Product Aesthetic Form
Bill's philosophy of product aesthetic form design (the exterior form design and "styling" of a product) is based solely on simple geometric forms: the creative combination of primarily right cylinders and rectangular prisms plus additional features such as corner/edge radii and radial curves, etc. He is also a strong believer that engineers, and many others, can learn product form design competently. The traditional "owner" of this area of design has been the field of industrial design for decades ever since its emergence in the 1920s (after engineers "owned" it for decades previously).
However, as that discipline is shifting to more digital interaction design, Bill believes that a dedicated segment of engineers and others trained in a level of STEAM (Science, Technology, Engineering, Art, and Mathematics) can learn and execute good visual product form design quite well and need not always rely on industrial design for this (especially on "fancy" ID-style sketching). Regardless, individuals trained in these areas of STEAM will also be better able to successfully collaborate with industrial design on product design projects. In fact, anyone practiced and trained in Computer Aided Design (CAD) modeling has great potential to be a competent product form designer.
Bill’s paper about this subject of CAD-based product form design, presented at the INTERNATIONAL CONFERENCE ON ENGINEERING AND PRODUCT DESIGN EDUCATION 6 & 7 SEPTEMBER 2018, DYSON SCHOOL OF DESIGN ENGINEERING, IMPERIAL COLLEGE, LONDON, UNITED KINGDOM, can be accessed by clicking here: Bill's paper.
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