ROBRADY design stresses a comprehensive speed-to-market plan by collaborating to identify the greatest areas of opportunity and producing profitable product solutions.

ROBRADY delivers design, production, and capital solutions to its clients in support of their research-to-reality philosophy.Chaos Group provides state of the art rendering solutions for architectural, VFX, film, media and entertainment, automotive design, television and other industries.

What more can you tell us about the ROBRADY work environment? Do you work as a team or individually? Do you work in a big open space or in separate offices ? Is ROBRADY a fun place to work?
ROBRADY is an incredible place to work, and a lot of that comes from the open environment. There are no walls between the departments, industrial designers work across the aisle from the mechanical designers, which promotes the collaborative process. All projects are worked on as a team, with industrial and mechanical designers contributing at all design stages.

THE INSPIRATION
Who worked on the DBO Electric Folding Bicycle project and what is their experience in both the industry and with ROBRADY?
The concept work was a collaboration between the Design Director Rob Brady, Senior Industrial Designer Erik Holmen, Industrial Designers Andre Minoli and Antonio Molinari, and Senior Mechanical Designer David Poirier. Each designer has extensive experience in the transportation and power sports industries and has been with ROBRADY for several years. While ROBRADY has been active in this market space for decades, this was the first complete bicycle project for the team. Once the concept level 3D models were completed, they were handed off to partner DK City’s team of production engineers for the next phase.

How did the DBO Electric Folding Bicycle idea originate ? Why was it chosen as a project for ROBRADY? And how/why did DK City and ROBRADY team up for this project?
The relationship between DK City and ROBRADY was put together by an expert in the electric bicycle field – he believed that the two companies would make a great team. The DBO bike project simply started out as an exercise to design a new folding electric bicycle DK’s expanding lineup of products.

From idea to physical product, how long did this project take to create?
The industrial design phase for ROBRADY starting in May 2009, and completed in August of 2009. There were some production design modifications that took place through January 2010.

THE BACKSTAGE EXPERIENCE
How did ROBRADY use V-Ray for Rhino in this project? Why did you choose V-Ray to visualize this project? And how did V-Ray help in the production?
ROBRADY uses V-Ray for Rhino in all rendering animation applications. The quality level of the renderings is a huge asset when communicating a design to the client. Once of the nicest features of V-Ray is the ability to launch DRSpawner on multiple networked machines in the studio, drastically cutting down on render time.

What was the biggest challenge in creating the DBO Electric Folding Bicycle?
The biggest challenge centered around the folding aspect of the folding bicycle. We wanted to make a design that, at a distance, looked like a folding bike. But you have to work very carefully to make the design function and articulate correctly. It took close collaboration between ID and MD to make sure the concept was groundbreaking but feasible for production.

How long has the team at ROBRADY been using V-Ray for Rhino?
The V-Ray software has been the sole render engine at ROBRADY for about 4 years.

CUSTOMER BENEFITS
Will you share some of the V-Ray settings you used in the DBO Electric Folding Bicycle studio images?
Absolutely, the settings we use are actually very simple. We start with the standard high quality setting, and set the lighting and reflection maps to a studio HDRI environment. This is the regular setup for most renderings the studio does. We will sometimes change the lighting/reflection map depending on the subject matter, but when rendering products and vehicles, I rarely have to change the core settings.

What V-Ray features did you find most useful when rendering the DBO Electric Folding Bicycle?
The ability to map reflections and lighting is extremely useful, but the distributed rendering has to be the best feature as it has saved us countless hours of render time. The ability to use the engine with the Bongo animation plug-in was huge in communicating the folding qualities of the bike.

What are some upcoming projects in which you will rely on V-Ray for rendering?
Every project that enters the studio requiring a 3D model will be rendered with V-Ray.

As seen on the Chaos Group website. Chaos Group provides state of the art rendering solutions for architectural, VFX, film, media and entertainment, automotive design, television and other industries.

Unappreciated by the world is the fact that in today’s elusive studio of motorcycle design America is a major player – for some, the major player. Dozens of designers, engineers and craftsmen are creating some of the most exciting and innovative motorcycles the world has ever seen – ever dreamed about. This doesn’t just mean “yet another chopper”. It means names like Confederate, Ecosse, Fischer, Roehr, Vectrix (producing an electric sportbike), and MotoCzysz in addition to, and no less worthy in this context, the establishment Harley-Davidson with Buell, Victory, and even Indian. Award-winning author Alan Cathcart visits twenty-five shops interviews the designers and engineers and rides the motorcycles. Each shop, interviewee and motorcycle has been photographed especially for this book.

Check out the following excerpt from the book featuring the rMoto Electrix Superbike. You can also download a PDF file here. To purchase a copy of American Dream Bikes by Alan Cathcart click here.

By Kim Cartlidge

Hosting a design summit solely for designers and creative types is so last year. The forward-thinking Ringling College of Art and Design chose instead last week to spread the word about how design thinking might deliver businesses and the region from the grips of the recession. The Sarasota International Design Summit on the campus kicked off with an invitation-only CEO roundtable led by international creativity consultant Sir Ken Robinson.

Rob Brady, CEO / Design Director of ROBRADY design.

Sir Ken Robinson, above, spoke at the Sarasota International Design Summit, and later signed copies of two of his books. Photos by Lauren Redifer.

Sarasota-Bradenton business attendees included Sun Hydraulics Corporation CEO Allen Carlson, Beall’s Inc. CEO Steve Knopik and ROBRADY CEO Rob Brady.

“The business environment is as challenging as it has ever been,” says Robinson, who has advised governments in Europe and Singapore on creating economies and education systems for today’s global age. “The key message was that this is not the time to give up on being innovative.”

Rob Brady leads ROBRADY design, a local firm that epitomizes both design innovation (having recently released a trendsetting folding bicycle) and the type of business Sarasota’s leadership wants to attract and retain in this region. I asked Brady how he defines design thinking.

“It’s a methodology we were taught in design school,” say Brady, who was educated as an industrial designer. “We analyze problems in a very visual way –in both two and three dimensions. What’s so approachable is that it’s so easy to pick up.”

For Brady, design thinking entails using light boards, graphics and problem statements. It requires questioning the question itself, meaning turning a critical eye on how a company is framing a problem. It also involves brainstorming without negativity or judgment, which can take the wind out of the imaginative process. “We don’t disqualify ideas immediately. Often that gem is two or three ideas away from you. If you throw away the crazy ideas, you throw away the bridges.”

ROBRADY lost 85 percent of its business in the downturn, but is on track for phenomenal growth this year with several new products. “Last year, we got clobbered by the recession, and if we did not reinvent ourselves, it would be an obituary. We survived by looking inside and applying design methodology to ourselves and going after new markets,” Brady says.

Brady adds, “Innovation without a process is reckless. Innovation with a proper methodology is a phenomenal competitive weapon in business.”

The word Ringling College President Larry Thompson wanted to share with the CEOs is that design thinking is not just for the creative fields: it’s a survival tool that can lead us out of this dismal economy.

Thompson plans to expand the CEO roundtable and opportunities for local entrepreneurs to apply design thinking to business problems. For more information, call his office at 359-7601.

Syndicated From: Sarasota Magazine

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To my surprise, not only have his design parameters changed, but also his business models, which I found to be far more revolutionary. ROBRADY has always provided end-to-end services of design, documentation, prototyping, sourcing and shipping, but in the hyper competitive product development world, he has added a new service option. For those customers (typically in the emerging markets) not comfortable with standard design service fees, ROBRADY alternatively offers exclusive partnering deals that lower up front costs and shares program risks – specifically, licensing the targeted design itself.  It’s a way of moving the majority of fees from the front of the project to the back where revenue can come into play. The customer pays only for the designed components they consume in their production, allowing them a less expensive entry into the marketplace, while gaining access to cutting edge design services that they know they will need to be competitive on a global basis.

As we have seen, the emerging markets, most notably India and China, offer challenges to standard business models, forcing every customer / vendor in every industry to adapt. ROBRADY has met that challenge with an innovative new business model.

To see the amazing vehicles and products ROBRADY has designed, check out their website here.

Syndicated From: All Cars Electric

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In my experience, “content” started out as a goofy term created by Web programmers who didn’t really care what the site was about. Visual webmasters worried about the visuals, programmers worried about the code, ad agencies wanted to preserve the integrity of the brand and clients wanted whatever was in the brochure to be on the Web site. In the early days, nobody worried about “content” the way we think of it today.

The struggle between style and technology took a turn for the worse when SEO experts started dumbing down site designs to feed the search engine spiders. They wanted content, but mostly as a means to enhance keyword density. This created amazing results for some companies for a while until search engines got wise and started looking more at backlinks (links from other, credible sites back to yours) and other factors, as an indication of the quality/relevance of a site.

In order to build backlink love, site owners learned that they needed to provide people with interesting stuff to read. Programmers still didn’t care what the “content” was, but they knew Web sites needed content and plenty of it. They even came up with ways to let site visitors help create it. Web 2.0 was born, the Web became awash with fresh content and the rest, as they say, is history.

But the story continues to change as the demand for information, entertainment and community evolves to include multimedia dialogue between companies and customers. In the ten minutes or so it took me to write this, 100 hours of new video has been uploaded to YouTube, ranging from slick movie trailers to homemade video reviews of products by end users.

I believe in content-based “inbound” marketing and I understand how it can cause people to think of Web sites as plain boxes to hold content. (This blog is a good example; check back soon to see some evolution here.) But demand for multimedia content is exploding. The next batch of hot content marketing books will talk more about this.

Thanks to the multimedia content revolution, brands have more opportunities to project style than ever before—and customers want it. From a design-constrained environment like Facebook to the wide-open canvas of multimedia content, to emerging opportunities like iPhone apps., style is back, baby!

Syndicated from: Odato Marketing Group


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