Brite Euram-Project |
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BE 96 - 3579
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Objectives |
Introduction | 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:
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... |