Digital design

Led by Professor Boris Eisenbart, this program leverages our expertise in product design, strategic design and engineering to create novel solutions for manufacturing to Industry 4.0 standards, product and business management, and systems solutions for sustainability. 

Our work aims to provide solutions and strategies applicable to individual parts and processes, as well as entire systems across diverse fields such as automotive, aerospace, production and medical devices. 

Our research streams

There are three research streams in this program:

• design-driven product and manufacturing innovation
• mixed-reality design and manufacturing
• design for sustainability

Design-driven product and manufacturing innovation

This stream aims to push the boundaries of how to develop strategies for products, services and systems to address customers and markets that lie just beyond the horizon. Our team’s technical knowledge generates not only creative and innovative, but also viable and actionable solutions, and we use advanced computational tools to apply cross-disciplinary optimisation. 

The central elements of this stream are: 

• early-stage concept assessment and selection

• computation modelling and simulation

• design for manufacture, design for X

We want to help the Australian industry utilise the full potential of design and its role within the emerging Industry 4.0. We are heavily involved with the world’s first Industry 4.0 Testlab for smart design and the manufacture of fibre-reinforced composite parts.

Mixed-reality design and manufacturing

Within this research stream, we use virtual and augmented reality to help engineering designers conceive better solutions and connect design with production planning much earlier in the process. Our aim is the visualisation of solutions in a virtual or mixed-reality environment for a fully integrated digital chain – from initial designs to production and assembly planning. 

The central elements of this stream are:

• AR/VR collaborative design

• virtual manufacturing and factory

• ergonomics

• digital twins

Design for sustainability

This stream rethinks how we create and use products sustainably. We look at the entire life-cycle: how we design products and systems to be inherently less resource intensive in the way they are built, how they work (energy and resource consumption), how they are created (energy efficiency and impact of production processes), their different use phases, and second- or third-life options that are available through recycling into new forms of usage or products.

The central elements of this stream are:

• product lifecycle management (PLM)

• circular economy

• modelling and decision making

• design for efficiency and efficient manufacture