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.

Biomimicry. When Nature Inspires Design

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.

The Future of Factory Automation

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.

Materials Control in Complex 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.

Designing for Emission Control

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

Chair Ergonomics Presents a Design Challenge

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.

Revolutionary 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.

Designing Motorcycles for Endurance and Performance

Embedding electronics demands new processes and technology for product design.

Electronics in Mechanical 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.

Designing Products that are Easy to Assemble

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.

Complying with Sustainable Design Requirements

Every week the Product Design Show digs into the engineering and design behind well-known products.  Vince and Allison deliver a fast-paced and entertaining show that features their unique combination of story-telling and humor.

There are not that many podcast that layout product design in this manner. I love it!

Just what I was looking for!

Product Design Show - ENGINEERING.com

How does Maslow's Hierarchy of Needs fit into concept design? Allison and Vince show how The Psycho Aesthetic approach helps guitar designers forecast future consumer needs to create next generation instruments.

Rock your Concept Design with Psycho Aesthetic Approach

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.

The Evolution of Product Design Tools

RKS uses emotion as a starting point for new product design. This episode of the Product Design Show looks at the Kor water bottle and how decisions designers made at the concept stage makes buyers feel better about themselves.

Designing Emotion Into New Products

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.

Product Design for Emerging 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.

Multi-CAD Environments are the New Normal for Design

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.

Retrieving Design Intent for Old Models

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

The Whats and Whys of Direct Modeling

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.

Top Down and Bottom Up Design

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.

Integrative Thinking and Experimentalism in Design Thinking

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.

Design Thinking. Bringing Empathy and Collaboration to Your Designs

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.

Product Concept Design - Past and Future

Vince and Allison show the egg shaped Tamaggo, a soon-to-be-released camera whose unusual 360 degree image created unique design challenges.

360 Degree Camera

Ram Racing redesigned their Formula SAE car to increase stiffness by 100% and reduce weight by 10 lbs, leading to big reductions in lap time.

Stiffer Chassis With Less Weight

Designers from System Group wanted to build a fully autonomous packaging machine that could build a box for any sort of product. Allison and Vince show how they incorporated bar code data to predetermine the right size box. The result is the very cool “Freebox” machine, as shown in this episode.

Box Making Design Magic

Architects designed a huge cantilevered canopy for the new Francis A Gregory library in Washington DC. Problem was, hanging a canopy 40 feet from its support isn’t an easy engineering challenge, as the engineers from CST Covers pointed out. Vince and Allison walk us through the solution.

Building Design that Pushes Engineering Limits

The best podcast episodes on physical health. Episodes talk about your diet, sleep, exercise and all the things that people do to improve their physical health and live a healthier life. This topic is for everyone, with applications in all of our everyday lives. Add episodes you're interested into your queue below!

Best Episodes on Physical Health & Your Body

The best podcast episodes of the most interesting stories and things. From skyping someone while they're in space, to tracking down and meeting a telephone scammer in person, to the story of a Galapagos. These episodes will keep you and all your friends entertained and captivated for hours. Learn something new in every episode! Add episodes you're interested into your queue below!