A survey to evaluate how non designers perceive aesthetic properties of styling features

World-wide market competition and the need to create products that better satisfy the market expectations require a more comprehensive involvement of the customer in the product definition loop. Therefore, it is crucial to provide customers with very easy-to-use shape definition and modification tools, allowing them to verify and evaluate possible shape alternatives without requiring specific knowledge on geometric modeling. A set of aesthetic properties guiding the shape characterization and appraisal have been identified together with measures for their evaluation and shape modeling methods for their direct modification. Since these properties have been indicated by stylists, no guarantee exists that they are usable in a context directly involving customers in the product definition loop. To verify the extent to which the terms indicating the properties, their meaning and their measures are significant and understandable by non-expert designer people we carried out a survey. This paper describes the methodology adopted and the outcomes of this survey

Integration between Creativity and Engineering in Industrial Design

The objective of the paper is to illustrate which are the key issues today in the industrial design workflow, paying particular attention to the most creative part of the workflow, highlighting those nodes which still make hard the styling activities and giving a brief survey of the researches aimed at smoothing the transfer of the design intent along the whole design cycle and at providing tools even more adhering at the mentality of creative people. Based on the experience gained working in two different European projects, through the collaboration with industrial designers in the automotive and the household supplies fields, a general industrial design workflow will be depicted, highlighting the main differences between the automotive and non-automotive sectors; the problems still present in the design activity will be also illustrated. The paper includes short surveys, in relation to the aesthetic design, in matter of research activities aimed at - identifying the links between shape characteristics of a product and the transmitted emotions - better supporting, in a digital way, the 2D sketching phase and the automatic interpretation and transfer of the 2D sketches into a 3D surface model - improving the 3D Modeling phase

Automatic Extraction of Assembly Component Relationships for Assembly Model Retrieval

AbstractEven if during the Product Design Process, assembly models are described in terms of their constitutive components and associated relationships, only the position of each component is often stored within the Digital Mock-Up. Thus, the mating information are lost. However, these relationships are crucial for many applications, such as retrieval, assembly planning and finite element simulations. In this paper, we propose a method for the detection and use of the mating relationships for assembly model retrieval. The proposed approach detects and analyses the interferences between parts to compute their degree of freedom and kinematic pairs. To support the retrieval of assembly models, the extracted information are formalized and capitalized in a newly proposed hierarchical assembly model descriptor. Results of the application of the method are also provided to show the system capabilities. Moreover, considering that a same joint can be defined in multiple ways, this work provides also a method for retrieving assemblies in a dataset according to the part relationships and their class of equivalence

CAD assembly descriptors for knowledge capitalization and model retrieval

Today, there exists a huge amount of digital data easily downloadable from Internet and/or simply accessible from large databases. Despite this rise, the methods to retrieve and search for specific data have not been sufficiently studied and developed, notably when considering 3D contents. Thus, it is sometime more efficient to define new 3D shapes starting from scratch rather than to try to make use of existing ones hardly identifiable within those databases. This is particularly true when considering CAD assembly models often resulting from a long and time-consuming modeling phase within the Product Development Process. Thus, having new methods, models and tools to capitalize, retrieve and reuse CAD assembly models would help saving a lot of time. This paper addresses such a difficult problem of finding a method to characterize and structure CAD assemblies so as to be able to search for similar ones. A framework has been designed for the retrieval of globally and/or partially similar assembly mod- els according to different user-specified search criteria. It is based on an assembly descriptor, called the Enriched Assembly Model (EAM), which encodes all the required data automatically extracted from the geometry and structure of the CAD models. The data are organized in several layers thus enabling multi-level structuring and queries. It also allows fuzzy queries, which can be further refined

Microzooplankton composition in the winter sea ice of the Weddell Sea

Sympagic microzooplankton were studied during late winter in the northern Weddell Sea for diversity, abundance and carbon biomass. Ice cores were collected on an ice floe along three dive transects and seawater was taken from under the ice through the central dive hole from which all transects were connected. The areal and vertical microzooplankton distributions in the ice and water were compared. Abundance (max. 1300 ind. l-1) and biomass (max. 28.2 μg C l-1) were high in the ice cores and low in the water below the sea ice (max. 19 ind. l-1, 0.15 μg C l-1, respectively). The highest abundances were observed in the bottom 10 cm of the ice cores. The microzooplankton community within the sea ice comprised mainly aloricate ciliates, foraminifers and micrometazoans. In winter, microzooplankton represent an important fraction of the sympagic community in the Antarctic sea ice. They can potentially control microalgal production and contribute to particulate organic carbon concentrations when released into the water column during the ice melt in spring. Continued reduction of the sea ice may undermine the roles of microzooplankton, leading to a reduction or complete loss of diversity, abundance and biomass of these sympagic protists

Towards an automatic semantic annotation of car aesthetics

The design of a new car is guided by a set of directives indicating the target market and specific engineering and aesthetic constraints, which may include also the preservation of the company brand identity or the restyling of products already on the market. When creating a new product designers are used to evaluating other existing products to take inspiration or to possibly reuse successful solutions. In the perspective of an optimised styling workflow a great benefit could come from the opportunity of easily retrieving the related documentation and existing digital models both from internal and external repositories. In fact, the rapid growth of the web contents and the widely spread adoption of computerassisted design tools have made a huge amount of digital data available, whose exploitation could be improved by more selective retrieval methods. In particular, the retrieval of aesthetic elements may help designers to more efficiently create digital models conforming to specific styling properties. The aim of the research described in this document is the definition of a framework able to support a (semi-) automatic extraction of semantic data from 3D models and other multimedia data to allow car designers to reuse knowledge and design solutions within the styling department. The first objective is then capturing and structuring both the explicit and implicit elements that contribute to the car aesthetics and can be realistically tackled through computational models and methods. The second step is the definition of a system architecture able to transfer such semantics through an automatic annotation of car models

Coexistence Mechanism for Colocated HDR/LDR WPANs Air Interfaces

This paper addresses the issues of interference management among Low Data Rate (LDR) and High Data Rate (HDR) WPAN air interfaces that are located in close-proximity (up to 10 cm) and eventually on the same multimode device. After showing the noticeable performance degradation in terms of Bit Error Rate (BER) and goodput due to the out-of-band interference of an HDR air interface over an LDR air interface, the paper presents a novel coexistence mechanism, named Alternating Wireless Activity (AWA), which is shown to greatly improve the performance in terms of goodput of the most interference vulnerable air interface (i.e., the LDR air interface). The main difference of the proposed mechanism with respect to other collaborative mechanisms based on time-scheduling is that it synchronizes the transmission of the LDR and HDR WPANs at the superframe level instead of packet level. Advantages and limitations of this choice are presented in the paper. Furthermore the functionalities of the AWA mechanism are positioned in a common protocol layer over the Medium Access Control (MAC) sublayers of the HDR and LDR devices and it can be used with any standard whose MAC is based on a superframe structure