The big issues

Today the world is neither physical or digital. It’s both.

That’s especially true when designing new products. Designers need to bring together a myriad of digital and physical prototypes, models, and tools to develop and test their ideas, with each tool bringing its own costs, strengths and obstacles.

For example, while tangible and ‘real’, physical prototypes are slow and expensive to make. Digital prototypes on the other hand are incredibly flexible and intelligent, but can be hard to make and inaccessible to the untrained.

Navigating the web these tools create is an ever-growing challenge that costs companies time and money.

Alongside this physical and digital co-dependence, products themselves are getting more complex, cyber-physical and integrated, making them ever more difficult and costly to make.

Beyond technical challenge for the designer, this also impacts the users. Although there’s a growing market demand for user-voice and customised, bespoke products, to engage with design they must be able to rise to the complexity of products and the tools used to create them. Too often, this is a truly major task.

These challenges set the scene for this project: How can we create the next generation of prototyping tools and technologies that streamline the process, engage users, and allow the creation of ever more technically advanced products quickly, by anyone, and at a lower cost?

Our response

In this project, we’re investigating how we can use Immersive Technologies (XR) to bring the physical and digital domains together in design. We believe that these technologies hold huge potential to streamline design processes, offload complexity to computation, and simultaneously increase accessibility to anyone regardless of their background.

XR technologies combine the physical and digital to change how we perceive and interact with the world around us, creating physical interactions with the digital world and augmenting digital information straight into our physical hands.

Using a combination of mixed reality, haptics, physical tracking and more, this project will explore and develop a toolbox of cross-domain prototyping technologies that simultaneously leverage the benefits of both physical and digital working.

For example, we could let designers physically hold and manipulate digital designs, which they then rapidly reconfigure into new options without waiting for manufacture.

Or augment physical objects with a virtual aesthetics, running user studies and gathering opinions without the time or cost of making every prototype.

Or even overlay physical prototypes with performance data during their creation, allowing users to instantly understand the impact of their design decisions.

Despite their huge potential and although proven in technical capability, the use and value of XR for design has yet to be explored. Can they achieve their promise to designers and if so, how?

The benefits

By redefining the prototyping toolchain to simultaneously strut both the physical and digital, this project envisions a world where the tools work for the designer, rather than a create web for them to navigate.

We want to change design to a process that anyone can take part in, that uses technology to increase understanding, give us new information, and give us new ways to interact with and perceive the products that we are creating.

Through a range of studies strutting across engineering sectors, tool vendors, product designers and end users, we will develop and trial new ways of working across the domains that take advantage of the strengths of each while cutting back the weaknesses.

In doing so this project will set the tone for how products are designed in the future. We will start to shift design from an activity strutting hundreds of prototypes with huge complexity and cost, into a physical-digital process that streamlines prototyping, cuts back on cost and time, and let everyone input their voice.

How is BDFI involved?

We are providing practical support for this project that is in line with our mission.