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Abstract Applications for additive manufacturing (AM) continue to increase as more industries adopt the technology within their product development processes. There is a growing demand for designers to acquire and hone their design for AM (DfAM) intuition and generate innovative solutions with AM. Resources that promote DfAM intuition, however, historically default to physical or digitally non-immersive modalities. Immersive virtual reality (VR) naturally supports 3D spatial perception and reasoning, suggesting its intuitive role in evaluating geometrically complex designs and fostering DfAM intuition. However, the effects of immersion on DfAM evaluations are not well-established in the literature. This study contributes to this gap in the literature by examining DfAM evaluations for a variety of designs across modalities using varying degrees of immersion. Specifically, it observes the effects on the outcomes of the DfAM evaluation, the effort required of evaluators, and their engagement with the designs. Findings indicate that the outcomes from DfAM evaluations in immersive and non-immersive modalities are similar without statistically observable differences in the cognitive load experienced during the evaluations. Active engagement with the designs, however, is observed to be significantly different between immersive and non-immersive modalities. By contrast, passive engagement remains similar across the modalities. These findings have interesting implications on how organizations train designers in DfAM, as well as on the role of immersive modalities in design processes. Organizations can provide DfAM resources across different levels of immersion, enabling designers to customize how they acquire DfAM intuition and solve complex engineering problems. 

Abstract Solving problems with additive manufacturing (AM) often means fabricating geometrically complex designs, layer-by-layer, along one or multiple directions. Designers navigate this 3D spatial complexity to determine the best design and manufacturing solutions to produce functional parts, manufacturable by AM. However, to assess the manufacturability of their solutions, designers need modalities that naturally visualize AM processes and the designs enabled by them. Creating physical parts offers such visualization but becomes expensive and time-consuming over multiple design iterations. While non-immersive simulations can alleviate this cost of physical visualization, adding digital immersion further improves outcomes from the visualization experience. This research, therefore, studies how differences in immersion between computer-aided (CAx) and virtual reality (VR) environments affect: 1. determining the best solution for additively manufacturing a design and 2. the cognitive load experienced from completing the DfAM problem-solving experience. For the study, designers created a 3D manifold model and simulated manufacturing it in either CAx or VR. Analysis of the filtered data from the study shows that slicing and printing their designs in VR yields a significant change in the manufacturability outcomes of their design compared to CAx. No observable differences were found in the cognitive load experienced between the two modalities. This means that the experiences in VR may influence improvements to manufacturability outcomes without changes to the mental exertion experienced by the designers. This presents key implications for how designers are equipped to solve design problems with AM. 

Abstract The demand for additive manufacturing (AM) continues to grow as more industries look to integrate the technology into their product development. However, there is a deficit of designers skilled to innovate with this technology due to challenges in supporting designers with tools and education for their development in design for AM (DfAM). There is a need to introduce intuitive tools and knowledge to enable future designers to DfAM. Immersive virtual reality (VR) shows promise to serve as an intuitive tool for DfAM to aid designers during design evaluation. The goal of this research is to, therefore, identify the effects of immersion in design evaluation and study how evaluating designs for DfAM between mediums that vary in immersion, affects the results of the DfAM evaluation and the mental effort experienced from evaluating the designs. Our findings suggest that designers can use immersive and non-immersive mediums for DfAM evaluation without experiencing significant differences in the outcomes of the evaluation and the cognitive load experienced from conducting the evaluation. The findings from this work thus have implications for how industries can customize product and designer-talent development using modular design evaluation systems that leverage capabilities in immersive and non-immersive DfAM evaluation. 

Abstract Although there is a substantial growth in the Additive Manufacturing (AM) market commensurate with the demand for products produced by AM methods, there is a shortage of skilled designers in the workforce that can apply AM effectively to meet this demand. This is due to the innate complications with cost and infrastructure for high-barrier-to-entry AM processes such as powder bed fusion when attempting to educate designers about these processes through in-person learning. To meet the demands for a skilled AM workforce while also accounting for the limited access to the range of AM processes, it is important to explore other mediums of AM education such as computer-aided instruction (CAI) which can increase access to hands-on learning experiences. Therefore, the purpose of this paper is to analyze the use of CAI in AM process education and focus on its effects on knowledge gain and cognitive load. Our findings show that when designers are educated about material extrusion and powder bed fusion through CAI, the knowledge gain for powder bed fusion is significantly different than knowledge gain for material extrusion, with no significant difference in cognitive load between these two AM processes. These findings imply that there is potential in virtual mediums to improve a designer’s process-centric knowledge for the full range of AM processes including those that are usually inaccessible. We take these findings to begin developing recommendations and guidelines for the use of virtual mediums in AM education and future research that investigates implications for virtual AM education.