Sample of entry for this year’s competiton

LG Mobile Phones has again partnered up with crowdSPRING and Autodesk to hold its competition to define the future of mobile communication.  Starting on March 15th, LG Mobile Phones will give consumers the chance to design their vision of the next revolutionary LG mobile phone and compete for more than $80,000 in prizes. The competition will award over 40 winners.  The first place winner will be awarded $20,000, one Wacom Intuos4 medium tablet, and Autodesk industrial design software.  The second place winner will be awarded $10,000 and Autodesk SketchBook Pro software, and the third place winner will be awarded $5,000 and Autodesk SketchBook Pro software.  To reward as many people as possible in the name of creativity, LG will also be giving out a whopping 37 honorable mentions at $1,000 each.

This year’s competition marks the inaugural participation of Russell Bobbitt, a world renowned movie prop master.  Bobbitt has worked on a variety of visually stunning films such as Star Trek, Iron Man and Iron Man 2.  He recently received the prestigious “Behind the Camera” prop master award for his work on the first Iron Man film.  Bobbitt will serve as a guest judge to reward one contestant’s cutting-edge design with the Prop Master’s Choice award.  The contestant’s design will then be created into a non-working mock-up that could wind up in Bobbitt’s next blockbuster film.  The Prop Master’s Choice winner will also receive $3,000 plus Autodesk SketchBook Pro software. Autodesk will supply participants with a free 15-day trial of SketchBook Pro, a paint and drawing application for use on the Mac or PC.

When

Eligibility: Any U.S. resident (citizen or green card holder) that is 18 years (or age of majority in state of residence) and older
Start and End Dates: The competition begins on March 15, 2010, at 12 a.m. PST and ends on April 26, 2010, at 9:00 a.m. PST
Winners will be announced on May 14, 2010 at www.crowdspring.com/LG/winners.

The Prize

• First Place: $20,000 Cash Award + 1 Wacom Intuos4 medium tablet + Autodesk industrial design software
• Second Place: $10,000 Cash Award + Autodesk SketchBook Pro software
• Third Place: $5,000 Cash Award + Autodesk SketchBook Pro software
• Prop Master’s Choice: $3,000 Cash Award + Autodesk SketchBook Pro software + 1 non-working concept mock-up creation
• 37 Honorable Mentions: $1,000 Cash Award

Where

Official rules can be found at www.crowdspring.com/LG

Martyn opens his magic box for our favourite Italian gentleman (Dr. Sandro Sozzi) - causing obvious delight. The contents of the box, however, remains a mystery.

We’re just past the Ides of March, the month is half done and we’re rapidly approaching April. Other than being 1,066th anniversary of Julius Caesar’s death, this also means that COFES, or the Congress on the Future of Engineering Software is on the horizon.Held each year around the 15th of April at the Scottsdale Plaza Resort, COFES has become of one of the leading events of the product development software industry events to attend. It’s a heady mix of both technical sessions, breakouts with industry analysts, round table discussions and presentations from all manner of ‘visionaries.’ Each year’s events has a theme associated with it, this year’s tag line being Best-practices aren’t good enough, with the team behind the event asking “What can we do to make our customers more effective innovators?” and “How can we innovate in the development of better practices?”

But as I said last year, COFES for me, isn’t about the keynotes, isn’t about the breakout sessions and it certainly isn’t about sitting around a table and discussing the problems of ease of use and data translation. What it IS about however, is a single place to meet with some of the brightest minds in the industry, catch up on what they’re up to, what they’re working on and discuss it in an open environment. All too often software vendors work in isolation and right so.

Blake Courter, one of the founders of SpaceClaim, invites 35 random people into his hotel room to emote about direct editing - not for the first time..

After all, these are profit making organisations which have their own customer base to protect, their own profit levels to maintain - that’s how business works. But at COFES, for some reason (be it the sunshine, the beer/wine or the sing-a-long on the last night) industry executives seem more open to discuss what their plans are, what they’re doing with both users, we in the media and the world as a whole. you get a better picture of where different vendors are at, what’s in their roadmap when its put in the immediate context of the industry as a whole. COFES is also about face to face connections - something that’s incredibly valuable even in today’s hyper connected, social media led world.

As part of the proceedings, the organisation behind COFES Cyon Research, are conducting two survey of users and the industry as a whole and I’d encourage you to take the time to fill out the surveys and give your input - this information is distributed at the event and much made available to those that participate. The first is the Market Outlook survey, which should take 5 minutes to whizz through - This will give a good an idea of what people are expecting from the year ahead and compared to last year, should provide interesting reading. The second, and the more interesting, is a more in-depth study of users of software tools for design and engineering and will take about 20 minutes to complete.

The COFES web-site is found here, but there’s also a series of interviews being conducted by the rather fabulous and always dapper Kenneth Wong over at the Desktop Engineering blog so have a look-see there. If you’re heading out to COFES, drop us a line and we’ll meet up. Martyn and myself can usually be found, somewhere at the back, sniggering slightly when the more ‘aged’ industry pundits start rambling about “ease of use and running something on a mini-vac and how these kids don’t know how hard it was.” As evidenced by Mr. Day on one of his less lyrical rants:

It’s been a while since I caught up with what Vuuch has been upto since it launched its social-media-collaborative-informal- tool last year and things are progressing nicely. As Josh Mings wrote in his review of the system last year:

There’s a critical metamorphosis about to change the way we communicate during design. You may sense it with each email you receive, each search you perform, and within the meetings where everyone scurries to make notes. This transformation is about moving critical design discussions into your design tools, making it a coordinated effort across the design team and into web interfaces where anyone can become a part of the process. The catalyst for this is Vuuch and it’s set to affect the whole landscape of how and where we discuss design.

I just got a message on twitter from Chris Williams, CEO of Vuuch, telling me about a webinar that they’re holding later this month. What caught my eye was a sentence on the invite page. It read:

Learn how Vuuch improves project execution while delivering product liability, compliance and regulatory requirements without forcing people to change how they work

I was curious as to how the system has progressed and how Chris and his team are looking to solve these particular problems, so I got some answers.

Chris WIlliams: Working habits (you know, the way shit actually gets done) have gone from a highly structured and heavily documentation based approach (SOPs and lots of paper work) to a very unstructured approach where now very little of what was done or how you did something is documented (well maybe it is fragmented in your inbox, but good luck putting it back together again).  There are many drivers to this:

• Our love affair with email
• Distributed organizations
• Organizational empowerment (push decisions into the organization)
• Shorter cycle times
• And on and on…  

The customer has two big problems that they need to solve and they need to do so within a cycle that is dramatically reduced:

• Project Execution – Reduce cycle time and increased electronic communication has created a negative situation with respect to how a project is managed.  This is not a project planning problem but this is a project execution problem (see attached ppt). This is a work management issue.  Who is doing what and who else are they connected with and how do I keep people aware.
• Compliance (call it what you want, compliance, regulatory or liability) – All regulations today are focused on how you did something.  For example the FDA medical device DHF regulations want to know what and who and they are not interested in the resulting versions.  PLM is very good at telling you what A was and what B was and what C is, but PLM has no idea of how you went from one to the other and why. Liability based regulation is interested in validation down to a detailed level, what issue was defined, who contributed, what solutions were proposed, how did you pick the solution and what validation was done to determine the fix did not change the stated performance of the product.  You can look at this from a law suit perspective as well.  Who did what (this is why there are electronic forensic experts now – you know the people who can find what everyone expects is deleted).  

Vuuch delivers to both of these because “Vuuch knows” the execution plan.  Vuuch manages what happens.  Vuuch knows how each person on the team is related to each component of the product.  This is the essence of solving both problems stated above. 

When we first looked at it, there was a basic Desktop Client as well as a SolidWorks and Pro/E plug-in. Things have moved on apace and there are currently plug-ins and workflows for MS Office, Pro/Engineer, SolidWorks, AutoCAD, Adobe PDF and a Desktop client. With this and other things Vuuch are working on, now would be a good time to sit in on the webinar and find out. it’s being held on the 25th of March at 10 EDT. Registration and further details are found here.

Further reading:

• Google Wave - the end of email?
• Josh Mings reviews Vuuch
• Josh Takes a look at Vuuch V1
• Social media and CAD
• vuuch.com: Applying social media to product development?

There’s also a presentation by Chris at Mass Innovation Nights (http://massinnovationnights.com/) from earlier this year that’s work a gander - and I’m glad ot say the camera work is even sketchier than mine:

Image courtesy of the Lego Group.

Granularity. There’s a word I love. It just sounds nice and rolls off the tongue nicely, even with my dodgy mid-british accent - unlike ‘caramel machiato’  which sounds horrendous and causes American baristas to look at me in the same manner people look at dogs when they’re trying to tell them something - a look that says “Ummm… What?”. Now, where was i? Oh yes.

Granularity.

According to the source of all mildly accurate information, Wikipedia, Granularity is defined as:

...the extent to which a system is broken down into small parts, either the system itself or its description or observation. It is the extent to which a larger entity is subdivided.

Now. Why am I talking about this? The reason is that this is something I believe it’s going to become increasingly important to designer users as we progress through this century. Let me explain.

At present, when you look at the vast majority of tools we use to define a product, the data we store and the information we manage is quite basic. Most 3D CAD systems, while being granular in terms of feature-based descriptions, sketch entities and such, when it comes to management, we store parts, assemblies, sub-assemblies (and of course, subsequent to that, drawings). More advanced systems allow you to store and manage user defined feature sets and other such sub-part level information, but a collection of features is about as small as it gets.

This, I believe, will change. Why? Ok. Let’s do that.

There are two things that might influence this and push us into further levels of explicit detail and granularity. The first is the ‘cloud’ (yes, I broke my own rules). When you’re working on a system that’s remotely located on a server, whether that’s over your internal network or across the wider web, you’ll need to manage and exchange finite packets of information, features, sketch entities and such. the rise of collaborative working systems, such as Catia V6, will mean that users are working on the same data, in parallel, at the same time. If not at the same time, there will be times when design changes, down to feature and maybe sub-feature level, will need to be managed and rationalised. To do that, you need to manage and keep track of those individual parcels of data and oackets of change. That’s going to require a level of granularity that’s way beyond what most data management systems are currently capable of. I’m aware that some executives of their competition might disagree, but this is why Dassault acquired MatrixOne on a technical level. It has the ability to manage and control very large amounts of data, much more than Dassault’s existing data management products.

The other area is when you start to look at how the shift towards green is starting to effect how we design products and the technology that’s under development to allow us to gauge the environmental and legal impact of design choices as we work. Today, there are numerous vendors working in this field and its split into two camps. One is compliance led. The other is sustainability. The two fields are related, but quite often independent.

Sustainability often refers to the impact on the environment of not only the manufacture of a product, but the lifecycle surrounding it, from raw material extraction, material processing, production, logistics etc. It’s the warm fuzzy end of the green spectrum, but with real world impact potential. It’s a very early stage field with huge potential and we’ll be looking at what’s out there shortly.

Compliance on the other hand, is the cold hard end of the spectrum. Compliance relates to legal requirements, whether through regional, national or international, of what materials are in your products. This is about ensure that you can take your products in specific regions and areas and not have the wrath of the authorities (or indeed, Greenpeace) breathing down your neck, getting you fined and your product removed from the market. This is perhaps the area that granularity might effect the most. To carry out compliance auditing, you need the most granular level of information about your product - down to the CAS registry number level. Yes. We’re talking chemical element level. That, my friends is granularity of the highest order (or is that lowest order?).

Take these two figures as an example.

This shows a basic multi-level assembly. There’s three subassemblies, those sub-assemblies are then comprised of either parts or further sub-assemblies - down to five levels. There are three major sub-systems and in total, seven parts and 13 data records. Not a very complex part - whatsoever.

Now, this shows a new version of the same assembly. Remember, just a five level product structure, seven parts, but when you start to drive the requirement to discover compliance data, the order of magnitude of the data you’re looking at expands rapidly. Again, this is a very simplistic example, but you can see that that 17 data records very quickly becomes nearly 40 records, purely by tracking material within those data records, but also to the CAS Number level.

Now. Consider what would happen when you start to work on today’s products, in a highly collaborative environment, where data is being passed globally, between teams, between languages, between professional disciplines. And you still need to track data down to this type of level. And when you’re working on a product that looks like this:

X-Ray image courtesy of Samsung.

There you go. Granularity. It’s here to stay. Mark my words. And we’re going to need a new breed of data management system to handle this if all these processes and tasks are to be rationalised as part of the product development process.