Product Design Show - ENGINEERING.com

Every product starts off as an idea. Product Concept Design is all about shaping that idea into a real product. In today’s episode Vince and Allison look at how modern Product Concept Design has developed, and where it’s going.

Vince and Allison report on important examples of biology in design, from birds in flight to a new car whose shape was inspired by a box fish.

Since the 1970 factories have become ever more automated. In this episode Allison and Vince look at current trends in factory automation and show how networked facilities are changing the landscape of manufacturing.

Complex supply chains can lead to unwanted or prohibited materials in your product. In this episode, Vince and Allison review how product design teams can meet regulatory and company goals for complex global products.

2025 CAFE standards are forcing auto designers to upgrade existing technology. The internal combustion engine can become a lot more efficient, but it will take a lot of intensely collaborative design work. In this episode, Allison and Vince cover some of these opportunities.

People don’t always sit up straight, especially when using portable electronics. New designs show smart engineering.

Designers at Steelcase surveyed thousands of users on how they sit when using new devices like smartphones and tablets at the office. They found that common office chairs don’t support the way people sit, which led them to a revolutionary new office chair design.

The Dakar off-road motorcycle race has daily sections of up to 550 miles. The design team at KTM has produced winning bikes for the last 12 Dakars. In this episode, Vince and Allison share the unique challenges and winning formulas from KTM’s motorcycle design team.

Embedding electronics demands new processes and technology for product design.

Vince and Allison speak with designers at toy company, k'nex, and learn a few things about designing products that will be assembled in the field.

How do designers meet regulatory requirements and consumer preferences for sustainable design? Vince and Allison delve into design practices that comply with standards like RoHS and Reach.

Emerging markets represent the biggest sales opportunities for western brands. But what’s a designer to do when competitors release a $65 smartphone tailored to the needs of those consumers? In this episode, Vince and Allison explore design challenges for foreign markets.

Why do different CAD systems cause a problem for designers? It comes down to the feature definitions in the various packages. Newer software does a better job of geometric translation. That’s a good thing, since multi-CAD environments aren’t going away any time soon.

Vince and Allison discuss how to retrieve the design intent from a CAD model even though the original designers no longer work at the company. This episode shows how to edit CAD models without knowledge of the model's feature history.

Vince and Allison show how a supplier can use direct modeling to modify a design from a customer that’s in a different CAD format.

Vince and Allison explain direct modeling and compare it to parametric modeling, using lots of examples.

Allison and Vince overview the concept of Flexible Modeling, a combination of parametric and direct modeling environments. Vince uses direct modeling to accommodate Allison’s late stage design change even though the original part was designed with parametric modeling.

In this episode Allison and Vince review the reasons why parametric modeling provides such a powerful CAD environment, but recognize that it's not necessarily the best solution in every case.

In this episode Allison and Vince show you how CAD systems have advanced to bring the most important part of your business, Concept Design, into the 21st century.

In this episode, Vince and Allison talk about when top down design is the right way to go and the value that design teams can get from a bottom up approach.

In this episode of the Product Design Show, Vince and Allison explore the last two components of design thinking, integrative thinking and experimentalism, and explain why those two elements are crucial to the whole process.

Design Thinking is a process of bringing integrative thinking, experimentalism, collaboration and empathy into the design process in a structured way. In this episode Vince and Allison walk us through the empathy and collaboration aspects of this framework.

Product concept design tools have come a long way from hand sketches. Even proper drafting rules made a big difference, and so have computer design tools. Now designers are using social media to bring consumer interaction into the concept stage of product design.

Designers at Babyzen redefined the traditional umbrella stroller to address 3 major performance headaches.

Counter insurgency warfare demands split-second decision making and real time information. In this episode, Vince and Allison review the design of a throwable reconnaissance robot.

Lee Valley Tools design engineers are "judged against history" when developing new products. Vince and Allison take us through the redesign of a block plane that keeps the comfort and familiarity of previous tools while improving the overall performance.

Vince and Allison show the egg shaped Tamaggo, a soon-to-be-released camera whose unusual 360 degree image created unique design challenges.

Ram Racing redesigned their Formula SAE car to increase stiffness by 100% and reduce weight by 10 lbs, leading to big reductions in lap time.

Aston Martin Racing takes lessons from the race track to inform their consumer car designs.

Whether you’re producing plastic or metal products, you’re likely using machines to shape them. In this episode of The Product Design Show, Vince and Allison talk to JR Automation Technologies about their design of an assembly line that manufactures coolant reservoirs for car radiators.

Designers from System Group wanted to build a fully autonomous packaging machine that could build a box for any sort of product. Allison and Vince show how they incorporated bar code data to predetermine the right size box. The result is the very cool “Freebox” machine, as shown in this episode.

Drafting helps cars go faster on the race track, but NASCAR fans were complaining that too much drafting makes races less exciting. So on Jan 10th, NASCAR changed the design rules. That’s good news for fans, but bad news if you are a design engineer for a NASCAR team. The Product Design Show spoke with Drew Kessler, Designer on the PENSKE racing team, to find out how they got ready for race day.

Even professional design teams can learn a few things from the FIRST Robotics competitions. In this episode, Vince and Allison report on a project to design and build a robot that can shoot a ball into a basket. The student team faces a lot of the same challenges as commercial design teams.

Design engineers put a lot of effort into commercial cleaning vehicles, as Vince and Allison discover. All those scrubbing, squeegeeing and drive train components have to fit together somehow.

What's the ultimate tool for demolition? In this episode, Allison and Vince talk to designers who went well beyond the sledge hammer to create a portable tool for tearing down infrastructure.

Architects designed a huge cantilevered canopy for the new Francis A Gregory library in Washington DC. Problem was, hanging a canopy 40 feet from its support isn’t an easy engineering challenge, as the engineers from CST Covers pointed out. Vince and Allison walk us through the solution.

We’ve all heard the distinctive rumble of a performance car. This week we spoke with Pat Hodgins, Chief Engineer of Callaway about how they design that signature sound into their cars.

Prosthetic designers face a fascinating range of issues when designing devices that simulate normal walking. In this episode Vince and Allison review how designers control the proportional loads from walking by capturing and harnessing the ground strike forces.

Indy cars can flip after an initial crash, like Franchitti's famous crash in 2007. Allison and Vince talk to engineers at Dallara about their redesign that makes such famous flips less likely.

Allison and Vince show a range of collaboration tools that help designers collaborate with suppliers on product concepts without sharing the full intellectual property of their designs.

In this episode Vince and Allison show us the intricacies of designing and manufacturing a carbon bicycle frame, and how one mountain bike company benefitted from incorporating one of their vendors into the design process.

In this episode Vince and Allison focus on tools to help an internal design team collaborate, from Social Media to Top Down Design to Skeleton models.

Fit and alignment are the keys to making prosthesis wearers achieve a proper gait. And gathering good data is the key to getting the alignment right. In this episode, Vince and Allison show how designers measure the complex forces and moments in a human stride.

There are already police robots currently on the market. However, in this week’s episode, Vince and Allison show us one that can also climb stairs…and be built at an economical price.

Green-powered vehicles typically look anything but cool. This week Vince and Allison show us an electric motorcycle that really turns heads.

In this episode Vince and Allison share tips and techniques to incorporate the voice of the customer into your product designs.

Firemen need a steady flow of water through the nozzle to safely put out fires. In this episode, Vince and Allison explain the design challenges of matching water flow to the different water pressure available at a variety of fire sites.

This week Vince and Allison take us on a tour of a high-speed warehouse that features packing machines operating at ground speeds of over 70 mph. Imagine how fast you could pack for your trip to Vegas, baby.

Architects typically consider the reflection of light in their work. In this episode, Allison and Vince show us how it is becoming increasingly significant to engineers, and their designs, as well.

New packaging machine custom measures and cuts cardboard to fit all sorts of products. Vince and Allison walk us through how it wraps a box of tiles. Imagine what this could do for your Christmas wrapping.