The Art of Product Design E-Book

Hardi Meybaum

• Herausgeber: John Wiley & Sons
• Kategorie: Fachliteratur
• Sprache: Englisch

Seitenzahl: 266

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2014

Beschreibung

Embrace Open Engineering and accelerate the design and manufacturing processes Product development is a team sport, but most companies don't practice it that way. Organizations should be drawing on the creativity of engaged customers and outsiders, but instead they rely on the same small group of internal "experts" for new ideas. Designers and engineers should be connecting with marketing, sales, customer support, suppliers, and most importantly, customers. The Art of Product Design explains the rise of "Open Engineering," a way of breaking down barriers and taking advantage of web-based communities, knowledge, and tools to accelerate the design and manufacturing processes. * Explains how to establish open flows of information inside and outside an organization, increasing the quality and frequency of input from different groups and stakeholders * Hardi Meybaum is the founder and CEO of GrabCad, the largest community of mechanical engineers and designers in the world Open Engineering is crowdsourcing, it's collaborating, it's sharing and connecting. And it's helping a growing number of companies create better products faster than they ever imagined. The Art of Product Design shows you how to harness its power for your company.

Leseprobe

Contents

Introduction: The Digital Revolution Gets Physical

Chapter 1: Gearheads Get No Respect

Love at First Sight

Getting over the Wall

What I Discovered in America

Executive Takeaways

Chapter 2: Since the Potter’s Wheel, the Most Important Tool in History

CAD History from the Cavemen in a Nutshell

Cloud Looms over the Picnic

I Looked up at the Cloud . . . and Saw the Ball Heading Straight at Me

Executive Takeaways

Chapter 3: A Million Engineers on the March

We Set Out to Stop Reinventing the Wheel . . . and Ended up with Something Unexpected

Four Flywheels Driving Open Engineering

Bottom Line: This Revolution Is Bottom Up

Executive Takeaways

Chapter 4: New Culture, New Tools Converge in the Cloud

All Heads Converge in the Cloud

Wrapping Heads around a New Business Model

The Exciting Part

Executive Takeaways

Chapter 5: Design Challenge

Who’s Taking the GrabCAD Challenge?

General Openness

Sketching out a New Model for Design: Key Word Is “Collaboration”

If Big, Start by Opening Inward

Start-Ups: You and Whose Army?

It May Look Good on Paper . . .

Executive Takeaways

Chapter 6: Here’s My Prototype; Please Kick the Crap Out of It

Virtual Is Virtuous . . .

. . . But We Still Need to Get Physical

Executive Takeaways

Chapter 7: Manufacturing

No More Colored Collars?

Offshoring: Amazingly Enough, It Works . . . So Far

Homemade: Now It Just May Be Viable

Robots That Speak CAD

The Earth Becomes Flat

Making “The Old Man” Virtual

What’s the Outcome?

Executive Takeaways

Chapter 8: Marketing

As Close as Lips and Teeth

Make Your Engineers Dance

Put a Car on the Moon? Piece of Cake, Mate

The Marketing Treasure in CAD

Executive Takeaways

Chapter 9: The Puzzle Pattern Emerges

Piece by Piece

The Digital Force That Drives It Forward . . .

. . . And the Decisive Factor That Will Determine the Winners

End the Senseless Zombie Slaughter

The Winning Hand?

Appendix: Meet the Cadopoly

Dassault Systèmes SA

Autodesk Inc.

PTC (Formerly Parametric Technology Corporation)

Siemens PLM Software

Acknowledgments

Index

Praise forThe Art of Product Design

“The communications revolution created by the Internet is breaking down barriers between countries as well as companies, enabling talented individuals everywhere to find opportunities around the globe. The GrabCAD community is a story of how smart, creative people from around the world can find each other; solve problems, old and new; and do amazing things.”

—Toomas Hendrik Ilves, President of Estonia

“Hardi does a nice job of amplifying the underlying trends that are revolutionizing the mechanical product development process. At Kiva Systems, we experienced these forces at work while designing and delivering four versions of our robot in four years—leveraging a broad community of interconnected designers and suppliers, working virtually and across continents, then physically, sometimes with next-day overnight deliveries. The power of this radically new world always hit home when we booted up the first prototype and it ‘just worked’ as designed. Hardi’s book is a must-read for executives in and around physical product development—disrupt or be disrupted.”

—Mick Mountz, CEO and founder, Kiva Systems

“Hardi tells two fascinating stories with this book, one about how he founded and grew GrabCAD and the other about how he sees the world of product design changing. Both stories are relevant to anyone seeking to take advantage of new online communities and connections to grow their business.”

—Dean Kamen, founder of DEKA Research and Development Corporation

“The online community Hardi and his team have created is a great example of how today’s unprecedented access to technology, content, and people is changing the way we make things.”

—Carl Bass, CEO of Autodesk

“Listen to the stories you find in The Art of Design about the next industrial revolution and you’ll be ready for the future—Hardi has his hand on the pulse of what happens next in the 3D design world.”

—Bre Prettis, CEO of Makerbot Inc.

Cover design: Wiley

Copyright © 2014 by GrabCAD. All rights reserved.

Published by John Wiley & Sons, Inc., Hoboken, New Jersey.

Published simultaneously in Canada.

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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data:

Meybaum, Hardi.

The art of product design : changing how things get made / Hardi Meybaum.

pages cm

Includes index.

ISBN 978-1-118-76334-6 (cloth); ISBN 978-1-118-88103-3 (ebk);

ISBN 978-1-118-88104-0 (ebk)

1. Product design—Technological innovations. I. Meybaum, Hardi. II. Title.

TS171.4.M49 2014

658.5'752—dc23

2013046064

INTRODUCTIONTHE DIGITAL REVOLUTION GETS PHYSICAL

Over the past 30 years, anything and everything that needs no physical form has been reduced to bits. Music, photographs, newspapers, plane tickets, and money have all gone digital. Soon, with driverless cars on the horizon, even taxi drivers may be transformed from flesh into software.

By comparison, change in things that must remain physical has been almost glacial: How we design and make stuff today—hardware, manufactured goods—is not radically different from what it was in 1980. And sadly, in the so-called post–industrial age, making things has been downright uncool. Intangibles such as software and finance have been where it’s at.

But that’s about to change—and very quickly.

Powerful forces are converging to drive a second great wave of the digital revolution. Where the first wave was about shedding physical form, the second wave exponentially amplifies our ability to create physical form, in any shape or size to any end we can imagine. In the process, it radically reorders all our notions about making things: who designs and who builds; how fast, where, and at what scale; and how is it marketed?

It’s not simply a matter of making new things we never dreamed of. This revolution comes with the opportunity to refashion thousands of everyday objects, making them smarter, greener, and connected with the surrounding environment. And now is precisely the time to do that as technological viability converges with surging demand for solutions for critical challenges ranging from spiraling health care costs to global warming.

It’s a revolution fueled by the monumental waste—waste of time, energy, and health, both human and ecological—that is built into our current technology. It’s about red traffic lights at midnight: the oceans of motor fuel we emit and the millions of minutes we waste while stopped at them, even when there’s no traffic. It’s about the millions of pounds of cure we administer where nano-ounces of preventive health care would do. It’s about the millions who still die needlessly in car crashes despite our having to endure red lights at midnight.

There is a humongous load of needlessly stupid stuff in this world that needs to be fixed, not “when we get around to it,” but right now.

If waste fuels this revolution, an explosion of creativity drives it forward. At its very core are epoch-making new tools that dramatically eliminate the barriers between human inspiration and physical reality. If you can imagine something that you know will work—anything—you can now build it, virtually if not physically.

The revolution takes shape as creators awake to the vast potential these tools unlock. It moves forward as creators pioneer new ways to organize human genius and effort around the new tools. It accelerates with passion and excitement, from the earnest desire to solve problems great and small to the eternal quest for human delight, be it high art or street-cool. And, of course, there’s the scent of profit, too. There is definitely money in all this.

You may have already noticed aspects of what’s happening without realizing how the pieces fit together: New products appear in months instead of years, three-dimensional (3D) printers are in the news, hardware start-ups are sprouting up in unlikely places with crowdfunded capital, and talk of a “maker’s movement” ensues.

Behind all these innovations are new tools that have matured and proliferated over the past 30 years with surprisingly little notice beyond the disciplines of design and engineering. They are the tools that now allow small start-ups to sprout up by achieving in mere months feats of technology that would have taken an army of engineers years to complete in the 1960s. They are the source of stunningly realistic visualizations that now draw investors from the crowd. They are the brains that precisely instruct those 3D printers. And they are what makes the maker’s movement more than just a hipster notion.

Collectively, these tools are functions of three-dimensional computer-aided design, or 3D CAD as we call it. In this book you will learn why I believe historians will one day rank 3D CAD alongside Gutenberg’s printing press among truly epoch-making technologies.

Skip to the absolutely essential thing to grasp about 3D CAD today: It concentrates unprecedented and phenomenal creative power on the designer’s screen, at the point where ideas takes shape, at the very top of the process that results in manufactured objects. And it projects that creative power through every stage of the process: from design through capital fund-raising, prototyping, market research, and manufacturing, all the way down to marketing.

From the earliest inception of an idea, CAD eliminates abstraction by generating a three-dimensional virtual reality that is as quickly malleable as the clay on a potter’s wheel—and globally communicable with total fidelity at broadband speed. Via highly realistic 3D renderings, anyone anywhere can see instantly and exactly what the object is meant to do and provide feedback. What’s more, via highly comprehensive numerical instructions, CAD can precisely instruct those who manufacture the object.

Here’s where we arrive at a key point of convergence. Those highly comprehensive numerical instructions that CAD generates are written in the language understood by robots and other increasingly sophisticated automated factory tools. From the designer’s screen to the factory floor—be it in China or Chicago—nothing is lost in translation.

In a nutshell, this is what makes 3D CAD pivotal in the second and physical wave of the digital revolution. But why is its impact only now becoming apparent? That’s the story this book is going to tell.

The first short answer is that, until now, 3D CAD has developed essentially as four archipelagos of unconnected islands. Four giant vendors have sold expensive and mutually incompatible systems, mainly to corporate customers, that have kept them strictly isolated behind firewalls. This setup allowed automakers and aerospace companies to make huge strides with gargantuan enterprise systems, but it meant that CAD remained largely a corporate phenomenon. For years its revolutionary potential did not extend far beyond the immediate supply chains of large companies.

That started to change over the past decade as increasingly sophisticated capability began to come within reach of small enterprises and individuals by way of (still expensive) installed software. Even so, CAD users remained relatively isolated from one another, relying on e-mail or file transfer services to pass around huge files—hardly what you could call an ecosystem.

This is where our story begins, as several trends began to converge circa 2010.

First, cloud computing began to make it possible for those huge CAD files to reside on a server where all stakeholders could securely access them. Even better, creators started to realize that the cloud would enable them to focus massive compute power on the objects in these files—crash testing, for example. All this made people start to ask why it made sense to use expensive installed programs when they could be using always-up-to-date, pay-as-you-go software in the cloud. People suddenly saw through the emperor’s new clothes.

Second, like a dissipating fog, the uncool stigma around hardware began to lift. Seemingly out of nowhere, trendsetters in places such as Silicon Valley began to talk about “makers.”

Third, as I discovered, there was growing unmet demand among CAD users for community, for some way to bridge the gaps between tens of thousands of individual engineers and designers who were exploring their still newfound capabilities.

In 2010 I cofounded GrabCAD.com as an online community that allows 3D CAD users to share their designs and learn from one another. In just three years our community has grown from a small village to a metropolis with more than one million members—more than one-third of the world’s 3D CAD users. It’s become an intense global community, buzzing with experimentation and imagination.

Imagine is, in fact, the key word, because now the playing field tilts toward creators and designers. Although technological innovation opens the gate to this revolution, its motive power isn’t in the tools. It’s in the individual genius they unlock. It’s in the new forms of networked collaboration they enable. It’s in devolving to individuals and small teams the ability to design, perfect, and fabricate any object they choose to create.

The tools are now in hand, and imaginations are fired up. What is only now beginning to develop are new models of social organization better suited to a product development and manufacturing process that will be vastly different from the models developed through the age of mass production.

What will these new social models look like? Will giant companies be toppled by small, agile, crowdfunded start-ups? Will design and manufacturing become completely divorced? Or will new verticals emerge, with CAD designers directly instructing completely automated production? Will unskilled factory labor disappear? If labor cost becomes less decisive, will manufacturing activity leave China as fast as it arrived? And where will it go if it does?

Everything we currently take for granted about product design, development, and manufacturing is now up in the air. Where it finally comes to rest will have huge implications for investors, businesspeople, workers, and national economies.

As the revolution unfolds, only a couple of things are certain. One is that “the Force” will be with teams—big or small—with the binary combination of powerful imagination and the collective skills needed to elaborate it accurately and quickly.

The other certainty is that imagination is available from only one source: the inspired brains of individual human beings. That’s why this revolution will be driven from the grassroots up, by engineers and designers with the full binary package.

This book tells the story of this revolution, with a focus on the “inspired brains” I mentioned. And while many of those brains reside in engineers and designers, I think the lessons are important to anyone involved in making, selling, or even buying things, which is to say, all of us. To help make the connection between the engineering world and the more general business world, I’ve included at the end of each chapter a list of “Executive Takeaways” that spells out ways I think executives and other business people can take action.

And who am I to tell you all this? As the host of a remarkable online community, I have a ringside seat on the revolution. And in the following chapters I will share what I have seen so far.

Chapter 1

Gearheads Get No Respect

Look around you. Unless you’re in an antique shop, almost any manufactured object you see was created by a mechanical engineer using computer-aided design (CAD) software. Like a cowboy and his horse, object creators and their three-dimensional (3D) CAD tools are almost inseparable today, so much so that after a long week working on CAD at the office, many will head straight to the basement after dinner on Friday to dive right back into CAD, working all weekend long on their hobby projects.