Intelligent Styling System for Industrial Design.

In the present competitive worldwide market, styling is one of the key factors for the commercial success of a product.
It is a matter of fact that quite often people tend to recall products more for their original design qualities than for their specific technical features. As a consequence, companies, if they want to remain competitive, have to improve efficiency and quality of the styling process during the initial stage of the design process.

Styling is an articulated activity characterized by more intuition based problems than mathematical related issues during which designers crystallize their mental model into a practical solution through abstraction and mental simulation.
Nowadays, the process of styling is becoming more complex due to new materials that provide the designer's creativity with a greater freedom. During this complex phase usually computers are not used because the system behavior does not fit the way stylists work. In fact, the mismatch between stylist's conceptual model and the limits of present-day Computer Aided Design (CAD) interfaces bound the designer's freedom through the imposition of a formal and constrained graphic language. In short it can be stated that a number of deficiencies distinguish user interfaces of existing CAD systems:

• High expenditure of time and costs for training

• Functions are often poorly assigned to the menus

• The user has to think in function of the interface
implementation

As a consequence, while the use of computer-aided technologies in the area of product design is quite well established, its use is still severely the styling phase where a gap is still present inside the computer-aided process chain. The main objective of the InSIDe project is to provide an innovative solution that can fill this gap through an innovative tool specifically tailored for the stylists' and engineers' needs.