Last year we launched one of our most ambitious projects to date, the Bot Initiated Longevity Lab (B.I.L.L.), a robot-augmented system to clean and repair sneakers. — The culmination of two years of close collaboration with Nike’s innovation team, B.I.L.L. was built as much to extend the life of pre-worn sneakers as to bring the topic of circularity closer to consumers in an exciting way. As B.I.L.L. continues its journey from Niketown London to Nike’s European Headquarters in Hilversum, we sat down with two of the PCH engineers behind its development, Florian Born (hardware extraordinaire) and Christian Kokott (software superpower) to talk about their unique processes, challenges, and the tech that made it happen.

Unlock operational efficiency and enhance employee well-being — Recent developments in artificial intelligence (AI) will unlock enormous gains in operational efficiency and work-life balance for manufacturers. To leverage this technology, lean managers should jump to isolate and automate the tasks that steal creative attention and add stress to their employees. This article will help you understand the benefits…

The third in our *Eye on AI* series breaks down how AI should be used to support and not replace designers. 1. Admit there’s a problem Designers need help. There is an increasing need to support designers at the early conceptual design stage of the engineering design process. Why do designers need help? Risk aversion — The majority of resources spent bringing a product to market are committed by decisions made in the first 10% of the design activity…

Design isn’t about tools, it’s about people. In the second installment of our *Eye on AI* series we look at the changing role of generative design over time and how our home-grown tool BLANK AI reimagines its future. What’s the point of CAD tools? The purpose of computer-aided design (CAD) tools is to give time back to product designers so they can focus on the creative tasks that have the most impact. Useful CAD tools dissolve the interface between humans and machines to enable frictionless expression of design…

As we come to see and increasingly feel the effects of the climate crisis, the circular economy has emerged as both a worthy challenge and a necessary response. What role can robotics play in advancing it? Ever since humans started creating, we also started creating waste. And as technology became more sophisticated, so our waste became more damaging. Accelerated by an insatiable consumption economy, society today has a problem to solve that requires a dramatic shift in methods, materials and mindset. …

PCH has always looked for new ways to harmonize technological capability with human imagination. In the first of our *Eye on AI* series we introduce BLANK AI, the AI-powered, 3D surfacing assistant we developed to do just that — and show its potential to rethink collaborative concept creation. The creation and refinement of evocative and brand-aligned product geometry is a coveted craft. As both the volume and velocity of inspiration and insight expand, the challenge of creating novel and relevant designs becomes more complicated as industrial designers must filter more and more information. Like any artist, the industrial…

How do you choose the most sustainable material? Well, the more you know, the more you realize how complex and variable the answer may be. We’ve compiled a few open-access databases and analytics tools that go some of the way to guiding those choices, and thought about how we’d like to see them evolve. — Scroll down for living list. Last updated 01.22 The linear economy is, simply put, a one-way ticket from ‘take’ to ‘waste’. We extract a material, we make something from it, we sell it, use it, discard it. The circular economy, by contrast, is a transformative round-trip. It captures value at…

To innovate is to create something new. To change something established. It’s been PCH’s business since 2006 but also an internal studio pledge that we uphold — sometimes by design, sometimes by necessity. …