Digital Fucina’s Corner [Ep.5] – ONEOFF… At A Time!

>> We've opened up a space for Digital Fucina's founder, Fabrizio de Paolis, a professional 3D modeler and Grasshopper specialist. In the following months he'll be posting several ideas on what Mass Customization means to him and his project Digital Fucina.<<

Hello everyone and welcome back!

For this article I decided to tackle a slightly different topic than on previous opportunities, let's say a more concrete one. I want to talk about ONEOFF, an Italian company located in Milan.

They are a Digital Manufacturing service that uses modern CAD CAM systems in order to build models and prototypes alongside skilled young artists who make high-quality architectural models. Let's see how Parametric Design can help them!

One Project. One Model. One Container.

Every work, construction, project, is unique in its appearance and size. You could say it's a "one off"...

The models made by this company are shipped all over the world and the transport crates must be designed and made ad hoc from time to time. This tasks has proven to be more time consuming than it needs to be so the company asked us at Digital Fucina to create a tool that helps them automate this process. Challenge accepted!

Why waste an hour if it can take a second?

The challenge was to ensure enough elasticity while still having tight tolerances. ONEOFF needed to be able to freely manage the size of the box according to the volume to be contained, while respecting precise parameters like the thickness of the wood available, the tolerances of interlocking, the type of padding, the width of the teeth and the height of the lid.

The configurator I've just mentioned can't be shown for privacy reasons, but I can share this prototype version:

Thanks to this new tool designed by us at Digital Fucina using Grasshopper, the average design time of these boxes was reduced from an average of one hour to a few seconds! This obviously translates to less man-hours dedicated to a process that now takes literally seconds. 

What would your company do if you could suddenly free up your working force of mundane, repetitive processes? THAT'S how Parametric Design has helped ONEOFF.

We can no longer deny that we are really living the 4th Industrial Revolution. An era that will undeniably change the world by making "work" more efficient. I say goodbye this time quoting one of the fathers of the original Industrial Revolution:

"If I had asked people what they wanted, they would've said faster horses."

- Henry Ford

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