RKS Design is consistently recognized as one of the top 10 industrial design firms in North America. I posted previously that VP and Creative Director, Lance Hussey, was to present in a webinar entitled Top Tips for Selecting Concept Design Software. Lance explains some cool real-world examples of innovative designs from RKS and how they came to be.
At end of the live event we received some great questions from the audience which were fielded to Lance as well as Creo’s Technical Sales Manager, Paul Hamilton. For your reading enjoyment, the live Q&A transcript:
Q&A with Lance Hussey of RKS and Paul Hamilton of PTC
Q: Why do you believe direct modeling is a better approach than others duringconcept design?
LH: For our process, when we need to have the flexibility to change and go in different directions while trying to come up with something, direct modeling is fast. History-based modeling is great, it has its place, it’s just a different type of tool. But because we really move around a lot on the map, in terms of being able to change and modify things, direct modeling is how we’re able to develop fast. It’s been a huge advantage in terms of the overall process. Designers can come in and be comfortable enough to use it because they don’t have to understand the knowledge of how everything fits together and fight processes- they can just go create as they think through it.
Q: Do you use other tools like sketching or rendering during concept design?
LH: Absolutely, there is no replacement for hand sketching, we do that all the time. We also use Illustrator and similar programs that help us visualize before we go to 3D. But when there are tight time cycles or when concepts are hard to understand but simple enough to do in 3D, it’s an advantage to be able to do that. I find that with direct modeling, you can net out a 3D concept in about the same time as a 2D concept, just depending on the level of detail.
Q: Is it important to also manage and keep track of the designs clients don’t pick?
LH: Yes, I think that is a very good question- What happens to the bandwidth of designs? If only one goes forward, what happens with the others? Yes, I think that what can happen, especially with product development, is that sometimes those designs need to be looked at when similar challenges occur in the future. It’s important to reconsider them and understand what might be their benefits and even apply those designs to unrelated products. We usually keep them in the database.
Q: How many design alternatives do you typically explore during concept design?
LH: It varies quite a bit. For some projects it might be 3 alternatives and other times it could be 20. It depends on the type of project and expectation level of the client. But typically we do 3-5 and narrow that down to 2 or 1. Sometimes you need to explore more options and whittle that down- so you make more in 3D before you narrow it down and develop further.
Q: Are you following any phase gate design process to design? If so, can you share your process or ideas for faster turnaround design from concept until production?
LH: Yea, we use the classic design cycle. We do preliminary design with review points then decide how to move forward with selection. It is a phased approach prior to strategy and research which then gets integrated in. The nice thing about our team is that a number of the designers are involved in the strategy and research. This is really valuable when we’re translating that knowledge and data into either assets to provide our clients and/or the designs themselves. We have a nice waterfall flow of what happens in strategy and research then going into the classic design cycles.
Q: Is direct modeling useful beyond concept design?
PH: Good question. There are a few key characteristics of direct modeling that lend it very useful in a variety of areas of product development. Certainly there are companies that use it from art to part. Some characteristics like those Lance mentioned make it especially fast. If you think about geometry and validating that geometry as quickly as possible there’s just nothing faster.
There’s also the flexibility that Lance talked about- the ability to interact with geometry regardless of how it was created or where it was created. And when we’re working directly with geometry (as with direct modeling) you can interact with it from any source. It doesn’t matter what CAD tool it was created in, doesn’t matter how it was created- it’s geometry. And geometry is the master document with direct modeling. As such, concept design is a great place to utilize direct modeling.
Direct is also great if you have to go through a bid proposal process. If you need to generate geometry and quickly validate it for proposals, nothing’s faster than direct modeling.
Another area we see companies utilizing direct for is preparing a model for the analysis process, maybe simplification and defeaturing for FEA. Companies may want to extract the negative space for computational fluid dynamics, things like that. So there are a variety of areas where you can use direct modeling and it will add value in your process.
Check out the recorded webinar which is now on-demand.
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