SOLIDWORKS WORLD 2017: The New. The Next. The Never Before.

If you have attended our annual user conference, you know that the energy at SOLIDWORKS World is electric. You can feel the excitement in the air. The opportunity for me to take the stage and share the future of SOLIDWORKS is an experience I look forward to every year. The audience’s reaction fuels me and all of us here at SOLIDWORKS to continue working tirelessly to build the best design portfolio possible and give you ample choice of tools and technologies. Our goal at SOLIDWORKS World is to give you fresh perspectives to take on your projects for the coming year and help us understand how better to meet your engineering and design needs. At SOLIDWORKS World 2017, we plan to accomplish this by presenting the new, the next, and the never before.

The future is a concept we take very seriously. Not just the future of SOLIDWORKS capabilities, but what’s coming in the design industry itself. We feel that by providing you with a more connected, collaborative, and efficient way of designing, we are helping you usher in the next generation of amazing products and innovations to change the world. At SOLIDWORKS World 2017, we will show you the future. Here’s a preview of a few topics you can expect to hear about in Los Angeles or during the Live Stream.

We’re finding new ways to close the gap between design and manufacturing. Currently, there’s a large amount of human involvement that creates inefficiencies in the design to manufacturing process. One way to solve this problem is by enabling machines to better read our minds and fully understand our designs. This will minimize mistakes and create a continuum to mend the fracture between design and manufacturing.
Another way to close the gap is by transforming the manufacturing process to become more like the buying experience on Amazon. Smart machines will read and understand your work, then provide you with access to information on quality, delivery time, and cost. This approach represents how we envision the future of transforming bits to atoms in SOLIDWORKS.
We need to improve the “A” in Computer-Aided Design. When you assemble an office chair with five wheels, you’re still stuck with millions of clicks! The assembly process must be smarter and faster with computers that actually “aid” you by providing intelligent suggestions based on the power of analytics and big data.
We must focus on providing more guidance in geometry. As a result of new ways to manufacture, such as building microstructures, complex design challenges are increasingly becoming best suited for computers to tackle. These specific types of designs involve thousands of tiny elements, requiring massive amounts of meticulous work. It’s impossible for sketch and extrude features to effectively support this type of work, so we must provide you with the best alternatives.

I’m very excited to share in full the new, the next, and the never before from SOLIDWORKS World in Los Angeles. If you cannot join us in person, remember to watch the Live Stream each morning on Monday, February 6 through Wednesday, February 8 from 8:15 AM to 10:00 AM PT. I hope to see you in LA…the future is waiting!