#Working3D: Six Questions for an Industrial Designer

In our #Working3D interview series, we tell you about exciting professions within the AM landscape. In this latest interview, we learned how exactly AM can be used in product design. To do this, we spoke to Alex Kimber, industrial designer and founder of AKD, his industrial design studio with a focus on digital manufacturing. AKD combines maker culture and professional design and specializes in product design for digital manufacturing technologies. Alex told us more about his approach, the challenges he faces in his day-to-day work and what makes an industrial designer and what drives him personally on a daily basis.

3DN: Could you introduce yourself?

My name’s Alex Kimber, I live in London and I’m an industrial designer with a focus on using digital fabrication and striving for distributed design. I currently work with the lighting manufacturer Aktiva as well as running my own design studio, AKD, which is where I’m all about additive manufacturing. I’ve been engaged with the maker movement for a long time and have a keen interest in bringing the rigor and discipline of professional industrial design to the world of open source hardware, local production, bespoke design and so on. For me, it’s about decentralizing design in a way that’s responsible and sustainable. My career has ranged from entrepreneurial ventures to working as a design engineer in architectural glazing products. I studied MSc Design and Innovation at the Technical University of Denmark and my BSc in Product Design Engineering at Brunel University.

With his design studio AKD, Alex Kimber is committed to the sustainable decentralization of design

3DN: How did you discover additive manufacturing?

It started in college, what we call high school in the UK, where our product design teacher gave a class on manufacturing technologies and told us about 3D printing. I already had some experience with machining, so I knew the potential as soon as I heard about it and became hooked ever since. I helped out after class with the RepRap at the college and I wrote one of my papers on AM, entitled “What is the Future in Additive Manufacture?” Remarkably, my teenage estimations of the AM industry 10 years hence were pretty accurate. I bought my first 3D printer while at university; the Printrbot Simple in plywood. That was a terrible machine, compared to what is on the market today, but it was so exciting to send the first home axis command to that little thing and watch it come to life on my desk. I still get a buzz every time I send something to print and the machine starts moving – probably because I never expect it to actually work.

3DN: What is your current role and what is a typical day like for you?

My current role is as an industrial designer, but I would say I wear many hats. In my day job I work in a small, tightknit design team, where we develop customizations on our product lines, from slight configurations of size and finish right through to complete bespoke designs. Unlike other design disciplines, such as graphic or UX, where one might have an account manager who engages with the client, sets the brief for the team and manages design tasks, in this line of work we liaise directly with the clients. This means I’m on the phone talking with stakeholders daily.

There’s a lot of design documentation and version control that’s necessary, when issuing lots of technical drawings to fabricators, contractors and so on. I’m also a bit of an Excel warrior, looking at spreadsheets of product costings, technical calculations and production schedules, which can be a bit boring but it’s an essential part of the job.

The role of an industrial designer is not only to design, but also to customize, check for feasibility and document.

Related to AM, we have numerous 3D printed components, which we outsource to print bureaus, so they need modelling, ordering and checking in when they arrive, ensuring they’re compliant and will work for the assembly team. In my own studio work, it’s a combination of commercial duties, marketing activities and wrangling with Grasshopper.

The most fun but challenging part of my day is watching tutorials on one screen while looking at a tangled mess of a Grasshopper file on the other and trying to think through how exactly I’m going to model the idea that I have. It can be frustrating, but ultimately learning how to overcome a problem and actually realise an idea is the most satisfying part of the work. Then at the end of the day, a chamomile tea is in order.

3DN: What qualifications and experience are required to work as an Industrial Designer?

Typically, industrial designers require a bachelor’s degree and many go on to get their masters, as I did, but quite honestly it should be entirely possible to get into design from a more vocational path. There is a lot of technical knowledge, hard skills and experience using industry standard software packages that’s all necessary to enter into industrial design, which a reputable university course would take you through. However, university won’t teach you how to manage the conflict of interest between your fabricators and your clients. You won’t get shown the practical, day to day administrative work needed in a small business. So, if you can get work experience, even if it is unrelated to design, that’s invaluable.

3DN: What are the biggest challenges you face?

Honestly, it’s the business side of things. Finding technical solutions is what I’m trained to do. Being inspired to create new designs using additive manufacturing is my passion. But being able to communicate to stakeholders and end customers about the value of AM, without using technical jargon, that’s really tough.

It’s also been quite challenging to identify which design solutions will be commercially viable. A design consultancy might take a brief and go looking for which manufacturing approach best suits the design solution, but when your starting point is the manufacturing approach, in this case AM, it can be hard to translate the technical benefits of AM into tangible value for customers.

It is necessary to balance customizability and practical use when you think of designing a part

Let’s take customization for example. AM facilitates mass customization, which opens up amazing opportunities, but which products should be customized? Do customers want everything in their home to be totally personalized? It’s about finding the right fit between what the technology offers and what people need, then communicating that in a way that’s accessible. A hard feat for most engineers, myself included, who love to talk about the more technical aspects of the solution.

3DN: What advice would you give to someone hoping to work as an Industrial Designer using additive manufacturing?

Firstly, you should learn surface modelling software, like Grasshopper, Blender, Maya, CATIA, etc. It’s invaluable in AM, but at university you often only get taught parametric CAD. There’s plenty of free or highly affordable courses online, so just start whenever you can.

Another consideration to remember is that AM has its limitations. Yes, there is an incredible geometric freedom, but in the practical world of making functional products that reliably work for people, it’s simply not true that you can ‘print anything you can imagine’. I can certainly imagine designs that are not possible or appropriate to be 3D printed, so any designer using this technology should speak with their technicians, speak with the engineers and speak with the bureaus, to learn what can and can’t be done. You may just find an even better solution to your problem.

Additive manufacturing is not just a different manufacturing technology, it’s a different manufacturing category. That requires a shift of mindset. The way you go about solving problems changes, your constraints are different, as are the workflows. For example, AM allows for much greater geometric freedom, like biophilic design. The way you’d go about modelling, iterating and developing a biophilic design would be radically unlike a more mechanical design solution, from the software you use to the specifications you set for the process and the design documentation you produce.

But this shift in mindset goes further than how you design and make things. AM allows for distributed production, localised manufacturing and small batch scales. Now, we’re talking about systems thinking, changing the relationship between designers and consumers and challenging linear supply chains. So my advice would be to keep your mind open to new ideas as to the potential for the technology and start thinking systemically.

Curiosity and awareness of the limits of AM are key in the work of an industrial designer using AM.

Here you can find out more about AKD. What do you think of the role of an industrial designer in additive manufacturing? Let us know in a comment below or on our LinkedIn, Facebook, and Twitter pages! Don’t forget to sign up for our free weekly newsletter here for the latest 3D printing news straight to your inbox! You can also find all our videos on our YouTube channel.

*All Photo Credits: Alex Kimber