That’s a paraphrase of the wonderful scene in The Graduate, where Mr. Maguire tells a young and confused Benjamin (played by Dustin Hoffman) that plastics are the future. In many ways, he was right.

If your job is plastics, you know that that little phrase hides a very complex production process. Making a mold is a balancing act. How can you get the look you want in a finished part but still make the widget cheap and durable? I recently wrote about this in Desktop Engineering,

Designing plastic parts and their manufacturing process is a combination of art and engineering. A good design means parts are consistently high quality, and can be produced at high volume. A bad part or process design means costly rework, poor quality and disappointed consumers. How can you set yourself up for success?

I then lay out a couple of simple ideas that, no surprise, focus on simulation. Simulate the part, the mold, the materials — as many aspects of your product and production process as you can. And focus on the outside, too, since that’s the buyer’s first impression of the object. Yes, that cellphone case needs to be durable; but if it’s got puckers or other material defects, no buyer will even pick it up.

Read the rest of the piece here, and check out the whole magazine here (my column is on magazine page 6, PDF page 8). A column like this doesn’t have much room; I didn’t have space for light weighting, precision cooling and other big topics … All of these are important considerations, so tell me in the comments what you’re most interested in and we’ll dive in here on the blog.

PS: A little squee. I’ve been published in print before and it’s always a rush. Thanks, Desktop Engineering!