UX/UI Design
Additive Industries
Co-designing Project Lead
Leveraging Additive Industries’ unique vision in the User Interface
When Additive Industries briefed us on their vision for modular autonomous 3D printing, we were thrilled.
The design team spent several days on-site, observing and talking to operators performing various tasks on traditional systems. This research convinced us that Additive Industries' unique vision could serve as a natural starting point for both the Industrial Design and the User Interface.
Since this is a fully contained system, users need to be able to monitor the entire journey of parts through the system. In order to achieve this, we enabled two distinct views: A spatial view that would display the system as a complete stack of modules, visualizing the location and status of every job, and a temporal view that would show the production schedule on two different time resolutions.
While this helicopter-view supports the normal production mode, there was also the need to deep-dive into module settings during process development or diagnostics. For this we re-used the same individual module visualizations where we added the detailed settings that are not be available in production mode. A quick prototype was created to discuss our ideas with the project team as well as some operators, and it showed we were on the right track.
Apart from modularity, autonomous operation is the second key characteristic of the system. The system is capable of producing parts without human intervention for up to 32 hours. To emphasize this we decided to make this the default user-facing screen in the system. This would underline the core value proposition of the system during demos and factory tours.
Making it real
After several rounds of optimizations and a user test, we handed over comprehensive documentation to the development team while reserving some budget to support them. The result is an award-winning product that is truly unique in its market.