The growth in Industry 4.0 marks a change in some ways that products will be created as well as the ways in which professions like industrial design will continue to grow. Advances in technology, data, and analytics will increasingly give designers the ability to develop customized or bespoke products for a range of end users. Specifically, the intersection of 3D surface scanning, generative design and digital fabrication could trigger this growth. This paper examines how the intersection of these technologies is currently being leveraged by designers for bespoke solutions and identifies growing opportunities and attributes that make the design of customized repetitive use products a strong candidate for adoption of these digital tools.

Industrial design has a long history of leveraging anthropometrics human factors data as a basis for good design and decision making throughout the design process. This data ranges from individual measurements supporting the bespoke design for the individual to large data sets normalized across populations that supporting a much broader user group. When it comes to the design of medical devices, traditional anthropometric data has increasingly been complemented by a range of scanning methods (3D surface, CT, MRI) as a form of input with a resulting output of CAD models as well as digitally fabricated medical models. Both the digital and physical medical models can support a number of industrial design activities as well as serving as a collaborative platform between allied disciplines during the design and development of a medical device. This paper relays the specific role medical modeling played in the industrial design process for the device design of a limb cooling product. This product was targeting the impacts of tourniquet induced limb ischemia by leveraging cooling to mitigate tissue damage. Over the course of this project, limb medical models were utilized as a platform for a number of activities including supporting several industrial design methods from early ideation to testing and concept refinement.