''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 ...

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. ...

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 -- ...

Andrew Hargadon has innovation figured out. Hargadon, director of the Center for Entrepreneurship at UC Davis, has studied the way big-name innovators such as Edison and Ford were able to come up with a steady stream of noteworthy developments that rocked the world. Hargadon put his insights in a book called How Breakthroughs Happen: ...

Preseason football is on TV, the kids are getting ready for the school year, and theme parks are anticipating their final Labor Day crowds. It can only mean one thing: That’s right, the election season will soon be here. The top political issue facing the country these days is the economy. Many regions look with envy at hot-beds of ...

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, ...

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 ...

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 ...

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 ...

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 ...