By Design Videos by Plastics News

(Excerpted from Plastics News’ site)

Plastics News Global Group has produced a series of videos entitled “By Design” culled from interviews and speaker presentations at the Industrial Designers Society of America’s 2009 international conference, held Sept. 23-26 in Miami. The original weekly series features design leaders from the U.S., China, South Korea and beyond, as well as materials and plastics industry officials.

In this week’s episode features IDSA Materials and Processes Section Co-Chair Kristin Charlton of Bemis Manufacturing Co. She shares with Plastics News Editor Robert Grace her belief that “cowboys and farmers should get along”.  That’s her analogy for promoting friendly interaction between designers and engineers — two groups of professionals that tend to speak different languages, approach problem solving from differing perspectives, and frequently suffer from, shall we say, creative tension.

Check out the rest of the videos featuring IDSA Executive Director Clive Roux, former IDSA Executive Director Frank Tyneski, Material ConneXion’s Andrew Dent, Ecco Design’s Eric Chan and Tupperware’s David Kusuma.

Video: “Designing for Performance” by Kevin Vittitoe, Priority Designs

IDSA’s Central Ohio Chapter hosted a really fantastic event last year in Columbus: ‘New Trends in Materials and Processes’– and Erin Hamilton was nice enough to post the video she recorded of the event. Now that we have the M&P has a blog, I’m trying to collect links to some of these videos so others can enjoy them.

The first video is of Senior Industrial Designer Kevin Vititoe from Priority Designs as he speaks about new trends in performance materials and heavy duty manufacturing processes. The first half of his presentation covers the development of a lacrosse stick head for STX:

The second half of Kevin’s talk is a case study on a baseball glove design:

This a really fantastic presentation. I’ll be posting some more videos from this event shortly…

Video Library for Making Parts, Patterns, Tools, and Molds

From urethanes and epoxies to specialty waxes, vacuum bagging materials, and silicone rubber, Freeman Manufacturing & Supply Company supplies materials for prototyping, mold-making, modeling, toolmaking, composites manufacturing, and foundry patternmaking. They sell all kinds of cool stuff and show you how to use it in their Video Library.

From the basics all the way through the more advanced thin-wall molding, watching these videos really give you a great appreciation for the art of patternmaking and craftsmanship. In addition to learning about making urethane castings form RTV molds, they’re a great introduction to other low-volume processes like laminate tooling and composites. there’s even videos on using Renshape and jewelry making.

There’s over 2 hours of video in this collection, so even if you never make any prototypes yourself, there’s a lot here to learn. Make sure you go ahead an register to get access to “Multiple Cavity Molds” and “Casting Thin-Walled Parts”.

Have fun…