s a m h o c h b e r g – m e t i c u l o u s l y r a n d o m i z e d

The Design Duo Behind Pink Floyd’s Iconic Aesthetic

samhochberg — Thu, 26 Jan 2023 18:57:42 +0000

Great music and great design? Yes, please.

Squaring the Circle (The Story of Hipgnosis) is a reasonably informative, if rather dry, look at a subject with much more potential for exploration.

From Squaring the Circle (The Story of Hipgnosis), dir. Anton Corbijn, 2022 (courtesy Anton Corbijn)

via Dan Schindel at Hyperallergic

SALT LAKE CITY — A narrow ray of light passes through a triangular prism, breaking into a rainbow. Two men in suits shake hands, seemingly oblivious to the fact that one of them is on fire. An enormous pig floats in the air above a power station. All these images from Pink Floyd album covers (The Dark Side of the Moon, Wish You Were Here, and Animals, respectively) have become pop culture icons, and all were created by the English design group Hipgnosis. Founded in 1970 by artists Storm Thorgerson and Aubrey “Po” Powell, the group would go on to work not just with Pink Floyd but also Led Zeppelin, Wings, AC/DC, Peter Gabriel, and many, many more musicians. Through these collaborations across the 1970s and early ’80s, their visual sensibility essentially became the aesthetic of rock music during that period. Now the documentary Squaring the Circle (The Story of Hipgnosis), currently playing at the Sundance Film Festival, delves into the group’s history.

For dedicated rock fans, few of the stories in this film are likely to be new. Thorgerson, Powell, and their contemporaries have told and retold them over the years. Powell appears, along with Paul McCartney, Robert Plant, Noel Gallagher, and others. The film is like a best-of compilation, supplemented by a wealth of behind-the-scenes pictures and footage. It’s fun to see the unused photos from the Wish You Were Here shoot, assembled in sequence to create almost an animation of the two men meeting on a studio backlot, or hear an explanation of the chemical process behind the color-changing cover of Led Zeppelin’s In Through the Out Door. These anecdotes provide helpful insights into the mundane logistics that often underlie fantastical imagery. It’s easy to see Pink Floyd’s Wish You Were Here cover and not consider the effort to find a stuntman willing to be set on fire. And we hear in full about the infamous fiasco during shooting at Battersea Power Station for the cover of Floyd’s Animals, in which the iconic pig balloon flew away from them.

Pink Floyd’s Wish You Were Here album cover (photo by the Montreal Concert Poster Archive via Flickr)

Structurally, though, the film is oddly clumsy in ways that typify documentaries steered by directors who are experienced in fiction films but venturing into nonfiction for the first time, as director Anton Corbijn is here. Multiple times, interview subjects point out the cleverness of the name “Hipgnosis,” in nearly identical ways. (It’s “hip” and new, plus “gnosis,” meaning “spiritual knowledge.” Get it? If you don’t, someone else will be sure to say it again.) One sequence featuring talking heads musing on contemporary album cover design versus Hipgnosis’s heyday feels natural to slot into the denouement, yet instead, it appears roughly in the middle of the runtime, making for a jarring chronological hop back and forth. The film also commits a cardinal nonfiction sin of employing animation to illustrate events with insufficient documentation, but only doing so sporadically, making these sections feel out of place.

Still, Corbijn comes from his own background in photography and art, and clearly has a warm rapport with his interviewees. The film is at its best when its relaxed, almost hangout-like mood results in entertaining asides. During a discussion of the cover for the Paul McCartney and Wings single “Getting Closer,” there’s an unexpected but wildly funny break in the flow when McCartney cannot recall that he ever put out a song with art featuring a man walking a lobster on a leash. (Lest any fans worry over his mental state, rest assured that he does eventually remember.) More moments like this would have been most welcome. As it stands, Squaring the Circle is a reasonably informative, if rather dry, look at a subject with much more potential for exploration.

Squaring the Circle (The Story of Hipgnosis) screens at the Sundance Film Festival through January 28.

A glossary of automotive design terms

samhochberg — Wed, 18 Jan 2023 20:17:24 +0000

Cars and Design – my kind of stuff!

via Sajeev Mehta at hagerty.com

This series has always been about elevating discussions about car design for all, specifically in a space more public than most car design websites. Along the way I’ve used words that aren’t exactly common knowledge, and I’ve even made my own two-word phrase that encapsulates an otherwise complicated design disappointment.

I do my best to avoid car-design jargon, but that only goes so far. Clearly, the time has come to create a glossary of terms used here in the Vellum Venom column.

Sajeev Mehta

But this ain’t no rehash of what you see on Wikipedia, as these are the terms I’ve referenced in Vellum Venom on a somewhat regular basis. Many are germane to design students and scholars, but this glossary aims to be a more casual collection of words that come to mind when I walk around a vehicle. One final point: This is a living document that will be amended as feedback requires.

Feel free to ask for more terms in the comments section! (Last updated: 1/17/23)

A

A-line: The line that creates the top half of a vehicle’s silhouette, regularly seen in “teaser” photos released by OEMs looking for a little promotion of a future product.

Axle: An imaginary line that starts from a wheel’s centerline and runs “through” the vehicle to the wheel on the opposite side.

A-pillar: When looking at a side view, the first roof pillar that helps frame the windshield. More info here.

Accommodation curve: When looking into an interior from the side, the arc in a seat’s back that ensures a comfortable distance between the chair and the pedals as the occupant moves the seat moves up or down.

Aerodynamics: The study of how air moves and influences a car’s performance, as a whole or at the component level.

Air dam: An aerodynamic panel added to the bottom of car’s front end to aid fuel economy and engine cooling.

Airfoil: The cross-sectional shape of a wing.

Aperture: An opening on a vehicle’s body. May be as small as a cooling duct or as big as the holes covered by doors/deck lid/hood.

Approach angle: The maximum angle a vehicle can climb without damaging the front bumper or front suspension.

Air curtains:Aerodynamic trick to reduce drag by directing air around the front wheels, often providing a marginal benefit to fuel economy.

See that vertical slot towards the outside edge of the front fender, below the headlight? Air curtain. Callaway

Art and Science: Marketing term for Cadillac’s angular design language, first seen on the 2002 CTS sedan.

Art Deco: A style of visual arts originating in France in the early 1900s that influenced cars like the Talbot-Lago.

Asymmetry: A lack of a mirror image when examining the front or rear of a design from its centerline. See Land Rover Discovery.

B

Backlight: The back glass of a vehicle’s greenhouse.

Baroque: A 17th century art movement characterized by ornate and excessive ornamentation. Used to describe design elements of luxury cars from multiple time periods.

Belt line: A horizontal line that separates a vehicle’s lower body from the side windows (see greenhouse).

B-pillar: The second pillar of a roof, when moving backward from a vehicle’s nose, after the A-pillar.

Benchmarking: Line drawings of a concept placed over a vehicle chosen to be the concept’s template for size and proportion.

Bevel: A hard-angled cut that adds slope to a component. See 1980s Lincoln Town Car.

Brand character: The visual building blocks of a design that signify a unique automotive brand. (See Hofmeister Kink.)

Bulkhead: A panel that separates a vehicle’s engine, passenger, and cargo compartments into distinct spaces.

Buttress: An angled panel that supports another design element, for visual or structural purposes (or both).

C

C-pillar: The third roof pillar, and the final one for conventional sedan and coupe body configurations. Learn more here.

Center High-Mount Stoplight (CHMSL): The third brake light set higher than those situated within the vehicle’s light assemblies at each corner at the rear.

That little red triangle tucked under the spoiler is the Kona N’s CHMSL. Hyundai

Cab-backward design: Styling notion to push the passenger compartment (cab) further away from a front-mounted engine. Stronger cab-backward designs are regularly seen as more prestigious than weaker implementations.

Cab-forward design: The opposite of cab backward, affording more passenger space at the expense of engine access, and commonly associated with dedicated fleet vehicles (vans, cab-over trucks) and the Chrysler LH platform.

Cant rail: The portion of the roof that connects the A, B, C, and D pillars (when applicable) to each other.

Centerline: A line that runs through the center of something, used as an aid to create a symmetric design at the front or back of a vehicle.

Center of gravity: A point at which the majority of a vehicle’s weight is concentrated.

Chamfer: A bevel designed to connect two disparate surfaces.

Character line: A line stamped into a panel to add visual interest or improve structural rigidity (or both).

Clamshell: A portal (normally a hood) that opens in the same manner as a clam, thereby drastically altering the shape of a traditional fender. See Kia Soul.

Coach light: Ornamental light normally placed on the B- or C-pillars of a roof.

Contrast: A visual difference in the appearance of distinct elements in a design. Adding more or less contrast changes the impact of a design.

Cowl: The base of the windshield, and a flashpoint of significant cost and functionality for modern car design.

Cut line: Any break in the body used to separate unique features like doors, hoods, trunks, bumpers, and fascias.

D

DLO FAIL: A lament for the proliferation of opaque plastic panels in lieu of glass, visually cheating the shape of a vehicle’s greenhouse. More info here.

DNA: see brand character.

Daylight Opening (DLO): The glass area of a vehicle’s greenhouse as seen from the side. More info here.

Dash-to-axle [ratio]: The distance between the centerline of the front wheel and the bottom of the windshield. More info here.

Deck lid: The horizontal plane of a conventional trunk on a sedan or coupe.

Deflector: See fairing.

Departure angle: The maximum angle a vehicle can descend without damaging the rear bumper or exhaust.

Dogleg: The part of the quarter panel behind the rear doors of a four-door vehicle, its relationship to the door and the rear wheel arch makes it resemble a dog’s hind legs.

Dog’s eye view: Photography term used to show what a vehicle looks like from a low vantage point.

Down-the-road Graphic (DRG): Recognizable front-end styling, intended to help market/promote a vehicle’s brand via visual recognition. Ex. BMW’s kidney grilles.

Downforce: The weight of air (and gravity) that pushes down on the front or rear of a vehicle at speed.

Diffuser: An aerodynamic panel at the bottom rear of a vehicle, designed to draw air out of from underneath to increase downforce.

Drag: The force of air pushing against a vehicle at speed. NASA calculates this by taking the “drag coefficient times the density (of the air), times half of the velocity squared, times the reference area (frontal area).”

Drag coefficient: A unitless number calculated to determine the resistance of a vehicle at speed. More info here.

E

Eight-bit design: Retro design implementing pixels in a style befitting digital creations of the 1980s. See the Hyundai Ioniq 5.

F

Fairing: a part that is added to a vehicle (or a vehicle accessory, like roof racks) to reduce aerodynamic drag or deflect wind.

Facade: architectural term for the face of a building, but can be used to describe customer-facing elements of automobile design.

Fascia: the facade of either the front or rear of a vehicle.

Fast back: an elongated C-pillar that shortens the length of the deck lid relative to other body styles available for the same car. See the 1966 Ford Mustang.

Fender: when viewed from the side, the body panel that normally covers the space between the front bumper and the front door.

Firewall: see bulkhead.

Flying Buttress: an angled support beam, popularized by the back pillars of the 2001 Chevrolet Avalanche.

Frontal Area: the area inside the shadow that’s made when shining a light at the front of a vehicle.

G

Greenhouse: the upper part of a vehicle’s body that houses the glass, and resembles a greenhouse for growing plants indoors.

Globalization: in terms of car design, a business concept stressing interchangeability of platforms and parts across the globe. See the Chevrolet Spark ACTIV.

Ground Effects: functional extensions added to the rocker panels to generate downforce via low pressure between the chassis and the ground, often complemented with downforce added by front and rear wings.

H

H-point: the point of a seated human’s hip in car, when viewed at the side of an interior space.

Hard point: location on a body that cannot be changed as per the functional requirements of the vehicle.

Hatchback: a two-box design with rear access via a lift-up access door. See the Porsche 928.

Header panel: structural assembly mounted above the front bumper, housing the headlights, grille, and often a front fascia.

Heckblende: German word that explains filler panels visually connecting the left and right taillight to make a full-length taillight. Often aftermarket for vintage vehicles, but also see the Porsche Taycan.

Hockey stick: a unique curve to the quarter window (where it meets the base of the C-pillar) on Saab products.

Horizon line: the line that separates the earth from the sky.

Hofmeister Kink: a unique bend on a quarter window (where it meets the base of the C-pillar) on BMW products.

Cameron Neveu

I

Impact structure: Crush space needed in a body for safety purposes, often related to front and rear overhangs seen in side view.

L

Laminar airflow: Streamlined flow whereby all air particles move at the same speed and direction.

Lift: The force acting to pull a vehicle off the ground at speed, either at the front or rear axle.

Liftback: see hatchback.

M

Marker light: An amber-colored light that does not flash and only exists for identification purposes.

Minimalism: A style of visual arts traced back to Japanese traditional notions, in which fewer elements make a design more valuable.

Modernism: A style of visual arts from the late 19th century that prioritizes the craftsmanship and style originating from changes found in the Industrial Age.

Molding: A protective or decorative trimming, most commonly seen as flexible strips placed along a vehicle’s sides.

N

NVH: Field of study aimed at reducing a vehicle’s Noise, Vibration, and Harshness characteristics, involving both engineers and designers.

Negative space: The area of a body that’s intentionally left empty. These can be functional (to improve aerodynamics, cooling) or ornamental (to reduce visual weight)

Neoclassic: Styling elements from the pre-WWI era but interpreted for contemporary times. See rococo and Zimmer Motor Cars.

O

Overhang: The part of the body that doesn’t reside within the wheelbase of the vehicle.

One-box design: When viewed from the side, a vehicle that incorporates passengers, cargo, and powertrain spaces within a single box. (Think of a city bus.)

Opera window: A decorative window added to the C-pillar. Primarily for rear seat occupant comfort, but can help reduce blind spots from larger C-pillars.

P

Parking light: See marker light.

Pillar: A vertical post that holds the roof above the body of a vehicle.

Pedestrian-friendly design: Originating from legislation in Europe that mandated a vehicle’s front end is shaped for pedestrian safety, and that hood height is tall enough to provide adequate space between a human body and the engine upon impact.

Perspective: The visualization of a 3-D form on a 2-D surface, with the assumption of a correct representation of all elements in the design.

Profile view: The side view of a vehicle.

Projector lens: A headlight assembly design that uses a focusing lens similar to that of the human eye.

Proportions: The interaction between individual styling elements either with the basic shape of a vehicle or amongst other elements in a smaller space. (Think headlight assemblies.) More info here.

Portholes: A round opening into which windows or cooling vents are implemented into the body.

Q

Quarter panel: When viewed from the side, the part of that body that fills the gap between the rear doors and the rear bumper.

Quarter window: Glass mounted at the trailing edge of the DLO, either in the C-pillar or in the rear door. Can be functional for cabin ventilation, or to aid in clearing window mechanisms in rear doors with irregular shapes.

R

Rake: The angle, measured from horizontal, of a design element when viewed from the side, most notably seen in windscreens and A and C pillars.

Reflector lens: Headlight design incorporating a complex reflector behind the light bulb to focus light into a beam.

Retro: A historical callback to vehicle design of the past, especially within the same brand as the vehicle in question.

Retrofuturism: A style of visual arts that depicts the future with elements of the past. Designer J. Mays applied this to the VW New Beetle, Audi TT, Ford Thunderbird, and others.

Audi

Rocker panel: The part of the body that’s below the doors.

Rococo: Art movement from the late Baroque period, often used as a pejorative for an overstyled element.

S

Sectional view: The shape of an object when a portion is cut out for easier visualization.

Shoulder line: A curve or bend along the body that provides visual separation on par with the way that broad shoulders separate an arm from the body. See 2000 Volvo S60 (below).

Volvo

Signal light: A light that both flashes to indicate turning and softly illuminates like a marker light.

Surfacing: The act of contouring a flat piece of sheetmetal for visual or functional enhancement (or both). Popularized by Chris Bangle’s flame surfacing during his tenure at BMW.

Swage line: See character line.

Splitter: A front valance that extends farther forward than conventional air dams, pushing higher pressure air over the car to increase downforce at speed.

Spoiler: A barrier mounted on the rear deck with the purpose of directing air up and away from the car, reducing lift and preventing the turbulence that occurs when high and low pressure air interact behind the car. Not to be confused with a wing.

Streamline: The act of lowering the resistance of a design to aerodynamic drag by removing superfluous elements.

Streamline Moderne: A style of visual arts that “streamlined” Art Deco designs to make them more aerodynamic. See the Cord 810/812.

Sajeev Mehta

Symmetry: A mirror image of lines facing each other when comparing the left and the right side of an object relative to its centerline.

T

Texture: The look and feel of a surface, usually pertaining to unpainted trim on SUVs and off-road vehicles.

Tumblehome: A nautical design term applied to show the inward tapering of a greenhouse from the beltline to the top, when viewed from the front or rear of the vehicle.

Three-box design: When viewed from the side, a vehicle that houses passengers, cargo and the powertrain in individual boxes spaces within a single box. See the Ford Crown Victoria sedan.

Three-quarter view: Vantage point that’s halfway between the profile and the front (or rear) of the vehicle.

Two-box design: When viewed from the side, a vehicle that incorporates passengers and cargo in a singular box, with the powertrain in another box. See the Range Rover.

Turbulent airflow: Inconsistent speeds and directions in an airflow, the opposite of laminar airflow.

U

Underbody: Bottom of the vehicle, whose design is crucial to increasing aerodynamics, lowering NVH, and optimizing packaging guidelines.

Unibody: Chassis type that integrates both the structural frame and the body into a single, unitized, design.

V

Valance: Bumper extension that routes air like an air dam, but generally better integrated into a vehicle’s overall front end design.

Vanishing point: A point out in space where seemingly parallel or unrelated lines on a car would converge, if extended past the body.

Volumes: The basic shape of a vehicle, the outline of the body work when seen from the side. More info here.

Venturi Effect: An increase in speed when air is forced through a smaller space, with the result of lower air pressure for more downforce. See the rear section of the Ford GT.

Vent window: Moving glass panes attached to the front doors to aid in air circulation inside the cabin. Mostly seen on older cars, but the 2013 Ford Fusion had non-functional vent windows.

Visual weight: The force of an element within a vehicle that ultimately catches the viewer’s eye, thus altering the balance of a design. See the deck lid of the Continental Mark IV.

Vortex: Airflow pattern where the air rotates around its centerline.

Vortex generators: Small aerodynamic design feature that creates a vortex, when used in a series can reduce drag on a body panel or wing.

W

Wedge: When looking at the side view, the overall rake of the A-line from front to rear. Most vehicles have a taller rear, making a positive slope to the wedge.

Wedge design: Minimalist styling originating from Italian design studios of the 1970s, featuring literal wedge shapes. See the Lancia Stratos HF Zero.

Wheel well: The area housing a vehicle’s wheel, often lined with plastic, with or without enhancements like air curtains.

Wheelbase: Measurement of the space between the axles of a vehicle. More info here.

Wing: Often located significantly higher above the deck lid than a spoiler, it deflects air upward to increase downforce. See the McLaren Senna.

Online CAD Conference Burnout

samhochberg — Wed, 27 Oct 2021 13:00:00 +0000

Solidworks ceo Gian Paolo Bassi on the virtual stage

I used to love, love, love the annual CAD reseller/user conferences, be it Dassault Systemes, Autodesk, or PTC, all of whose dealer channels I have worked in. The networking, the inspirational testimonials, the obligatory evenings spent bonding with one’s peers…

Until this year, when I’ve only been able to attend them online. At first I was disappointed, and then I realized:

I can “attend” more keynotes and breakouts than ever.

I can watch (or re-watch) replays, as my schedule best fits.

Here’s a great take over at Ralph Grabowski’s World CAD Access on the topic. What do you think?

Fiat’s Rooftop Race Track

samhochberg — Wed, 06 Oct 2021 13:00:00 +0000

When it was built in the 1920s in Turin, Italy, the Fiat factory was designed with a racetrack on the top of the building, both for car testing purposes and for racing.

The factory’s best-known symbol is the test track, which is a superb piece of design modeling, and construction that occupies the whole roof surface of the workshops. Two 443 meters straights, joined by parabolic bends, form a continuous track for testing the cars.
Originally, as soon as the cars left the assembly lines they could flow directly upward to the test track through the snail-shaped ramps completing the whole processing cycle inside the factory. Moreover, these spiraling ramps inside the building allowed the cars to be driven back down and into showrooms.

The track was a little over 1/2 mile long. Many more views at Rare Historical Photos. (via @laxgani)

via kottke.org

AI Generated Movie Posters

samhochberg — Wed, 22 Sep 2021 16:26:56 +0000

Noah Veltman fed an AI movie descriptions and made it generate images. The results are in quiz form so that you can guess the movies. I would give myself a poor rating for guessing the movies, but once you see the answer, you’re like oh yeah of course.

Veltman used VQGAN+CLIP, which you can find out more about here.

Via Flowing Data

iPhone Photographer of the Year Contest

samhochberg — Fri, 30 Jul 2021 13:33:18 +0000

Jeff Rayner
United States
3rd Place

Is the iPhone more capable than one might think? Or does photographic talent transcend equipment? Here is the full list of winners.

The end of another semester

samhochberg — Wed, 12 May 2021 20:01:19 +0000

It was recently Teacher’s Day and many social media posts implored people to remember or post about a particularly inspiring teacher they’d once had. I have a few stand-outs; those that gave me confidence, the math teacher who clarified order of operations for me, the engineering teacher who insisted the most important professional skill was the art of dining out in fine restaurants. I could go on. Most of the teachers I am remembering are no longer alive or at least well into retirement, and LinkedIn searches have proved unsatisfactory.

I have enjoyed being an adjunct faculty member in addition to my day job; in fact this was the first year I was able to teach both Fall and Spring semesters, often with the same students in both classes. Admittedly, what I teach can, from a distance, seem very dry (“Introduction to” and “Advanced Parametric Design using @SOLIDWORKS” at @Waubonsee Community College). My classes offer a wider group of students than one might expect…traditional students, returning adults, creatives, engineering management, career changers of all ages…all with their own interesting stories (I always considered myself a non-traditional student but that’s another story for another day).

I try to motivate and inspire as well as train. I try to share more intangibles than the textbook provides. I try to make it fun.

I am certainly willing to stay in touch with my former students, and help them in the ways that I can…advice, resume review, industry connections, etc. Only a small percent really take me up on that offer. I truly love hearing of their updates on LinkedIn or through other channels.

Yet, there are so many connections and interdependencies in life we don’t see. Maybe, just maybe, on some future Teacher’s Day, I will be the one remembered.

What will it be like when we go back to the office?

samhochberg — Thu, 04 Mar 2021 19:41:53 +0000

Some people are sick of working from home, but the office they remember is very different from the one they will return to.

If absence makes the heart grow fonder, what will a pandemic sabbatical do to your feelings about the office? You may miss the way you set up your cubicle, recall fondly the water cooler conversations, or can’t wait to use the office printer again. But for as long as COVID-19 remains a threat, and possibly even after most people are vaccinated, office life will be very different from what it was before the global pandemic.

To understand what that might feel like, we spoke to some experts on work and workspaces who predicted that social distancing measures and hybrid work models are here to stay. Walk through our simulations below to experience what going back to the old/new office might be like. Make sure to avoid contact with others along the way!

Click here to continue, via Sarah Slobin and Feilding Cage at Reuters.com

Where is AR/VR headed?

samhochberg — Wed, 17 Feb 2021 19:54:21 +0000

via solidworks.com

A view on where AR/VR is headed, roundtable discussion from those who know

via Leslie Langnau at 3D CAD World

Recently, Ron Fritz, CEO of Tech Soft 3D, hosted a roundtable discussion with five other industry executives to discuss the current state of augmented reality (AR) and virtual reality (VR). The core question at hand: whether AR/VR is finally poised for its breakthrough moment – and if so, what barriers might need to be removed to usher in this new era.

The participants included:

– Asif Rana, COO of Hexagon, a provider of sensor, software, and autonomous solutions

– Martin Herdina, CEO of Wikitude, an augmented reality technology company

– Susanna Holt,VP Forge Platform, Autodesk, a provider of 3D design and engineering software

– Thomas Schuler, CEO of Halocline, a developer of VR products for production planning and manufacturing

– Tony Fernandez, CEO of UEGroup, a user experience agency

A lightly edited and condensed version of the conversation and their unique perspectives follows.

Q: At various points over the past decade, many of us have believed that AR/VR was ready to really take off in the industrial setting – but it hasn’t happened yet. What are the barriers that are standing in the way of that widespread adoption, and what should the industry be focusing on?

Asif: One of the fundamental things that we tend to forget when we think about commercializing a technology is the user experience. I think one of the main hurdles of AR/VR in the commercial usage is we don’t think about the full user journey or what the full end-to-end solution looks like.

Martin: For a while, there was such a focus on technical benchmarks that nobody really talked about what could be achieved with AR/VR. Even when people did start to talk about what could be achieved, they didn’t really look at the full picture and at how things could be scaled beyond a single isolated use case. As long as that underlying basis is missing, widespread adoption of AR/VR will be hampered.

Susanna: I think one thing that’s lacking around AR/VR is pre-processing of data and data preparation – from CAD design data, to mesh poly count reduction. That kind of stuff needs to be automated, robust, fast, and scalable. And at the moment, all of that still seems to require too much manual work to really enable this AR/VR takeoff that we’ve been anticipating for the past 20 years.

Tony: I think the core issue is that AR/VR did not emerge from a human-centered point of view. It emerged from a technological exploration point of view. And what that has meant is that the human factors of this technology are terrible.

To take the case of VR: Who thought it was going to be a great idea to duct tape a TV to your head and blindfold you? Meanwhile, with AR, one of the problems that we continually run into is arm and body fatigue from having to hold up a device. Because AR/VR technology hasn’t centered around the reality of the human body, how it gets fatigued, and how people feel motivated to use their bodies, it will continue to have a difficult time breaking through to the mainstream, regardless of the value proposition it may offer.

Q: From what everyone’s saying, it seems that the user experience is one of the big barriers to mainstream adoption. What needs to be different for people to feel comfortable? How can companies remove this barrier?

Tony: I think mobile AR is a really difficult problem to solve. And again, part of the problem with most existing AR solutions is that they require people to use their bodies in unnatural ways. From a hardware perspective, we’re going to be much closer to solving that problem once we get to some sort of compact glasses. Of course, glasses come with their own problems around power and where to place the battery and so on. But I think that’s what AR’s waiting for, in terms of a hardware platform solution.

Asif: I wonder whether there are the same expectations on an enterprise level as at a consumer level for AR/VR. I say that because in the enterprise, you do see technology that’s not so comfortable to use – but it delivers such a high value that it’s used anyways. So, perhaps the AR/VR hardware is “good enough,” and it’s the content side that deserves more focus to deliver applications that can really make an impact and deliver value. Either way, I’d say that if the hardware companies focused on more business cases, that would be helpful to the enterprise sector.

Susanna: It’s true that the enterprise use case may put up with all sorts of inconveniences. But when I think of a use case for us at Autodesk, which might be an architect or structural engineer at a construction site or building site, inconvenience can quickly become a safety concern. AR provides a limited field of vision. In normal life, we don’t just look straight ahead – we’re constantly taking in things occurring on the periphery. Excluding that visual information in a potentially dangerous environment like a construction site does strike me as a risk factor. So, the hardware has to be natural to the way we conduct ourselves as humans in a particular environment.

Martin: I think the most important point that people have hit on is that things have to feel natural. When you wear a HoloLens, it’s cool, but it’s nothing that you would want to wear for 10 hours per day at your workspace. Another aspect that companies should address is the fact that so many AR use cases totally lack context. For example, why would you use AR to project a team roster on your desk when there are so many other user interfaces that make so much more sense for that objective? AR needs to really link reality to a reasonable set of content.

Q: Lots of big names – including Google, Apple, Facebook, and Microsoft, to name a few – are heavily investing in the belief that the barriers around AR/VR adoption are being resolved and that this an area that is ripe for explosion. All of your companies are, to varying degrees, investing in that belief as well. What makes you optimistic that AR/VR is getting close to a real breakthrough? What drives your confidence?

Thomas: It takes a long time to bring hardware technology from an early prototype to a usable product. You have to really keep at it for quite some time. What makes me optimistic is that the hardware vendors are still investing in it and pushing it forward – they’re not standing still.

At the same time, more and more content is now being produced that makes more sense. I think more people understand now that you need a different set of tools for AR or VR rather than taking the same old tools that you had before, but just manipulating them differently. So, while the progress might be slower than everyone expected, that progress is very much ongoing. That makes me optimistic that we are on an eventual path towards more widespread adoption for AR/VR.

Susanna: Well, let me turn this question the other way around. We’re hearing so much from our customers about how AR or VR is needed and how they’re expecting it to play a bigger role in their workflows. Some of that, of course, is a reflection of hype that they see in the media, but a significant proportion of it is a reflection of real need.

For example, while wearing a HoloLens headset might be uncomfortable today, it does allow you to make those important decisions much faster than having to look at something, take a photograph, go back to the office, think it through, discuss it, and so on. It will speed everything up. It’s about faster decisions, better decisions. There’s a real need in the market – so that bodes quite well for AR/VR, because a lot of technological advancement and evolution is driven by market need.

Tony: I would say AR/VR will break through if it can focus on its fundamental promise, which is to reveal information and perspectives in ways that would be difficult to do any other way. I’m not necessarily a believer that the way most companies have defined AR at this point is necessarily the path forward. For example, AR doesn’t necessarily always have to be visual in nature, right? It can be haptic in nature. It can be lots of other things. But visual is the primary road for now, and I think the need to visualize information that is otherwise difficult to do any other way or get access to any other way is going to drive the solution.

Martin: At my company, we perhaps have a unique perspective, because we have thousands of developers using our tools on a daily basis to create AR use cases, and we can see what those people are working on. The things they are doing today with AR are substantially different from what we saw two or three years ago. There are still people working on proof of concepts, but the number of people who are moving from POC to commercial grade installations – and the number of use cases we see that are no longer for two or three or five users, but 10,000 to 20,000 users – has rapidly increased in the past year.

Also, from a finance perspective, AR is no longer tapping into the budgets of the innovation units – it’s tapping into the budgets of the actual business units. That’s the ultimate sign that technologies like AR/VR are starting to take hold in the enterprise space.

Asif: There are at least three reasons why I’m very feeling positive about AR/VR. The first is the acceleration of digitalization that has taken place as a result of the COVID-19 pandemic. Many, many systems are getting digitally transformed, and digital journeys that might have taken years to complete are now on the fast track. So, the ground is really set for AR to make a move.

The second reason is that digital process management has really evolved. The journey really starts with connectivity first, then it goes to the integration, then it goes to the digital workflows. Once you have the workflow, to augment the workflow with AR is very straightforward.

The third reason is the advent and proliferation of smartphones and tablets that are loaded with the sensors and features that are required for AR/VR. These devices are now at everyone’s fingertips, ready to be used for various advanced workflows. So, really, I think the time is very, very good right now for AR/VR.

Unemployment and Occupation

samhochberg — Wed, 16 Dec 2020 14:00:00 +0000

Fascinating Beeswarm/Moving Bubble chart at Flowing Data illustrating unemployment trends by occupation over the last year. Love these methods of data visualization.

Unemployment is still higher than usual, and as you probably know, the shutdowns nationwide have affected industries differently. We could look at unemployment for just this year, but it’s more useful to see what the rate was for last year and compare it to this year. This gives us a baseline to compare against.

The over-the-top space fashions of the original Star Trek

samhochberg — Wed, 18 Nov 2020 14:00:00 +0000

I guess these cornball Star Trek articles have been jumping out at me lately…

It’s long been a joke that the formula for generating aliens on Star Trek is to give a bipedal humanoid a weird prosthetic forehead. And non-human ears.

Star Trek: The Original Series, very much a product of the 60s, followed another formula for the fashions of futurity and alienation. For women, it was bullet bras, beehive hairdos, hemlines all the way to the Orion belt, and miles of pastel-colored chiffon caftans. For men it was varying-lengths of bell bottom pants, silvery tunic tops, and silly hats.

Slap on a prosthetic forehead and some rubber ears… Aliens.

See more costumes in this MeTV piece. And this piece on ScreenRants.

via BoingBoing

Data visualization in virtual reality

samhochberg — Thu, 22 Oct 2020 13:00:00 +0000

Virtual reality helps us to picture what can’t actually be seen…

Virtual reality puts you in a digital world that can feel like a real world when it’s done right. Research from Benjamin Lee, et al. explored some of the possibilities in work they’re calling data visceralation.

As a proof of concept, shown in the video above, the researchers recreated popular works for virtual reality. Watch Olympic runners sprint past you or look up at the comparison of the world’s tallest buildings.

The goal is essentially to make the abstract shapes or data points feel more real. Looks promising.

By the way, this work is going to be presented at VIS 2020, which will be virtual and free to attend this year. If you’re interested in poking your head in, but don’t know where to start, Robert Kosara wrote an outsider’s guide to the conference to point you in the right direction.

via Flowing Data

Typography and Star Trek

samhochberg — Thu, 24 Sep 2020 13:00:00 +0000

In a lengthy excerpt from his book Typeset in the Future: Typography and Design in Science Fiction Movies, Dave Addey speaks on the typography and design of Star Trek: The Motion Picture (and Trek in general).

If you’re a fan of Star Trek: The Original Series, you might be expecting to see the font from its opening titles in Star Trek: The Motion Picture too. This font was (perhaps unsurprisingly) called Star Trek, though its modern-day digital version is known as Horizon, and is available only in non-italic form:

Read the rest of the article here…

Porsche is 3D printing pistons

samhochberg — Thu, 27 Aug 2020 13:00:00 +0000

3D printing technology is already used at the sports car manufacturer in prototype construction, manufacturing spare parts for classic sports cars as well as in other areas.

For the first time, the pistons for the high-performance engine of the 911 flagship model, the GT2 RS, are now being produced with a 3D printer.

3D printing allows the pistons to be manufactured with a structure that is optimised for the loads acting on the pistons. As a result, the pistons from the advance development project weigh ten percent less than the forged series production pistons. They also have an integrated and closed cooling duct in the piston crown that could not have been produced by conventional methods. “Thanks to the new, lighter pistons, we can increase the engine speed, lower the temperature load on the pistons and optimise combustion,” explains Frank Ickinger from the advance drive development department at Porsche. “This makes it possible to get up to 30 PS more power from the 700 PS biturbo engine, while at the same time improving efficiency.”

More at Porsche.com

Why Should We Sacrifice Great #Design As We Age?

samhochberg — Tue, 21 Jul 2020 18:30:14 +0000

How a failed shopping trip for their mum inspired Suse and Anne Costello to launch an elder-design revolution.

Finding a cup that can be easily and elegantly held by older, uncertain hands—that was the mission of English sisters Susan (“Suse”) and Anne Costello who, in 2016, began their search for a two-handled cup able to support their 82-year-old mother’s unstable grip. Their quest would span years, bringing the pair from High Street to the outer reaches of the internet in a futile search for elder-sensitive design that would also be visually compelling. “We were genuinely shocked by the quality of the products available, and the generally low standard of merchandising,” explained Suse, a seasoned design professional, by phone from Hackney in London. “When we started looking at the landscape, we realized that these products were often poorly made, poorly designed, and the way they were being sold and merchandised was appalling—no thought whatsoever!” Feeling that discerning consumers deserved better, she and Anne conceptualized Eyra, a design platform that would showcase goods and products designed specifically for visually discriminating older users. This month, the team launches with a series of uniquely angled handles and kitchen utensils created in collaboration with famed British industrial designer Sebastian Conran, now available on Kickstarter.

Necessary beginnings

Before Eyra, Suse had worked for decades in the design industry, starting at famed branding agency Wolff Olins before moving on to roles as a digital development director and marketing consultant for luxury consumer and elite sportswear firms. She’d never given much thought to designing for the 60-and-over crowd who, incidentally, are also frequently overlooked by advertisers and brands. Seeing her mother, known for her exquisite taste and refined aesthetic sense, consigned to a world of plastic and generic goods, Suse sensed an opportunity to do something meaningful in the retail sector. Along with Anne, whose decades of experience as the operations and resource director at THIN (a medical research firm) had given her a sixth sense for medical systems and standards, they committed to creating a functional but visually striking line of senior-oriented products.https://tpc.googlesyndication.com/safeframe/1-0-37/html/container.html

“As you age, things that would be easy to do daily become harder,” laments Suse, referring to mundane tasks like opening jars, getting in and out of chairs, and even “holding steady on your feet.” But many of the products for this market are not only standard issue, but bulky and unnecessary. “You notice that older people’s homes tend to get cluttered with stuff—things that occupational therapists, well-meaning friends and family give them, or their doctors advise them to have around. These are the things people feel they have to have—but do they want to have them?” She questions the adverse mental and physical health effects of being surrounded by terminal drabness. “The items we surround ourselves with contribute to our well being,” she adds. “Beautiful things make us happy, and the reverse is also true. If you spent your younger life around beautiful things, why would you now want to be surrounded by so much beige?”

Design hunting

To create Eyra, the pair drew on a range of inspirations, from Lanzavecchia + Wai’s ‘No Country for Old Men’ walking cane line to scouting trips at Naidex (Europe’s biggest trade fair for Daily Living Aids) and Rehacare. But the ‘New Old’ exhibition at the Design Museum, featuring design that enhances the “experience of our later lives,” was a powerful influence. The show introduced the pair to the higher end of healthcare design with pieces like Priestman Goode’s Scooter for Life, Paro’s robotic seal, the Aura Power Suit by Yves Behar, and MiRo by Sebastian Conran, their future collaborator.

Suse later met Conran at an industry event where the two bonded over their mutual interests. Conran, who had previously worked at Mothercare, a one-stop-shop for “beginning of life” goods, had cut his teeth designing for babies and toddlers, and now hoped to create a brand aimed at older consumers. For his Eyra collection, Conran created a pasta grabber, a serving spoon, a spatula, and a slotted spoon, and he’s currently working on a set of tableware, a chopping board and, yes, a cup with two handles for older hands.

To round out the team, the Costello sisters enlisted Eve O’Sullivan, an occupational therapist, for critical input. Eve, who works in client-centered rehabilitation for the elderly and people with life-changing neurological conditions, had previously noticed that her clients were always looking for better-designed products, often refusing to use items which, although necessary, were at odds with their personal visual aesthetic. Many of Eyra’s modifications come out of this collaboration, including a magnetic rack meant for easy retrieval, and utensils designed specifically for those with reduced mobility in their hands and wrists. The handles of the utensils, optimally shaped and weighted, are coated with a soft rubber specifically chosen for its anti-slip properties.

Eyra’s kitchen utensils are user friendly for older people.

More than just aging “gracefully”

The team launched with these utilitarian products feeling they could be useful to a wider market—not just those experiencing difficulty with their hands. On the horizon, Eyra has several new kitchenware projects planned with established creators and product designers. Ultimately, they want their products to be judged as beautiful objects of art, not merely as practical aids. “Becoming older doesn’t mean losing our sense of style,” Suse explained, “our ability to express ourselves creatively grows with age. This is why artists don’t retire! They continue to express themselves creatively, as I think one does as one gets older and, in fact, probably even more so.” She points to brand inspirations Iggy Pop, Mick Jagger, and Vivian Westwood as her ideal users. “If you are the kind of person who has surrounded yourself with things of quality in your life, then it makes sense that you would continue to do that as you age.” Ultimately, she believes great design not only enhances our lives but infuses them with joy. “Beautiful things make you happy, and ugly things make you sad and depressed. It’s all a bit Marie Kondo, isn’t it?”

Eyra is live on Kickstarter through July 30, 2020.

—Laura Feinstein via Core77

How COVID-19 Will Influence Car Design

samhochberg — Thu, 18 Jun 2020 14:00:39 +0000

“COVID-19 will very much influence the way we design our cars in future,” Karim Habib, Kia’s new design chief, told Car Magazine. Specifically, it might halt what was previously a foregone inclusion: “For the last few years we have been talking about a sharing economy, shared mobility and public transportation,” Habib says. “We will have to see how that develops right now, because of social distancing.

“These new requirements will have a long-term effect on behaviour. What does this mean for cars? I think we’ll have to wait and see – right now we are trying to expand our understanding of what this might mean – not only the types of vehicles we drive, but also how to design vehicles for shared mobility, or not, as the case may be.”

On a more prosaic level, Hyundai–which was already using antimicrobial paints and materials on their interiors prior to the pandemic–revealed that they’re “developing self-sterilizing materials to maintain clean, antiviral, and antibacterial cabins,” and also “about to use UV light sterilization technology on their vehicles.

“Direct UV rays are well known to be harmful to human skin, so the feature should be activated while no one is in the car. It would be ideal and effective when the device is on the ceiling because it could sterilize the seats, floor mats, dashboard, and the steering wheel all at the same time.”

Ford has yet another approach. As Autoblog reports, Ford recently rolled out a software update for all of its Police Interceptor Utility vehicles dating back to 2013. When the vehicle is empty, the heater bakes the car to more than 133 degrees for 15 minutes, which “lowers the viral concentration by greater than 99% on interior surfaces and materials.” The car flashes its exterior lights during the heating process, as a warning not to enter.

The company says they plan to roll the software out to other vehicle models–thus far, police-kitted vehicles only. No word on when the technology will be made available to civilians.

via Rain Noe at Core77

While away those stay-at-home hours… The British Museum has made over 1.9 million photos of its collections freely available to the public.

samhochberg — Thu, 30 Apr 2020 13:00:57 +0000

Get closer to the British Museum’s collection and immerse yourself in two million years of history, across six continents.

Collection online has been completely redeveloped, making it much easier to find what you want. It allows access to almost four and a half million objects in more than two million records. The search is more intuitive and now offers suggestions as you type.

High definition images can be enlarged and examined in detail which will enable you to view the incredible workmanship on the Royal Game of Ur, the intricate carving on this African hunting horn, the amazingly preserved deerskin map from North America, or this delightful drawing by Raphael of an old man’s head – just a few of the thousands of highlights to discover.

Enjoy exploring the collection – from some of the earliest objects created by humankind to works by contemporary artists. Or choose from the curated collections below, which reveal the fascinating stories that transcend time.

See https://www.britishmuseum.org/collection

The Dark Art of Cutaway Drawings

samhochberg — Wed, 08 Apr 2020 13:00:01 +0000

Technical illustrations give us a glimpse at the bones of our favorite machines. It’s why we feature such drawings on these pages, and why Jim Hatch has spent 30 years creating similar illustrations for clients in the automotive and motorcycle industries.

The New Jersey native attended the Otis-Parsons School of Design in Los Angeles (now the Otis College of Art and Design). A professor there introduced him to Kevin Hulsey, a titan of technical automotive illustration. “[Hulsey] gave me a test to take home. He said, ‘Copy this and bring it back,’ so I did. I didn’t know it at the time, but that was actually a job interview.” During his senior year, Hatch worked as Hulsey’s assistant, going full-time when he graduated in 1991.

“Everything was done by hand. There were no computers,” he said. “I would ink everything on a big board with a pen and Kevin would airbrush everything.”

Hatch later joined the team that helped create Los Angeles’s Petersen Automotive Museum, serving as an art director and illustrator and taking full advantage of the cars at his disposal. At the Petersen, “I would wait until everyone went home. Then I would go down and pick a car that I liked, I’d wheel it out into the open, and I’d take it apart without anyone knowing.”

One of those machines was a Nissan IMSA GTP prototype. “That car was the first one [where] it all kind of came together. Not only did it come out good, but it kind of launched how [I was] going to do this.”

The Nissan drawing was done with pen, paper, and paint, but by the time he left the Petersen, Hatch had switched tools. “The museum hired a graphic designer, and he came in with a computer, and said, ‘You should look at this.’ So he went home one night and I jumped on his computer and actually created a poster. From there, I was pretty much completely digital.”

The switch made life easier. “Because everything was done by hand, we took a lot of care in each line, line weight, how the lines look, and I think that transfers over very nicely into digital,” he added. “It’s all the same even though you’re using different tools.”

Coloring, too, has become much easier. “I’ll paint [the drawing] in Photoshop, but it is sort of a by-hand process,” he says. “The freedom of that part is amazing. I used to airbrush, and it was just a horrible process. You’d spill the paint, and you’d run out of air. It was just a mess.”

Hatch currently works on a Wacom Tablet and an Apple iMac Pro. The actual hardware he employs hasn’t changed much, but software technology has advanced rapidly in the last 22 years. “It’s the speed… the stability of it,” he says. “Back in the day, if you wanted to undo something in Photoshop, it could take a few minutes to wait. Now, it’s like a millisecond.”

To create his illustrations, Hatch starts with whatever source material he can get. This ideally means having the subject on hand, but digital files from engineers or photography will also do the trick. He likes to work with the people behind the products, he says.

“It’s cool to talk to the engineers and get their thoughts. To be that involved, not only do you get better art, it just makes sense.”

Even in the age of virtual reality and 3-D modeling, those insights are what keep us coming back to cutaways. The human touches at the heart of every machine.

“In the world of 3-D and CAD, people are looking for a bit of a different style,” Hatch says. “That’s kind of where I fit in.”

via Road & Track

This story originally appeared in the February 2020 issue of Road & Track.

Smithsonian Releases 2.8 Million Images And 3D Models Into Public Domain

samhochberg — Wed, 25 Mar 2020 13:00:49 +0000

The launch of a new open access platform ushers in a new era of accessibility for the Institution

Culture connoisseurs, rejoice: The Smithsonian Institution is inviting the world to engage with its vast repository of resources like never before.

For the first time in its 174-year history, the Smithsonian has released 2.8 million high-resolution two- and three-dimensional images from across its collections onto an open access online platform for patrons to peruse and download free of charge. Featuring data and material from all 19 Smithsonian museums, nine research centers, libraries, archives and the National Zoo, the new digital depot encourages the public to not just view its contents, but use, reuse and transform them into just about anything they choose—be it a postcard, a beer koozie or a pair of bootie shorts.

And this gargantuan data dump is just the beginning. Throughout the rest of 2020, the Smithsonian will be rolling out another 200,000 or so images, with more to come as the Institution continues to digitize its collection of 155 million items and counting.

Full article at Smithsonianmag.com

Read my latest #SOLIDWORKS #Composer #CAD blog on #3D model rendering

samhochberg — Fri, 13 Mar 2020 13:00:43 +0000

Read my latest #SOLIDWORKS #Composer #CAD blog on #3D model rendering at the GSC website. https://t.co/DwX75W2o2w

— Sam Hochberg (@SamHochberg) March 12, 2020

Parametric Modeling: still going strong thirty-one years on

samhochberg — Wed, 26 Feb 2020 19:52:07 +0000

To get to parametric modeling and to the newer direct modeling, CAD has undergone such radical changes as to make the early systems look unrecognizable to today’s engineers. Here’s a quick review.

Last year, parametric modeling turned thirty.

“Parametric modeling made solid modeling practical for the first time and was a huge time saver,” says Jon Hirschtick, chief executive officer at OnShape, a CAD software company. “The beauty of feature-based parametric modeling was that engineers could create solid models with an ordered list of understandable modeling features like sketch, extrude, fillet, and shell. By changing dimension values—or adding, editing, reordering or deleting features—a solid part’s geometry would automatically update,” he says.

Now, direct modeling has joined parametric design as a model-building maneuver, and other techniques join their repertoire. Yet, parametric modeling continues to roll along. Mostly because, as Hirschtick points out, it works well.

To get to parametric modeling and to the newer direct modeling, CAD has undergone such radical changes as to make the early systems look unrecognizable to today’s engineers.

With the kinds of advances Hirschtick and others have made to CAD software through the years, it sometimes can be difficult to remember the technology has only been around since the 1960s, and parametric modeling since 1988.

The Wayback Machine
Ivan Sutherland is often credited with creating the modern graphical user interface and kicking off CAD. He essentially came up with the idea of drawing on a screen.

In 1963 while still a Ph.D. student at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Sutherland created his Sketchpad system, the first program to use a graphical user interface to interact with users. The program comprised an x-y plotter display and the recently invented light pen, a computer-input device shaped like a wand.

Ivan Sutherland created his Sketchpad system, the first program to use a graphical user interface to interact with users in 1963. The program comprised an x-y plotter display and the recently invented light pen, a computer-input device shaped like a wand.

“In the past, we have been writing letters to, rather than conferring with, our computers,” Sutherland wrote in his thesis. “For many types of communication, such as describing the shape of a mechanical part or the connections of an electrical circuit, typed statements can prove cumbersome. The Sketchpad system, by eliminating typed statements in favor of line drawings, opens up a new area of man-machine communication.”

Sutherland’s system displayed vector graphics rather than the raster graphics we’re used to today. Sketchpad users controlled the cathode ray tube’s electron beam via light pen to draw vectors on screen, creating shapes line by line. It was like operating a ray gun. You’d turn it on, draw a line, turn it off, move to the next point, and turn it on again in a process not entirely unlike the workings of an Etch-a-Sketch (which is, in fact, a simplified vector plotter), says Bernhard Bettig, a mechanical engineering professor at the West Virginia University who has taught a course on CAD history.

The phosphate that displayed the drawings tended to fade so users had to continually refresh the display. With very complicated displays they’d have to refresh often, he says. “And the system blinked a lot and when you got really complicated, you got a lot of blinking,” Bettig says. “But you still had lines on a screen, so it was a big deal.”

The systems allowed engineers to work out potential manufacturing errors on screen, to readily update their designs, and to render designs faster than they could by hand,” Bettig says. “These were wireframe drawings, which couldn’t depict volume and that could oftentimes lead to confusion.”

“Did a part open from the top, from the left, the right? It was ambiguous in terms of where the surfaces were. You didn’t know how to look at it,” he says.

The 1970s saw the advent of 3D modeling. Those early systems were based on solid modeling and stem from the work of two men on two continents who worked on separate approaches at about the same time. In 1976, mechanical engineering professor Herbert Voelcker’s group at the University of Rochester in New York used a process that came to be called constructive solid geometry, essentially a molding and joining of shapes.

Also in the middle 1970s, Ian Braid at Cambridge University in England released his solid modeler, Build, which delineated the boundary between solids and nonsolids to create models. As their methods varied, so did the eventual CAD systems based on those methods. Still, their underlying principle was much the same, writes David Weisberg in his 2008 self-published book “The Engineering Design Revolution: The People, Companies and Computer Systems that Changed Forever the Practice of Engineering.”

Yet, 3D CAD systems met with resistance from designers who said it was difficult to use.

“It was not until the introduction of parametric-based CAD that this resistance began to melt away,” writes Jami Shah in the book “Theoretical and Computational Basis Toward Advanced CAD Applications (Springer, 2001). Shah is an Ohio State University professor of engineering design.

In parametric design, the relationship between each element is used to inform the design of what will become complex geometries and structures. When using a CAD system driven by this method, engineers are called upon to build a geometry piece by piece, based on parameters like the depth of a hole, the diameter of a circle, or the thickness of a shape, Weisberg says.

One important and defining feature: the software tracks each step in the building process. When an engineer modifies the value of a dimension, the shape of the model changes accordingly. That single change can ripple through the model to automatically update each area affected. Engineers needn’t isolate and make those changes themselves.

In 1988, Parametric Technology Corporation, founded three years earlier by mathematician Samuel Geisberg, released the first commercially successful parametric modeling software, Pro/Engineer, Weisberg writes.
The goal was to create a system flexible enough to encourage engineers to consider a variety of designs, with the cost of making design changes as close to zero as possible, he says.

PTC Creo delivers a scalable range of 3D CAD product development packages and tools. Its variety of specific features and capabilities help engineers imagine, design, and create products better.

Pro/Engineer was implemented from the start as a solids-based system. Everything was done with double-precision solid geometry and NURBS surfaces.

To create a model, the user typically started by creating a profile of the object. This shape was then converted into a solid model by translating it through space or revolving it around a centerline. Additional geometry could be added or subtracted from the base model. Some of the geometry was in the form of features such as holes, bosses, and ribs, Weisberg writes.

“A key characteristic of Pro/Engineer was that as the model was created, the software recorded each step the operator took. This was referred to as a ‘history tree.’ The software also recoded geometric aspects of the model such as whether two surfaces were parallel or the fact that a hole was a specified distance from the edge of the part. Each dimension used to define the part was also recorded. If the user placed a through hole in a block and the thickness of the block was later increased,” he says.

The program was successful from the start in part because it didn’t have to support the legacy minicomputer and mainframe-based software that its competitors did at the time, Weisberg says.

“PTC developed Pro/Engineer from the start to be hosted on networked UNIX workstations. Its software was written in a higher-level language and the system used the latest software architecture techniques,” he writes.

Another modeling method
That’s the point at which things more or less rested until around the turn of the most recent century, which saw the introduction of a new method called direct modeling.

CAD systems driven by direct modeling don’t require engineers to use parameter-driven regenerations of a solid model. Instead, an engineer changes a solid model by pulling it, stretching it, and moving it as needed, rather like working directly with clay, says Holly Ault, mechanical engineering professor at Worcester Polytechnic Institute, Worcester, Mass.

Alternate terms for direct modeling include synchronous modeling and dynamic modeling, she adds.
“Direct modeling is an intuitive approach to creating geometry without the burden of history-based dependencies,” Ault says. “Construction methods are similar to those used in conventional solid modeling. The user can design a 2D profile and then develop the model using commands like extrude, revolve, mill, and bore. Without the presence of a parameterized history tree, manipulation of the geometry is greatly simplified.
The approach allows engineers to design directly on the model’s geometry, she adds.

Direct modeling creates geometry rather than features, so it’s prefect for conceptual modeling where the designer doesn’t want to be tied down with the interdependencies of features and the ramifications making a change might have,” Ault says.

CAD into the future
Of course, CADmakers don’t stand still. Many are looking at ways to include artificial intelligence to increase the ways engineers can use CAD tools for design.

Last year, for example, Autodesk released generative design to subscribers of its Fusion 360 Ultimate product development software. The design concept allows engineers to define design parameters such as material, size, weight, strength, manufacturing methods, and cost constraints–before they begin to design. Then, using artificial-intelligence-based algorithms, the software presents an array of design options that meet the predetermined criteria, says Ravi Akella, who headed the product management team for Autodesk’s generative manufacturing solutions before moving last year to become director of product development at Roblox. The feature focuses on helping designers define the problem they’re trying to solve, he says.

“The software asks the user preliminary questions. ‘What sorts of materials would you consider for your design? Where does it connect with other things as part of an assembly? What are the loads? What are the pieces of geometry?’” Akella says.

After a short period of time, the software then presents designers and engineers with an array of design options that best meet their requirements. Designers choose the best design. Or, if none of the options meet their needs, they can begin the generative process again, this time offering slightly different inputs.

CAD software will continue to evolve and who knows how AI will influence design. But it will be an interesting journey.

via Leslie Langnau and Jean Thilmany, Senior Editor, 3D CAD World

User Interfaces and Artificial Intelligence

samhochberg — Wed, 22 Jan 2020 14:00:34 +0000

Does the above picture bring back memories? And not just of a museum visit?

Fortunately, user interface and user experience (UI/UX) design continues to make great strides, and is now entering the realm of artificial intelligence (AI). Think of an interface that adapts to the way you work, perhaps even suggests or “auto-completes” command selections in a fashion similar to Gmail. Context sensitivity is key and UX designers have already made great strides in that regard.

CAD (and, really, all software users) have seen the transition from static text-based menus to static icon-based GUIs in the early 80’s back to cascading text-based menus in the 90’s and ultimately most have adopted the reasonably contextual MS Office Ribbon-style standard. Most all these forms have been customizable, and/or could be augmented with keyboard shortcuts, and with a small initial investment in time, a user could create an efficient, transportable environment. Let’s also agree that even the worst interfaces become reasonably effective through time and repetition, as muscle memory kicks in. (Not so good for the occasional user, perhaps, but that is the same shortcoming some proposed AI-based methods will have.)

Of course, through all the paradigms, there will be early adopters that love it, and the “who moved my cheese” crowd that will not.

I have heard AI-based UX designers sum it up this way: “When it works, it can be great. You want it to be right in 90% of situations, otherwise, it can be annoying.”

What do you think? Are you ready for the next step?

Five Myths About 3D Printing

samhochberg — Wed, 08 Jan 2020 14:00:24 +0000

Many underestimate the current state of 3D printing technology. However, many overestimate it.

From our friends at SolidSmack:

Five (Endless) Myths About 3D Printing

After reading yet another mainstream publication talk about “3D printed human organs” I thought it wise to share my thoughts about the five most frequently heard myths of 3D printing.

These myths have been around since I started in this business over 12 years ago, and for some unexplainable reason, they have not gone away. Perhaps it was because of the initial excitement over the technology and the corresponding lack of true, depth understanding of what it could do and not do.

Now, years later when we should all be more knowledgable about 3D printing, some of these myths are even now stronger than ever.

But they’re still myths.

3D Printers Are Only For Prototyping

This was a true statement years ago because the initial materials available in early 3D printers were really designed to make it easy for the printer to print, and the thought of using parts produced into those materials for a real-life application wasn’t truly possible.

Thus initial uses of 3D printers were for prototyping shapes and sizes of parts, and not so much for testing heat or mechanical resistance.

That has changed with the introduction of many new materials of engineering quality, particularly those in the high-temperature ranges. PEEK, ULTEM, PEKK, Carbon Fiber-Reinforced and many other materials are now routinely used with the right equipment.

On the metal side, metal prints have now been certified as having sufficient quality and consistency to be used in real-life applications, and in particular in the aerospace industry. Production parts made through additive manufacturing are now normal.

Sure, 3D printing is still used for prototyping, and always will be. But production parts are the future.

3D Printed Human Organs

Twelve years later, there are no 3D printed organs.

What there has been a steady progress of innovations towards the idea of 3D printed organs, which could theoretically replace the need for donations and transplants. However, that’s a very, very long way off yet.

The problem is that human organs are highly complex bio-machines made from many different components, all “grown” over several years. To replace that requires an incredibly detailed understanding of what’s happening in the organs to an almost molecular degree. We’re nowhere near any of that.

Yes, you can 3D print very simple organs, such as “skin”, but a new heart? Stomach? It’s going to be quite a while yet.

3D Printed Houses

I seem to be writing about this one every week, but let’s do it again briefly.

There are monthly press releases from one unscrupulous company or another boasting of 3D printed homes being produced in only 24 hours! This is patently false, as the homes are actually entirely built with conventional methods, except that a portion of the concrete work was done using a computer-controlled concrete extrusion system.

If someone said, “Concrete Foundation 3D Printed In 24 Hours!” I would be happy.

But no one says that. Ever.

3D Printed Dinner

One of the first questions I am always asked about the technology is whether dinner can be 3D printed. I have no idea why there is this fascination about 3D printed food, other than perhaps people are inherently lazy and are hoping for a Star Trek-like steak dinner to magically appear.

The biggest issue is that 3D printing is slow, and you’d likely starve before dinner could be prepared. This alone has relegated the notion of 3D printed food to pre-made items, like cake toppers.

Foods are being 3D printed, but there are enormous constraints on the type of food material, as it usually must be reduced to an extrudable paste. Long ago 3D Systems announced sugar and chocolate 3D printers targeted at chefs, but they didn’t seem to have any legs and were swiftly discontinued.

Once again the issue comes down to materials: many foods are complex compositions of multiple ingredients combined in a specific sequence using particular mixing techniques. These are not processes found on typical 3D printers, which usually employ a single making process to build an object in a single material.

I think a different kind of 3D printing technology is ultimately required for true “dinner printing”.

3D Printers “Bring Back Manufacturing”

The loss of manufacturing jobs in the West has been quite problematic for many families, and anything to restore those jobs would seem quite desirable. Those jobs went to two places: Asian countries where the worker wages were a lot lower, and to robotic automation. In fact, I’m told the automation effect was actually far greater than the low wage effect.

Nevertheless, could “jobs come back”? I’m afraid I don’t think so. Should a manufacturer set up a new factory, it’s almost certain the factory would make extensive use of robotic automation, and in particular 3D printers, leaving only a few supervisory, machine operations and design jobs available. It’s actually likely that as the cost of automation drops, even the low-wage earning Asian workers themselves could find themselves being automated out of work. Everyone can use the same 3D printers regardless of location, after all.

Perhaps “manufacturing” can be brought back to the West, but there won’t be many jobs coming with it.

Those are my five biggest myths of 3D printing. Do you have some of your own?

Haikus generated based on your map location and Open Street Map data

samhochberg — Wed, 18 Dec 2019 14:00:27 +0000

Satellite Studio made a map thing that generates haikus based on OpenStreetMap data and your location. From the announcement:

[W]e automated making haikus about places. Looking at every aspect of the surroundings of a point, we can generate a poem about any place in the world. The result is sometimes fun, often weird, most of the time pretty terrible. Also probably horrifying for haiku purists (sorry).

This is pretty great. It’s neat how the poems generate on the fly.

via Flowing Data

How To Write Like An Architect

samhochberg — Wed, 04 Dec 2019 20:56:06 +0000

…or any draftsman, for that matter.

I’ve been told, “I can’t believe your handwriting was ever so neat.” OK, so this is what using CAD for too long has wrought. But alas, there is hope. It just takes practice.

Or as they proclaim over at OpenCulture.com:

All it takes is determination, time, and—as taught by Doug Patt in his How to Architect series, above—more tools than can be simultaneously operated with two hands:

an Ames lettering guide

a parallel rule or t-square

a small plastic triangle customized with bits of tape

a .5mm Pentel drafting pencil

If this sounds needlessly laborious, keep in mind that such specialty equipment may appeal to reluctant hand writers with an interest in engineering, robotics, or scientific experimentation.

Read the full article – with videos! – here.

The Internet Archive is Digitizing LPs to Preserve Generations of Audio

samhochberg — Wed, 13 Nov 2019 14:00:16 +0000

In a previous career tangent, I earned my living in the music industry. It’s gone through just as many changes as the #CAD industry I am now in. So, I get not only professional, but personal, delight from this news….

Imagine if your favorite song or nostalgic recording from childhood was lost forever. This could be the fate of hundreds of thousands of audio files stored on vinyl, except that the Internet Archive is now expanding its digitization project to include LPs.

Earlier this year, the Internet Archive began working with the Boston Public Library (BPL) to digitize more than 100,000 audio recordings from their sound collection. The recordings exist in a variety of historical formats, including wax cylinders, 78 rpms, and LPs. They span musical genres including classical, pop, rock, and jazz, and contain obscure recordings like this album of music for baton twirlers, and this record of radio’s all-time greatest bloopers.

Unfortunately, many of these audio files were never translated into digital formats and are therefore locked in their physical recording. In order to prevent them from disappearing forever when the vinyl is broken, warped, or lost, the Internet Archive is digitizing these at-risk recordings so that they will remain accessible for future listeners.

“The LP was our primary musical medium for over a generation. From Elvis, to the Beatles, to the Clash, the LP was witness to the birth of both Rock & Roll and Punk Rock. It was integral to our culture from the 1950s to the 1980s and is important for us to preserve for future generations.”

– CR Saikley, Director of Special Projects, Internet Archive

Since all of the information on an LP is printed, the digitization process must begin by cataloging data. High-resolution scans are taken of the cover art, the disc itself and any inserts or accompanying materials. The record label, year recorded, track list and other metadata are supplemented and cross-checked against various external databases.

High resolution imaging of album cover art. The boxed area is shown at high resolution at right.

“We’re really trying to capture everything about this artifact, this piece of media. As an archivist, that’s what we want to represent, the fullness of this physical object.”

– Derek Fukumori, Internet Archive Engineer

Once cataloged, the LP’s are then digitized. The Internet Archive partners with Innodata Knowledge Services, an organization focused on machine learning and digital data transformation, to complete the digitization process at their facilities in Cebu, Philippines. An Innodata worker digitizes 12 LPs at a time, setting turntables to play and record by hand, then turning each record over to the next side. Since each LP is digitized in real time, it takes a full 20 minutes to record an average LP side. By operating 12 turntables simultaneously, the team expects to be able to digitize ten LPs per hour.

Audio stations complete with turntables & recording equipment set up in Cebu, Philippines.

Once recorded, there is a large FLAC file for each side of the LP, which needs to be segmented so listeners can easily begin at the desired song. There are two different algorithms used for segmenting; the first one looks at images of the vinyl disc to locate gaps in its grooves, which usually line up with gaps between songs. A second algorithm listens to the audio file to find the silent spaces between songs. When these two algorithms align, our engineers have a good measure of confidence that the machine has found the proper tracks.

These algorithms currently predict segmenting with about 80% accuracy, but some audio files are more difficult. For example, recordings of live music fill in the spaces between songs with applause, while classical music utilizes silence as part of a song. In order to account for these anomalies, digitized LP files are always checked manually before being added to the online database.

Identifying the empty spaces between songs for segmenting.

Currently, there are more than 900 LPs from the Boston Public Library LP collection available on Archive.org. The Internet Archive continues to digitize the remainder of the BPL collection in addition to more than 285,000 LPs that have been donated by others. The organization aims to engage a greater community of LP and 78 rpm enthusiasts by welcoming contributions and improvements to the recorded metadata. Many of the audio files online can be listened to in full, but some of the albums are only available in 30 second snippets due to rights issues.

For decades, vinyl records were the dominant storage medium for every type of music and are ingrained in the memories and culture of several generations. Despite the challenges, the Internet Archive is determined to preserve these at-risk records so that they can be heard online by new audiences of scholars, researchers, and music lovers around the world.

via archive.org and Faye Lessler

Machine Hallucination

samhochberg — Wed, 23 Oct 2019 13:05:29 +0000

How to tell the invisible story of data?

See Artechouse: Machine Hallucination by Refik Anadol

Creativity Takes Time

samhochberg — Wed, 09 Oct 2019 13:00:01 +0000

“Leave yourself twice as much time as you think you need for a project, knowing that half of that may not look like “making” anything at all.”

Here is an I.W.W. “stickerette” produced in the 1910s, protesting the exploitation of children in textile mills.

I can’t help but think of it when my first grader complains about going to school:

“The day felt like a week!”

“I don’t get to think about what I want to think about!”

“It takes me away from my music!”

His protests aren’t that school is all that bad (he has a great teacher and a sunny classroom) but it’s just too long.

It’s like Chris Rock said in Kill The Messenger: “There ain’t enough time when you got a career. When you got a job, there’s too much time.”

Here’s Jenny Odell (author of How To Do Nothing) on how she tries to slow down time for the students in her classes:

I can’t give my students more time in their lives; but what I try to do is change the way they think about and value it in the first place. My class typically includes students who aren’t art majors, some of whom may never have made art before. I give them the same advice every quarter: Leave yourself twice as much time as you think you need for a project, knowing that half of that may not look like “making” anything at all. There is no Soylent version of thought and reflection — creativity is unpredictable, and it simply takes time.

Emphasis mine. The first grader knows it already, and all too well… and it’ll only get worse!

via Austin Kleon

CAD and AI: making design better, faster, and easier

samhochberg — Wed, 18 Sep 2019 12:54:08 +0000

AI has the potential to allow engineers to design products faster than before while meeting design specifications, sometimes in new and unique ways.

Artificial intelligence could be said to be the new hot buzzword, as it seems to be making inroads into all types of software.

“We don’t see a lot of AI yet in a CAD environment, but it’s coming,” says Andreas Vlahinos, chief technology officer Advanced Engineering Solutions, a research and design firm in Castle Rock, Colo.

AI is a broad field focused on using computers to do things that require human-level intelligence.

But how CAD will make future use of AI is still up for debate, he adds.

While some CAD makers are delving into AI functionality, the marriage of AI and design software is in the early stages, says Jon Hirschtick, chief executive officer of Onshape, which makes cloud-based CAD software. “AI has great potential, but so far no one has illustrated how it will unfold,” he says.

AI doesn’t have a one-size-fits-all definition within any industry yet, says said Gian Paolo Bassi, chief executive officer at Dassault Systèmes. “Today, there’s a huge debate about what AI is. People say AI is machine learning, or they say it’s related to the neural network or to neuroscience. Definitions vary.”

The machine learning that AI depends on is actually already present to a certain degree in the CAD systems that include topology optimization and generative design capabilities. “The primary functions of these features within CAD is to automate the analytical steps of design, Vlahinos says. The computer generates designs from an engineer’s preliminary directions.”

The key focus of AI in CAD right now is design optimization achieved through the creation of more intelligent designs which are lighter, stronger and more economical. And, in some cases, more artistic, continues Vlahinos.

Typically, designers create their design step by step, analyzing certain junctions to get critical feedback about performance. They tweak the design if it doesn’t meet performance needs or customer specifications. The incorporation of AI, as it stands now, allows the designers to skip these time-consuming steps allowing the task to get over quickly and effectively.

Like other big-name CAD makers, SolidWorks also includes topology optimization capabilities within its CAD software.

“We expect the computing platform to anticipate your design goals,” says Bassi.

But, Vlahinos adds, the AI in those systems is used for simulation rather than for design. It’s by continual simulation that the designs are found. The tools allow the engineer to skip all the step-by-step analyzing. The human is still involved in the process and must validate the simulation the CAD system returns.

“The generative process could get you plus or minus 15 percent of the real answer but with 2 percent of the effort,” he says. “So, you know how to make the heat exchanger this way or that way – you’ve isolated the design alternatives and you can find them right away and validate.”

Even though the tools function through simulation, “You get amazing design insights and design innovation so you can see how something can be done,” he says.

But Vlahinos cautions against relying fully on the current AI-enabled CAD optimization tools.

“They are not simulation replacement,” he says. “Don’t let the vendors oversell them. They are design guidance, like a spell checker for you design concept. But they do give you more amazing results.”

Still, by helping engineers more quickly meet their prescribed design specifications, AI also frees up time engineers can spend focusing on other aspects of the piece—like its inherent shape or its artistic merits.

And – with proper validation in place — these tools can help ensure parts will meet manufacturing specifications and allow for much quicker design than traditional methods. It also can create unorthodox, sometimes never-before-seen-shapes that can be manufactured through 3D printing.

The engineer as artist

Design for manufacturability, as it’s called, is of course an important—some might say bedrock—necessity. AI techniques have a role to play in other aspects of design. And some of its uses may not have been conceived of yet, as CAD makers focus on these first AI implementations, Vlahinos says.

“Right now, it’s ‘Please tell me what the optimal shape is to achieve my engineering goal,” Vlahinos says. “We could see AI answering other questions in the future.”

Though his career has focused on rapid product development — Vlahinos recognizes that AI could help engineers design products faster than before — at the same time it offers engineering company customers new and unique ways to meet needs they may not even know they have.

For instance, broaden the view beyond the focus on manufacturability and AI can also lend artistic value to an engineered piece or product, he says.

“We’ve never properly valued the artistry of the design. But we could,” he says.

A product’s design artistry is, of course, subjective, so putting a monetary value to that number — as opposed to function — has always been elusive. Likewise, the capability to add never-before-seen geometries that create swirls and whorls in new and unexpected ways to pieces can bring a great deal of satisfaction, or headaches, for designers, depending on their liking to bring creativity to their engineering work.

With proper validation in place — AI tools can help ensure parts will meet manufacturing specifications and allow for quicker design than traditional methods. It also can create unorthodox, sometimes never-before-seen-shapes that can be manufactured through 3D printing.

If CAD can evolve, in the not-too-distant future, everyday objects like your blender, electric toothbrush or even the engine within your automobile, will take the shape of nothing you’ve ever seen before, said Hod Lipson, a mechanical engineering professor Columbia University and director of the school’s Creative Machines Lab. He is a roboticist who works in the areas of AI and digital manufacturing.

Most 3D printers take their printing instructions from 3D CAD files. Because the 3D printer receives its instructions from CAD files, the printers are limited in the shapes that those CAD systems generate, Lipson says. CAD software only allows for designers to work with recognized geometries: circles and ovals, squares and rectangles, and so on, he says.

That’s changing as topology optimization and generative design capabilities make their way into design tools, Vlahinos adds.

So the day of the twisted blender may be upon us sooner than we think.

Beyond simulation

Feature and character recognition, which have been part of AI for many years, are part of the SolidWorks system. In fact, they’re so standard that many users may not recognize the AI component of those features—until, for instance, they begin to type a misspelled word they use frequently and see that word corrected automatically, Bassi says.

And AI has a role in CAM as well. For instance, SolidWorks CAM automatically generates a part’s manufacturing toolpath after design. CAM software uses the CAD models to generate the toolpaths that drive computer numerically controlled manufacturing machines. Engineers and designers who use CAM can evaluate designs earlier in the design process to ensure that they can be manufactured, Bassi says.

AI has a role in CAM as well as CAD. For instance, SolidWorks CAM automatically generates a part’s manufacturing toolpath after design. CAM software uses the CAD models to generate the toolpaths that drive computer numerically controlled manufacturing machines. Such a features helps engineers evaluate designs earlier in the design process to ensure that they can be manufactured.

“The toolpath captures design strategies and recognizes features and types of materials, so you can have a CAM solution that’s almost completely automated,” Bassi says. AI drives the way the toolpath is automatically created.

“You can create a toolpath in a couple of clicks. You don’t need a lot of details for intelligent manufacturing,” Bassi said.

One thing is certain, Vlahinos says. AI will never take the human engineer or designer out of the equation.

Even intelligent machines need guidance. That means engineers will always be vital to the design process, he adds. A human will always be needed to view shapes and designs in the same way other humans will. To translate a part’s use — its form, and its function — with an eye toward other human users.

via 3D CAD World

Back To School with #SOLIDWORKS Apps For Kids #STEM #SWApps4Kids #CAD #SolidworksEducation

samhochberg — Wed, 04 Sep 2019 13:00:55 +0000

Interested in giving your kids – or yourself! – exposure to some basic computer-aided design tools? SOLIDWORKS Apps For Kids is the perfect place. Kids can create their own projects or just “riff” on others. Plus, it is browser-based so there is no downloading or installing or formidable hardware requirements. Find more information here:

https://www.swappsforkids.com/

If you’re an educator, and would like to incorporate this type of learning into your curriculum, you can find lesson plans, virtual classroom setups, and many other resources at:

https://www.swappsforkids.com/educators/

The Astonishing Future of VR

samhochberg — Wed, 21 Aug 2019 13:00:36 +0000

What image does the phrase ‘virtual reality’ conjure? Chances are it’s someone in an oversized helmet, clumsily navigating their way through a videogame. Is that right? Well, adjust your expectations. VR has made generational leaps in a very short space of time. The reality is that it’s virtually unrecognisable from what it once was.

Seeing isn’t quite believing

Virtual reality works by changing our perception to accept as real what is fake. (Or, in augmented reality’s case such as Microsoft Hololens, faking what’s in front of you.) Wandering around pre-rendered environments packed into a headset can be a disorientating experience. It offsets your balance, as your brain adjusts to a brand new worldview as if you’re really there.

That version of VR has its limitations, however. Despite vision and sound doing their very best to convince the user to accept what’s in front of them, there’s another sensory experience that up until now has been hard to replicate: touch.

Traditionally, there’s always been a disconnect between mind and body, as VR has struggled to impose physicality on the experience. Grab a virtual gun all you like, but without that tangible force in your fingertips or feeling of physical exertion, VR’s heavy lifting has been left purely to the eyes and ears. Not anymore.

Those tentative baby steps in a virtual world are about to take a virtual stride across the playing field thanks to haptics technology.

Feel the force

Ever played the blindfold party game where you guess various items solely by touch? Recognising objects by their weight, texture, shape and solidity can be quite a revelation. That physical connection is something for which engineers have been striving in the virtual space. Ergo, haptics. Essentially, tech designed to make the user connect physically with software.

At its most primitive level, it’s a PlayStation controller vibrating when you’ve taken a bump in Gran Turismo. Convincing? Perhaps not. But the tactility of a rumble provides a greater sensory experience, plugging that gap between brain and body. At the other end of the scale, at its most advanced level, there’s a space age tech suit that’s doing its damndest to convince its wearers of the reality of virtual worlds.

Suit up, we’re going in

The Teslasuit isn’t your average work gear. Designed by VR Electronics Ltd, it’s full body clothing with adaptive haptics technology that projects physically simulated sensation. Touch and force feedback is stitched into the fabric, creating the illusion of immersion for those using it. A full 360 degree awareness, muscle memory, feedback and changing temperatures.

Burning down the house (virtually)

Firefighter in training? Simply load up the software and enter a virtual burning house with lives to save, and none of the risks or smoky odour that lasts for days. Haptics technology provides a physical resistance that puts the user in as near to a recreation of reality as technology will allow. No longer virtual reality, this next level progression has been dubbed Extended Reality. Whether it’s athletes perfecting technique or military undergoing operative briefings, it’s a new method of getting to grips with dangerous situations from a safe, simulated vantage point.

Sure, its current prohibitive price means we’re a while away from mass production. But the widespread use of this Extended Reality technology is just around the corner. With just a smartphone and a cheap cardboard box, you can have VR on the go for mere pennies. Haptics-based XR tech is perhaps a little more than loose change, but its march towards reality is virtually unstoppable. Headsets on, let’s go.

via SOLIDWORKS UK

The myth of “keeping up”

samhochberg — Wed, 07 Aug 2019 13:00:11 +0000

Wow! 13 years old, and perhaps more relevant – and important! – than back then…

Do you have a stack of books, journals, manuals, articles, API docs, and blog printouts that you think you’ll get to? That you think you need to read? Now, based on past experience, what are the odds you’ll get to all of it? Half of it? Any of it? (except for maybe the Wired magazine)

So you let the stack of “things to read” pile up, then eventually when the pile gets to high you end up tossing half of it–or worse, moving it to a deeper “stuff to read someday stack. We have selective amnesia about what we’ll ever get to, but mainly because most of us keep feeling like we have to keep up! Keep up with what?

You can’t keep up. There is no way. And trying to keep up will probably just make you dumber.You can never be current on everything you think you should be. You can’t simultaneously be current on:

Technology
Current events
Pop culture
Professional practices
Health/fitness/diet trends
And on and on and on…

Why do we pressure ourselves? Why do we constantly feel like we’re struggling to keep up, yet never succeeding? I remember when Java 1.02 came out (the first public release), and it had 200 classes. You could fit the entire class library in the same space as Miss January (magazine centerfold). But then 1.1 came out and the API more than doubled, to 500 classes. It no longer fit on a centerfold, but you could get it on a wall poster. With 200 classes, you really could master the entire API. With 500, it took some effort, but you could at least be familiar with just about everything, given enough time. But then… by Java 1.4, the library had swelled to 2300 classes. And today? It’s something like 3500 classes just in the Standard Edition (not including the mobile and enterprise extensions). You could wallpaper an entire room with the class library.

By the year 2000, it had become impossible for even a Sun Java engineer–someone creating the API–to be familiar with everything in the standard library. Yet the rest of us were feeling guilty. Like we were falling behind. Like we weren’t hardcore Java programmers.

So… it’s time to let that go. You’re not keeping up. I’m not keeping up. And neither is anyone else. At least not in everything. Sure, you’ll find the guy who is absolutely cutting-edge up to date on some technology, software upgrade, language beta, whatever. But when you start feeling inferior about it, just think to yourself, “Yeah, but I bet he thinks Weezer is still a cool new band…”

Besides letting go, what else can we do to combat Information Anxiety? I have just a few tips, but I’m hoping you’ll add more:

Find the best aggregators
Aggregators become increasingly more important. Finding the right person, business, web site, etc. who does the best job of filtering (attenuating) in a specific area adds time to your life.

Get summaries
Publisher Joe Wikert recently blogged quite positively about a service called getAbstract, that offers online book summaries. Initially skeptical, Joe found getAbstract to be a tremendous time saver. (I haven’t checked it out, but I tend to trust Joe’s advice)

Cut the redundancy!
Do you really need three news magazines? Do you have to subscribe to every technical journal? Get with your friends or colleagues and divide up the main ones. Each person is responsible for subscribing to and keeping up with just one, letting the others know IF there’s something in a particular issue worth a read.

Unsubscribe to as many things as possible
Like the previous point, you probably have way too much redunancy in both your printed and online subscriptions. Again, if you’re using the right aggregators, they’ll tell you when something is worth it. For print, you can save some trees if you give up more of your physical newspapers and magazines.

Recognize that gossip and celebrity entertainment are black holes
It’s like watching a car accident despite our best intentions… we just can’t help look, so the more you can stay away from the publications that document every personal detail of every music and film star the better. Let that be your guilty pleasure for when you’re at the dentist’s office…

Pick the categories you want for a balanced perspective, and include some from OUTSIDE your main field of interest
Better to have one design magazine (architecture, product design, graphic design, etc.) (regardless of whether you’re a designer or not), one news magazine, one arts magazine (music, photography, etc.), and one technology/lifestyle magazine (Wired, Make, etc.) than to get rid of everything but your three software development journals. Keeping up with a different field is sometimes just as useful (if not more) than keeping up with your current one.

Be a LOT more realistic about what you’re likely to get to, and throw the rest out.
Don’t file it. Don’t store it. What you don’t have piling up you can’t feel guilty about. Some people put little height limits on their “to read” stack. (OK, when it gets as high as that drawer, I must throw out the oldest 50%…)

In any thing you need to learn, find a person who can tell you what is:
* Need to know
* Should know
* Nice to know
* Edge case, only if it applies to you specifically
* Useless

Too many product manuals, tech docs, books, etc. include everything without necessarily giving you the “weighting” for how imporant each thing is.

Finally, are WE part of the problem? Are we overwhelming our users with documentation? Or are we part of the solution to their info anxiety? We’re the ones that should be helping our users really focus on the things they need at any stage. While we all recognize that we are stressed for time and on info overload, we tend to think our users have all the time in the world to figure it all out (RTFM).

There’s an opportunity for all of us to help our users (or start a business around helping people reduce the info overload/pressure-to-keep-up stress most of us feel).

In the meantime, take a deep breath and repeat after me, “I will never keep up. Keeping up is a myth.” And if it makes you feel any better, add, “John isn’t keeping up either.”

Once we let go of trying to be more-current-than-thou, we can spend more time on things that really matter. Like learning to Ollie.
(And thanks to Miles Davies for the spectacular tip from an earlier post: “stop trying to ollie. get zen on its ass…be point b.”)

Posted by Kathy on April 29, 2006 | Permalink

Posters of STEM Role Models

samhochberg — Wed, 24 Jul 2019 13:00:40 +0000

The folks behind the Nevertheless podcast commissioned a set of seven posters of STEM role models, people who have made significant contributions to science, technology, engineering, and mathematics. The posters are free to download and print out in eight different languages (including English, Spanish, and Simplified Chinese).

via Jason Kottke

The Design Evolution of Car-Based Pickups, Part 2

samhochberg — Wed, 10 Jul 2019 13:00:20 +0000

The Design Evolution of Car-Based Pickups, Part 2: From Australia to America

Low-riding nifties from the1950s

Early Australian Evolution

1934 Ford Coupe Utility

Following Australian designer Lewis Bandt’s invention of the Coupe Utility form factor, other manufacturers began releasing their own versions. In 1937 American manufacturer Hudson designed their innovative Terraplane Utility Coupe:

1937 Hudson Terraplane. Image credit: Alden Jewell, CC 2.0

What you may not realize from the illustration above is that this was meant to be a car or a truck, not both at the same time. It was essentially a car in regular use, but by opening the trunk, a steel box was revealed. This box could be extended outwards like a drawer and locked into position, effectively serving as a hideaway pickup bed.

1937 Hudson Terraplane. Image credit: 96Impala

The war years of the 1940s disrupted most worldwide automotive design and production, but by the 1950s manufacturers were back on track. Holden, an Australian subsidiary of General Motors, released the Holden Coupe Utility in 1951:

1951 Holden Coupe Utility. Image credit: Chris Keating, CC 2.0

Ford Australia’s offering for 1951 had more modern styling than Holden’s design, with the front end pointing the way towards the look of the ’50s:

1951 Ford Coupe Utility. Image credit: Sicnag, CC 4.0

1951 Ford Coupe Utility. Image credit: Frank Beale, TradeUniqueCars

Making the Jump to America

Following his original 1934 design, Lewis Bandt had traveled to America and met Henry Ford. Ford reportedly referred to Bandt’s coupe utility as a “kangaroo chaser”–whether he said that in derision or affection, I don’t know–and stated that they would one day build such vehicles for the U.S. market. That promise had taken some time to fulfill, but it really paid dividends in 1956, when Ford released a new design for the American market called the Ranchero:

1956 Ford Ranchero

In 1957 the design was tweaked, with cowling added to the headlights, and the body accent lines migrating rearwards:

1957 Ford Ranchero

In 1958 the design was tweaked again, with extra headlights added and the accent lines in the body now starting to flatten out:

1958 Ford Ranchero. Image credit: Detectandpreserve, Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 Unported

The customized version below has had the bumper removed from in front of the grille, and has had its suspension lowered, but you can still see the body’s accent lines and overall gesture of the vehicle quite clearly:

1958 Ford Ranchero

The Ford Ranchero proved to be a hit with both buyers and the automotive press, selling in the low five figures annually. Here’s how the car was marketed:

Ford competitor Chevy noticed the sales figures, and decided it was time for them to get a piece of this market. Before we show you what Chevy’s designers did, first let’s review how Ford’s designers were gradually evolving the Ranchero, in terms of the accent lines, gesture and length, from year to year:

1956 Ford Ranchero

1957 Ford Ranchero

1958 Ford Ranchero

Looking at the photos above, it’s as if some giant grabbed the car from front and rear and began stretching it.

With that in mind, here’s what Chevy released in 1959, the El Camino:

1959 Chevrolet El Camino

Ford’s offering for that year, the 1959 Ranchero, looks positively stodgy and dated in comparison:

1959 Ford Ranchero. Image credit: https://www.flickr.com/photos/that_chrysler_guy/

It seemed like Ford’s designers had lost it, and the sales figures for 1959 reflected it: Chevy sold 22,246 El Caminos, while Ford moved just 14,169 Rancheros.

Here is a magnificently restored 1959 El Camino by Randy and Peaches Clark at Hot Rods & Custom Stuff (HR&CS) in Escondido, California:

1959 Chevrolet El Camino

This coupe utility form factor–nowadays more commonly referred to as a car-based pickup–would continue to evolve in Australia, America and elsewhere. But as we shall see next, the results weren’t always good.

Cars

via Core 77 and Rain Noe

Rain Noe is a writer and industrial designer based in New York City.

The Design Evolution of Car-Based Pickups

samhochberg — Wed, 26 Jun 2019 13:00:01 +0000

The Design Evolution of Car-Based Pickups, Part 1: Invented in Australia

Lewis Bandt’s “ute” form factor spawned multiple generations and started a craze

“Form follows function” is what they taught us in design school. But when I look at modern products–furniture, cars, bottles, consumer electronics–it seems many designers aim to make something look “different,” just for the sake of being different. Zig zags, arbitrary curves and surfaces with no relation to each other seem to have been added purely because the designer’s CAD package made such forms possible.

In contrast, I find it both fun and educational to look back at a time when industrial design was in its infancy, and the established form factors of today had yet to be worked out. Everything from the individual taste of the designer, to global economic conditions, to local idiosyncrasies, to sheer manufacturability could influence what lines made it onto the page and subsequently into factory production.

For today’s example we go back to a dusty farm in Australia weathering the Great Depression. The combination of the farmer’s wife being literate, and Australia having an established postal system, were unwittingly about to spark the creation of an entirely new form factor that persists to this day.

__________________

In the 1920s cars in Australia, as elsewhere, were an expensive luxury, but local banks made them affordable by offering credit. That is, until the Great Depression of the 1930s hit. At that point, the banks yanked credit programs for cars, though left them intact for working vehicles for farmers. That’s tractors, riding machinery, and this new thing called a “pickup truck,” which was a Ford Model T (later A) modified to carry a cargo box on the back.

An early Ford pickup truck.

Pickup trucks back then weren’t like the pickup trucks of today. Rough-riding, utilitarian and largely open-air, these were used for actual work, not the double-duty family outings they’re used for today. And this arrangement dissatisfied at least one farm-based married couple in Gippsland, Victoria in 1933. The wife of the couple broke out some stationary and wrote a letter to Hubert French, the managing director of the Ford Motor Company of Australia:

“My husband and I can’t afford a car and a truck,” her letter read, “but we need a car to go to church on Sunday and a truck to take the pigs to market on Monday. Can you help?”

French could’ve crumpled the letter up and thrown it in the garbage, but instead he passed it on to his sales manager, Scott Inglis. Inglis then forwarded it to Slim Westman, the plant superintendent. Westman brought the letter to a 22-year-old kid named Lewis Bandt, who was Ford Australia’s sole designer. They apparently deemed the farmer’s wife’s needs relevant, and started a discussion: Could they design and produce something that would fulfill this requirement? Was it possible for a car to do truck duty? How heavy is a pig?

“Westman quite rightly reckoned that if we cut down a car and put a tray on the back, the whole thing would tear in half once there was weight in the back,” Bandt later said. “I told him I would design it with a frame that came from the very back pillar, through to the central pillars, near the doors. I would arrange for another pillar to further strengthen that weak point where the cabin and tray joined. I said to Westman `Boss, them pigs are going to have a luxury ride around the city of Geelong!'”

Bandt began working his ideas out in 1:1 scale, drawing orthographic views on a massive 30-foot-long blackboard. He showed the completed design to Westman, who then authorized the production of two prototypes.

Bandt (standing) in 1933. Behind him you can see the blackboard on which the full-sized drawing was done.

The prototypes were shown to Inglis, who green-lit £10,000 for tooling and a limited production run of 500 units.

In January of 1934 the new Ford Coupe Utility, based on the Model 40 coupe, started rolling off of the assembly line.

It had the face of a car–respectable, church-parking-lot friendly–yet could indeed haul pigs (or any weight up to 1,200 pounds) in the rear, strengthened by Bandt’s monocoque design and powered by Ford’s V8 engine. Business in the front, party in the back, this was an early automotive version of a mullet.

To our 21st-Century eyes, it may be tough to recognize this vehicle’s design victory. To understand what Bandt had achieved from a design perspective, look at this 1931 Ford Model A pickup truck:

A 1931 Ford Model A pickup truck.

You can see how the passenger cabin and the truck’s bed have little to do with each other. In contrast, look at how Bandt connected the cabin and the bed’s sidewalls into a continuous form, not just for looks, but for strength:

Bandt’s 1934 Coupe Utility.

The one in the photo above is admittedly in pretty rough shape. To get an idea of what Bandt’s design looked like new, check out this restored version:

Bandt had essentially created a new automotive form, and one that became particularly popular in Australia and New Zealand. “Utes,” as they were called, gained a firm footing throughout the 1930s and ’40s.

A ute on an Australian farm, circa 1939.

You’ll notice that the restored yellow car in a photo above has a door handle in the modern position. However, the car was originally designed with “suicide” doors, as was common at the time. Here’s a photo of Bandt, decades after designing the original ute, alongside a restored one:

Bandt’s story ends tragically. He put in a full career as a designer for Ford, retiring in 1975. Some eleven years into his retirement, he managed to find an original 1934 Coupe Utility and restored it. In 1987 he was driving it home from the Australian Broadasting Corporation’s television studios–where he was being featured in a documentary about utes–and got into a head-on collision with a sand truck. Ironically, Bandt died inside of one of his most influential designs.

Up next, we’ll look at the incredible profusion of vehicle designs that Bandt’s creation unwittingly kicked off.

via Core 77 and Rain Noe

Rain Noe is a writer and industrial designer based in New York City.

Vintage TV Test Patterns

samhochberg — Wed, 12 Jun 2019 20:54:13 +0000

Ah, yes, remember falling asleep at night, in front of the television, only to awake to the ubiquitous test pattern on the screen? Wait, you don’t? Well, thanks to Jason Kottke, here’s a little walk down memory lane…

It’s hard to believe now, but television didn’t used to be a 24/7/365 affair. TV stations stopped broadcasting late at night and when they were off the air, they would commonly display a test pattern until programming resumed in the morning.

Used since the earliest TV broadcasts, test cards were originally physical cards at which a television camera was pointed, and such cards are still often used for calibration, alignment, and matching of cameras and camcorders.

From Wikimedia Commons and Present & Correct, here are some vintage test patterns:

As you might expect, the BBC test card with the girl and clown has both a backstory and a cult following.

One of the most-used test images was RCA’s “Indian-head” test pattern:

As this annotated version shows, each of the card’s elements had a specific testing purpose:

If you’re feeling extra nostalgic, here’s 36 minutes of vintage test patterns from all around the world:

The Cost of #CAD in 2019

samhochberg — Wed, 22 May 2019 14:31:13 +0000

Subscription models are now the norm and perpetual licenses are taking the back seat.

This year’s overview of CAD software reveals that software subscription licensing is now the norm instead of the exception. When Onshape debuted in 2015, its subscription-only licensing model was considered as novel as its 100% cloud operations. Soon after that Autodesk announced plans to eliminate perpetual licenses and convert its entire product line to subscriptions, causing a CAD industry earthquake with aftershocks still being felt today.

Diverse CAD Market

What has not changed is the incredible diversity of the CAD marketplace. Prices in our chart range from $49.95 (TurboCAD Designer) to $10,000 (nTopology Element Pro). Not every vendor makes its prices public, or the high-end price would be even higher. Dassault Systemès’ Catia, for example, is sold specific to the task with a set of add-on solutions complementing its core modeling technology. Its prices can range from $9,000 to more than $65,000 per seat and it is rarely sold in single units, but as part of a company’s standardization on Dassault products.

How companies price product support has changed as well. In the past only the most expensive products carried a separate maintenance charge; now it is common for most products more than $1,500 to carry a maintenance charge.

The Grande Total

We’ve gathered a myriad of information concerning vendors and their products. Prices should only be considered as a guide, as vendors and dealers often reduce prices from suggested retail as part of larger sales.

Click here to download detailed information on CAD software products, pricing and details (PDF).

via Cadalyst

When People Find a New Job

samhochberg — Wed, 08 May 2019 13:00:17 +0000

I’m finding through the years that I am again enjoying things I’ve done earlier in my career. What about you? Indeed, is a career linear, or circular? Is it want vs. need? Of course, I’m in a field that has remained dynamic and refused to plateau for decades now.

In our teens and early twenties, we’re still figuring out what we want to be when we grow up. As we get older, we start to settle into a career. In between, we switch jobs in the search. Based on data from the Current Population Survey, this is when people make the switches and the jobs they switch to.

Read the rest from Nathan Yau at Flowing Data

CAD users look ahead

samhochberg — Wed, 17 Apr 2019 13:00:57 +0000

Business Advantage (BA) has been measuring the CAD market since 1992. The company conducts surveys worldwide on a custom basis. The group also conducts a regular trends survey to help them keep an eye on the interests of CAD users and promote their services.

BA’s trend surveys have also proved to be a valuable weathervane about CAD users real requirements and interests. This year’s survey was taken from the company’s large database of one million CAD users and decision makers. The survey drew 626 qualified responses, which is in the range of past surveys. The global distribution of responses between North American, EMEA, and Asia is equally distributed between Europe and North American with 41% each of respondents and 18% for Asia. The response from Asia is relatively low compared to our estimates for the worldwide distribution of CAD users but consistent with our own experience conducting surveys.

The Business Advantage group tries to consistently cover the same topics over a period of years but also add new topics as they bubble up in the CAD community and to drop topics as interest falls off.
This year BA surveyed their database on 16 topics:

3D Modeling
BIM (Building Information Modeling)
Cloud-Based CAD
Mobile Access to CAD (via laptops, tablets, mobile phones)
Collaborative Design
PLM (Product Lifecycle Management)
Rendering
CAD licensing options
PDM (Product Data Management)
Augmented Reality
2D Drafting
CAM
Virtual Reality
Machine Learning
Artificial Intelligence
Generative Design

New to the list this year are Rendering, Virtual Reality, Machine Learning, Artificial Intelligence, Generative Design. These new topics are trending as vendors add new tools to make the technology accessible to customers. This is reflected in the awareness vs. usage figures shown below.

Standard tools

In some cases, the correlation between awareness and usage is obvious. CAD users are aware of 2D drawing and 3D modeling and a high number of them are using these tools. The other aspect of the 2D/3D split for CAD users is that 2D and 3D are not mutually exclusive. In the future, 3D may grow, and we expect that to be the case; and perhaps 2D will drop off as users become accustomed to working entirely on digital platforms, but it’s now clear that 2D and 3D workflows will remain in use at most organizations.

As an aside, the high proportion of use for rendering in Business Advantage’s results surprises us a bit, because it indicates the trend is a little ahead of what some of us might have thought. Sixty-three percent of respondents indicated rendering is relevant in their work, and 39% use the technology. Enterprise providers Dassault and Siemens have acquired rendering technology and have brought them in house. Nemetschek, a strong player in AEC has powerful rendering tools in its portfolio, thanks to its Maxon division. In addition, the processor companies AMD, Intel, and Nvidia are making ray tracing technology tools and programs freely available. As rendering becomes easier, faster, and less expensive, we expect to see its use become more widespread in the large population of CAD users.

Up and coming or misunderstood?

On the opposite end of the scale, machine learning, AI, virtual reality, cloud-based CAD all score well in user awareness, but relatively few users are actually taking advantage of the technology. The challenge of measuring AI and machine learning usage is that these are not usually optional features for customers, they’re examples of technology to be integrated into the software so, customers will probably not realize the extent to how AI and Machine Learning are being used in their products.

On the hardware side, machine learning also comes into play in IoT, and on that front, we do expect to see customers reaping the benefits of machines being able to self-monitor and report on their relative health, even though they will not be directly involved with the mechanisms. However, this is not an area where the majority of designers and drafters will directly interact.

Business Advantage sees a similar disparity for virtual reality, with 54% of people saying they know about the technology, but only 9% are using it. These results don’t surprise us and are in keeping with our own estimates.

Nonetheless, VR is a really interesting topic in 2019. Only 12 months ago, it looked like VR was headed towards becoming another promising technology lost in the purgatory of the hype cycle, doomed to endure another round before getting another chance for the brass ring. In comparison, AR seemed to have some staying power thanks to its use in IoT, industrial maintenance and repair, automotive, and other fields where hands-free working makes the heads-up display afforded by AR glasses a benefit.

But, in 2019 we are seeing and expect to see significant announcements in the industrial and scientific segments around VR from leading providers, which points to a gradual pick up in the technology. It’s hard to overstate the importance of Microsoft’s entry into the AR field with the Hololens and Windows support for head-mounted devices. Microsoft can provide the consistent hardware and software infrastructure that emerging trends require. AR and VR are both going to benefit.

Business Advantage has a plot graph of the major trends it is tracking. Some of those trends down in the lower quadrant where awareness may be low, and usage is lower are going to start rising. Some trends are not well understood by users or by analysts. When technology is new it’s not always clear how users will eventually put it to work, if at all.

Cloud-based software is a perfect example of this. Customers have had a sharp reaction to the possibility of losing their computer-resident, boxed software but vendors have had other plans. It has been evident for quite a while that the cloud is going to play a very important role in digital technology. What vendors, customers, and analysts have all been struggling to understand is how will the cloud be most useful to customers and when?

The benefit of the cloud is that it puts content in a central location where all stakeholders in a project can access the most current files. The CAD program itself could be resident in the cloud, or it cloud be on a client computer, and there are hybrid approaches. Cloud-based applications are always the latest version.

Also, cloud-based programs are accessible on any device, regardless of operating system and, for the most part, onboard processing power.

These are features that appeal to customers.

We’re seeing a lot of variation in the ways in which the cloud is being used by customers. They’re taking advantage of processing in the cloud, storage, and they’re showing increased willingness to actually do their work in the cloud. For example, The cloud-based CAD programs OnShape and Autodesk Fusion are seeing steady growth. These new tools may be used in addition to traditional CAD products or on their own but, the acceptance is clearly growing.

Another look at the lower left quadrant of Business Advantage’s plot of survey answers shows mobile access to CAD programs and data, cloud-based CAD, moving up. Collaborative Design is in the upper right quadrant where trends are considered important and people are putting them to use. The way we see it, collaborative design is a driving trend that will make incorporation of cloud resources a necessity. Access to CAD on mobile devices and to CAD program access anywhere are bonuses.

Summary

The digital revolution has swept through the industry like wildfire, dramatically changing everything it touches, and utterly transforming work practices. Meanwhile, CAD customers are doing critical work in the design and creation of our modern world. In some cases, they may be ahead of the curve, and in some cases, they may be so busy getting work done, they’re not really thinking about how to add new practices to their workload. But, it’s always a good idea to ask customers what they think.

This article is an opportunity for us to look at Business Advantage’s survey results in the light of our own experience and research, and we recommend you go see the survey and listen to the company’s own analysis.

That information is free and available on their site.

via Kathleen Maher at GraphicSpeak

Are some design tasks still better done by hand? And where is the line between designer and artist?

samhochberg — Wed, 03 Apr 2019 13:00:17 +0000

I’m a huge believer in computer-aided design. But read about Acura’s car body process.

A Look at Six Car Design Specialties, Part 2: The Clay Modeler

Design Modeler Matt Mantz’s job is to interpret 2D sketches and translate them into 3D by hand

Thanks to Core77 and Rain Noe

This series is about the different sub-specialties within car design. No matter the studio, a half-dozen different design teams are all required to provide a complete design. But the sequence and the manner in which each team is utilized may differ from studio to studio. Most studios start with 2D concept renderings, which then have to be translated into 3D. Some studios accomplish that by handing the rendering off to a computer modeler, who then interprets the drawing to realize the form in his or her screen.

Acura’s recipe, however, is to go from concept sketch to clay, almost directly; in between, a computer modeler does interpret the sketch to get rough dimensions, estimating mechanical fit, and then a digital milling machine carves a rough approximation of a 1/4-scale model using the digital modeler’s files. But at that point the all-important clay modeler jumps in.

In Acura’s process, the clay modeler plays a significant role in determining the final form, using old-school hand tools, aesthetic judgment and expertise. But it’s not all artistry with no science; the clay modeler will even optimize the exterior for the sake of aerodynamics, coordinating with wind tunnel testing facilities for validation.

Here in Part 2 of this series, we chat with Acura Senior Design Modeler Matt Mantz. Mantz had an unusual upbringing that might’ve been common a century ago, but which is pretty rare today. We were fascinated by the role that upbringing played in Mantz’s aesthetic training.

Core77: Can you describe your position, and what led you to it?

Matt Mantz: Sure. It’s nice to have people come in, see what I actually do. I’m a Senior Design Modeler here at Acura. I’ve been here for about 12 years. Some of the other cars I’ve worked on are the 2014 MDX, the 2016 NSX and I was the project leader for the 2019 RDX.

So before I get started–I was raised on a horse ranch in northern California and my parents had horses. I was actually a pig farmer. I went from pig farmer to car design. Yeah.

On the farm I rode dirt bikes and I was also really into art as a kid. I had some good art teachers that taught me sculpture, and I really enjoyed it. I loved modeling and building things.

How did you get from there to car designer?

I went to school at the Academy of Art in San Francisco, and that’s where I learned clay modeling. I was recruited by another auto manufacturer and worked there for about 10 years before coming to Honda. I always loved Honda because of the dirt bikes I rode as a kid.

Where do you come into the car design process here?

When we get started, I’ll get these sketches from the designers, and a package drawing [of the chassis] from the engineers. It’s my job to take that sketch and put it over the package. Sometimes [that transition yields something that] looks a little funky and weird, so then we go back and forth changing the proportion of it, [while still being faithful to] the image.

As you’re interpreting the sketch into the clay, what are some of the things that influence or inspire you as you’re shaping the clay?

Being an artist that grew up on a ranch, I’d really studied the forms of the animals that we had. I ask myself “How does that relate to cars?” As a clay modeler, I’m trying to make the car look attractive, and I get a lot of proportions from the animals that I’ve observed, on or off the farm. I’d look at the hips of a horse, and you can see that’s where the power comes from. So I’ll put the [gestural] power over the wheels. Or look at a cheetah: It’s really lean through the middle, the power is over the shoulders. We tried to do that same thing here [indicates the RDX model], make the body look really lean and nimble, and put the fender flares on the car to try to emphasize where the power is coming from.

Then there’s the eagle and the shark. The eagle is a very aerodynamic animal and aerodynamics on a car is very important. So we think about things like, how does air flow over an eagle? And how does the water flow over a shark?

The animal inspiration is fascinating. How do you reconcile that with real-world performance?

For one thing, we do wind tunnel testing. In our wind tunnel in Ohio, we’ll have [clay models of the] car mounted to these posts and as wind blows over the car, those posts are measuring the forces being pushed on the car. You get figures for drag, lift, yaw, all kinds of different forces. Then we’ll make actual changes to the clay model while it’s in the wind tunnel.

Digital tools have changed the car design process over the years, but one thing that’s the same now as it was 50 years ago is clay. Can you talk about why?

Everyone asks, why do we still use clay, and there’s a number of reasons. Number one is, the evaluators want to not only see the car, but feel it. We could show the car digitally, but you can’t actually feel a digital model on the screen.

Another reason is because we make a lot of changes to this as we’re going through the development. For example, [in the middle of the design process] the hood on this thing had to be raised to meet some pedestrian impact standards. So, clay is a material that can be easily added and removed and it’s always very accurate. We can control the accuracy on this. Other materials would either be slower to use or not quite as accurate.

We do use some digital tools now [points to a nearby milling machine]. We do a lot of digital modeling, but those are just another tool in my toolbox, to speed up the process. I have my analog tools and my digital tools.

Can you talk about the interchanges between the two?

So by hand, we’ll actually concentrate on one side of the car, usually the entire driver’s side. Then we’ll scan the car and use the digital mill to mirror the passenger side of the car.

There’s two benefits to this: One, the mill can keep working overnight, when I’m at home, and two, it’s much quicker than I can do it. It would probably take us three days to mirror the full passenger side of this car, but for me to do that by hand might take three weeks.

Were you there for the digital transition? From when you had to do both halves of a car by hand to when the mill came in?

Yeah. When I started clay modeling in ’98, after one side of the car was finished, we’d have one guy on the finished side measuring and calling out points. Another guy on the other side of the car would literally be digging a pointer into the clay, and we’d do that every 50 millimeters, a whole row of points up the car. Then move 50 millimeters beyond that and do another whole row of points. That took forever, just weeks of calling out points. And you had the possibility of human error, where I’m reading 346.5 but I might say “345.6.”

That lasted until maybe 10 years ago. Everybody’s using the 3D scanning and the mill tools now.

Is there still handwork to do after the mill cuts the other half?

So the mill leaves a surface that’s–I left this side rough so you guys can see it. Even the finished cut of the mill, you can see it has a little bit of a texture to it.

So we’ll take that texture off [with hand tools] before we view the car.

Is the car evaluated with just the clay finish?

No, we use ScotchCal film over the entire car. It’s almost like wallpaper, it’s got glue on the back. You soak the ScotchCal and then it’s like a big sticker sheet. We’ll use different colors for the headlights, the grille, that kind of stuff.

And then how do they–for a clay model, what’s the equivalent of marking up a sketch for revisions?

We use tape. Dave [Marek, Acura’s Executive Creative Director] will tape different lines on the car to communicate revisions to the designers. I have another design director who uses aluminum wire, he’ll say, “I think this shape should be flatter here–” and he’ll bend the wire and stick it on here. Those are very good communication tools, I can see exactly what they’re talking about. Then we’ll come back in and remodel based on those lines.

How do concerns about manufacturability affect your work?

There’s thousands of regulations based on safety, stamping–can the metal be stamped into this form? Sometimes we’ll create a shape that is so formed that when they try to stamp it, it just rips the metal. So they’ll come back to us and say, “Look, you’ve pushed it too far, we can’t stretch the metal that far. You’ve got to bring it back a little bit.” So then it’s, can you create the same shape, the same feeling, with a little bit less draw to the metal. So, we go back and forth.

Then there’s other changes needed–what I was talking about before with the bumper beam was, an engineer needed to make changes to the chassis for safety, and the form we had didn’t allow for the bumper beam to be hidden behind it. It would have been sticking out of the car.

So then we scanned the clay model, and I took that digital file and dropped it right over the chassis, which existed digitally. And I could see in Alias, very easily, exactly where that bumper was interfering with the exterior surface. I could take measurements and see exactly how much room I have. Then I was able to go back to the clay and just pull the form over the outside of it, but in such a way that it looked exactly the same. Dave came back and he was like, “Where’s the bumper beam?” and I’m like, “it’s in there.” He was like “How’d you do that?”

Can you talk about why you guys work in 1/4 scale?

The clay process is a two-year process, and we start with 1/4 scale because we can make a lot of big changes very rapidly. If they want to move the windshield forward a hundred millimeters, it’s only 25 millimeters of material for us. If you had to do that in full size, that’s a lot.

We try to get the main proportion of the car set in the 1/4 scale. Then we’ll scan the 1/4 scale car, mill out a full-sized buck, and do the same thing. We’ll sculpt on that for probably a year, while we’re going back and forth with the engineers about regulations, stamping.

Do issues crop up when you go from the 1/4-size model to a full-size?

So, in 1/4-size, a lot of times–we call it cheating, but we try to cheat the model to make it look better for the evaluators. We’ll make the fenders look a little bigger, add a little more curvature, a little more puff to them. But when you blow that up to a full size model, now they look like balloons. So we’ll make the 1/4-scale look good and after they buy off on it, we’ll fix it and tune it on the full-scale.

[Looking at Mantz’s hand tools] Did you make these yourself?

Most of my tools you can buy at a clay shop, but all my steels are handmade. Sometimes I won’t have a tool that fits the exact shape that I need, so I just take one with a generic end and modify it into whatever shape I want.

Once you decided you wanted to do car design, what drew you specifically to the clay modeling side?

When I was going through art school, we did all the different aspects of design: Research, sketching, clay modeling. I actually really enjoyed the research, I thought that was really fun–researching different companies, the customer, who are we making this product for.

Sitting down and sketching on paper, two-dimensionally, was not that much fun; it’s really hard for me to do that.

But as soon as we got into the clay model, it was really easy for me. My teachers saw that and recommended to me, “Hey, you should really be a clay modeler over being a designer. You’re really good at it.” And honestly, it’s a really good career. It’s tough being a designer. These guys have to perform all the time. I get to take their sketches and create this.

Also, some companies are more reliant on the Alias digital modeling, and one cool thing about Acura is that we still rely heavily on the clay model. The “touch, feel” is so engraved in, and you just can’t touch a digital model.

A benefit I try to explain to people about clay is: Let’s say I’m tuning and adjusting [a character line in the body], maybe a quarter of a millimeter over the entire line here. When I’m looking at this line and I’m this close to it, I can still see the rest of the car. So I have that reference there. When you do that on the computer screen, you can zoom in on the detail or you can look down the car, but you can’t see them both at the same time. So the clay allows us to reference the entire car and see the details at the same time.

Why – And How! – To Draw

samhochberg — Wed, 20 Mar 2019 12:00:19 +0000

Recently, a LinkedIn conversation I was in reminded me that the art of drawing was vital for product designers. I proposed other benefits as well. That’s the Why.

And then…lo and behold…I come across this post from our SOLIDWORKS peers at SolidSmack. So…this answers the How.

With over two decades of experience teaching how to design, draw, and render at the highest college level, concept designer Scott Robertson knows a thing or two about what it takes to make concepts ‘stick’ for his students. And as one of the most widely-recognized design sketching masters, he’s proven these concepts in his own practice through and through.

In How to Draw: Drawing and Sketching Objects and Environments from Your Imagination, the Art Center educator consolidates years of design sketching knowledge—from thumbnail sketches and perspective grids to shaded renderings—into a digestible self-study program that can take anybody’s sketching ability to the next level. Frankly, if you’re even remotely serious about design sketching, this book is an absolute necessity.

Let’s just let the man himself give us a breakdown:

‘CAD Trends’ Survey Covers More Technologies But Yields Few Surprises

samhochberg — Wed, 27 Feb 2019 14:00:22 +0000

3D printing adoption continues to grow significantly, as strong growth potential is found for emerging technologies such as generative design and artificial intelligence.

Four new technologies were added to the mix when Business Advantage surveyed users in the CAD/CAM market late last year to assess the most important technology trends; generative design, virtual reality, machine learning, and artificial intelligence brought the total number to 16.

“CAD Trends 2018-19” was the fifth-annual such survey conducted by the U.K.-based research and consulting firm, which specializes in the CAD/CAM market. It surveyed 626 CAD/CAM users worldwide at companies of all sizes to gauge awareness, use, and other factors related to technology adoption. Respondents were primarily in the manufacturing (38%), AEC (31%), process and plant (7%), and utilities (5%) market sectors. The company this week presented a summary of results to the media, including Cadalyst.

Not surprisingly, 3D modeling and 2D drafting remain the heart and soul of the design process, reflecting the highest rates of use (69% and 67%, respectively) and deemed by respondents as the top two most important technologies of the 16 surveyed. Rendering (39%) and building information modeling (BIM, 36%) were next highest in use.

This slide compares awareness of 16 CAD technologies with actual current adoption, according to the “CAD Trends 2018-19” report. Source of all data: Business Advantage; click any image to enlarge.
Importance is rising for collaborative design, BIM, CAM, 3D printing, 3D modeling, and cloud-based CAD, and stabilizing for product lifecycle management (PLM), 2D drafting, product data management (PDM), and mobile access to CAD, according to the report.

This slide shows how survey respondents rank the importance of technologies and how each is deemed more important by specific market sectors, regions, and company sizes. Click image to enlarge.
The greatest growth in use was found for collaborative design, also known as concurrent engineering, with a current adoption rate of 29% (12% more than the average use rate over the previous four years) and 3D printing, with a current adoption rate of 31% (6% more than the previous average). Reported use of mobile access to CAD (19%) was only 1% higher than the previous years’ average, and use of PLM (21%) was 3% lower than the previous average.

Based on survey respondents’ predicted future use of technologies, the greatest growth is foreseen for 3D printing, mobile access to CAD, cloud-based CAD, and virtual reality (VR) applications. Technologies that show the greatest growth potential, when compared with current use, are AI, machine learning, VR, augmented reality, cloud-based CAD, and generative design.

The most widely used CAD software among respondents was AutoCAD (35%), followed by SOLIDWORKS (25%), Autodesk Inventor (13%), AutoCAD LT (12%), and PTC Creo (11%). Those using more than one CAD system could select as many as three options.

When asked what type of license they had for their primary CAD software, 70% of survey respondents indicted perpetual license (39% with annual support/maintenance and the other 31% without), followed by annual subscription (37%).

Regarding hardware used to support CAD systems, desktop workstations are the most popular option (56%), edging out desktop PCs (49%). Solid-state drive adoption (25%) grew the most, and mobile phone use more than doubled (to 8%) compared with average use over the previous four years. Virtual workstation use remained the same year-on-year. Professional graphics cards (GPUs) debuted in this year’s survey, with 24% of respondents citing their use.

A recording of the “CAD Trends 2018-19” summary report is available on YouTube. In-depth data is available as well; contact the company directly.

via Nancy Spurling Johnson at Cadalyst

Design Inspiration – Quotes On Design II

samhochberg — Mon, 11 Feb 2019 14:00:38 +0000

If you’re reading this, there’s a very good chance you’re in the product design, manufacturing, document management, or marketing world.

And you’ve learned to rely on certain tools of your trade. Perhaps you carry them in a toolbox and they’re made of steel and plastic and wood and glass. Perhaps you downloaded them from a software manufacturer and they’re made of logic and code and a graphic user interface.

And with them you do your work and, I’m sure, do it well.

But what drives you? Is it a paycheck? Real or imagined security? Some sort of status or acclaim? All perfectly legitimate motivators. I’ll bet, however, that that’s not all.

You’re a creative person and that’s why you were hired. You translate others’ needs into a viable product, workflow, or result. You ideate. You modify. You tweak. You perfect. You perform the wondrous alchemy of turning things from the abstract to the concrete, to steel and plastic and wood and glass.

You innovate.

What is the primary ingredient of innovation? I contend that it’s inspiration.

Usually in this space you’ll find SOLIDWORKS tips, tricks, and articles. If you’re a regular reader, I am confident you’ve found all our GSC authors to be as knowledgeable as any in the field. SOLIDWORKS has grown so popular, I believe, because it doesn’t stand in your way; as one of our customers once put it, “it works like I think.” In other words, we have no roadblock between inspiration and design.

Where does this inspiration come from? I’ve pondered this for a series (1, 2, 3) of articles now. Speaking for myself, there are many people that can crystallize the essence of design (and its corresponding tools) to a brief, memorable quote. A few months ago, I began to share some favorites; this month I’ll add some more.

The only important thing about design is how it relates to people.

– Victor Papanek

Art is an idea that has found its perfect visual expression. And design is the vehicle by which this expression is made possible. Art is a noun, and design is a noun and also a verb. Art is a product and design is a process. Design is the foundation of all the arts.

– Paul Rand

The real problem with the interface is that it is an interface. Interfaces get in the way. I don’t want to focus my energies on an interface. I want to focus on the job…I don’t want to think of myself as using a computer, I want to think of myself as doing my job.

– Donald Norman

The design instinct, above all, is about viewing the world around you as a place filled with opportunities to add more thoughtfulness and care.

– Sahil Lavingia

In design man becomes what he is. Animals have language and perception as well, but they do not design.

– Otl Aicher

Good design is obvious. Great design is transparent.

– Joe Sparano

Our opportunity, as designers, is to learn how to handle the complexity, rather than shy away from it, and to realize that the big art of design is to make complicated things simple.

– Tim Parsey

The public is more familiar with bad design than good design. It is, in effect, conditioned to prefer bad design, because that is what it lives with. The new becomes threatening, the old reassuring.

– Paul Rand

A good designer finds an elegant way to put everything you need on a page. A great designer convinces you half that [stuff] is unnecessary.

– Mike Monteiro

Styles come and go. Good design is a language, not a style.

–Massimo Vignelli

It is true that great design seems transparent, we almost never even “see” it. We so easily spot bad designs, though! Here’s to the human alchemists that can distill ideas into the physical world, with products that work like we think.

Why 3D CAD Models – and Video Games – Are Made of Tiny Triangles

samhochberg — Wed, 30 Jan 2019 14:00:27 +0000

For Vox, Cleo Abram explains why game designers use triangles when designing 3D animated games (and not, say, circles or rectangles).

Triangles are a key part of how these gorgeous, detailed games appear on your screen — the hidden heroes we should all thank as we play. This simple shape helps keep the number of computations needed for each detail as low as possible, allowing the player’s computer to process these elaborate games.

I like how the arms race among game developers to create more and more realistic objects out of smaller and smaller triangles mirrors the process in differential calculus of finding the slope of a curve by — wait for it — using smaller and smaller triangles. The game designers are going to have a problem truly getting to infinitesimally small triangles though…

Hat tip to kottke.org…

Andreas Vlahinos on #Generative #Design

samhochberg — Mon, 07 Jan 2019 14:00:36 +0000

“Solid modeling, when it was introduced, let users design parts that could not be manufactured. With 3D printing, parts can be manufactured that cannot be designed.”

The Bear Growls – Andreas Vlahinos on Generative Design

Dr. Andreas Vlahinos. (Picture courtesy of ResearchGate.)

A variety of generative design products and technologies took to the stage at the second ASSESS conference. Generative, or GD, a technology very much ascendant on the hype curve, is breathlessly described as revolutionary. It is like CAD when it was first introduced. Or like parametric design. With the hype so cranked up, each vendor has a product better than the last. And each competitor has fixed the shortcomings of the others.

Next to me is Andreas Vlahinos, the bearded bear of a man, 20 years teaching engineers at University of Colorado, a PhD from Georgia Tech and holder of three patents, is sitting next me in the audience. He shakes his head. He does not agree with a presenter, who has just made a lofty claim about generative design. There’s been a lot of that. Andreas is having none of it. When a shake of the head is insufficient, he whispers, “No way.”

I use these things, he says to me later, meaning he knows enough to not be fooled.

Andreas, who is at the same time a champion and a critic of GD, now heads his own consulting firm. His favorite generative design is GENESIS. It’s an old code (created by De Garrett Vanderplaats in 1984) but he finds it more useful and robust than the new codes being introduced. Many of the vendors of the new codes are at ASSESS, which is in danger of being overrun with GD.

Andreas has been presenting and critiquing generative design for years, pointed to a flip-flop at COFES 2016. Solid modeling, when it was introduced, let users design parts that could not be manufactured. With 3D printing, parts can be manufactured that cannot be designed. For example, the internal structures that make a part super lightweight, composed of lattices or irregular cell structures.

You can barely model it, he says. Forget about simulating it.

Years of generative design user experience, as well as an overview of the technology, make Andreas much sought after by the founders of GD startups, who present Andreas their business cards after he makes it apparent, by the nature of his questions, that he knows more than they do. They would do well to employ his services exclusively, assuring themselves of his insight and—at the same time—denying their competitors. In the race for the ultimate generative design software, one that will truly be the revolution in design, usefulness and ease of use will no doubt determine the winner, but it will take someone with true insight to determine to what measure the product has achieved in both criteria.

via Roopinder Tara at The CAD Insider

Is it good #design…if it never gets used?

samhochberg — Mon, 17 Dec 2018 14:00:54 +0000

Consider this perfectly practical, effective idea…the original parallel parking assist.

The fifth-wheel system uses your spare and hydraulics to help make parking easier

Parallel parking has never been fun, and drivers have always struggled with the skill required to slot in between two cars at the curb, especially in tight parking spots in major cities like New York or Los Angeles. To ease those woes, automakers have started adding systems that effectively park your car automatically. Park assist might seem like a modern feature, but it’s about 80 years old.

In the not-so-roaring 1930s, Brooks Walker filed a patent for the system you see above — a hydraulically assisted parking system. Hydraulically, because it uses a hydraulic ram to lift your car, by way of the spare tire. Then, the spare-tire-turned-park-assist powers your car into a parking space without having to do your best Austin Powers impersonation.

While Walker displayed his system using Packards and Cadillacs, it was available for any and every car. Obviously, the system required modifications to work — namely slicing up the trunk floor and possibly relocating the fuel tank. Those extensive changes are probably some of the reasons why the system never caught on with the public.

If you want a better look at how the system works, Old Cars Weekly tracked down one of Walker’s display models — a 1953 Packard Cavalier. The car was well-preserved over the years but was repainted by one of the previous owners.

If you’ve ever used one of the modern park assist features, watch the video above to see the way your parallel parking procedure would have been decades ago. It’s still interesting to see the ideas that never caught on with the mainstream automotive world.
via Wesley Wren at Autoweek

On #Design and Libertarian Paternalism: How to help users make better choices

samhochberg — Mon, 03 Dec 2018 14:00:17 +0000

If we define “best” as healthiest for users’ well-being, should we as designers be forcing users into what we know are the “best” options? A few examples to get us started:

Should Netflix turn off its services temporarily for users who have been watching for a few hours because Netflix knows about the negative effects of binge watching?
Should Apple force users to use Nightshift during sleeping hours because blue light emitting from smartphones affects users’ sleep quality?
Should a pizza app not allow users to complete their order unless they have a healthy topping such as spinach on their pizza?
Should a company force all employees to participate in a 401(k) without an option to opt out?

The answer to all these questions are no, we shouldn’t. While these could be the “best” options for users, many products may not be successful by employing such strategies because people generally do not like being told what to do (obviously).

Often times, users and stakeholders don’t pick the “best” options because they are ill-informed on the problem our system is attempting to solve. Despite this, they ironically always think they are making the right choices, which is why they make them.

Our responsibility to be more creative

source: Joanna Kosinska, via Unsplash

Drawing from a well-established study in behavioral economics and cognitive psychology, we know that individuals make inferior decisions in terms of their own happiness and well-being all the time. Although, those decisions would likely change if they had complete information on the topic. This is true in many domains (our products included), as people lack stable, clear or properly ordered preferences. The shoddy choices they make are a result of framing effects, starting points and default rules designed by us.

There is no way for our users to know what is best for them as well as we do. They did not conduct heaps of user research regarding our products and they do not understand the problem our products aim solve as well as us. It is not their fault for having poor judgment when using systems we design, but rather it is our fault for not designing around it. We, the designers, are responsible to help them pick the best option. They are not UX designers and should not have to be to use our products.

With that being said, forcing users to do things or using any type of cold turkey mechanism is not the solution we are looking for. We can do better than that! As designers, it is our duty to find ways to steer users in the right direction rather than just blocking users out.

Invisible nudges

Enter the concept known as Libertatian Paternalism: an approach to addressing a complex web of values including free choice, self-control, human welfare, among others. In simpler terms, libertarian paternalism nudges stakeholders toward making choices that are “best” or “good” for them while also enabling stakeholders to make their own choices.

source: rawpixel, via Unsplash

To help me describe the importance of Libertarian Paternalism in Design, let’s explore a simple scenario. Consider a high school cafeteria that offers lunch daily for students. Each day the cafeteria makes multiple decisions such as what foods to prepare, what ingredients to use, and how food options are presented. One observation the director makes is that the students have a tendency to choose more of the items that are presented earlier in the line. With this information, she now needs to decide the order in which they are presented. Some strategies are:

She could keep the items in random order.
She could put items that are healthiest at the front of the line.
She could put items that are unhealthiest (worst off) at the front of the line.
She can just give students only the healthiest item limiting their freedom of choice.

By looking at this scenario through a Libertarian Paternalism lens, we can easily choose option 2 because it gives the students all the choice in the world to eat what they want, but we are nudging them in the right direction to make the choice that is best for them: the healthier food option.

Other examples are listed below:

Companies having employees opt into their 401(k) by default, but allowing them to opt out at anytime.
Apple defaulting Nightshift to change from sunset to sunrise but letting users change this with ease.
Reddit making comments sort by “new” for ongoing discussions such as a football game thread but sorted by “top” for opinion based discussions such as a political thread. Another option that can be changed with a single click.
A pizza app presenting the veggies before meats when customers order pizza.

Libertarian Paternalism and the idea of nudging users in the right direction without forcing them into options is a core aspect of Design and is something we should all consider when attempting to solve new problems. It is our role as Designers to think of more creative ways to get users to make the “best” choices without them even thinking twice. We can do better so our users can be better! Little pushes go a long way.

via Jake Burke at UX Design

Read my latest @GSC3D #SOLIDWORKS blog post #3D #CAD

samhochberg — Wed, 14 Nov 2018 14:00:24 +0000

It’s Autumn.

The evenings are shorter, the days cooler. Football and hockey seasons are ramping up. Monotonous green landscapes turn into a panoply of colors as leaves, soon to be raked, exalt in one final boastful display.

Aw, the heck with that stuff. The new release of SOLIDWORKS is out!

Yes, dear friends, it’s that time of year, when our marketing mavens and social media masters gather all of us tech brainiacs into a meeting and ask us to write about our favorite new features.

[Figure 1: Marketing rounds up blog ideas from tech staff.]

New, Favorite SOLIDWORKS Features

It’s easy to cover new SOLIDWORKS features, right? I mean, we live for this stuff, don’t we? The only problem is…we’ve already written about our top 10 new features in SOLIDWORKS Mechanical CAD. And Electrical CAD. And Simulation. And the all-important Document Management. What’s left?

As the radio DJs say, time to take a deeper dive. I’m going to spin the wheel of “favorite feature fortune” and…look…it’s landed on…Bill Of Material enhancements!

Read the rest at GSC’s website

ITEC 2018

samhochberg — Mon, 29 Oct 2018 13:00:53 +0000

I’ll be speaking 11/2/18 at the IL Tech. Edu. Conf., presented by the IL Design Educators Assn., Technology Education Assn. of IL., and Project Lead The Way, representing GSC @gsc3d, on @SOLIDWORKS #3D #CAD in Business and Academia. #PLTWorg #STEM. All attendees are invited to join me in Turner Hall, IL State U., Room 167, at 1:00 PM.

This is why you should hire a military veteran

samhochberg — Mon, 08 Oct 2018 13:00:27 +0000

If you are overlooking veterans, you are missing out on these skills.

Americans do a lot to celebrate and show appreciation to veterans after they return home from active service. However, the picture for them returning to employment after leaving the service has typically not been nearly as rosy. With the economy up, the jobless rate for all veterans declined from 4.3% to 3.7 % in 2017 according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics. However, that still leaves a lot of unemployed veterans. Many Americans outside of the military are unaware of the many skills and experiences that veterans acquire while in service. Misconceptions about what sort of skills one picks up while in military service abound, and some employers mistakenly believe that the skills that veterans have are not transferable outside of the military world. Adam G. Gonzales, a service veteran, started Silent Professionals to help connect veterans with employers as well as to educate employers on what veterans have to offer.

Here are 9 reasons for organizations to hire veterans:

Leadership and “Followership” Capabilities

From the time they enter service, veterans have been groomed to both become good followers and be ready to take on leadership responsibilities. In field situations, military people have to be ready, willing, and able to make quick decisions in the face of physical dangers and in ever-changing and uncertain situations–vital skills which easily translate into a fast-changing work environment.

Teamwork Ability

Military veterans are the ultimate team players, as this is something ingrained in them from the first moment they enter service. They are accustomed to thinking in terms of what is best for their team and what they can do to strengthen and improve the teams they are part of. As most of what is accomplished in the working world is based on working as part of a team, veterans are already well ahead of the learning curve when it comes to teaching teamwork.

Ability to Perform Under Pressure

Military personnel are trained and expected to be able to perform under pressure, deadlines, and trying conditions, all while judging priorities and accomplishing goals. Staying with a goal until it is completed is all part of the military’s rigorous training. This is a quality that is highly useful in any job requiring tight deadlines, and a skill that resonates well with employers.

Experience Working Within a Diverse Group

Veterans have served alongside people of various backgrounds, races, and ethnic origins. In order to accomplish their goals and missions, they have learned to trust and rely upon one another regardless of their backgrounds. They fit in and work well within a workplace that is becoming increasingly more diverse.

Goal Focus and Orientation

Veterans are accustomed to making timely assessments of situations and coming up with plans of action. After actions are taken, they typically debrief, look at what worked and what didn’t, and come up with ways to improve in the future. This ongoing form of focused improvement is what all successful organizations strive for. Veterans already have the mind-set and ability to carry this out.

Persistence and Determination

The ability to stick with a problem or situation for a period of time when no immediate solution appears at hand is an attribute that is taught in the military. This requires the ability to endure, change direction when necessary, and stick with a course of action over the long haul until results are achieved. The ability to forego immediate gratification for long-term benefit is an attribute that veterans accept and are used to.

Attention to Detail

While learning to always be aware of the big picture, the military teaches the importance of paying attention to detail–an attribute that can be difficult to find in the general population and can pay big dividends for organizations that require people who are detail-oriented.

Conscious and Safety Orientation

Safety is a major concern for all organizations, and the military ensures that safety is constantly focused on and regulations adhered to. Following rules and regulations has become second nature to veterans, and they easily adapt to and become highly aware of any dangers inherent in their new environment.

Adaptable, Coachable, and Trainable

The military environment is one in which learning, adapting to an environment in which situations change rapidly, and the ability to improvise is a constant necessity. Members are expected to be constantly learning and prove their ability to take initiative and be accountable for their actions.