Hi, I'm Phnam.
Hi, I'm Mardis.
We're the hosts of Future Future, where two designers talk
about the future of everything.
We're in the business of turning science fiction into reality
for a better future.
And today, we're going to talk about how we can make hardware design
more agile.
Many people we work with have been working in hardware for a long time,
and as they say, "hardware is hard."
That expression actually didn't exist until the
digital world developed [and became] very prominent,
especially in Silicon Valley, where we're based.
So it's really a perspective of whether it's hard or not. To us, hardware
is not difficult, it's just a process.
Exactly. So let's define what "agile" and "waterfall"
mean first. Agile means that, for example, if I come up with a software product - let's
say an app. I make a prototype and I can send it to people to use right away. And if there
are certain things that are wrong, I just give them updates and the product becomes
better and better (hopefully). And the difference with hardware is that we don't use that, really.
We're more on a waterfall-style of development. So, we'll design and think ahead and do a
lot of developmental design through software and different processes, and then at the very
end we release manufacturing and create a final product. And once that final product
is done, you can't release a patch or release an update to make it better without going
through some costly changes.
And the reason why we are talking about this is because we
have a lot of experience with doing this. Not only have we put out a lot of products
- a lot of physical products on the market - but we have started integrating a lot of
agile methodologies, and our clients are listening and our clients are reaping the benefits of
it. So, what we would like to share with you today are methodologies that we're using at
our studio, Nonfiction, that can help turn hardware into something a little more agile.
Just a tiny bit.
When you work in hardware, you hear a lot about, "oh, molds are expensive."
And they are. Molds are typically the metal parts that create each of the parts
of a product. For example, if you have a mouse like this, each part here that you see is
actually created by a mold. And the mold has multiple divisions. Typically, the top part
and the bottom part for a very, very simple mold. You have to have a lot of molds to make
a lot of parts to make one product. And if there are mistakes in the fabrication of those
molds, you have to remake those molds, and that costs a lot of money and wasted time.
We're talking hundreds of thousands of dollars and each mold usually takes about three to
five weeks to create, depending on the complexity.
So there are different types of molds. What
we call hard molds are made out of steel. Very expensive, very durable. You can make
many, many parts out of them. A hundred thousand plus to a million parts out of a mold, depending
on how complex it is. And there are other types of molds called soft molds. Some of
them are made of metal as well, like aluminum, but they put out a smaller number of high
quality parts, let's say five thousand, ten thousand parts.
And often times, they're cheaper to manufacture and
make because they use different materials,
they use smaller quantities of materials.
And sometimes you have very, very soft molds...physically soft molds made out
of silicone. And that's what they use a lot in jewelry design. If you're making a ring,
for example, you can make a mold out of a very specific silicone, pour in your metal,
and then finish up your ring after it's been formed.
We would like to encourage as much
as possible to use a soft mold so you can actually make fewer quantities of products
and update your geometry and your products more often. If done well, it can save you
money and can reduce the amount of risk that the product has. But it really has to be done
by people who know what they're doing, unfortunately.
Absolutely. This falls under the category
of what we call rapid manufacturing. So we're making smaller tools for the manufacturing
of these products quicker and more cost effective so we can really churn out products. If we
need to make changes, we can go ahead and do it rapidly.
In terms of rapid prototyping,
one of the most successful methods right now is 3D printing. 3D printing - there are many
different types. There is additive manufacturing, where basically it's layer by layer, the materials
are being formed and your shapes start taking form. Sometimes you're in a bath of a certain
material that is being...
basically it's a photopolymer.
Exactly. It's a photopolymer
and then the material comes out in the shape you want. And you can 3D print soft materials,
you can 3D print hard materials, you can 3D print multiple materials at once, different
colors, different levels of transparency. It's pretty high tech right now.
What if you used computational design or generative design?
So, you want to define those?
Well, I think computational and generative...
generative is really interesting, because what it is
is it's you putting certain constraints and parameters and it allows the software to design
the structure in between two different parts based on forces, mechanics, and maybe one
of your constraints that you want to establish is, "I just don't want to use a lot of material
because it takes a lot of money to make something."
So, you will use the power of AI and the power
of computational design to help design a better, more efficient product that would take a human
thousands of tries to get it right, which for human speed would take forever, but for
a computer could take hours.
And also, these computational design and generative design
shapes are very interesting because they're optimized based on the function of a product,
whether it's lightweight, whether it's strong, whatever, it tends to look very organic. A
lot of them look like bones.
If you imagine what a human's bone looks like, it's a rod
with two balls where the joints connect. But then you look at a bird's bone (if you've
ever seen those), they're kind of hollow, right? They have a very porous network that
really allows the bones of a bird to be very lightweight yet very structurally sound.
In order to turn hardware into something more agile, let's talk about local manufacturing.
We've been used to working with overseas manufacturing in China
and anywhere else in Asia and all over the world.
That requires a lot of communication, a lot of travel, a lot of trusting that things
are going to be done on time, a long time shipping the products over.
So, we can make things a little more agile by
including local manufacturers who have certain skills, connecting
them with the right partners in order to create the product that you want to put out there.
There's a couple of other really cool hidden benefits. One, less taxes, customs, tariffs,
things like that - we know that's changed a lot lately - and we feel a little bit better
about our environment because we're no longer shipping things across oceans, which takes
tons of gas and leaves emissions and carbon dioxides in the air. We're doing it locally,
we're sourcing potentially more local materials, and we're really employing our local community
to create these.
And then lastly, the point we want to cover is virtual testing. So, you could
3D print things, products, one after another, test them on humans, and that's great.
But before you do all that, you can save a lot of time and money by making the experience
virtual. You can put on virtual reality headsets or AR headsets and actually experience how
it feels to be around this product you just designed, and then make smart decisions from
there. That can be very interesting.
And you can actually come up with some very very cool innovations.
We've done this a number of times. What happens is we'll put several stakeholders
in the same virtual "room," a designer, an engineer, a CEO of a company, someone who
has to buy off of the design, in a virtual environment, and they're to scale.
So they're actually holding the product as it is.
It's not looking through a screen and looking at what
it might look like in reality. They're actually there. And there's a lot of really interesting
artifacts in the virtual environment, like you can have haptics.
If you don't know what haptics are,
they're where there is feedback through the controllers.
So when you pick up an object,
it really feels like it has weight. It feels like you're interacting with it.
And it's a really truly beautiful experience that we're just starting to take advantage
of, and we've been doing it for a little while now here at Nonfiction.
So, here we're going to talk about actionable items,
whether you're a designer or you're a company trying to put
out some really cool products, or you're just someone's who's curious about how hardware
works, or if you work in the digital world and you don't know whatever we're talking
about every time we talk about hardware.
We would like for you to start overlapping these two worlds.
The digital world is one thing, the hardware world is one thing.
The only way to make the hardware world more agile
is to use digital tools in a hardware experience
we've had in the past decade, and merge them together to make them more efficient,
make them communicational tools between different stakeholders,
and really push great ideas forward.
Let's stop making the same old products that look the same year after year.
Let's actually use these tools we just talked about to take industrial design, hardware design,
to the next revolution.
So here we just touched the surface of what it means to make hardware more agile.
We want to hear from you. We want to hear about the ideas, all the technologies
you would like to integrate into the methodology of turning ideas into hardware
into products that people love.
We want you to do that in the comments.
We can start new episodes about
your ideas and how we use them in the future.
If you are a company that is trying to make
the process more agile, talk to us. We'd love to start a conversation.
So, until next time, thank you very much.
It's been a pleasure.
Thank you, bye!
Bye.