Consumers and evolutionary design

While stretching his own creative boundaries, IPFW’s Nelipovich hopes to inspire people to think in new ways about their belongings

By Elisabeth Andrews, Published January 12, 2007

For many product designers, helping to design a tennis racket that Serena Williams used to win the Australian Open might be the pinnacle of professional success.

But when IPFW design professor Richard Nelipovich describes that point in his career, it’s only a side note in the “before” portion of his story.

“What disturbs me about the product world of consumption is that you have anonymous objects that move from the shelves to the home to the landfill. It was a big issue for me in that world. With the work I am doing now, I no longer feel like I am making landfill.”—Richard Nelipovich

Nelipovich, a Fulbright scholar who joined IPFW this year, left the world of mass production to pursue his vision of individualized design–a hybrid concept that marries digital technology with a customized, participatory process that blurs the line between manufacturing and craft. He is presently developing code that enables computer-aided design (CAD) tools to produce sets of objects that share characteristics but are individually distinct. These programs are intended to replicate the naturally occurring variance of the organic world through a system he calls “evolutionary design.”

To understand his current projects, it is helpful to consider Nelipovich’s background, which spans both sides of the design/craft divide.

He began his undergraduate work at the University of Wisconsin as an engineering student, but later pursued a degree in art. While in school, he produced his first designs for eyeglasses, and worked as a goldsmith and a blacksmith. Following a research fellowship in Wisconsin and a summer studying engineering and design in France, he joined Design Concepts, Inc, a product design firm in Madison. Throughout his time at the firm, he also taught blacksmithing at Madison Area Technical College.

“I would work all day on drawings and models of product designs,” he recalled. “Then I’d put on the leather apron and teach people to forge hot steel over an anvil.”

During his tenure with Design Concepts, Nelipovich’s projects ranged from golf clubs to refrigerators, but he found the work surprisingly repetitive and clinical. He became dissatisfied with the constraints of mass production, which demanded an appeal to a large number of people with a single product.

“I had a handmade background. After a certain point, I lost interest in the goal for the mean. I found myself pining for something that was based on the individual. I decided I wanted to go back to having a relationship with the consumer,” he said.

The product design project that had held the most interest for Nelipovich involved office furniture that could be reconfigured by the user. These pieces, which he describes as “non-linear,” function in multiple arrangements as desks, partitions, storage areas and power supply systems. When Nelipovich headed back to school to pursue a master’s degree in fine arts from the Cranbrook Academy of Art in Michigan, he worked to expand the “non-linear” concept to create computer programs that would allow customers to specify preferences in the design of the product.

“I wanted to find a way to create individual objects for individuals without giving up the capabilities of computer-aided production. So I started programming. The idea is mass customization. It builds on the same kind of concept that car manufactures use when they allow you to choose your accessories,” he said.

One of Nelipovich’s projects involved program scripts that generated a set of spoons varying in length, shape and the curvature of the handle. His original idea was to develop a consumer interface that would provide a number of choices from a drop-down menu. But he received some unexpected feedback when he tried to determine which choices to include among the selections.

“I created a set of 12 spoons and wanted people to handle them so I could isolate the best solutions. I knew that the tactile experience would be really important in finding the best fit. But when I passed out the spoons to 12 people, I got back 12 different responses. It turned out there was a different solution for each person,” he said.

Nelipovich realized that anatomical differences and variations in eating habits would lead each person to select unique specifications if he or she was able to choose among an infinite number of spoons.

“That got me thinking about how in nature, no two leaves are exactly alike. I started reading about evolution and discovered that at any one point in any system the best possible solution is the greatest number of solutions possible. You never know what the selection criteria are going to be. If you have only one option, then you could wind up with a potato famine,” he said.

Nelipovich is now incorporating code that mimics the growth structures of nature, so that each time the program is run, it “grows” a new and unique object.

He has also continued to work on the customization side of manufacturing through his work with eyeglasses. He is now able to “sketch” a unique design based on a photograph of a person’s face and then use a computer-controlled milling machine to carve the design of the frame.

Because the custom-design process is so time-intensive, the cost to the consumer is high. Nelipovich hopes he can bring together the generative elements of his evolutionary design programs and the participatory nature of his custom eyewear to eventually offer personalized, organic objects that are as affordable as they are unique.

This past year Nelipovich sought inspiration from Droog Design in Amsterdam through a Fulbright scholarship. He chose to work with the firm because, like him, it is “conceptually based” in its design philosophy, he said.

“Droog is an amazing environment for conceptual design. They operate out of curiosity or critique of society. For me, it was the difference between most contemporary product design focusing on style and sexy surfaces versus thinking about the world a little bit differently and interjecting inquisitiveness into products,” he said.

Nelipovich hopes he can bring his Fulbright experience and his multifaceted background to his classes at IPFW. He wants to encourage students to seek alternative solutions to design questions whether they choose to work independently or with a corporate design firm.

“It’s important to show them that someone with strong individual thinking can function within a corporation,” he said. “In their function as designers in a company, I tell them that whatever the parameters are, go beyond them. Give your client additional concepts that stretch what they think they can do.”

Nelipovich will continue to stretch his own means of expression in blending elements of design and craft into a new species of production. He describes his current trajectory, like his computer programs, as an evolutionary process, and he is confident that his work will advance the theoretical development of product design. While he readily admits that “there’s no accounting for taste,” he feels strongly that a system that generates unique objects will encourage a more meaningful relationship between people and their belongings.

“What disturbs me about the product world of consumption is that you have anonymous objects that move from the shelves to the home to the landfill. It was a big issue for me in that world. With the work I am doing now, I no longer feel like I am making landfill,” he said.

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