Mechanical Designing: Shape

The concept of shaping refers to the design process of giving a shape to an object to be shaped.

The term comprises two variants of meaning:

Design as a craft or industrial process

In mechanical designing the engineering and execution of art objects, the production of the intended form is referred to as forming or form design from a blank. As a purely industrial process, the creation and production of hollow forms, tools and other industrial goods is defined as mould construction.

Each design requires a minimum of stability, which is usually guaranteed by the source material. In the case of special materials, however, it can also occur in the course of production, e.g. by curing (steel, concrete, ceramics, etc.), by drying or by stiffening.

In most cases, the blank has the properties of a solid body, although it is often formed by casting into hollow forms. The processing of an initially raw or informal material takes place, apart from a few exceptions in the visual arts, in several working steps:

The coarse form or the outline of the blank is first produced (for example with the hammer, by cutting-off production, by bending, etc.),

The following is the more detailed form and modelling – mostly using special tools such as the sculptor or the woodcarver,

And most recently a treatment of the surface (hardening, grinding, polishing, glazing, etc.), while a possible painting is no longer a design.

Mechanical Designing

For processes with special surface treatment or high-precision instruments, such as a large mirror telescope, the final shape process can take longer than its actual production.

In art, the coarse form can also be left to auxiliary or to the disciples of a master, provided that they know the critical properties of the material such as fracture risk or fissures ("jumps"). For the more detailed shaping and for processes with fine grinding or polishing, not only the mechanical peculiarities of the workpiece and the tool must be matched, but also in many cases their chemical, hydrophilic and thermal characteristics. For more information, see also the articles active medium, grinding and temperature resistance.

Shaping as a design-intellectual process

In the fields of architecture, design and partly in the visual arts, "shaping" is the design or technical process of designing an object or space.

In a literal sense, the term "shaping" includes design approaches that promote design both from a formal viewpoint (such as beauty or under the primacy of a style), as well as from functionalist viewpoints or those that Material, construction, structure, etc. In general, however, the term is used narrowly. Especially since the modern period, the term has been and is usually used to distance itself from the formal approaches of the nineteenth century, in which design often took place under the question: "In what style should we build/design".

In line with the terms "style" and "styling", the term "shaping" is usually used when the functional and material-appropriate form is the object of the design. In contrast to this, the meaning-like term "design" is used more neutrally in practice.