Mechanical engineers and industrial designers sometimes butt heads. Discover the new technology that’s improving their working relationship and cutting product development time in half:

Mechanical engineers and industrial designers can sometimes have a prickly working relationship as they bring products from the concept to the tooling stage in manufacturing companies. While designers concentrate on product appearance, especially external shape and appeal, engineers direct their attention to the inside, configuring the mechanisms within the product’s shell.

Sometimes, the result is discord between the two departments—an uneasy dynamic that has persisted for years in many manufacturing organizations—until now. Today, companies like Symbol Technologies in New York and B/E Aerospace Inc. in Florida are reconciling engineer and designer by implementing industrial design technology that helps both parties equally and aids their constant communication.

Preserving Design Nuances

At Symbol Technologies, maker of mobile computing devices, the person responsible for smoothing out the engineer-designer relationship is Curt Crowley, principal industrial designer. He implemented CAID (computer-aided industrial design) software for designers, and this technology has been integrated with engineers’ CAD software.

Before CAID, Symbol’s industrial designers worked in 2D while mechanical engineers labored in 3D, says Crowley. Designers built foam models and drew 2D sketches and sent those over to engineers, who would render them in a 3D CAD system. It was therefore up to the engineer to depict the subtlety and the essence of the design issued in 2D. Unfortunately, engineers often failed to capture design nuances because of tight product turnaround schedules.

“Imagine that you’ve got to get a database to tooling and you have a designer who gives you a bunch of 2D stuff and a physical model, and then is hanging over your shoulder, saying, ‘I want this shape a little more swoopy,’” explains Crowley. “The engineer is just trying to get the job done, but the designer is saying, ‘Make it more this, make it more that.’ There’s been a rift between designers and engineers over this for about the past 10 years.”

And while engineers thought designers were overly demanding, designers were frustrated that engineers sometimes diluted their ideas. “Just ask any industrial designer how happy they were with their last design as it made its way into production and you’d hear them all fret and say, ‘My original concept was so pure and it got so bastardized as it wound its way through engineering and production,’” says Crowley.

Fortunately, that all changed with CAID. With the new software, industrial designers can now design and sculpt on screen—much like they did with foam models and 2D drawings—but this time there is a software feature that lets them import the product’s mechanical components from the engineers’ solid modeling software.

This means that the designer knows what he or she will need to make room for inside the product—say, a scan engine or a set of batteries—before even beginning to shape the product’s exterior. Stock digital designs of such parts are easily sent from CAD to CAID, giving designers a sense of the interior layout. “When I give my design to the engineer, I know it will fit with the mechanical components,” says Crowley.

Additionally, the CAD and CAID software packages are so well integrated that, if an industrial designer modifies the exterior shape, the mechanical features automatically adjust, sparing engineers from having to rework internal parts each time the outside is altered. This automatic update capability also allows design changes to be made later in the process.

The new software reduced the amount of time engineers and designers spent sending the design back and forth by one-third to one-half, estimates Crowley. In fact, the implementation of CAID has been so effective in expediting the process that the company’s product development time has been trimmed from 18 to just 6 months, he says. At times, a product could even progress from the concept to the tooling stage in a speedy three months.

Correcting Rampant Translation Errors

Meanwhile, at B/E Aerospace Inc., maker of cabin-interior products for commercial aircraft, new software also resolved the engineer-designer rift. In this case, their formerly tense relationship was not the result of a 2D-3D disparity, but incompatible software packages, says Tom Plant, vice president of engineering for the company’s Seat Products Group.

In the past, designers and engineers had to translate files into a neutral file format before they could share them. But translated files were packed with errors, requiring the receiver—be it the engineer or designer—to labor for hours correcting mistakes and sometimes even reconstructing the geometry, recalls Plant.

When data made its way from the industrial design to the engineering department, translation errors were sometimes so severe that even the designer’s basic concept was hard to decipher. In such cases, engineers struggled to work with the surfaces rendered by designers. “There were no features on the surfaces that we could modify,” says Plant.

But the company soon realized that it had to strengthen the engineer-designer relationship to take on a new challenge. Japan Airlines had asked the company to design fully reclining seats—formerly a first-class only luxury—for business-class travel. This meant that B/E Aerospace had to design a seat that would rival the first-class seat but take up less space.

Engineers were charged with the task of fitting the seats’ various internal components—including electronic motors and audiovisual equipment—into a smaller footprint. This entailed close collaboration with designers, says Plant, and the company jumped on this opportunity to upgrade to software that could forgo the cumbersome translation process.

The firm chose Unigraphics NX from EDS, and the new software has allowed industrial designers and mechanical engineers to access each other’s files in native format. They can now send designs back and forth as often as needed to come up with the optimal layout for internal parts, says Glenn Johnson, industrial design manager at B/E Aerospace. Additionally, because of the upgrade, both departments can now use more advanced modeling techniques, and that has aided their efforts to fine-tune the seat’s shape.

Indeed, at both Symbol Technologies and B/E Aerospace, the implementation of new software has promoted a symbiotic relationship between mechanical engineer and industrial designer. And while both parties were initially leery of the effect of new technology, both are now enjoying its benefits. Engineers no longer have to redo their work to accommodate design changes while designers can now see their visions turn into finished products—with all the nuances intact. And both parties are happier.

Source: Shaking Hands Again
Jean Thilmany
Mechanical Engineering, April 2003
http://www.memagazine.org/