Design competition on ‘Digital Manufacturing’
Student Teresa Joeken designs winning book cover in a competition on ‘Digital Manufacturing’ held by the Information and Communication Design programme
The winning cover design depicts the idea of product individualisation in an interesting and innovative way, while simultaneously underscoring the thematic focus of the book, an edited volume on digital manufacturing to be published in autumn 2015 by Metropolis-Verlag. 39 students of the Information and Communication Design programme in Kamp-Lintfort took part in the competition, which was organised by professors from the programme in conjunction with Metropolis-Verlag.
Kleve/Kamp-Lintfort, July 21, 2105: The ongoing digitalisation of manufacturing is fundamentally transforming commercial value chains. This has the potential to change the very way consumers live and work. Digitalisation is leading to an expansion of virtual networking within value chain systems and producing new levels of local intelligence in machines and products. These two aspects in particular are making it ever more feasible to produce highly configurable goods according to customer-specific demands. As new innovations in manufacturing technology hit the market, it’s becoming both cost effective and realistic for companies across a variety of sectors to manufacture individualised, customer-specific products on demand (i.e. batch size 1).
As part of a design competition at Rhine-Waal University of Applied Sciences, 39 students from the Information and Communication Design undergraduate programme set out to visually capture this changing landscape by depicting intrinsic elements of digital manufacturing. The winning design earned not only a cash prize, but will also be featured on the cover of a soon-to-be-published edited volume on digital manufacturing from the publishing house Metropolis-Verlag. An expert jury was put together to judge the submissions, and included the two editors of the new volume as well as Professor Dr.-Ing. Christoph Haag, Professor of Procurement and Value Chain Management, Professor Dr. Torsten Niechoj, Professor of Economics and Political Science, and Professor Jörg Petri, Professor of Media Production. All three professors teach in the Faculty of Communication and Environment in Kamp-Lintfort.
Of the 39 participants in the design competition, it was Teresa Joeken who most impressed the selection committee. Speaking on behalf of the jury, Prof. Niechoj explained that “Ms Joeken’s winning design depicts the essence of product individualisation both elegantly and succintly”. To symbolise the vast amount of minutely configurable possibilities that new manufacturing technologies can bring, her design takes a central element – a gear-like workpiece – and repeatedly depicts it with slight variations within the context of a single, overarching pattern. Prof. Niechoj also noted that “Ms Joeken’s design is exemplary in how it incorporates the principles of good typography”.
For her winning design, Teresa Joeken, who is in her second semester of study in the Information and Communication Design programme, received an award of €150 and the enthusiastic assurance from Metropolis-Verlag that her design will be featured on the cover of their upcoming edited volume on digital manufacturing. The volume centres on an academic symposium held in February 2015, in which an interdisciplinary range of experts critically examined digital manufacturing and the impact it will have on various aspects of society. The volume will include numerous talks from the symposium and other publications from experts in the field of digital manufacturing – as well as Ms Joeken’s winning design on the cover, of course.