A tangible design tool for sketching materials in products

Abstract

Industrial designers make sketches and physical models to start and develop ideas and concept designs. Such representations have advantages that they support fast, intuitive, rich, sensory exploration of solutions. Although existing tools and techniques provide adequate support where the shape of the product is concerned, the exploration of surface qualities such as material and printed graphics is supported to a much lesser extent. Moreover, there are no tools that have the fluency of sketching that allow combined exploration of shape, material, and their interactions. This paper evaluates Skin, an augmented reality tool designed to solve these two shortcomings. By projecting computer-generated images onto the shape model Skin allows for a "sketchy" tangible interaction where designers can explore surface qualities on a three-dimensional physical shape model. The tool was evaluated in three design situations in the domain of ceramics design. In each case, we found that the joint exploration of shape and surface provided creative benefits in the form of new solutions; in addition, a gain in efficiency was found in at least one case. The results show that joint exploration of shape and surface can be effectively supported with tangible augmented reality techniques and suggest that this can be put to practical use in industry today.

Design Daydreams

“…Reframe creative prompt tool: using text from a user's notes and readings, Reframe creates randomized prompts to juxtapose concepts in new ways (https:// reframe.media.mit.edu/) projection mapping, commercial AR headsets and mobile AR apps. However, as other researchers have noted [15], while these systems allow for detailed tracking of the objects they are augmenting with highresolution imagery, we found them to be cumbersome and inaccessible to most designers. We wanted these digital images to feel like the proverbial 'post-it note'; a small fragment of an idea quickly encapsulated visually on a simple piece of paper that can be moved around and juxtaposed to other media and ideas, similar to Weiser's iconic 'scrap computing' Pads [17].…”

Touching Tubs and Grabbing Gable‐tops: An Editorial to the Special Issue on Human‐packaging Interaction

“…Affordances are well known in product design but have received limited attention in the field of packaging. Other tools that are being developed to aid the packaging designer include work on projecting skills on three‐dimension (3D) models, for example, Saakes and Stappers (2009) and the application of Kansei Engineering to align affective qualities of packaging and its content . Recent work in Packaging Technology and Science also covers explorations of optimal point size in typography applied to 3D packaging shapes …”