This week is all about the iPad, Apple’s new device. I’ve only had a brief fiddle with one in the Apple Store here in Portland, where I’m visiting Autodesk to find out about the latest and greatest from Alias, Inventor, Moldflow and of course, have a look at SketchBook Pro, the company’s new offering for the iPad.

When Apple release a new product, there’s the usual complete and utter onslaught on coverage across the gamut of media - print, web, tv. The world, to be frank, goes ape-shit. When this company releases a new product, opinions are often formed long before the product ships and its often divisive. One of the more interesting things that happens is that an organisation called iFixit gets the hot product and strips it down to its component parts - something that is essential considering they make their cash from selling you components to fix these types of product. Being of a curious nature I took a look at the iPad stripdown - find it here - a fascinating look into the internals of a very neatly packaged product - the build quality is astounding, the display crystal clear and the interactivity is exceptional.

One thing leapt out at me when looking at the stage by stage breakdown was the aluminium rear cover. On the outside, it’s that classic Apple thing. Incredibly ‘simple’ looking forms that require a very high quality surface model to represent - and something I would imagine is fought over strongly during development to get it just right in terms of aesthetics as well as tactile response. But it wasn’t that which intrigued me. It was this shot of the inside:

Image courtesy of iFixit.com

The internals of the rear cover are machined from a single billet of aluminium. While I’d imagine huge care is taken to get the exterior just right, the internals are clearly machined in a very short space of time. You can see the z-levels of the tool-paths used to create the part and it looks like it’s machined with speed in mind.But then you also notice that the plastic components have been designed to interface with that form also - as you’ll from the shot of the speaker assembly below:

Now that’s impressive. What they appear to have done is removed time from the machining process, by removing traditional fixtures for these types of components and offset that against a slightly more complex tool for the plastic components. When you’re shifting serious units, the slight increase in cost of more complex tooling for these types of components is going to pale into insignificance compared to the potential savings when machining major components from aluminium in a dramatically shorter amount of time, of removing the need for additional fasteners being replaced with adhesives and well matched component forms and of course, a reduction in assembly steps.

Many people talk about Apple in hallowed terms, as the pinnacle of design-thinking, of innovation - there’s a trillion books on the subject and a factor of 10 more online articles. But often they concentrate on the aesthetic form of the product; namely, the exterior and there does seem to be something of a backlash against such posturing. But when you see this type of attention to detail, I’m led to believe that the real innovation and clear thinking is often found on the inside - to me, that’s design-doing and getting a job done and reducing complexity - and with that, there’s an inherent beauty that 99% of customers will never see.

I had the pleasure to have a meet-up with the guys at Protolabs (or Protomold or First Cut) over in Telford today. Not too long of a drive, a friendly and knowledgable team and they have a rocking service if youre looking for machined prototypes or injection moulded components.

On the way back, I drove through Ironbridge, a small village in Shropshire that, for those of us involved in design and manufacturing, holds a pretty big key to how we got here and it got me thinking. Consider this, next time you’re up against a challenge, a client has asked for what seems impossible or higher improbably.

Early in the 16th century, a gentleman turned up in a smaller villiage down the valley called Coalbrookdale. A gentleman by the name of Abraham Darby I and took over an existing iron forge. Forging iron was an inaccurate, non-repeatable process and the quality of the product produced was not what you or I would expect. And somewhat dangerous - the forge Darby took over blew up a few years before he arrival). What Darby did was look at the process (which previously used charcoal), use da different material for smelting (coke), developed the Blast Furnace and refined the method until it reached pretty much what we have today. You would think that kick starting the Industrial Revolution would be enough for his family.

About 80 years later, his grandson, Abraham Darby III, undertook the job of building a bridge across the valley in which his family’s business worked, a bridge designed by a local architect (who would never see it completed). What was unique about this bridge was that it took his grandfather’s new process (now three generations old) to new scales and new heights. Building a cast iron bridge, simply hadn’t been done before, so everything, from casting moulds, to joints (many mimic joints typically found in carpentry as these were well established) had to be developed from scratch. Few of us will be lucky to work on projects that will still be active, working and so impressively current in 200 years time.

So next time you’re looking at your workload, looking at a new challenge that comes in and it seems tough; think back. Think back to a time when innovation actually mean true, honest-to-god, innovation. When you had to make things up from scratch to move forward, when advances were discussed in generations and history was made.

If you’re ever in the area, visit ironbridge or the various museums (Blists Hill, and the Museum of Iron) around there. For anyone with an engineering interest, its the hot bed of so much that it can’t fail to be fascinating.

PS: Interesting thing: SolidWorks have a fantastic PR lady by the name of Darby Johnson - yup, she’s related. Synchronicity - its a wonderful thing.

As more and more of us work from home, from Starbucks, the greasy spoon around the corner from the office (to get some peace) or from economy class lounge (biz class is for the over paid, under worked), then we all will resonate with the simple fact that squeezing your laptop into the present space is a royalpaininthearse. I doubt we’ll see them at D3D’s service stations* of choice soon, but its clever thinking (note, I’m not using the I word).

According to designer Robin Carpenter JUST is made of an inner metal frame construction defining the form which is upholstered for comfort. The chair is covered with a washable textile and the stand allows 360 horizontal rotation. His IRO lamp is pretty slick too.

*Oxford M40 and M6 Toll - covered outdoors areas, good coffee and a 3G signal

I don’t really want this to turn into a book review blog, but there have been some amazing publications in the last few years. One of my personal favourites is Designing Interaction by IDEO founder, Bill Moggridge. For anyone involved in design, in product development, its chock full of interview and studies of how designers are adapting to accomodate how users interact with their products, be that by software, hardware - whatever. One of my favourite chapters is an interview with Kenji Hatori, a software engineer at Canon who developed PhotoStitch. It describes the stitch assist mode for cameras and Rikako recounts the process used to design the screen behaviors for the PhotoStitch software, with a clear structure indicated by tabs and actions clarified by animations. The book is supplied with a DVD that’s worth sitting a watching (and yup, boring your families with) - a great deal can be learned. You can see a video of the interview here.

If we’re to develop truly stunning products, whatever field they are active in, then the whole user experience needs to be address - and its something that CAD vendors should take note of - more so now than every before. The technology we use to develop products seems to be getting easier to handle, but without some form of forethought, some sort of rationalisation, its all for nothing. and again, the question of whether the Microsoft Ribbon UI is the way forward spring to mind. We develop in 3D - should our tools follow the same UI characteristics as Word, Excel and Outlook. Familiarity is the reason that vendors have jumped all over it. the argument being that if you can drive Word or Outlook, you can drive SolidWorks, SpaceClaim, Inventor et al. I’m not convinced.http://www.designinginteractions.com/

Desktop Engineering is a magazine I’ve written a lot for over the past few years and its odd that I never actually get to read the paper version. But anyway, I like Mike Hudspeth’s comment peice this month, on the relationship between Industrial Design and 3D design tools. Just because you have the tools, doesn’t mean you’re any good at it - something i couldn’t agree with more.

“First, and perhaps most important of the myths, is that anyone can do industrial design. After all, it’s just about styling, right? Wrong. Not everyone can design.”

“Industrial design is a whole lot more than meets the eye. It takes into account how things work and what the target audience needs — with an eye turned to their expectations. Customer psychology plays a huge part. Industrial design also has to do with responsibility — to one’s customers as well as to the environment. Safety issues are very important. And form doesn’t always follow function. Sometimes a product cries out for an artistic re-imagining to reinvigorate it and save it from sheer market boredom.”

Its not a case of trying to protect a career, or trying to protect a field of specialism, but one of training, of research, and shear bloody talent. Just because you have a set of paints, you’re not a good painter. And the same goes, just because you have a 3d design tool that includes surface modelling, G3 curvature continuity, does mean you’re an industrial designer.

Nice one Mike.