#SEU15: Invention and drawings
The theme for the latest Solid Edge release, ST8, is “Design Without Boundaries”. I don’t think the team at Siemens could have predicted how wildly appropriate it would be at this year’s Solid Edge University (SEU). SEU is a typical user event: a lot of tactical how-to, certifications, hands-on sessions by Siemens and its partners and not too much of the strategic “here’s how to make your business better” stuff.
Imagine then a keynote speaker who watches cockroaches moving across uneven terrain and harnesses those observations to make a robot have better traction without requiring extra smarts. Or who invents a Trojan carrot (like the horse but, well, a carrot) to help a bunch of rabbits rescue their foodstock from raiders. Philip Ross Norman is an architect, author, painter, inventor and thinker who takes the ordinary, like renovating a barn, and turns the experience into new design concepts. Not all of them work, of course, but Mr. Norman’s perspective on creativity is an eye-opening lesson for all of us:
- Don’t reinvent. The odds are, nature already has a model to follow. It may be the structure of a leaf, the pattern wind makes in sand or how an insect crawls; observe and see how you can reuse this in your design
- A good design is more than the sum of its parts. Once you’ve worked to get in everything essential and nothing extra, walk away.
- Look at design challenges from lots of perspectives. Mr. Norman’s robots need to enter hazardous environments; maybe crawling in isn’t always the best way. What if the robot could be thrown or catapulted into the scene somehow? In that case, it needs a tail or something else to absorb the impact.
Ross Robots (http://www.robosynthesis.com/) are used in a lot of different situations. Mr. Norman said that he’s talking to chicken farms, search & rescue, nuclear installations — all of whom see the benefit robots could bring, but who have vastly different use cases. As a result, Mr. Norman devised a robot platform that can be customized as needed. That’s very cool thinking and a realization that he and his small company can’t address all needs for all user types; creating the ecosystem lets him sell a platform on which others fulfill the detailed requirements.
Mr. Norman gave a terrific presentation. I don’t believe it’s available online; you’ll have to make do with this brief video shot by Solid Edge:
Most of us left the keynote feeling a bit inadequate, since we don’t look around us with quite as much curiosity as Mr. Norman brings to it — but we should. it was a great reminder to look up, move away from the keyboard and get inspiration from the rest of the world.
That’s what SEU is all about, after all. Speaker after speaker showed how they were using Solid Edge to make interesting stuff, or to make their jobs easier in some way. ST8 has been out for a couple of months, but the majority of attendees are still on older versions so hung on Dan Staples’ every word as he showed off the newest features. I outlined quite a few after the analyst event Siemens hosted at PLM Connection so I won’t recap them all here, except to say that the users at SEU were most excited about some of the things many of us consider ordinary: drawing production, for one. Most of us have been around CAD for so long that we forget it stands for “Drawing”. Yes, 3D is essential for design, clash detection and many other things — but most people still wind up producing drawings. Even Mr. Norman, who went from 2D pen and paper drafting to Solid Edge admitted that he generates drawings to communicate — because people expect drawings.
Other audience favorites included
- ST8’s symmetric modeling
- Pattern by Table where an Excel table governs placements in ST8. I went to a longer session on this after the keynote, and the really useful bit is that this adds a flavor of Engineer to Order (ETO) to designs that need it. For example, customer wants a longer conveyor belt? Build the intelligence into Excel to add supporting structural elements.
- Welds productivity enhancements to place & duplicate welds, extract properties (for costing, QA and other uses)
- Enriched digital mockups and Variable Table Motor, which allows you to drive variables in assembly to show motion
And, probably my favorites (though I still really dig the Pattern by Table stuff), is Drawing Compare. How many times have you mixed up your naming convention or been asked to figure out what’s changed in a part by looking at two drawings? Doing a diff automatically isn’t sexy or exciting, but it is incredibly useful.
Siemens also showed off Catchbook, its new on-a-tablet design solution (coming out soon, they promise). It hit the stage right after Microsoft told us about the latest release of Surface tablets and laptops, which could not have been better timing. The combo of Catchbook and Surface, with accurate sketching and vastly reduced lag for pen/tablet interactions, is really compelling. Catchbook can turn scribbles into lines, arcs, and ellipses, correcting inaccuracies to help with precision; that makes this useful instead of a toy. Accurate shapes are created from quickly sketches. A couple of years ago, audiences would leave a demo like this brainstorming how to get their bosses to approve an iPad purchase; now they’re wondering what they’ll do with it once they get it.
Mr. Staples also talked about Siemens’ plans for Solid Edge in the cloud. He told the audience that Solid Edge in the cloud is available on a free trial site for US (http://www.plm.automation.siemens.com/plmapp/se/en_US/online/Shop#ACTION=1189811524) & UK (apologies; I can’t seem to get a UK link). This version of Solid Edge streams in HTML5-compatible browsers, for now, in a 20-hour trial. Long term? Unclear, though Mr. Staples was adamant that Solid Edge will continue to be offered on a desktop — it’s what his customers tell him they want and need.
Mr. Norman gets the last word. How did this inventor, a 20th century Leonardo DaVinci-type guy get into Solid Edge? At a party, he was explaining his paper and pen process to an engineer from Airbus. This guy loaned him a laptop that with Solid Edge, basically saying, try this. Mr. Norman played with it and, he said within 24 hours, “Solid Edge completely won me over” as a way to create modular robotics designs, a sort of digital Meccano or Lego. That, by the way, can be used for analysis, drawing generation and all sorts of other things.
Note: Siemens PLM graciously covered some of the expenses associated with my participation in the event but did not in any way influence the content of this post.
Image credit: That’s Siemens’ Dan Staples talking about the release of ST8 in a completely packed hall.