Democratisation of Design

Democratisation of Design

Project Lead: Mark Goudswaard

Current means of manufacturing are bad for people and planet.  Additive manufacturing technologies can enable low cost distributed manufacturing without loss of capability but only if people are able to design functional parts for themselves.

Democratising design is about drastically reducing the skill level required to design objects and aims to achieve this through a hybrid physical-digital design methodology that would enable to generation of functional parts by novice users.

This project is investigating how a knowledge base of manufacturing parameters can be used to better understand and predict the mechanical properties of parts manufactured via additive manufacture.  This can then be combined with classical analysis techniques to create a generative design tool that can create functional designs that are validated by physical testing

Recent Posts

  • ICED 2019, Delft - Five of the team (Chris, David, Harry, Lee and Mark) attended ICED2019 at TU Delft, Delft, Netherlands. 3 papers were presented, along with a marketplace demonstration, that were all well received. The theme of the conference was "Responsible design for our future", with several keynotes highlighting how researchers and wider… Read More
  • DMF Lab visiting research partners in Colombia - In December I visited current and potential research partners in Colombia.  The main purpose of the visit was to explore research overlap between the DMF lab and La Universidad de los Andes in Bogota in areas related to the democratisation of design (the theme of my doctoral research) and also… Read More
  • CIRPe Conference 2018 - Mark will be presenting an overview of the design methodology being implemented as part of his doctoral research at the 2018 CIRPe conference in the coming weeks.  Below is a teaser video for what he will cover in his full talk which will follow soon! Read More
  • DMF Lab at the Transdisciplinary Engineering Conference in Modena - Earlier this month Prof Aydin Nassehi and Mark Goudswaard travelled to Modena in Italy for the 25th International Conference on Transdisciplinary Engineering. Prof Nassehi, in conjunction with Prof Linda Newnes from Bath, ran a workshop exploring how Transdisciplinary Engineering will influence the future roles and requirements of design engineers.  Mark… Read More
  • Democratising Design for Additive Manufacture - 3D printing has the potential to revolutionise the way we consume goods. The technology should be able to facilitate low-cost, personal manufacture but complex design software and a lack technical knowledge prevent this from happening. Without the ability to generate or amend digital models it is impossible to reap the… Read More