SOLIDWORKS World 2015: Wednesday General Session Recap

What’s next? That was the main theme for today’s General Session – not only for SOLIDWORKS, but for design as a whole.

To start the session, CEO Gian Paolo Bassi shared his new found love of all things rodeo and horseback riding thanks to last night’s special event at the Corona Ranch. With a new hobby established, Gian Paolo went on introduce today’s keynote speaker, industrial designer and Chief Globalization Officer at Linno, Jinsop Lee, who covered his fresh approach to design.

Since building an X-Wing fighter from spare Lego parts at a child, Jinsop understood that you do not have to follow instructions that come with the box. He’s built on this philosophy and become a multi-disciplinary designer, making use of the design process in a variety of ways – most importantly, designing for the five senses.

The five senses theory was dreamed up from Jinsop’s attempt at making academic papers less boring. Designing for the five senses means pushing to create stimulating experiences to heighten engagement. For example, riding a motorcycle is great for sight, touch and sound, but lags in taste and smell. For year’s Jinsop has been pursuing the ultimate five sense experience. What he’s learned: things like bungee jumping and free-falling all pale in comparison to great sex.

Moving back to product design, Jinsop shifted to comparing the classic Nintendo Entertainment System’s five sense experience to that of the Nintendo Wii. The added layer of motion required to play the Wii, makes the system a richer experience. As Elijah Wood’s character from Back the Future II would agree, as would many SOLIDWORKS World attendees who got their arms on a Myo band this week.

Product design itself relies on a sensory experience. It’s modeling and shaping concepts with sight and touch. Jinsop believes the more that his senses are engaged during the design process, the better his design and the greater his engineering skills will become. However, the best feeling any designer can have is that feeling of wonderment first experienced as a child eager to build something fun.

Next, Eyal Dadush presented the inspirational story of designer Seffi Udi. Seffi endured a car crash that left him as a quadriplegic. After the accident, he decided that he had two choices: lie in bed and cry about his fate or to make the most out of his life. Seffi quickly decided that lying in bed was not an option.

Seffi was introduced to SOLIDWORKS after he was accepted to the Industrial Design faculty at Bezalel Academy of Art and Design in Jerusalem. Since learning SOLIDWORKS in 2011, Seffi has designed amazing products, including a mouth-operated mouse and a Kindle reader that uses breathing to turn pages. He even found the time to redesign his home for more accessibility.

Seffi’s strength, dedication and passion for problem solving are traits found in many engineers. His lesson for those watching is that there is no challenge that cannot be put aside when you’re focused on arriving at a solution. There wasn’t a person onsite or streaming live who wasn’t motivated to push themselves further after hearing Seffi’s amazing engineering work.

Over the past sixteen years, Model Mania has provided SOLIDWORKS World guests with a chance to test their design mettle against the greater SOLIDWORKS Community in a battle of wits to see who can model and analyze a part faster, more accurately and more efficiently. Mark Schneider, Manager, SOLIDWORKS Senior Product Introduction announced this year’s winners:

Users:

Nick Vande Waerdt, Kooima Company, Time: 12:21
Jeremiah Feist, Onmetics Connector Corp
Richard Braine, Power Drives, Inc.

Resellers:

John MacArthur, Dasi Solutions, Time 14:57
Matt Koloski, Cadd Edge
Michael Steeves, Quest Integration

Congratulations and thank you to NVIDIA® for sponsoring Model Mania 2015.

SOLIDWORKS has been a user-driven company from the start, and the company looks to its customers for feedback to shape new features. For example, SOLIDWORKS 2015 included more than 200 new features and enhancements, and 90 percent of them were the direct result of requests and other feedback from end users.

Back in October, SOLIDWORKS put a call out to its users to share their feedback once again. For two months, users shared more than 900 ideas for consideration. In December, idea submission closed and the community was asked to rank the ideas for what would eventually become the SOLIDWORKS World 2015 Top Ten list. Bruce Holway, SOLIDWORKS R&D Application Define Director, introduced the results in a video featuring cameos from this week’s keynote speakers. This year’s Top Ten ideas include:

Support zero thickness geometry
Bidirectional sweep
Export sheet metal parts of an assembly to dxf/dwg in flat state
Selection list box is too small; should be bigger or flexible in size
Display the exact item causing the error
Ability to make the inferred relations permanent in sketch
Selecting inner loops on a selected face
Both direction pattern
Topology optimization from Tosca for all engineers
Variable pull direction draft

Continuing to focus on what’s new, SOLIDWORKS Portfolio Introduction Director Neil Cooke provided a first look at SOLIDWORK Conceptual Design 2016. Formerly SOLIDWORKS Mechanical Conceptual, SOLIDWORKS Conceptual Design features new innovations along with a new name. With a flexible, intuitive, powerful modeling environment, every challenge of conceptual design is transformed into a business advantage. Notable highlights for the next SOLIDWORKS release: Dynamic Motion Simulation, Mechanism Synthesis, History Based Mates and Enhanced Interoperability. Learn more about SOLIDWORKS Conceptual Design in this in depth blog post.

Following the SOLIDWORKS Conceptual Design demo, something wild happened. So wild, in fact, that David Atten, er, Pattern Borer was sent in to show us what we can learn from observing the rare species of designers in their natural habitat.

In a cubicle forest stretching as far as the eye can see, Pattern Borer was embedded in a design herd containing unruly workstations, one dominant power user and predatory creatures, like Mr. Lumbergh here…umm yeah.

Now Sir Pattern Borer’s mission was not merely observatory nature. His mission also involved changing the engineers’ habitat for the better by empowering the herd with developments in future editions of SOLIDWORKS. A few of these enhancements include (note, this is a technology preview and these updates are subject to change):

C2 EDGE BLEND
Curvature continuous edge fillets now supported.

FLATTEN SURFACE ENHANCEMENTS
Flatten surface with internal holes, flatten curves on surface, include split lines

RENAME PART
Rename a part from the assembly level without having to open the doc

USER INTERFACE – SCALES WITH OPERATING SYSTEM
Icons and text scale automatically with Operating System settings

Armed with new tools, a young upstart engineer overthrew the alpha engineer and took hold of the herd’s top spot while the old guard was banished to sales. Don’t lose your status. Stay on top of the design cycle of life with SOLIDWORKS.

Read this blog post for an in-depth preview of what’s being developed.

After a glimpse at what’s next Gian Paolo sported a cowboy hat and boots and marked off the last box on his SWW15 Bingo card. He left the audience with his vision for the future of SOLIDWORKS. His goal is to improve the product each year and make it worthy of the community responsible for creating the world we live in.

Thank you for making SOLIDWORKS World 2015 great. Now, we’re on to Dallas for SOLIDWORKS World 2016.