Parametrix
Best Practices in Parametric Modeling
Spring 2016 • Graduate Thesis
Parametrix is an educational tool that outlines some best practices to approach and build parametrically robust digital CAD models. It was the result of my industrial design graduate thesis at Georgia Tech where I set out to codify parametric modeling techniques and facilitate easier adoption of those techniques by designers.
To understand the modeling practices of professionals in the industry, I employed three approaches to data collection: online survey reaching out to a large group of audience, informational interviews with a few selected professionals, and shadowing the industrial design team at a large firm like Delta Faucet Company to observe their product development processes first-hand.
I, along with my thesis advisor Prof. Kevin Shankwiler, grouped the data obtained into three categories: Process - different ways employed by design professionals and/or firms to take an abstract idea from concept to a finished product; Approach - how each designer approaches a CAD model before going into details; Pointers - best practices and specific techniques that the professionals have developed over the course of their design career. These pointers were further categorized using an affinity map into 13 categories.
The coded information from the Process category and the pointers from the affinity map were formatted into a mind map to derive additional levels of information by questioning the How? and Why? behind each branch. This paved the way to the contents of the deck which naturally fell into four sections: Start Here, Preplanning, Modeling Methods, and Best Practices.
To gain an understanding of the information design principles that help in effectively laying out the information on a card, I benchmarked and studied three different educational products: 75 Tools for Creative Thinking, Design Heuristics for Inspiring Ideas, and IDEO Method Cards.
With the colors and typography of the deck setting the mood of a product, I wanted the palette to be bright, inviting and yet mature and gender-neutral to appeal to a wide demographic of users. Four distinct colors were used as the primary way of distinguishing between the sections in the deck. As much as I wanted to go with Helvetica for the typeface, I made a functional decision and picked Roboto, a narrow-width font, for the main body text so that more characters could be fit per line of text on the card.
I used illustrations to explain the concepts on each card which also acted as a way to provide a visual example. These illustrations were drawn in a uniform isometric scale and kept as greyscale to avoid conflicts with the primary color of the cards.
In addition to the text titles for the sub-categories in the Best Practices section, I used created custom icons for an additional level of identification. These icons were drawn on a 3x3 grid with two different stroke weights to avoid visual clutter.
To further tie the design of this educational tool together and make it a finished product, I explored different brand names and arrived at Parametrix - a portmanteau of parametric design and design metrics.
Parametrix is divided into four sections: 01 Start Here, 02 Preplanning, 03 Modeling Methods, and 04 Best Practices that each contain 7, 21, 5 and 16 cards, respectively. Each section has a cover card with a brief description about the contents in the section. There are a total of 55 cards in the deck.
To finish out the product with a simple packaging, I used a laser cutter to prototype cartons for the deck and worked through a few iterations before dialing in the right settings and design.
The final Parametrix deck design was printed on a 300 gsm smooth matte card stock in a standard 2.75” x 4.75” size.
Learn more about the design process behind Parametrix and get a deck of your own at parametrixdesign.com.
