Heather Miller
Elevate your design and manufacturing processes with Autodesk Fusion
Based in Edinburgh, Scotland, R&S Robertson has delivered exceptional lighting solutions for the hospitality and leisure sectors since 1939. However, as the lighting industry diversified in distribution markets and channels, they realized it was time to forge a new path to stay competitive and embarked on designing their very first collection.
Vivid Nine, an industrial design agency also located in Edinburgh, began working with R&S Robertson to create the new lighting designs. Both share the same core values of environmental responsibility and a sustainability-first mindset. The new collection shouldn’t just be eye-catching—it should help reduce carbon, too.
Adopting new tools to meet ambitious goals
Friends since their days in university, Jonathan Pearson and Terje Stolsmo founded Vivid Nine in 2022 after heading up design at different industrial design agencies. With Stolsmo based in Norway, Pearson in the UK, and a limited, bootstrap budget, they decided to begin using Autodesk Fusion instead of SolidWorks.
“We needed something that could work collaboratively across different locations,” Pearson says. “We’d have to buy a server and network licenses with SolidWorks. The whole infrastructure was a lot more complicated, whereas Fusion does everything in the cloud. We can use it wherever we want. With Solidworks, you’d also have to pay quite a bit extra to get static stress simulation built in and that is available in Fusion as-is.”
There were even more advantages with the switch to Fusion. With a strong commitment to sustainability, Vivid Nine has now taken advantage of the sustainability tools available with Fusion and integrated the Manufacturing Sustainability Insights (MSI) Add-on into their workflow. This powerful tool enables them to calculate the carbon footprint of their designs, optimize products for reduced carbon emissions, and enhance sustainability reports they generate for their clients, including R&S Robertson.
“Sustainability is core to our values, and it’s also a known business differentiator. Vivid Nine and their use of Fusion and MSI has—quite literally—shined a new light on how we approach our designs to reduce the carbon footprint.”
—Michael Lawrence, Marketing and Product Manager, R&S Robertson
Bringing style and sustainability priorities together
When Vivid Nine began their work to design the new lighting collection, they first started by interviewing interior designers. Since R&S Robertson provides lighting solutions for many hotels, the design would include a matching set of floor, wall, table, and desk lights. For interior designers, style was one thing—but a sustainable choice was paramount.
“One of the things that came out as a priority was sustainability,” Pearson says. “When asked, more than 85% said a sustainable choice was important to them. Being able to understand how different lamps compare to others could influence their choice as well.”
With this crucial knowledge in hand, Vivid Nine began their work on sustainable, Art Deco-inspired lamps. From start to finish, the new Hudson collection was designed and ready for manufacturing in Portugal within eight months. But, during the process, they still grappled with the best way to capture its carbon footprint, relying on Excel sheets, siloed data, and assumptions. Once MSI was launched, they were able to do a full lifecycle analysis to easily showcase Hudson’s sustainability data to R&S Robertson’s customers. MSI can now continually provide better values and information to improve the depth of the sustainability disclosures.
Not only that, but Vivid Nine immediately saw with MSI that the biggest carbon contributors were the lower and upper houses for the lamps, contributing 15kg of the total 22.6kg CO2 emissions. This hotspot highlighted where significant improvements could be made, either through a material choice change or design optimization.
The team also discovered a rather unexpected option. Using MSI, Vivid Nine was able to seamlessly compare the manufacturing impacts based on different locations compared to R&S Robertson’s manufacturing partner in Portugal. The insights demonstrated the substantial value of producing in Portugal, highlighting improvements in carbon emissions and overall environmental impact when compared to manufacturing in Asia. In fact, the European location is also influencing their material choices as Vivid Nine and R&S Robertson move forward with new designs.
“We’re doing more investigation into products that are even more marketable as a sustainable material, such as cork,” says Michael Lawrence, Marketing and Product Manager, R&S Robertson. “There are a lot of cork factories locally and near our partners in Portugal, which helps us deliver even more environmentally friendly products.”
Moving forward with MSI
Since MSI offers unparalleled and real-time visibility into the carbon impact of various design and manufacturing variables—such as material selection, manufacturing process, and geography—directly in Fusion, it’s now become an integral part of Vivid Nine’s workflow. This is especially evident with entirely new lighting collections in the works for R&S Robertson.
“We can go through each component piece of the light and run calculations of different CO2 values to try and reduce it,” Pearson says. “We can compare different manufacturing methods or different sizes to reduce the number. You can have a load of parts. But, with MSI, it’s easy to see what stands out as a really high value from a CO2 perspective and focus on what to change and impact the overall value.”
Since adopting the tool, Vivid Nine has used the MSI Add-on for Fusion for many new successful—and sustainable—lighting products with R&S Robertson.
“We have a range of 10 new designs coming out next year,” Lawrence says. “Our work with Vivid Nine and how they use technology such as Fusion and MSI really demonstrates the positive impacts that can be made both for your business and the world.”