“The furniture industry is quickly evolving, fashion trends are changing almost daily, and customers are demanding evermore complex solutions. Meanwhile, project implementation deadlines are shortening. To keep pace with these trends, design tools must be highly tailored to meet the needs of the designer.” 

–Celi Automated Design Systems

If you design furniture, case goods or interiors, chances are you’re working with wood. Whether it’s for a home, hotel, hospital, office, shop or retail chain, clients often want the warmth and natural look of the ages-old material, whether as a design accent or the main ingredient. And in applications where the finished surface will be painted, wood still remains an affordable and desirable substrate.

However, cost and manufacturing constraints mean wood materials have evolved heavily in the past few decades. A seemingly simple cabinet door is now much more than a surfaced board, and can contain a complex assembly of multiple materials: A honeycomb core encased in an MDF frame, backed with particle board, faced with veneers, finished off with edge banding, mated to its sibling pieces with a variety of unseen hardware. This yields cost-effective and repeatable furniture systems, but can provide a headache for designers during those crucial non-design phases of the project.

When designing with wood composites, slowdowns arise because CAD systems have not kept pace with the materials. Studies done by software company and Autodesk reseller Celi Automated Design Systems reveal that just a third of project time is spent on design, with the bulk of you or your design team’s hours spent on the non-design technical aspects: Preparing manufacturing drawings, calculating the BOM, working out the CNC/CAM files. (It’s enough to make a designer wish the client requested everything be done in sheet metal, as a lot of those non-design tasks have been automated for sheet metal in mainstay CAD program Autodesk Inventor.)

To illustrate this with simple math, let’s say you’ve got a wood-based design project with a two-and-a-half-week deadline. In other words, you’ve got 100 hours to execute it. By Celi’s math, in order to hit the deadline you can only spend 35 of those 100 hours on the modeling and design. The rest of the time is burned up on non-design essentials: You’ll need 25 hours to generate the manufacturing drawings, 20 hours to accurately calculate the BOM, and a further 20 hours to ready the CNC files.

Celi’s answer to this is Woodwork for Inventor, a software package that integrates with Inventor to makes designers’ lives easier. “Although Autodesk Inventor is a very powerful design engine, it doesn’t provide certain tools specific to the furniture design industry,” the company says. “We understand the specific needs of those working with wood and wood-based composites, and we understand which aspects of the regular modeling workflow would take them the most time to do.”

Thus Woodwork for Inventor, developed after closely observing the workflow of furniture designers, was designed to automate much of the tedious, non-creative parts. WFI’s built-in unified hardware library allows for automated hardware attachment and component placement, with hole fittings and connection joints added automatically. And once you’ve defined your assemblies with conditions you’ve set, you can stretch and shrink them without needing to go back in and manually adjust all of the component placements, fittings and joinery.

“Woodwork for Inventor’s functionality is perfect for us,” says Stephane Reneux, Designer-Builder for French laboratory furniture firm Equiplabo. “The Skeleton Dress-Up, Automatic Drawings Generator, precise BOM Generator, Assembly Copier, automatic sculpting of mortises and tenons are all things that we need in our line of work. We can’t imagine working without them.”

And WFI really shines during the non-design tasks. The BOM, manufacturing drawings and CNC files are all generated accurately and automatically. Material optimization algorithms will automatically nest profiles for cutting (while accounting for the all-important grain direction). If you’re overseeing production yourself, the CAM module allows you to drive the CNC router directly.

Auto-generated, accurate BOMs

Auto-generated manufacturing drawings

Automated profile nesting for CNC

These features, as well as others listed below, generate a tremendous time savings: Celi reckons that you can accomplish the same results as in the example above–the 100-hour project–in just 45 to 50 hours, even with an additional 5 hours of your time spent on modeling.

Learn more about Woodwork for Inventor’s specific functions:

– Dressing up the skeleton body with boards. Section, board, assembly, etc.

– Material assignment. Fillings, coatings, multi-layer boards, composite parts, etc.

– Multiplication arrangement of furniture hardware. Components, axes defining the hardware position, component database, etc.

– Automatic generation of mortises and tenons. Components, holes, joints, etc.

– iBox components. Multi-body Skeleton design, kitchen design, etc.

– Size calculations of part and blank. Texture direction, overlaps, added coating, sunk coating, etc.

– Export to cutting optimisation program. List of cutting parts, cutrite, etc.

– Bill of materials generator. Product structure, list of cutting parts, erp, etc.

– Automatic generation of drawings. Drawings, templates, annotations, projections, scaling, etc.

– Use of prototype and assembly copying. Renaming of files, connections between components, hierarchical encoding, etc.

– CNC preparation. CNC machine tool, drilling, milling, mortising, cutting, etc.

– Data integration with the autodesk vault program. Dimensions, materials, data, specification, etc.

Testimonials

With feature sets like these, it’s no wonder that WFI has attracted a worldwide following. Here’s what working designers and firms who have integrated Woodwork for Inventor into their workflows have to say about it:

Time Savings

“Woodwork for Inventor gives us the tools that the woodworking industry has been missing in 3-D software,” says Dale Erb, Director of Engineering for Canada’s Artco International, an outfitter of hotels. “Auto plan making, auto hole drilling, auto programming with their CAM module, to name just a few of the tools, has increased our production by up to 40%.”

“By using Woodwork for Inventor we’ve shortened the pre-production, information-preparation process from 12 to 14 days down to just 4 to 5 days,” says Audrius Gabrenas, CEO of Lithuanian office furniture company Ergolain Baldai.

Estonia-based plywood products manufacturer Klavis Ou has seen even more dramatic results. “Woodwork for Inventor has allowed us to speed up the design process, and the preparation of information necessary to start the production process, by 80% in comparison to the software we used before,” says Production Manager Mikk Taliaru.

Design Flexibility

The time savings engendered by the automation of repeatable tasks also offers flexibility in design work. “Woodwork for Inventor allows us to design a lot of different furniture models with the same structure–but in different materials and configurations–in the quickest possible way,” Daniel Malama, Founder of Romania-based furniture design firm Mobila Sa Slobozia reports.

Accuracy and Ease of Use

“Woodwork for Inventor is an excellent instrument with a very friendly interface and extremely precise BOM generation,” Mobila Sa Slobozia’s Malama says.

Designer Menti Fabio of Italian interiors firm Mattec S.R.L. says that “Woodwork for Inventor’s ease of use, together with its data delivery to the production department in the shortest possible time, means every interior designer must have this tool.”

“It gives us a very precise BOM not only in the production stage,” says Ergolain Baldai’s Gabrenas, “but also in the supply and bookkeeping stages. As a result, the entire lead time as been shortened dramatically.”

Diversity of Application

“We’re a custom sheet metal fabrication shop with a full custom woodshop,” says Brad Vanwingerden, a designer for U.S.-based Great Lakes Stainless. “We produce primarily for the food service industry with a good mix of other types of work: Airline, job shop, residential, and OEM.

“Autodesk Inventor is a great tool for the sheet metal side of our business as well as communicating our design intent. However, when it comes to the wood side, Inventor doesn’t have the tools built in to design efficiently. Woodwork for Inventor helps dramatically with this. The Assembly Copier functionality alone is a valuable tool which works for any assembly, not just wood. If you’re a custom wood shop and are looking to utilize 3-D modeling I would highly recommend Woodwork for Inventor.”

Customer Support

“The Woodwork for Inventor team is reliable and has never let me down when I have questions or need personal assistance,” reports Laurens Geldtmeijer, Manufacturing Engineer for Dutch furniture manufacturer Meubelmakerij Het Woud.

Eases Bookkeeping

“Woodwork for Inventor is our first choice for fit-out design, from design to production. The integration to SAP and Vault works very well, and all BOMs are getting pushed directly,” says Jens Otterstedt, Director of Operations for U.A.E.-based interiors firm FDC Interiors.

What Will You Do with the Time Savings?

“Since integrating Woodwork for Inventor, we have become more efficient and work with far greater precision,” says Valter Lisboa, IT & Administrative Manager of Switzerland’s Raboud Group interiors firm. “We have also seen time savings across our entire process. The time saved allows us to work on our innovation and creativity.”

Albert Schlegel, CEO of Germany-based retail, hotel, office and restaurant design firm Schlegel Deutschland says that WFI has enable them to increase their business. “Both the number of projects we can take on, and our productivity as a whole, have increased significantly since we started using Woodwork for Inventor.”

If you’re ready to dive in, you can download a free trial of Woodwork for Inventor.

Dezeen Awards 2020 opens for entries next week, with eight new architecture, interiors and design categories to enter.

New architecture categories for this year include landscape project and infrastructure project. There are also new architectural lighting design and exhibition design categories.

Two of last year’s most popular interiors categories have been split. There are now two retail interiors categories – one for spaces that are over 250 square metres in size and another for smaller spaces. Individual bar interior and restaurant interior categories also replace last year’s combined category.

This increases the total number of categories to 42 for Dezeen Awards 2020, which opens for entries on 4 February 2020.

All of the last year’s categories will be available to enter again, with the chance to get your work in front of a stellar lineup of judges and compete for a coveted Dezeen Awards trophy.

The architecture categories include urban house, rural house, housing project, civic building, cultural building, rebirth project and small building.

Interiors designers have 12 categories to choose from, including house interior, apartment interior and hotel and short-stay interior.

Design categories include furniture design, lighting design, homeware design, product design, sustainable design and graphic design.

You can also enter one of the six studio categories for a chance to be named the best established or emerging architecture, interior design or design studio of the year.

Entrants will have the chance to join the illustrious list of previous winners, which includes Sevil Peach, Studio Drift, Atelier NL, Christ & Gantenbein and Vo Trong Nghia Architects.

See the full list of categories here.

The standard entry deadline for Dezeen Awards 2020 is 2 June. To get a discount on the entry fees, submit your project before  31 March.

This year, we are also introducing a late entry period, with an extended deadline of 9 June, but a higher entry fee.

Dezeen Awards celebrates the world’s best architecture, interiors and design projects, and the studios and individual architects and designers producing the most outstanding work.

Receiving more than 4,500 entries from 87 countries last year, Dezeen Awards has grown rapidly into one of the most popular awards programmes in the industry, becoming the benchmark for design excellence and the ultimate accolade for architects and designers.

To stay updated with all Dezeen Awards 2020 news, sign up to the newsletter at www.dezeen.com/awards/subscribe.

Once entries open on 4 February, you can log in or create an account to start your entry at www.dezeen.com/awards/signup.

The post New categories revealed for Dezeen Awards 2020 appeared first on Dezeen.

Ribbons of wood wrap around The Exchange by Kengo Kuma, which has opened in Darling Square, Sydney, Australia.

The photos captured by Martin Mischkulnig reveal the spiralling form of the six-storey civic centre, which is Japanese architect Kuma‘s first building in Australia.

Now open to the public, the building is wrapped in 20,000 metres of light-coloured wood that Kuma has arranged in “a dynamic and exciting manner” to offer passersby glimpses of activity inside.

Kuma first revealed plans for The Exchange in 2016 as the focal point of Darling Square, a neighbourhood located on western outskirts of the Sydney central business district in Darling Harbour.

At the time of its reveal, he said the building was designed as a landmark that would be recognisable from all angles.

“Our aim is to achieve architecture that is as open and tangible as possible to the community, and this is reflected in the circular geometry that creates a building that is accessible and recognisable from multiple directions,” said Kuma.

“The wooden screen wraps the exterior of the building in a dynamic and exciting manner, a historical reference to Darling Harbour originally being a hive of business activity and a focal point as a market exchange.”

The characterful form of The Exchange is created by the staggering of its six curved floorplates, enveloped by angled walkways.

Though the photos do not reveal the interior of the building, it contains a library, childcare centre, market hall and a “makerspace” to support creative and technology start-ups. There is also a rooftop bar and restaurant with views over Tumbalong Park, the Chinese Gardens and Cockle Bay.

Darling Square and The Exchange are being developed by property company and contractor Lendlease as part of the revitalisation of Darling Harbour that is being overseen by architecture studios OMA, Hassell and Populous.

The redevelopment will provide housing for 4,200 people and is hoped to create 2,500 jobs, while also attracting more visitors and activity to the area.

Japanese architect Kuma founded Kengo Kuma and Associates in 1990. His studio, which has offices in Tokyo and Paris, is known for his playful use of timber.

Other timber projects by the studio include a Tokyo cake shop encased in intricate timber latticework, a Starbucks cafe with walls covered in criss-crossing beams, and a computing facility covered in hundreds of wooden strips.

The studio will also shortly open its latticed-timber stadium for the 2020 Tokyo Olympics, which featured in our roundup of buildings due to open this year.

Photography is by Martin Mischkulnig.

The post Kengo Kuma completes first building in Australia appeared first on Dezeen.

Vous êtes-vous déjà demandé ce que c’est que de plonger sous la mer d’un bleu profond et de nager côte à côte avec la vie marine exotique? Eh bien, maintenant vous pouvez par procuration grâce à la photographe Laura Emerson. Sa nouvelle série, «Deep Blue Cosmos» est la première partie de ce qui sera de multiples collections de photos de son passe-temps de plongée libre.

«Vaincre la peur des inconnus et des insondables», a-t-elle déclaré dans une introduction à son projet. Vous découvrirez un nouveau monde sous la mer, un «mystère profond et merveilleux».

Good storage units are essential in any and every living space! Unless you want a mess all around you, incorporating clever storage areas into your home or even office space is the way to go. Just like this snug shelving system by Juz Interior, we have gathered some interesting storage designs that are sure to declutter your cluttered lives!

The Becky Corner Shelf by Noook comprises of a selection of stackable shelves, that turn even pointless little corners into useful storage spaces. This one’s been crafted just for your bathroom!

This shelf design by Soheil Yousefi is truly one-of-a-kind.  What starts off as a proper shelving unit at the top, slowly shrinks away to create an intriguing design that still manages to hold your little items for you!

The Cesar and Fanny Collection by Désormeaux and Carrette consists of pretty pastel storage units that add a hint of softness and warmth to any living space. Not to mention they look like little picket fences!

The Conch by Wei He comes with a molded-plywood inner body and a dual-density foam outer body, giving it structure as well as supple softness. However, what caught our eye is the storage unit that is right under you for everything from books to a cushion to other bric-a-brac!

Onda by Schneid Studio is a modular shelving unit featuring curved lines and soft contours. It is delicate and subtle, suitable for all the lovely ladies and their precious belongings!

The Creative Chair Storage by FLORES Taller de Arquitectura doubles up as, well, a storage system as well as a chair to sit upon! Its quirky geometric structure makes it pretty amusing to have around. I would love to fold and unfold this design…just for fun!

VG Studio’s Band Rail looks like a typical wooden handrail accompanying an ordinary staircase at first glance, providing you with support as you amass your expansive home. However look a little deeper, and you realize it functions as a bookcase as well! Wooden ‘gills’ mimicking the gills of a fish adorn the entire length of the handrail. The gills provide little nooks and crannies to subtly store your books. It’s a staircase with a storage unit for books!

This bunk bed by Amber Lewis doubles up as the perfect storage unit! With shelves for your books, plants, and other miscellaneous items, as well as under bed drawers, it’s the ideal multifunctional design.

Designed by the Mint Tiny House Company, this super cool staircase also doubles up as a storage unit! Each individual step functions as some form of storage area. The staircase smoothly integrates with the kitchen, forming kitchen cabinets and a spot for a mini-fridge!