From Shop Floor to Software : innovation

A soft-skinned car?

Leslie_Gordon — Thu, 12 Mar 2009 14:14:00 GMT

"Let the material do the talking" is one of the ideas behind GINA, BMW's concept sports car. Instead of a metal body, it has one made from stretchable material. Thus, designers don't have to worry about, say, smooth continuity between the wheel wells and the body -- the material naturally takes care of a flow. Also, the car's headlights act and look like human eyes, blinking open and shut as needed. GINA stands for something like "Geomety shape functions In N Adaptations." http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kTYiEkQYhWY

CAD in Japan

Leslie_Gordon — Wed, 11 Feb 2009 14:10:00 GMT

I'm at the SolidWorks 2009 conference in Orlando, Florida, looking out my hotel room window, which oversees a lake lined with palm trees, the Swan Resort with giant statures of swans on its rooftop, and blue, sunny skys. I heard it is warmer in Cleveland, but I am in no rush to get back home to snow, ice, and near zero temperatures.

Yesterday, I spoke with Haruyoshi Iida, President and CEO of SolidWorks Japan K.K. He says the CAD system first came to Japan in 1995 when Jon Hershtik made sure to introduce a localized version for the language. Interestingly, SolidWorks has an large presense in Japan, he says, with about 80,000 seats, 40,000 of which are commercial. Mr. Iida says Japan has 300,000 manufacturing companies, mostly heavy industry. Many of these companies still use 2D, but industry is slowly moving to 3D. He says Japanese companies are not "in a big rush."

SolidWorks World 2009 -- Day 1 & 2

Leslie_Gordon — Tue, 10 Feb 2009 15:22:00 GMT

According to CEO Jeff Ray, over 4,000 people are attending the SolidWorks World 2009 event being held in Orlando, Florida over the next few days. Although times are tough, that is not evident at this show. Attendees are upbeat and the theme "innovation" predominates. The Great Depression spawned nylon, car radios, and everyone's favorite -- SPAM. Today's big problems can be addressed by yet more innovative designs. Take for example modern windmills, which came out of a need for sustainable energy. Many people don't want them in their back yards and the devices are expensive. Still in the concept phase is a 3 to 4-ft tall windmill that would fit on a house rooftop and generate enough energy for the house. Another problem: many people in the world lack access to safe drinking water. A company has invented a device that bombards drinking water with UV light, cleaning the water without the use of chemicals or chlorine. Fifty of the devices are currently being deployed near N.Y.C., enough to fill the Empire State Bldg. eight times a day with water.

Sir Richard Branson spoke on the first day. For a guy worth billions of dollars, he is quite personable, humble, and has a wicked sense of humor. He has started another company -- Virgin Galactic Airways -- because he thinks commercial space aviation will become a reality. His suggestions for combatting a tough economy:

-- Expand out of it instead of contracting. If you can afford to, continue to innovate.
-- Before just laying people off explore the alternatives such as job sharing. There might be employees who would really appreciate only having to work a few days a week such as ones with small children.

Branson says America is quite protectionist, which translates to anti-innovative. "We must get rid of all the barriers in the world," he says. He is a big fan of Obama.

Day Two, Jon Hirshtick, the former CEO of SolidWorks, spoke on what he says will be the technologies most important in affecting CAD in the future:

-- Touch and motion UIs. A lot of industrial designers already use Wacon Tablets, like a big computerized drawcuesing pad that imports Photoshop files, and draw directly on them.
-- CAD will become a hardware business again in that more and more users will be using hardware specifically designed for CAD such as the 3D mouse.
-- Online applications will get even more prevelant. Already have an application on SolidWorks Labs (labs.solidworks.com) to create 2D drawings which can be accessed by many devices including cell phones.
-- Video gaming technology will get increasingly prevelant in CAD. Features such as ambient occlusion are already in CAD that have been borrowed from video games. Many graphic gards now have more transistors on them than CPUs.
-- 3D printing will become a key part of the design process and be used iteratively.

Other speakers mentioned how industrial design uses "styling cues" from other areas of society to get ideas for designs. Industrial designers choose a "form language" they are interested in for different products.

Check out smoothon.com for material that lets you rapidly mold things using, say, a 3D printed mold.

BoardCAD.com is a free download for making surface models for things like surfboards.

More than just user-centric, design nowadays must be desire-centric. This even applies to machine design which can borrow techniques from consumer design.

COFES 2008

Leslie_Gordon — Sun, 13 Apr 2008 00:13:00 GMT

Attending the COFES 2008 (Congress on the Future of Engineering Software) conference has been a nice surprise. For one thing, the event is being held at the beautiful Scottsdale Plaza Resort near Phoenix, Arizona. Think bright blue skies, hot sunny days, and unusual fauna such as the bottle brush tree, which has what looks like thousand of red, bristly bottle brushes hanging from its branches.

For another thing, the event is way more intellectually oriented than are most trade shows. That sounds boring, but is in fact, quite inspiring. Here are a few of the things I have seen and heard, in no particular order: Karl Ulrich from the Wharton School of the Univ. of Pennsylvania gave a talk that could have easily been titled: Quantifying innovation. He qualifies extreme innovation as something that makes a lot of $$ and gave the example of the Oral B toothbrush, which has the largest market share in the world of any toothbrush. The company used what is called a "tournament structure" to come up with the best design: designers generated hundreds of ideas; the company made models of the best 50 and tested them with consumers. Out of this came the best five. The company tested these thoroughly in the lab using mirrors to watch participants brush their teeth from every angle. The winner was the now widely known brush with a co-molded handle.

Pixar used the same method to pick a movie to make. The company got 500 one-sentence pitches and out of these picked the best, "A hot-rod racecar gets waylaid in the desert and finds the meaning of friend and family." This resulted in the movie Cars. He also says tournaments are not always needed. A good example is the problem, "What should a roof beam look like in engineering software?" This problem and others like it only take one or two passes to solve. Ulrich says Six Sigma is the wrong logic for innovation because it aims to produce the same thing the same way every time. Instead, it is better to think of innovation statistically using the tournament framework to:

-- Take more draws from a larger distribution
--Shift the mean of the quality of ideas upwards
--Increase the variance in the qualities
--Increase accuracy in evaluating opportunities

In one case, this method produced a money-making idea from an Indian doctor -- that of brokering "medical tourism" for semi-elective surgery.

Coming soon: A new RP format that replaces STL

Annoying design

Leslie_Gordon — Mon, 28 Jan 2008 18:15:00 GMT

Badly designed products are bad enough. But what might be worse -- annoying or senseless designs. They add on layers of unecessry complexity, making it exceedingly difficult for us poor slobs trying to use the things. Case in point is a new kind of torque screw. No argument that torque screws in general make a lot of sense -- once you tighten a screw down, it won't easily vibrate off. But what genius had to put an additional post in the center of the screw head? Now all your old wrenches don't work so you have to go buy a whole new set. Or, take you car to an expensive mechanic.

Another design that peeves me: the seatbelt warning on my 2007 Toyata Matrix. Don't get me wrong -- in general, I love the little car. It is cute and gets me where I want to go without gulping gas by the gallon. But the beeper that warns you forgot to put on your seatbelt drives me NUTS. It is a high, piercing wail that goes on seeminly forever. I've taken to letting my little dog ride in the passengar seat, and we often zip along uneventfully for miles, when suddenly off goes the &*^%$%$% alarm. Even the weight of a 15 lb dog sets it off! I can't wait to figure out how to kill that darn alarm.

Do you have any pet design peeves? If so, send them in and I might feature them here.

Conduit "creatures" that walk the beach

Leslie_Gordon — Tue, 22 Jan 2008 00:06:00 GMT

Day Three, live from SolidWorks World 2008:

Announced today at the opening session of the SolidWorks 2008 show was a new program called 3Dvia Composer -- formerly Seemage -- that Dassault recently purchased. It is a Web-based product that works with SolidWorks to deliver 3D content for non-engineering personnel such as marketing and sales.

A few customers highlighted in today's presentation include medical companies such as Still River Systems Inc, which makes proton therapy systems (used instead of the more-intrusive X-ray systems). The systems use particle-beam accelerators to fire electron in a precise manner towards tumors. Another one is Taga Innovations in Israel which designed a device called the "Rewalk." Quadriplegics can strap one on and walk for the first time in their lives.

Danny Forster from the Discovery Channel's Big it Builder show spoke on how as an architect he designs in nothing but 3D. One recent project was the Glenville Stadium in Arizona which has a retractable football field. This makes it easier to grow fresh grass on the field, as well as allows it to be used for activities other than football. In the past, stadiums were designed as a structure with the design then wrapped around it like wallpaper. It was decided that this building should look like a snake coiled on itself because of its desert surroundings and because the snake is the Patriots logo. So, the stadium was engineered as a hyperbolic curve bent in on itself.

But of all the presentations, the one that truly blew my mind was one from a kind of mad genius named Theo Jansen. He engineers "creatures" that live on the beach -- what he called "new forms of life not made of protein." The creatures' protein is cable conduit, while their "muscles" are conduit that pumps air into a soda bottle for reuse. "Nerve cells" made from inverters trigger the muscles. Three inverters make a dynamic system or a computer that is the beginnings of the brains of the animal. The creatures get their energy from the wind and do not have to compete for food. Jansen's vision is that they will eventually live on herds on the beach.

Check out this video of the incredible creatures.

A creature taking a nap

Big trends in the future of CAD

Leslie_Gordon — Mon, 21 Jan 2008 03:23:00 GMT

Day Two: Jeff Ray, CEO of SolidWorks, says the show has so far drawn 4,400 attendees. In the future, he wants to see more sharing between DS technologies and SolidWorks. He says software developers cannot afford to "fall in love with their own technologies." Companies should never think that they own customers. Nobody does. Customers can pick whatever they want whenever they want. Ray also says Latin America is SolidWorks' fastest region of growth, even faster than China.

Also speaking was an electrical systems teacher at Long Beach Community College who has his pre-engineering students design submersible robots in SolidWorks and enter them in robotic competitions. He thinks that human-intensive manufacturing is rapidly disappearing, but we should not be all doom and gloom -- there are plenty of rich opportunities in automation. People are needed to design, build, and install robots, as well as maintain them, for example. He says a recent graduate who knows more than just one thing, say, mechanical, electrical, hydraulics, and pneumatics, have their pick of high-paying jobs.

Ex-CEO and one of the founders of SolidWorks, Jon Hirschtik gave an interesting look CAD's 50-year history. It all started in 1963 with Ivan Sutherland who wrote his M.I.T. thesis on "SketchPad: A Man-Machine Graphical Communication System." Back then, he even discussed the idea of doing structural analysis in CAD and applying constraints to models -- unheard of at the time. Hirschtik says the 1070's brought 3D modeling research at Cambridge University. Research in using B-reps as the basis of CAD was underway. And Alan Grayer and Charles Lang helped write the ACIS and Parasolid kernels. The name "ACIS" came from its developers' initials: Alan Charles Ivan System. The 1970's also brought some of the first commercial applications such as Computer Vision, Cadam, and Applicon, and a Unigraphics CAD-CAM system called "The Total Solution." By the 1980's, second-generation CAD was coming along with CATIA in 1981, AutoCAD in 1983, and Pro/Engineer in 1987. SolidWorks was developed in 1993, and since that time, there have been 16 major releases.

Hirschtik also discussed what he thinks are the big trends in the future of CAD:

Hosted computing -- Applications run on Web sites, not on PCs. Only the Web browser runs locally. This is already being done extensively in other areas (e-mail, online banking, and Google Docs).

Open source -- The source code is open for anyone to change. If they do change it, they must implement the changes in the original code. Current examples include Linux, Apache, MySQL, OpenOffice, Firefox, and Apache.

Video game technology -- Graphics quality, 3D user interfaces, and physical simulations are all things that CAD will exploit more and more in the future.

Touch Interfaces -- Already big with the iPhone, Wii, and 3-axis mouse.

3D printing -- Can only get bigger in the future.

Do more design online, free

Leslie_Gordon — Sun, 13 Jan 2008 15:16:00 GMT

Web-based programs, downloadable software, and virtual worlds are now letting us do more and more, and all without shelling out a dime. For example, Web-based software such as Autodesk's Project Draw lets you create vector drawings for floor plans, electronic-cirtuit diagrams, user interface mockups, and the like. An intuitive interface makes using the drawing program a breeze. Just drag rectangles, ovals, and the like onto the workspace and use handles to strech and pull shapes. You can save your work in several editable formats on your server or the developer's. Export your diagrams as PDFs, JPGs, PNGs, and SVGs. At the bottom of this post is an example of a simple drawing I created in the software, which I saved on my local machine as a JPG.

SolidWorks Labs has a link to the developer's island on Second Life. I am still stuck on dial-up at home (yes, yikes!) and our company firewall won't let us interact with Second Life at work, so I can't yet explore this as much as I would like. I am ready though. My avatar's name is Pez Balut, and I am just about to purchase land so I can have a presence in the World. Are any of you active users of Second Life? If so, what do you think? Just email me or reply to this blog.

A nifty software package, available for free download is IBM Lotus Symphony. It's based on the Open Document Format (ODF) standard, so you're not locked into upgrades, proprietary file formats, and software licensing agreements. Included in the package are programs to create documents, presentations, and spreadsheets. I haven't tried the ones for presentations and spreadsheets, but the word processor is great. It has a clean, elegant, and easy-to-use UI. The software looks like Word, but better, and it works in a similar fashion.

Visual cues speak volumes

Leslie_Gordon — Wed, 15 Aug 2007 09:53:00 GMT

New, so-called direct manufacturing methods will soon let individuals make products at home using high-tech, smaller versions of industrial equipment. Smaller tool and die shops are now using laser sintering machines, previously the province only of large manufacturers, to "print" or build 3D parts directly from CAD models. Rust Belt methods are left in the dust as companies increasingly scramble to distinguish themselves from competitors. Design thus plays a more sophisticated role in developing products that will sell. In fact, the cover of a recent magazine* states, "Design drives spending, saving, and desire." Top better understand the subtleties of design, MACHINE DESIGN magazine now includes a monthly column covering topics on Industrial Design. Due to print soon, one column will report how "shape speaks a language that is understood on an instinctual level." In other words, visual cues speak volumes.

..........Innovative design might be a matter of targeting the primal brain?