Vince and Allison report on important examples of biology in design, from birds in flight to a new car whose shape was inspired by a box fish.

Since the 1970 factories have become ever more automated. In this episode Allison and Vince look at current trends in factory automation and show how networked facilities are changing the landscape of manufacturing.

Complex supply chains can lead to unwanted or prohibited materials in your product. In this episode, Vince and Allison review how product design teams can meet regulatory and company goals for complex global products.

2025 CAFE standards are forcing auto designers to upgrade existing technology. The internal combustion engine can become a lot more efficient, but it will take a lot of intensely collaborative design work. In this episode, Allison and Vince cover some of these opportunities.

People don’t always sit up straight, especially when using portable electronics. New designs show smart engineering.

Designers at Steelcase surveyed thousands of users on how they sit when using new devices like smartphones and tablets at the office. They found that common office chairs don’t support the way people sit, which led them to a revolutionary new office chair design.

The Dakar off-road motorcycle race has daily sections of up to 550 miles. The design team at KTM has produced winning bikes for the last 12 Dakars. In this episode, Vince and Allison share the unique challenges and winning formulas from KTM’s motorcycle design team.

Embedding electronics demands new processes and technology for product design.

Vince and Allison speak with designers at toy company, k'nex, and learn a few things about designing products that will be assembled in the field.

How do designers meet regulatory requirements and consumer preferences for sustainable design? Vince and Allison delve into design practices that comply with standards like RoHS and Reach.

Emerging markets represent the biggest sales opportunities for western brands. But what’s a designer to do when competitors release a $65 smartphone tailored to the needs of those consumers? In this episode, Vince and Allison explore design challenges for foreign markets.

Why do different CAD systems cause a problem for designers? It comes down to the feature definitions in the various packages. Newer software does a better job of geometric translation. That’s a good thing, since multi-CAD environments aren’t going away any time soon.

Vince and Allison discuss how to retrieve the design intent from a CAD model even though the original designers no longer work at the company. This episode shows how to edit CAD models without knowledge of the model's feature history.

Vince and Allison show how a supplier can use direct modeling to modify a design from a customer that’s in a different CAD format.

Vince and Allison explain direct modeling and compare it to parametric modeling, using lots of examples.

Allison and Vince overview the concept of Flexible Modeling, a combination of parametric and direct modeling environments. Vince uses direct modeling to accommodate Allison’s late stage design change even though the original part was designed with parametric modeling.

In this episode Allison and Vince review the reasons why parametric modeling provides such a powerful CAD environment, but recognize that it's not necessarily the best solution in every case.

In this episode Allison and Vince show you how CAD systems have advanced to bring the most important part of your business, Concept Design, into the 21st century.

In this episode, Vince and Allison talk about when top down design is the right way to go and the value that design teams can get from a bottom up approach.

In this episode of the Product Design Show, Vince and Allison explore the last two components of design thinking, integrative thinking and experimentalism, and explain why those two elements are crucial to the whole process.

Design Thinking is a process of bringing integrative thinking, experimentalism, collaboration and empathy into the design process in a structured way. In this episode Vince and Allison walk us through the empathy and collaboration aspects of this framework.

Product concept design tools have come a long way from hand sketches. Even proper drafting rules made a big difference, and so have computer design tools. Now designers are using social media to bring consumer interaction into the concept stage of product design.

Every product starts off as an idea. Product Concept Design is all about shaping that idea into a real product. In today’s episode Vince and Allison look at how modern Product Concept Design has developed, and where it’s going.

Designers at Babyzen redefined the traditional umbrella stroller to address 3 major performance headaches.