A new design revolution comes with augmented collaboration
The process of designing new physical products is about to be revolutionized. A virtual reality initiative from iconic designer Bjarke Ingels illustrates it.
Star Designer Bjarke Ingels wants to change “the way we design, review and communicate projects”
People familiar with user research know it: an undeniable proofpoint of a problem worth solving is when the ones experiencing the pain try to build a solution themselves.
Recently, we discovered that Bjarke Ingels — Wall Street Journal Innovator of the Year, Golden Lion at the Venice biennale, and a Teacher at Harvard, Columbia — worked on an initiative named Hyperform to “change the way we design, review and communicate projects”.
Needless to say, this got our attention.
At Augmented Review, we work to change the way designers collaborate around new product designs. We’re in constant discussion with many product designers, 3D artists, architects, design engineers, so having Bjarke Ingels sharing the vision … is BIG.
BIG — actually the name of Ingels’ studio — states this about Hyperform: “we usually discuss a 3D setting on a 2D interface. You can never feel the space. Sometimes you can build 1:1 mock ups of certain elements of a building, or an interior space, but this lets you experience in places in 3D”. For now, it is a working prototype pretty far from being ready to use — and people familiar with the state of XR (AR/VR/MR) today would question it’s short-term feasibility — but beyond the hype, it definitely shows a way, and more importantly, it draws more attention to the need for streamlined collaboration in the design industry.
The pain of collaboration in the (design) workplace
48% of a workweek is wasted on bad collaboration
Consulting firm McKinsey highlighted that workplace communications technologies have the potential to increase employee productivity by up to 25 percent as “the average interaction worker spends an estimated 28 percent of the workweek managing email and nearly 20 percent looking for internal information or tracking down colleagues who can help with specific tasks” according to the study.
Interestingly in the Slack era, this problem is still very true for design studios designing physical products, and will not change unless a dedicated alternative is built for them.
The case of digital product design: problem solved!
The parallel with digital product design (the teams building your next app) is pretty compelling. The Figma, the InVision or the Miro of the world understood that UI/UX designers used screenshots, back-and-forth emailings, slides, or hand sketching to share their work and gather feedback from their teams or clients.
Now within one single platform, UX designers can share a design draft, and easily gather directions and feedback from any of their stakeholders. Anyone can use those tools, and anyone using them gets it right away. They’re clean, made for collaboration, and are fit-to-the-purpose of facilitating the interactions necessary to launch an app quickly.
Actually, screenshots, back-and-forth emails, slides & mockups are still the day-to-day reality for those teams and studios designing physical products i.e. your next coffee machine, IoT devices, apparel, or even buildings.
Physical product design is still lagging behind on streamlined collaboration
The collaboration around physical product design is still a pain. Why? Primarily because these designers work in 3D but there’s no way to collaborate in 3D.
2D is the one way to interact with 3D
Sounds weird doesn’t it? Design in 3D, interact in flat-2D.
But this is very true. In his Harvard Business Review article, A Managers Guide to Augmented Reality, Michael Porter points this out:
“Though engineers have been using computer-aided design (CAD) capabilities to create 3-D models for 30 years, they have been limited to interacting with those models through 2-D windows on their computer screens, which makes it harder for them to fully conceptualize designs.”
It also impacts the way designers share and collaborate around 3D designs. Ingels’ vision — see above — is to“allow for increased understanding and collaboration”, and when you deep-dive into the design workflow designers, architects, engineers all report the same pain points:
- Sharing the design intent with non-designers is a challenge — the decision-makers are often not designers, they may have a hard time conceptualizing a 3D design from a rendering on a flat screen or printed paper.
- Prototyping takes time and money — Some do 3D Printing which has been high on the hype curve for years but its efficiency recently started to be questioned (it’s insufficient to exchange on textures, materials, interior components; how about 3D printing at scale for products bigger than an appliance?). Some do physical prototypes and mockups, which are oftenly costly, produced overseas and shipped back with a long turnaround that handicaps the design process.
- Streamlining the design workflow is a key challenge— For two reasons: 1. Design studios usually have to handle many 3D modelling softwares — 3DS SolidWorks, PTC Creo, Onshape, Autodesk Fusion 360, etc.). How do you ensure a seamless workflow when these platforms don’t speak with each other? Quickly the product design process consists of double the necessary work, designers use Solidworks to rebuild what has already been designed in Creo, or vice-versa. 2. None of these platforms are made for design reviews: how do you easily test a new shape in real-time in a design review with customers or coworkers? Designers often tell us about creative ways to address this (one of the best we’ve heard so far is to project a design on to a whiteboard and draw around it with markers). This is neither durable nor scalable.
What the solution is not
The solution is bigger than incremental changes to existing platforms, fancy renderings or devices.
What it’s not: just another CAD viewer
We often hear that “designers can invite their stakeholders to view a design within their CAD systems in a dedicated viewer”. Yes, they can. But they don’t. For the one simple reason that their stakeholders — and decision-makers who are mostly not designers — do not want to deal with an awkward 3D software interface and an awkward floating environment that is so far from the reality they are used to.
eDrawings for instance is one of those viewer extension from SolidWorks — the world-leading Computer Aided Design (CAD) software.
Obviously, there’s no public statistics on the use of eDrawings, however if you ask SolidWorks users: the vast majority do not use it. Just check the ratings and reviews on GooglePlay or the iOS Appstore they are appalling, respectively 2.8 and 2.3 as of today (and don’t miss the comments too).
The inconsistency lies in the fact that these viewers are designed for designers but are supposed to be used by their stakeholders i.e. mostly non-designers. This does not work. The point is to allow feedback on a platform which is the lowest common denominator that anyone can access and use.
What it’s not: just another visualization tool
When you have a foot in the design industry, you always see super high-end renderings. In addition, Keyshot — the rendering leader — recently announced it’s VR extension. But make no mistake: in the product design workflow, renderings are only the tip of the iceberg and happen late in the process when most of the designs decisions have already been made.
Before that designers have to discuss ergonomy, feasibility, shape, scale, integration, manufacturability, etc. This does not happen with renderings, but with “dirty textures” or even blank faces sufficient for 90% of design work.
High-end visualization is a necessary functionality not the core focus of such platform.
What it’s not: just another XR hardware hype
XR devices will help but the next XR devices will not usher in the next design revolution.
For years now, we’ve heard that this year will be the year of “[XYZ]R” thanks to the next “smart[XYZ]”. However the evidence says otherwise. Collaboration is the best on devices that are shared by the vast majority of users. As of now, there are over the 2 billion AR enabled iPhones and Android.
This proposes a pragmatic solution.
What the solution is: an augmented design collaboration framework
It’s bigger than a feature, an extension, or a new device.
It is about leveraging 3D as the main input for discussion
Paint 3D… 3D content in Facebook…online purchase supported by 3D assets… 3D is everywhere.
The ongoing democratization of 3D is now a reality for any design vertical, from designing equipment, to buildings or apparel. You can sketch in 3D with a digital pencil (forget paper), and you can even design while immersed in 3D with VR tools such as Gravity Sketch. 3D is going to be the main content at the heart of collaboration and should be the main asset feeding new collaboration frameworks.
It is about creating new interaction routines
New routines are the drivers of a revolution. Slack revolutionized our day to day work transforming our routines. A new design revolution will happen the same way, setting up new routines with a collaborative platform.
Quoting David Pierce in his Wired article Step Into Your New Virtual Office: “Picture it: You get to the office, grab a keyboard off the shelf, and find an open space. You log in to your glasses, and your entire workspace appears in front of you. To your right is a shelf stocked with all the apps and bookmarks you use every day. You reach over and grab one, place it on the floor, and the full-scale CAD model of the car you were designing pops into place. Pinned to the wall are all your digital notes, arranged in exactly the way you left them last night. To your left hover six virtual screens displaying browser windows, stock tickers, and Twitter.”
It is about interactive real-time rapid prototyping
AR/VR/MR/XR, yes! But as enablers. At Augmented Review, we often say we use AR, we are not only an AR platform. The difference is important. Al Dean, Editor of Develop3D points out the benefits of XR in his piece on the future of immersive engineering:
“Rather than sitting in front your 27-inch monitor, you pop on your headset, fire up your CAD system and see the object in front of you, ready to go. If you need to discuss the model with a colleague, they do the same and you can look at and edit your model collaboratively, just as you would if working on a physical model — pointing out areas of concern, making edits individually and inspecting the results.”
Augmented Review’s checklist vs this vision
We built Augmented Review with this same vision in mind to accelerate the product design workflow by putting 3D at the heart of the discussion and using rapid prototyping technologies of today such as mobile-AR.
Today, Augmented Review is available to all designers and is often praised for being a “game changer and a must use”. Here’s a preview:
So where do we stand vs this augmented collaboration roadmap:
- On 3D: we support multiple 3D assets, including the future JPEG of 3D named GL Transmission Format (glTF and glb) which is at the core of the democratization of 3D assets. We want to support native 3D files to make it a seamless experience for Designers.
- On routines: we were inspired by Slack and WhatsApp and GoogleDocs to allow for project related threads, as well as live multi-user sessions right after Apple announced this capability in ARKit 2. Industrializing this is part of our roadmap.
- On rapid prototyping: we use mobile-augmented reality which is the one mainstream way of displaying virtual prototypes anywhere and anytime today. Our roadmap includes support for wearables when they (finally) get mainstream.
The revolution is on its way, and we’re currenty executing a vision which is shared with one of the greatest names of the design industry today.
Thanks Bjarke for confirming our vision!
