Re: RP in industrial design

From: Brock Hinzmann (SRI  International)
To: André Dolenc (Helsinki University of Technology)
Date: Monday, August 9, 1993
Forwarded to RP-ML
Subject: Re: RP in industrial design
Dear Andre',
     Thanks for your reply. I believe I read about E&D in one of the NOR-SLA newsletters. I have been 
meaning to follow up. Industrial design firms in the U.S. do not generally like to use RP, because it is too 
slow for them. They want styrofoam models in 30 minutes to see their inspirations in solid form (solid 
foam? seems like an oxymoron). They will use it if the client requests it, but usually through a service 
bureau. Some large companies make use of it. Apple, for instance, makes prototypes from a mixture of RP parts and milled parts. The Apple RP machines are located at the machine shop and the designers 
somewhere else. The model makers and the designers communicate by internal e-mail to send the design 
files back and forth, so there is no real need to be in close proximity.
     Other modes exist. Cubital has its design front end terminal located at service bureaus. The service 
bureau works out the engineering design (as opposed to what the industrial designer might come up with) and sends it electronically to Cubital. Soligen, when it first started, suggested a network of service bureaus and a central service, where someone sends in their design and gets back a cast metal part from the nearest service bureau within three to five days. Nice idea, but they dropped it when they ran out of cash. Another concept is the extension of the corner photocopy business, where, in addition to a line of 
photocopy machines and viewgraph-making machines, the shop would have a 3-D printing machine, 
where anyone could walk in off the street with a CAD model and print out a copy. Also, the shop could 
have an optical scanning machine for scanning and then printed a copy of any object. I believe this is 
popular in France already for making head scans/models.
     I just turned in a draft of a report I have been working on on industrial design for strategic planners. 
RP and a few other items are mentioned in the technology section. The report is not as good as I had 
hoped, but we kept changing the concept, instead of adding to the content, which led to four rewrites. 
Form appears to have won out over function once again.
     I will try to figure out how to get to the others on the mailing list, so I won't have to bother you with 
everything, but keep up the good work. 

brock, the badger.