| Singapore Industrial Design Firm Uses Alias StudioTools to Create Simple, Elegant Form
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Wrap it, snap it and your head phone wire is easily adjusted to your personal length preference. Smart Wrap, a small piece of elastic polymer, comes in a variety of playful colors and is a simple alternative to tedious hand adjustment. Use it for MP3 players, mobile phones, office phone headsets, portable CD players – any small appliance that needs a tuck in its connecting cord.
“It’s small, easy to use and has no moving parts, but what looks simple is actually quite complicated to design,” explains Marcus Ting, industrial designer at Sumajin, which is based in Singapore. “Smart Wrap has very clean lines and to achieve that look I used Alias® StudioToolsÔ computer-aided industrial design software to create a free-flowing, organic structure with a lot of complicated, curving surfaces.”
The skill required to create Ting’s design was appreciated by the judges of the I.D. Magazine Annual Design Review, the premier international industrial design competition. They presented Ting with a Design Distinction award in 2002.
Surfacing Challenge
“The shape at the ends was the most critical and the biggest design issue,” says Ting. “I needed to increase the amount of silicone material at the ends so that the product properly grips the ends of the cord and holds it in.” That requirement caused Ting to approach the Smart Wrap design from a different perspective.
Usually a shape this complex would be comprised of several different surfaces which are matched up by blending the edges. For Ting, that process was not exact enough to create the flowing, elegant shape he wanted. Instead, he created one line and used the StudioTools revolve tool on the “y” axis. He scaled down or vertically compressed the profile in the middle to create the basic body shape.
The feel of this product is the most important factor so I needed to do a lot of testing with prototypes. I was able to experiment quickly by using the data directly from StudioTools,” says Ting. After testing several prototypes, the shape with the compressed middle turned out to be the strongest and most tactile in terms of how a person grasped or gripped the product.
Manufacturing Challenge
Most designers create plastic products that will be mass-produced by injection molding, but Ting felt this would compromise the simple design of Smart Wrap. “The injection method leaves marks on the body, from the injector pins pushing the piece out from the core,” explains Ting. “The pin marks would compromise the organic design on so small a part, so I used compression molding instead.”
The compression process, which works like a waffle iron, lends itself perfectly to the Smart Wrap design because the top and bottom of the product are identical in shape. What comes out at the end of the manufacturing process is a single piece of silicone rubber with no part lines. “That’s unique in the category of cable management products,” claims Ting.
Expanding the Market
Sumajin has also used StudioTools to help sell the Smart Wrap concept to distributors. “We use renderings to show potential buyers how the product looks from different angles and what colors it can be produced in. We can also resurface and render a product variation in just a few hours, showing a buyer how a different version of Smart Wrap can be used in a different market,” says Ting. For instance, Sumajin has recently looked at producing the cord adjuster in medium and large sizes for use on laptops, USB connectors, TVs and kitchen appliances.
“Smart Wrap has great potential,” says Ting. “For such a simple thing, it can do quite a lot and you don’t really need to learn how to use it. It meets the goal I use for every design project – get the maximum product appeal by pairing visual pleasure with utility.”
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