Inventor furnishes new fabric of design for InterFocus

Senior project manager James Cannon admits that it’s an unusual application, but says that Autodesk’s solution is perfect for developing concept designs and presenting them to potential customers. Cannon cites InterFocus’ recent completion of the design and build of new student kitchens in Trinity Hall, Cambridge – work that, he says, Inventor helped to secure. InterFocus used Autodesk reseller Micro Concepts to take it up from AutoCAD to Inventor, having turned down specialist kitchen design solutions, which Cannon says were too rigid. “We’re not engineers so we didn’t really know anything about Inventor, but we could see it would give us total flexibility to design how we wanted,” says Cannon. “Also we recognised that its integration of 2D and 3D, and interoperability with AutoCAD, would give us ideal design continuity. Our fitters and the architects we work with all use AutoCAD and, besides, we still planned to do much of our work in 2D to begin with.” And he adds: “I mainly wanted to use Inventor for visualising initial concept designs in a way that would explain to the customer exactly what we could do. This strategy really paid off when we tendered for the work for Trinty Hall. “Inventor also improves communication with the factory floor. I can discuss the 3D model with the factory manager, scroll around it and focus on parts that may be a problem.” Currently, Cannon is engaged in a new project – creating 3D images of the entire InterFocus range to feature on its new website, designed to enable customers to order furniture online – eliminating the need for professional photographers. “The website wouldn’t have happened without Inventor,” he says.