design.nexus

design.industry

Goal

Within design.nexus, we want to use product development to find solutions to various challenges that manufacturing companies are facing.

These challenges are:

  • Increasing complexity
  • Increased product variety, personalization, mass customisation
  • Impact of the digital revolution on design, manufacturing, services (IoT, Industry 5.0, smart products, social media)
  • Evolution towards industrial, human-centered cyber-, biophysical systems
  • Connected product-service or consumer-production systems
  • Understanding the transformation processes involved (workers, investment, education and training, knowledge).

Focus

Product design for new digital production techniques

We are constantly exploring new digital production techniques (e.g. 3D printing) and researching the opportunities of these techniques for product design. We also research the opposite, i.e. which products could be suitable for certain digital techniques.

Data-based and algorithm-driven parametric product design

Data (from users, for example) can be used via algorithms to control designs parametrically. In this way, unique designs can be generated on the basis of the acquired data. Designs that can also be produced using the new digital production techniques. 

Digital design tools

Many new design tools also offer new opportunities to designers in the industry. We explore new digital design tools (such as virtual reality) and look at how we can use these tools in the design process.

Productdesign for easy and intuitive manual assembly

Many products consist of different components that are assembled. Very often people are used for this assembly. As product designers, we are exploring how we can design our products to make assembly easier and more intuitive. But also how they can be disassembled more easily, with a view to repair, modularity and sustainability.

Labs

Computational Design & Fabrication Lab

In our Computational Design & Fabrication Lab, we explore and combine the latest digital design techniques with digital fabrication techniques. We investigate how to best design products for new digital production techniques (optimising the design for these new techniques). But we also explore these digital techniques in order to identify opportunities for new designs.

Beeld computational design

Lab Digital Design Tools

In our Digital Design Tools lab, we investigate how to use existing digital tools such as Virtual Reality as efficiently as possible in the design process. 

Virtual Reality

Product design lab for new industrial production (Industry 5.0)

In our design lab for new industrial production, we are researching how we can design products and product systems so that they can be easily and efficiently produced in the manufacturing companies of today and tomorrow. We also look very closely at the possible interactions with the designed product within this context, and from product development we build the bridge to production.

industrie-beeld

Medical Product Design Lab

In our Medical Product Design lab, in addition to the issues that are relevant to a product from a medical point of view (technical), we also investigate and interact with the various stakeholders (patients, doctors, nurses, etc.). Our design methodology and iterative approach aims to design the most optimal medical product system for these different stakeholders. 

Breastboard, an example of medical productdesign

Research projects & PhD research

VLAIO - TETRA: Designs for easy and intuitive manual assembly

In this project, we are going to refine our "design for assembly meaning (DFAM)" methodology in cooperation with various companies and adapt it to various business contexts. The methodology is aimed at making assemblies easier but also more intuitive for operators. The interaction of the operator with the product to be assembled is central to this. Easy disassembly with a view to sustainability and maintenance of the products is also addressed.

Bio-inspired braces: how seahorses may solve rehabilitation consequences of traditional braces

The use of braces after orthopedic trauma often implies a strategy of total immobilization of the affected joint, with negative side effects afterwards. In this study, we will look for natural solutions that allow both rigidity and mobility and thus avoid the negative effects of total immobility. 

Development of a novel total elbow arthroplasty design based on new insight into the anatomy and biomechanics of the elbow

The aim of this project is to better understand the elbow's anatomy and biomechanics and to develop an innovative modifiable implant based on these novel insights.

PhD research

Publications