The design-to-customer pipeline in companies operating in the high-end furniture market is pretty complex and fragmented, mainly because during the last years fundamental requirements have become: • to suggest the customer not only a single piece of furniture, but a whole interior design solution, building and communicating a ‘brand atmosphere’ with a strong semantic coherence; • to provide an increasing level of customization of the product, which turns into the problem of controlling variety and variability. For these reasons the sale process requires wide spaces, filled with many physical products, and the use of sophisticated images of furnished scenes in communication tools, to suggest the customer not only the functional performance of products, but also a ‘mood’ linked with immaterial brand values. Unfortunately, photographic sets and physical showrooms are resource demanding, and do not allow a fast time-to-market. Moreover, it’s practically impossible to have the full range of each product in a showroom, with all the configurations, accessories and finishing variants (i.e. the swivel sofa AMOENUS in Maxalto collection has more than 430 variants). In this context a first goal for companies is to have a significantly more structured design process, compressing time, optimizing resources, building a simpler and faster communication process. In this paper we present a new framework to assist the product customization in the furniture sector using digital methods, 3D virtual models, and high quality real-time rendering solutions. The paper is organized in 4 sections: a. Furniture customization problem characterization; b. B&B Italia Case study explanation; c. New design process pipeline using 3D models description; d. New ‘virtual furniture’ framework, adopting new visualization and project management solutions developed to support product customization, combining virtual modeling with photorealistic visualization depiction.
Tools and Methods to Assist the Product Customization in the Field of Furniture Design
GAIANI, MARCO;
2011
Abstract
The design-to-customer pipeline in companies operating in the high-end furniture market is pretty complex and fragmented, mainly because during the last years fundamental requirements have become: • to suggest the customer not only a single piece of furniture, but a whole interior design solution, building and communicating a ‘brand atmosphere’ with a strong semantic coherence; • to provide an increasing level of customization of the product, which turns into the problem of controlling variety and variability. For these reasons the sale process requires wide spaces, filled with many physical products, and the use of sophisticated images of furnished scenes in communication tools, to suggest the customer not only the functional performance of products, but also a ‘mood’ linked with immaterial brand values. Unfortunately, photographic sets and physical showrooms are resource demanding, and do not allow a fast time-to-market. Moreover, it’s practically impossible to have the full range of each product in a showroom, with all the configurations, accessories and finishing variants (i.e. the swivel sofa AMOENUS in Maxalto collection has more than 430 variants). In this context a first goal for companies is to have a significantly more structured design process, compressing time, optimizing resources, building a simpler and faster communication process. In this paper we present a new framework to assist the product customization in the furniture sector using digital methods, 3D virtual models, and high quality real-time rendering solutions. The paper is organized in 4 sections: a. Furniture customization problem characterization; b. B&B Italia Case study explanation; c. New design process pipeline using 3D models description; d. New ‘virtual furniture’ framework, adopting new visualization and project management solutions developed to support product customization, combining virtual modeling with photorealistic visualization depiction.I documenti in IRIS sono protetti da copyright e tutti i diritti sono riservati, salvo diversa indicazione.
