionism is alive in the lab.