IEN: What are the major concerns facing the design/OEM sector in the next few years?

Ping Fu: The biggest concern is how to differentiate your products in a saturated market where everything is becoming a commodity. Customers have an increasing desire for products that match their taste, style, and physical shape. The ability to differentiate will make or break design-oriented businesses. Making these individualized products available to the masses requires transitioning to new processes and technologies. Product manufacturers need to be prepared to ramp up their design, manufacturing, and marketing processes to accommodate this kind of mass customization.

IEN: How is the design process being incorporated throughout the industrial enterprise?

Ping Fu: The design process has always been important to the industrial enterprise. The problem has been a lack of tools that allow intuitive conceptual design. If one painstakingly designs something new in software, the design intent often is lost in engineering and manufacturing. Fortunately, there are now new tools to make the design process easily accessible throughout the industrial enterprise.

Verification of dimensional accuracy is usually the last step of the tooling or manufacturing process. New technology for rapid inspection using a 3D camera opens the opportunity to introduce manufacturing constraints early in the design process, ensuring that integrity is maintained throughout the entire design and manufacturing cycle. Automated quality assurance -- comparing scanned point clouds from an actual object to the CAD model -- is the key to making sure the product is built as designed.

(The spray gun and manifold images shown here depict photorealistic 3D models captured from physical objects and automatically processed by Geomagic Studio software for CAD, direct manufacturing, and marketing applications.)

IEN: What innovations are in store for users?

Ping Fu: The principal area of innovation is something that is not readily visible, but is the number one concern of all designers: ease of use. The consumer no longer has to search for piecemeal solutions for rapid design and manufacturing, then have the expertise to make them work together. The transition from data capture to digital model to final production is easier and faster than it has ever been. The leaders in this movement are companies such as Minolta with its scanners, Raindrop Geomagic with its 3D photography software solutions, PTC with its solid modeling software, and 3D Systems with its direct manufacturing systems and new materials.

IEN: How are software, equipment, and materials being integrated in today's design world?

Ping Fu: Standards are playing a key role in allowing all parts of design, engineering, and manufacturing to flow together. There are also strategic relationships among key vendors that enable different products to work together without much user intervention. At Raindrop Geomagic, for example, we have forged vendor relationships that help ensure a smooth and accurate transition from 3D data capture, to automatic processing, to final production, whether it's a real or virtual product.

IEN: What is design's role in the lean/flexible enterprise?

Ping Fu: Ideally, it is the driving factor for product differentiation and rapid manufacturing. The tools now exist to enable companies to produce personalized products in massive quantities. It all comes back to ease of use. Only one percent of goods manufactured today have usable 3D CAD data. In the minds of many, CAD stands for Computer-Aided Difficulties. At Raindrop Geomagic, we are helping companies move to 3D photography, the process of easily capturing the real object and quickly transporting a design between physical and digital worlds. This enables rapid manufacturing and mass customization that differentiates a company's products from the rest of the pack.

(The joystick shown here shows boolean operations within Geomagic Studio 4.)

IEN: Is rapid prototyping continuing to extend into actual production? To what extent? What technical changes are easing this transition?

Ping Fu: Yes, rapid prototyping is turning into rapid manufacturing. A key example of this is Align Technology, which last August shipped its one-millionth custom-made orthodontic device. In less than two years, Align successfully met the initial challenges of mass customization: fully leveraging the power of 3D photography and economically scaling up key areas of production for rapid manufacturing of one-of-a-kind products in mass quantities. We are seeing similar success stories in areas such as hearing aids, toys, crafts, and automotive and aerospace parts.