Additive Manufacturing (AM), also known as 3D Printing, is a family of manufacturing technologies that build physical artefacts by adding material layer by layer. Unlike manufacturing processes such as folding, milling, moulding or casting AM can make shapes that would be impossible or at least very difficult with traditional methods. AM capabilities are transformative for product design in many ways, but especially because they remove the traditional barriers of upfront investment in tooling that mark the end of the design process and the start of production. This can allow professional designers to change their designs continually without a clear end to the design process nor a final design. As in craftmanship or software development, each iteration of the product can become a new improved version of the previous. So, the sequential structure of product versions can disappear and be replaced by a continuous design flow of potentially unique or personalised products with new, improved or simply different functions or aesthetics. This can bring great opportunities but also many questions and challenges. For instance, how would the quality or regulatory compliance of a product be assured? How much time or effort should be invested in the design of each iteration? How would brand identity be maintained? How would the design process be managed? Would product designers have more or less work? What new knowledge and skills would be required? Our ambition in this project is to answer these questions by uncovering cutting-edge design practices in AM and studying empirically how product design practice is evolving; thus, defining the implications of AM for the future of the discipline. This project aims to provide a robust conceptual framework for understanding the impact of AM in product design practice; building a systematic methodology for studying the evolution of design practice; and presenting a new perspective through a comparative analysis of design practices across different domains and sectors. The data collected in this project will be transformed into a virtual exhibition that will inform both professional designers and academic research over the long term on the evolution of product design practice.

Additive manufacture, also known as 3D printing, offers many benefits to industry and medicine such as reductions in weight, material costs and medical implants personalised to the patient. Currently additive manufacture has a relatively low uptake due to a series of technical barriers that are preventing its progression into end-use parts. One of these barriers is design. Design for additive manufacture (DfAM) requires the engineer to think in a different way, one that is the completely opposite to design for traditional manufacturing methods such as milling. Similarly, the majority of software on the market is computer aided design (CAD) which has been developed to support the design of parts using traditional manufacturing methods. This research approaches this challenge, from a radically different perspective. Growth in animals and plants involves the expansion and multiplication of cells, to incrementally increase the volume of the form. In this way additive manufacture, which bonds material point by point, is analogous to growth. Two novel design techniques will be developed in this project. They are drawn from concepts seen in the development of the fetus and the plant root, and integrated into a software called GrowCAD. The development of GrowCAD will create a software interface which is more intuitive to DfAM. The platform will also incorporate Temporal Design, which will increase creativity in the design of additively manufactured materials. The design approaches will be confirmed against the AM and testing of biomaterials for cardiovascular implants and three industrial applications proposed by the project partners. This project offers a solution to the challenges that face DfAM, across industrial and medical applications. This research offers benefits to the UK economy by increasing the uptake of additive manufacture, and the inherent upskilling of design engineers through use of the software. In addition, there will be benefits to society through increased creativity in the design of cardiovascular implants, and thus enhanced levels of personalisation in healthcare.

To design the future of products we need the future of prototyping tools. Across the £30Bn+ consumer product markets, priorities such as demand for non-technical user voice vie against advanced products and tough time/cost targets. These pressures are acutely felt in the prototyping process, where models often number in the 100s for a single product, and are inflexible, technically advanced, and resource-intensive to create. To succeed and evolve prototyping needs to do more, quicker, cheaper, with higher accessibility. This project aims to enhance learning, accessibility, and efficiency during prototyping. It will explore feasibility and value of seamlessly integrating physical and digital prototyping into a single workflow. Recent and rapidly emerging technologies such as mixed reality, haptic interfaces, and gesture control have revolutionised the way we interact with the digital world. It's predicted that this tech will be ubiquitous by 2025, will be disruptive for the next decade, and will drive the way we work and interact across the future digital workplace, with engineering a top-5 sector to realise value. In prototyping, they will break down the physical-digital divide and create seamless experiences, where the strengths of each domain are realised simultaneously. This new physical-digital integrated workflow brings profound opportunities for both engineers and users, supporting technical activities and simplifying communication. Amongst many possibilities users may physically create and feel digital changes to prototypes in real-time, dynamically overlay advanced analyses onto physical models, and support early-stage decision-making with physical-digital, tactile, interactive prototypes. These capabilities will allow more learning per prototype, widen accessibility to technical design and streamline the prototyping process. However, we don't yet know how this exciting vision may be fulfilled, exactly what benefits, value or costs there may be, feasibility of implementation, or effective workflow approaches. The project will explore physical-digital workflow by creating and investigating several demonstrator platforms that combine and apply haptic, mixed reality, and gesture control technologies in targeted prototyping scenarios. Technologies will be explored to understand capability in isolated sprints, before prioritisation and development into focused demonstrator tools that allow us to explore integrated workflow across real prototyping cases, spanning activities, types, and stakeholders. Demonstrators will be evaluated and verified with end-users, industry partners, and the public to establish learning, speed, cost, and usage characteristics. Project outcomes will comprise workflows for integrated prototyping with knowledge of value, effectiveness, feasibility, and future opportunities. A 'toolkit' of implementations will also provide exemplars for industrial partners and academia and lead the effective use of integrated physical-digital workflow in engineering. All software and hardware will be open-sourced via Github and the project webpage, letting global researchers and the public create their own systems and build upon the work. Future work will extend capabilities in line with outcomes of the work, leading to the next generation of engineering design and prototyping tools. Industrial Partners The Product Partnership (Amalgam, Realise Design, and Cubik) and AMRC will bring prototyping, engineers, and end-user expertise and benefit from the workflows and technologies that are developed. OEMs Ultraleap and Autodesk will bring immersive technology expertise and access to cutting edge design systems, and will benefit from case study implementations and studies and future application opportunities. Bristol Digital Futures Institute will facilitate collaboration across 20+ partner businesses and the public, with outputs supporting their mission for digital solutions that tackle global problems.

The Government's Industrial Strategy highlights the need for the construction industry to embrace digitally-driven, automated manufacturing if it is going to deliver the planned infrastructure development, building and renovation of the built environment. The group funded through this award understands this need and envisages an industry that routinely deploys digitally-driven, off-site-manufacturing technologies to deliver customised and unique precision components to enable the rapid, just-in-time assembly of the built environment. Seamless digital workflow and accurate process simulation will reduce the time from design to product from weeks to hours, delivering buildings faster. It will facilitate the optimisation of components, removing unwanted material (reduced resource use and embedded CO2), designing out interfaces and reducing assembly time and complexity, both during installation and at end of life. 3D Concrete Printing (3DCP) is a digitally-driven, off-site manufacturing technology that is establishing itself worldwide as a viable manufacturing process, but its potential beyond aesthetic objects is fundamentally limited by the manufacturing tolerances achievable. The work undertaken by this group will develop the next generation, Hybrid Concrete Printing (or HCP), technology that uses 3DCP to create a near-net-shape (an object slightly larger than the desired object) and then uses subtractive process (cutting, milling and drilling) to remove a small amount of material to create the net-shape - the desired object to sub-millimetre precision. HCP technology will enable the intelligent integration of building performance and energy production and storage technologies, freed from traditional constraints on form and finish. This will unlock the potential for accurate interfaces and assemblies and, hence, open the gateway for a revolution in design and manufacture of buildings and the wider built environment. The team will develop research that answers three central goals of the Industrial Strategy Challenge Fund's Transforming Construction initiative: - Designing and managing buildings: We will develop and promote new design tools and design capabilities for UK design practise that will create globally marketable expertise; - Constructing quality buildings: HCP, a digitally-driven off-site manufacturing technology, will realise greater precision in manufacture than is currently possible, enabling repeatable, high quality components to be manufactured with a much shorter lead-time; and, - Powering buildings: The technology gives the designer close control of surface finish and component geometry, enabling them to add value through function and to design in order to integrate other active components as part of automated assembly.

The development and modernisation of UK infrastructure requires the ubiquitous use of concrete, but conventional casting methods are inefficient, inflexible and dangerous. The UK Industrial Strategy White Paper identifies that the UK has insufficient skilled labour to undertake the next 10 to 20 years of essential infrastructure development, to deliver the £600Bn National Infrastructure and Construction Pipeline. Hence, the development of world-leadership in automation of key parts of the construction supply chain is critical. 3DCP removes the need for conventional moulds or formwork, by precisely placing and solidifying specific volumes of cementitious material in sequential layers under a computer controlled positioning process. This represents a radical 'mould-breaking' change, that challenges the implicit mind-sets of architects and engineers, where for millennia casting has required moulds, which in turn constrain the form, geometry and variety of building components and systems. 3DCP technology implicitly binds design and manufacture in contrast to current practice where designers and constructors are separated organisationally, institutionally and professionally. 3DCP is creating worldwide interest from the construction sector and lends itself to using readily available robotic arms as positioning tools for clever material deposition devices, which enable the manufacture of components to be digitally driven. However the required pull into commercialisation requires architects and engineers to engage their clients with designs suitable for the manufacturing process. However the underlying science as it relates to concrete composite materials simply does not exist. This project will be the first in the world to systematically investigate the interrelationships between rheology, process control, design geometry and reinforcement design in relation to there impact on the hardened properties of the final material. The project goes further and makes the first steps towards encoding the rules learnt into a software environment that will seed the development of new design software in the future.