Brite Euram-Project
F I O R E S
BE 96 - 3579
 
Objectives
 
Introduction

Goal

Strategy

Benefits

Time Frame

Introduction

In a very competitive world wide market, styling is the key factor for the success of a product. In addition, the process of styling is becoming more complex, since new materials provide a greater freedom to the designer's creativity. As a consequence, the companies have to be successful in improving efficiency and quality of the styling process. While the use of computer-aided technologies in the area of mechanical product design is quite well established, the gap in the computer-aided process chain due to the styling phase is a severe problem: styling of complex-shaped products (like car hoods, consumer appliances, toys, packaging, etc.) is still a domain of hand drawing and model building. The main reason for this is that the system handling does not fit the way the stylist works. Moreover, there is a lack of objective formal criteria for evaluating aesthetic shape properties, which leads to drawbacks in the design process chain, such as:
 

Expensive manual work on scale one models before the final style decision.
Bad communication between aesthetic and engineering design.

The necessary translation of the styling model into the CAD format for further processing leads to discrepancies, loss of time and forbids concurrent engineering, making any feedback from downstream process phases very expensive.

This leads to the goal of the project...

 

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Please send your comments to Gerd Podehl e-mail: podehl@mv.uni-kl.de.

last update on February 5th, 1999 by Tobias Pfleger