The power of the portfolio
18 August 2008
Process type:
A portfolio is the ultimate tool for presenting your professional achievements. Josh Mings reveals why designers and engineers need to throw out their CVs and create a 3D representation of their work
A portfolio. It displays the projects you have worked on. It reveals the designs you have created. It lands the job you have dreamt of. A portfolio does all these things, but many people do not have one.
It’s sad, but a professional engineer with a portfolio is not very common. Artists are the people typically associated with the eloquent examples of style and culture that reside in what we visualise as a portfolio. It wasn’t until the early 20th century that the art form of Industrial Design (ID) gave artists and engineers involved in the industrialised aesthetics of consumer products the opportunity to blend their disciplines.
Artists have portfolios for their art. Industrial Designers have a portfolio to display their talent for creative design. So, where does that leave the engineer or designer who does not have a portfolio?
Today, with an array of 3D programs remodelling the landscape of product design, shameful 2D attempts at design have all but dwindled. More and more engineers are using 3D CAD to create stunning, visually interactive digital prototypes.
The only possible excuses for not having a portfolio are not knowing why one is needed and not knowing how to make it. 3D enhances the user’s ability to accurately render ideas and iterate collaborative arrangements of thought and material. In the end, it is both an outlet for creativity and an opportunity to stand out from the poor saps without a portfolio.
Why have a portfolio?
A portfolio not only displays what is learned, it shows how the owner has thought past a need to determine a solution. Engineers and designers do that every day, but for many, all the pride and accomplishment of years gone by lie within the margins of a single sheet of paper – their CV.
A CV is a just one portrayal of what has been drawn, modelled and written about, and it does a dismal job of showing the endless hours spent on each. The life of a CV begins in the inbox of an employer and ends abruptly when they research the applicant on the Internet. Online information often reveals more about a person’s character and abilities than a CV. Leaving that issue aside, it’s better that a CV complements personal attributes within the context of an eye-pleasing and simple portfolio.
A CV is required for most applications, but there are many companies that will also expect a portfolio or, at the very least, that a candidate has a technical understanding of modelling programs and manufacturing process. A portfolio helps employers understand someone’s capabilities, whether that person is interviewing for a job or being reviewed on their performance over the past year. A good portfolio can mean that a job is not lost or that a new one is won.
A portfolio brings the characteristics of the creator to light more clearly than text could ever do
A person’s innate ability means a great deal. ‘Skill and talent’ describes a million and one artisans in the design world. Within engineering, it’s rare to hear somebody being described as creative or even as a great engineer. But designers and engineers both have skills. They have expertise in an area of solving problems for a design. More often than not, a person in either of these disciplines has knowledge in multiple fields that combine to make their work as distinctive as they are. A portfolio brings the characteristics of the creator to light more clearly than text could ever do.
Creating a portfolio
For an artist or Industrial Designer, creating a portfolio is second nature, having been the main focus of years of attending this or that school of design. For an engineer, the focus is systemically turned away from the creative elements to concentrate on all that maths junk. Sure, the area under a curve can be extrapolated, but the CV is rubbish simply because there is nothing to show for the countless hours spent crunching numbers for a design. It’s a sad predicament. But making a portfolio is actually very easy and with all the tools now in place to create one, this is the time.
The 3D CAD tools available today give any designer, engineer or technical person the absolute, unhindered ability to create images that represent their studies or years spent in a career. Most 3D programs will allow you to add elements of colour, light and perspective to quickly create rendered images. After this, it can be as simple as printing out views on cardstock and sticking them in a stylish binder. But there is a solution that is even more relevant in today’s job market: the online portfolio.
With a portfolio that resides online, a person has the ability to quickly send detailed imagery of projects to anyone for viewing – no printing is required and updates can be made at any time. There are various online portfolios available, but the most feature-rich and easiest to use is http://www.coroflot.com. Within a few minutes a profile can be created, images uploaded and descriptions added to provide a location where anybody can see and admire the endless detail put into a engineering design.
The best types of online portfolios will include information about a person’s speciality, renderings of the overall concepts of design and detailed images of solutions to the problems the design addresses. 3D is an exceptional tool for creating exploded views, cutaways and section snapshots. This shows an individual’s aptitude for understanding how the product is assembled and then manufactured, while visually explaining key features of the engineering.
Conclusion
Web technology and advancement in 3D tools have made it extremely easy for a designer or engineer to exact vengeance upon the mundanity of the cubicle crazed world with the simplicity of an online portfolio. 3D is enabling both fields to bring their ideas into the vast reality of a world that is ready to devour the best product ever devised by a single human being that, oddly enough, started with a portfolio.
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Beyond the mouse and keyboard
07 August 2008
Process type:
Recent research shows that dedicated 3D control devices can have a major impact on design, but should we look to the consumer sector for a future beyond traditonal mouse/keyboard derivatives asks Al Dean
Let’s look at the set-up most of us use. There’s a keyboard, a monitor, the mouse and the big clunky box under the desk. Maybe we use a laptop instead of a workstation. Now is that acceptable for those that spend 40 hours plus sat in front of 3D-based design tool? In 2008 are we still stuck with a text entry device that was configured to stop manual typewriters from jamming and a 2D interaction device invented in 1967? What are the options? Where are the fantastic new 3D interaction devices we thought might be coming for the last two decades?
It seems that the world is finally catching up with the 3D professional user. Events I’ve attended recently have seen many of the major vendors discussing the future of 3D interaction and the majority are focussing onto several key areas.
The most common is the Wii Remote (or WiiMote), the headline-grabbing component of Ninendo’s Wii. Overnight, Nintendo has managed to revolutionise how games are interacted with in three dimensions and this is now starting to have a cross over effect in the 3D design world. Dassault made a huge splash at its recent DEVCON event, demonstrating how the WiiMote can be used to navigate a 3D world, based on Catia and Enovia. CEO Bernard Charles even hinted that its development team is currently working on its own hardware-based device for 3D model interaction.
While DS may have a head start because of its involvement in the gaming industry with its Virtools products another major CAD vendor with gaming connections is Autodesk (through its 3ds Max and Maya products) and it is making sure it’s not missing out on the Wii-action either.
Following a viral posting of a user integrating the WiiMote to control and navigate 3D CAD data with Autodesk Design Review, Autodesk has launched a fully endorsed version of that work on its labs website labs.autodesk.com. In the last week or so it’s also delivered a hardware driver based on the Chameleon Boom Cam technology which allows users to navigate a 3D model using a webcam.
Nintendo Wii Remote
Then there’s MultiTouch technology built into Apple’s new notebooks and the Ipod Touch. Even with limited support, the beta version of Rhino on the Mac OS, beneftis from MultiTouch for simple panning, zooming and rotating a model. And companies such as Autodesk are already applying this technology to larger scale devices where one hand is not enough. Interacting with 3D data using two hands on a giant multi-touch LCD screen is not just the stuff of science fiction films like Minority Report anymore.
While these 3D interaction technologies are still in their infancy the only vendor to be actively pursuing the 3D hardware market and gaining any traction is 3Dconnexion with its 3D motion control devices. The company has just released details of research conducted into the benefits of adopting its devices (3Dconnexion.com/productivity). It highlights that its customers said they felt comfortable using the 3D mouse within two days from the time they began using it (80% of them in fact) and 70% felt proficient within the first week.
From my own experience the devices are easy to learn and get up to speed with, but what I found most interesting was the metrics on productivity. Around 85% of the interviewees actually found improvements in their design work and in detection of errors, which is testament to having a task-specific hardware device.
What amazes me is that the company is still the only vendor actively creating hardware to interact with professional 3D models. But now, thirty years after the invention of the mouse, it may be getting some new competition. That competition isn’t likely to be another start-up with a fancy idea, but a much larger scale organisation who is developing mass appeal devices for the entertainment sector, onto which the 3D professional world can piggy back. I doubt the keyboard and mouse will be going away anytime soon, but whatever form it might take, whether that’s a remote you move around in your hand or a screen you touch with your hands there are sure to be devices coming on stream soon that may make navigation even more intuitive.
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The trouble with PDM
01 August 2008
Process types: Collaborate and Manage
Making the decision to deploy a Product Document Management (PDM) system seems easy enough. To actually pick the correct system, deploy it and maintain it, in a mixed environment, without having it control you, is the hard part.
We live highly digital lives these days and while we are not totally paperless, the originals of our work documents are now nearly always computer-generated. We are producing important business information all the time and with the move to modelling, the CAD file format is a major source of product manufacturing information, from simple Bill of Materials (BOM) to tolerance information and CNC toolpaths. Today’s CAD systems go way beyond merely documenting our product ideas and there is a big movement to liberate and distribute this information on-demand to project participants all over the globe.
While our reliance on paper-based docs lead to the invention of the filing cabinet and the plan chest, digital documents required an equivalent and thus Product Document Management (PDM) systems were born – a central place to store project-related digital documents from multiple computer applications. In principle this sounds straightforward enough but, in reality, finding a single PDM solution to handle every business need can prove to be elusive and the tighter the system is integrated the more restrictive it can be on your businesses use in applications.
In the last 15 years, there have unfortunately been many failed implementations of PDM with software developers failing to deliver on their feature/function promises, dealers failing to implement and customer expectations not matching what finally got delivered. In the early days, the high-cost of PDM, in terms of both software and implementation, led to some protracted multi-year deployments at large engineering firms, while trying to ‘get it right’, as nobody wanted to lose face having signed off substantial budgets on the promise of improved efficiency. This understandably led to a jaded view of the PDM market from customers, dealers and consultants - an outlook that persisted for many years.
In the last five years most of the CAD vendors have moved into the management side of the market by offering simple vaulting systems and applications which offer ‘out-of-the-box’ basic PDM. These are typically good for their own CAD file formats but not particularly broad in scope or expandable. While this has increased adoption of PDM within engineering workgroups, a company-wide PDM is still a much more complex area to address.
Dealers multi-CAD and PDM
In researching this piece I talked to a number of dealers and found that there was a common thought when it came to selling PDM to customers. That one common thought was one of risk and its avoidance. In the early days of PDM, most CAD dealers jumped at the new opportunity of selling management systems to their installed bases, only to find the systems they were selling were limited, buggy or were so problematic that the dealer’s profit margin was eaten up with technical support.
This caused serious customer relationship issues, undermined the dealer’s own faith in the PDM system they were selling (typically created by the CAD vendor they were affiliated to) and has impacted the way they have approached PDM enquiries ever since.
Truly independent advice on PDM is hard to come by. It’s like going to a pensions advisor that only has one policy to sell: You only get what they have on the menu
While implementations of PDM may vary greatly from customer to customer, dealers appear to only really want to deploy what they know has worked in previous instances, and while this may lead to some very basic installations, the most important criteria is that they deliver to the expectations they set, as opposed to the expectations of higher-level functionality a PDM developer may actually promote their product on.
When it comes down to managing data from multiple CAD systems, the most common response I received was that the best solution is to deploy multiple PDM systems. By choosing the PDM variant from each vendor to manage the file output from their respective systems you would ensure maximum compatibility and functionality, and you would expect companies like SolidWorks to be in the best position to leverage the information within its files and PTC to best work with Pro/Engineer. While each CAD vendor will swear blind that they have plug-ins to enable their PDM tool to work with CAD data from other CAD vendor’s products, the reality is that at best there will be a lag in support for changing file format. However, there are often other more fundamental problems like lack of support or reduced depth of access.
It’s not the cheapest solution and some would say it’s overkill but dealers feel that it’s a solution that works. If you had three core CAD systems, you would deploy three PDM vaults and would in turn hook those into a master database or business management system. The experience here dictates that it’s easier to map and link multiples than to get one centralised system.
If a PDM implementation goes awry, it’s not uncommon for the customer to change dealer and in some circumstances change CAD vendor and core modelling application. If the PDM from the CAD vendor can’t manage its own data, then who else is going to be able to sort out the company’s data needs? So, failure and past experience have lead to the dealer’s ultra-cautious approach to PDM sales. One dealer explained to me that if a customer doesn’t want to deploy the PDM system in the way that the dealer could assure it would work, they would sooner walk away from the deal and leave it to someone else than take on the risk.
Also worthy of note here is that the way the dealer networks have been set up and managed. It’s rather difficult to find a dealer who has any real choice in which PDM system he will sell. SolidWorks resellers tend to sell SolidWorks’ PDM application (or those of its parent, Dassault Systemes); Autodesk dealers tend to promote Product Stream or Vault from Autodesk and, well, the list goes on. Truly independent advice is hard to come by. It’s like going to a pensions advisor that only has one policy to sell: You only get what they have on the menu.
Vendors and PDM
There are a number of dedicated PDM developers that either sell direct or market directly to users. In these instances they tend to be a lot more bullish about the capabilities of their PDM solution and openly market suites of plug-ins for CAD file formats, as well as other systems such as SAP.
At this end of the market more elaborate solutions may be employed together with a requirement for consultancy and lengthy deployment. Also, the bias on a company-wide implementation would take into account more of the generic business needs and the IT department’s view on company standards and data vaulting. This in itself can mean that the specific requirements for CAD and manufacturing data get pushed further down the PDM checklist.
Upgrade cycle
If you have a number of different CAD systems, and you choose to deploy a single PDM system, or even if you end up deploying a number of PDM systems and link these to a master system, there is a massive issue of product upgrade cycles to take into consideration.
It’s unlikely but possible that at the start of the project the CAD and PDM system might get up and running and work totally as described in the sales pitch. However, software is a moving target and each Operating System, CAD application, CAD add-on and PDM system get revised at different times. Your entire product lifecycle software solution is like a wall that occasionally needs to have bricks replaced. As they may all be from different vendors and different sizes this can cause serious multi-year deployment problems.#
CAD system upgrades seem to vary from yearly to once every three or so years. As CAD is a strategic and important element of product design, it’s expected that you would want to upgrade within the year when the new ‘more powerful’ software comes out.
However, with a tight PDM integration, support for a new file format or new CAD capabilities will more than probably lag behind the new CAD version, which could actually delay deployment of new CAD tools until the PDM system has been enabled to support it. You would hope that PDM solutions for the CAD vendors would increment at the same time as their CAD product but this unfortunately hasn’t always been the case and support for legacy formats is an important issue.
At this point, especially with various levels of integration or bespoke work, somehow your PDM system can become the baseline application that rules when and what can be upgraded within your whole product development system. This can be amplified by hooking into ERP/MRP systems that are updated even less frequently.
Conclusion
The PDM market has been typified by unfulfilled promises, expensive mistakes or getting benefits to the detriment of limiting upgrades and enhancements.
A few years ago I attended an event at the Fraunhofer Institute in Berlin, where I talked with an engineer from Volkswagen. German companies are very process-centric and big proponents of PDM and Product Lifecycle Management (PLM) and Volkswagen, as you would expect, was no different.
However, what was interesting was the view that the company did not want to hand over its process to any one vendor and had decided to keep its systems multi-CAD and mixed PDM. While it would undoubtedly be easier to have everything supplied by one CAD/PDM vendor, the company would be at the mercy of the PDM system that had been installed and might not be free to install best-in-class applications. To me it made perfect sense.
From talking with dealers, multi-CAD companies cannot expect a one-stop shop, offering equal capabilities on all CAD formats. Once a PDM system is in place, a protracted upgrade path of systems will be a likely outcome as all products are on different upgrade cycles. To keep the whole product development system working this may mean skipping releases of certain software to keep compatibility.
The best news I could find concerning today’s management systems is that thanks to XML and standards like Microsoft’s Sharepoint it’s now much easier to aggregate information form disparate systems, pull this information together and package it up in bespoke company ‘dashboards’. So maybe document silos and a federated approach to document management will give the quickest return and are the fastest ways to integrate.
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