Clay Modeling Is Still At The Heart Of Industrial Design

It starts with the clay, which isn't clay at all, but plasticine, a mix of waxes and fillers designed to stay solid at room temperature. Or maybe it starts in the wood shop, where industrial designers make forms and bucks that will serve as the imaginary machine's skeletal structure, the bones on which talented hands will heap the muscle of their design. Or maybe it begins further back, with the first lines on a computer screen. It's hard to say where clay modeling begins because even now, in the age of computer design and virtual and augmented reality, it is still a crucial, inseparable component of design.

"Whenever you're looking into a computer screen at a 2D object, there's this issue of proportion and size and scale that's dependent on camera angle and the amount of curvature to the digital camera lens," Tim Huntzinger says. "When you look at something in the computer, and then look at it for the first time in reality, there's always a disconnect."

Huntzinger is a professor at the ArtCenter College of Design in Pasadena, California, where he helps teach students the art and science of clay modeling. He says that while some of the tools involved in translating a paper design to three-dimensional space haven't changed in 100 years—ovens to heat the clay to a workable temperature, gloves to carry and mold it, brushes, styluses, and knives to sculpt it—others have changed dramatically with the rise of the computer.

“Clays are typically scanned and then fixed,” Huntzinger says. “It’s really hard to get symmetry by eye, so they’ll be duplicated in the computer and edited, then a five-axis mill will cut each side so that it’s perfectly symmetrical.”

Even then, perfectly symmetrical may not be exactly right.

“It’s amazing how much a millimeter will make in certain areas,” Huntzinger says. “A good industrial designer and a good clay artist will sit there and talk about how highlights need to change, how a character line needs to break. You’re talking about fractions of a millimeter here and there, and to actually form those out in the clay is pretty incredible.”

But at the end, after hours of physical and digital editing, after thousands of passes by a CNC mill, the most important tools are the simplest.

“It’s this blend of art and technology and craft,” Huntzinger says. “The last pass is always the human hand and the human eye to get everything exactly perfect.”