Editorial
Article Type: Editorial From: Rapid Prototyping Journal, Volume 18, Issue 2
A recent discussion held with some of my colleagues in the Loughborough design School raised the possibility of “continuously evolving products”. These would be products whose design was never complete but deliberately allowed(indeed encouraged) to keep changing in direct response to consumer preferences. There may already be examples of such products in the marketplace, but just exactly how common could they become? 3D modelling software and AM hardware offer a powerful combination to facilitate such a revolution. Computer-aided design software is already available that enables a virtually unlimited number of design versions of a product shape to be created automatically or with minimal human input. The outputs from this iterative process can be evaluated visually or through simulated performance testing. In “conventional”design and manufacturing, this process would be used typically to optimise a product’s shape prior to release onto the market. The shape would then be fixed until the next product upgrade. This is because conventional manufacturing processes often require a large production run to justify the cost of tooling. However, with AM, smaller batch sizes are just as economical to produce as larger ones and so the product could be in a state of continual upgrading.
This opens up the possibility of deliberately releasing products that will continue to evolve throughout their life span, following a sort of “natural selection” paradigm where there needs to be:
an existence of near infinite product variety (provided by parametrically driven generative CAD systems);
a competitive selection system where particular product variants are chosen for future development (either automatically using a calculated performance factor or through human judgement);
a system which replicates the “winners” (e.g. parameter values from the selected variant(s) are used as the basis for generating the next design generation); and
a system for the generation of new varieties outside the original set (e.g. new parameters could be introduced by human users to generate new variations in the shape of the product).
As each successive generation of versions are produced, the winners from an automated selection process could be produced using AM and released onto the market via an on-line purchasing system. These versions could then undergo a second selection process where buyers could vote for them or even bid for them to determine which have the greatest value. These most valuable versions would then be used to propagate the next generation and the whole process repeated.
This could be seen as a move towards the “democratisation of design”where the future direction of a product is determined by the wider public and not a small number of company executives. Such a radical departure from the“standard operating procedure” will have many implications well beyond those covered by this journal. Never-the-less, any research papers tackling the new business models that might be needed for such an AM-enabled paradigm to thrive will be very welcome.
Ian Campbell
