#Working3D: Six Questions for an Industrial Designer

In our #Working3D interview series, we tell you about exciting professions within the AM landscape. In this latest interview, we learned how exactly AM can be used in product design. To do this, we spoke to Alex Kimber, industrial designer and founder of AKD, his industrial design studio with a focus on digital manufacturing. AKD combines maker culture and professional design and specializes in product design for digital manufacturing technologies. Alex told us more about his approach, the challenges he faces in his day-to-day work and what makes an industrial designer and what drives him personally on a daily basis.

3DN: Could you introduce yourself?

My name’s Alex Kimber, I live in London and I’m an industrial designer with a focus on using digital fabrication and striving for distributed design. I currently work with the lighting manufacturer Aktiva as well as running my own design studio, AKD, which is where I’m all about additive manufacturing. I’ve been engaged with the maker movement for a long time and have a keen interest in bringing the rigor and discipline of professional industrial design to the world of open source hardware, local production, bespoke design and so on. For me, it’s about decentralizing design in a way that’s responsible and sustainable. My career has ranged from entrepreneurial ventures to working as a design engineer in architectural glazing products. I studied MSc Design and Innovation at the Technical University of Denmark and my BSc in Product Design Engineering at Brunel University.

With his design studio AKD, Alex Kimber is committed to the sustainable decentralization of design

3DN: How did you discover additive manufacturing?

It started in college, what we call high school in the UK, where our product design teacher gave a class on manufacturing technologies and told us about 3D printing. I already had some experience with machining, so I knew the potential as soon as I heard about it and became hooked ever since. I helped out after class with the RepRap at the college and I wrote one of my papers on AM, entitled “What is the Future in Additive Manufacture?” Remarkably, my teenage estimations of the AM industry 10 years hence were pretty accurate. I bought my first 3D printer while at university; the Printrbot Simple in plywood. That was a terrible machine, compared to what is on the market today, but it was so exciting to send the first home axis command to that little thing and watch it come to life on my desk. I still get a buzz every time I send something to print and the machine starts moving – probably because I never expect it to actually work.