Technology Forward

Design lessons from the sports world

Additive manufacturing suits applications ranging from industrial automation to sports equipment. Designers in the sports world have been one of the quickest groups to adopt additive manufacturing technology. They’ve developed a few insights and perspectives that might be useful for engineers in other fields. I interviewed David Woodlock, Application Development and Design Manager at HP, and we discussed some of these insights.

Woodlock has seen how his team shifts their thinking through faster iteration to bring the athletes what hasn’t been possible before. “It’s about figuring out what the users care about and how the design team can use this new tool to advance the state of the art. “Additive gives us a bigger design space,” notes Woodlock. “

Customization and personalization have long been touted as key benefits of additive technology. Sports design takes them to new levels. Designers use the technology to account for different sizes, different strengths, different profiles, and so on, of the end user. Plus, additive makes it easier to offer a larger number of options for a design. Notes Woodlock, “With full personalization, not only is there a one-off for a specific person, there’s also the option to offer 10 sizes versus three, and that’s a ton of value.”

Another aspect is thinking differently. “In the sports field, a designer cannot discount a product or design because they don’t see value in it,” notes Woodlock. People have very different experiences in sports than I do. So, I can’t discount something because I don’t necessarily represent everybody’s problems.

One of the major areas of development will be software. For example, Woodlock thinks ordering systems will undergo major changes. “Today’s ordering systems can’t handle a single user ordering a custom part and getting it back to them in a way that fits into my ERP system. But look at the personalization ordering backbone for sporting goods. It is very similar to the one that you’d need for a personalized health care product like a prosthetic, or other custom products. This is a great opportunity for startups in the industry.”

“Engineering now is getting really fun because it’s moving into designing for the human being,” says Woodlock. “We’re past the point of technology for technology’s sake. We’re now at the point of what is the human experience and how can you improve that.

“Whatever discipline you study, be it chemical engineering, mechanical engineering, software engineering, the focus is on the person because that’s where I think the smartest, most empathetic people are uniquely able to solve and create value. Everybody’s looking for what improves my experience and that’s kind of why I think sporting goods is a leader in all these spaces.”

And change is coming to CAD programs. “Traditional CAD programs have had a good run since the eighties but they’re kind of the same, equation-based approaches.

But look at animation, especially in movies. “Animators have tools that can ride the compute power curve that traditional CAD does not have. They can use more polygons, more mesh and create this huge curve in just processing power and how they’re able to design 3D objects.

“I think traditional CAD starts to go away and you start to look at what is animation doing? What is video game design doing? Because they are advancing fast. At some point, processing power will catch up or every designer will design like the animators. But it takes a ton of horsepower to render all those things. It’s very computationally heavy. But that’s the future, not equations, organic shapes, representations, but leveraging what they’ve done in animation and bringing it into the creation of physical objects.

“Some of our best designers of 3D products come from either animation or video game design and they bring those skills into creating 3D objects that we then print and I think that’s the future.” DW

Leslie Langnau llangnau@wtwhmedia.com