Hi, I’m Matt, and I work over at SolidWorks. I’m the company Social Media Manager, which is a fancy way of saying it’s my job to get people at SolidWorks talking on Twitter, posting blog entries, and telling our product guys what’s happening on the Internets. I’ll be showing up here every now and then talking about SolidWorks and various related topics.

If you’re familiar with SolidWorks, chances are you know that SolidWorks World is starting next week. They tell me that this year’s wlil be the best ever, and we even have Sir Richard Branson coming to speak at the opening session on Monday. I’m hoping he parachutes in.

If you’re *not* familiar with SolidWorks World, it’s been best described to me as MacWorld for CAD geeks. Maybe that’s going a little far, but you get the idea. Thousands of CAD users will descend on Orlando, Florida for four days of learning, networking, sharing, and probably more than a little socializing.

Starting on Monday, I’ll be posting videos from the morning general sessions, as well as four of the most popular breakout sessions. We can’t show you CEO Jeff Ray’s talk with Sir Richard Branson, and I’d probably get in trouble if I posted the What’s New segment on Wednesday, but you’ll get pretty much everything else. And as for the breakouts…well…you’ll just have to check back and see. I’m going to get everything up just as fast as I can (gotta add a few hours for editing and uploading), so you should be able to actually see things that happened Monday on Monday.

I’m not the only one who’ll be posting updates though. Here’s a quick recap of some other things you should definitely check out:

• The Community News section of the SolidWorks World website will be rolling up every blog post that mentions SolidWorks World and every tweet with the #SWW09 hashtag.
• Lou Gallo over at SolidWorks Heard has set up a live coverage section on his site, using the Cover It Live app some of the guys used in Barcelona. Definitely worth checking out for up-to-the-second commentary.
• We’ve set up a Flickr group that everyone can post photos to. If you’re taking pictures, tag ‘em and post ‘em.

So be sure to bookmark the SolidWorks blog or add it to your RSS reader and get ready for the SolidWorks World goodness. And if there’s anything you’d like to see, let me know. My schedule is already pretty full, but I’ll see what I can do.

At today’s plenary session, CATIA CEO Jacques Leveille Nizerolle welcomed guests and turned over the show to Anne Asensio saying, “I told Anne that this is her day.”

Each presentation was fascinating, and I noted that almost everyone at some point repeated the same message: Design must be focused on humans, and the future of Design is customers doing the designing. I also heard a few times something along the lines of, “Creativity is individual, but innovation is collaborative.”

Anne told us that Design is emotional, and she certainly did a nice job of lining up some emotional treats. Her presentation started with a hip futuristic video, offering her team’s vision of tomorrow’s collaborative Design. I took a photo of it, which is pasted at the top of this post. I’m told DS Design Studio will post it on their new website soon (I wanted to get it to you for today, but they were busy in the dedicated Design track until late afternoon). Anyway, this is definitely worth a view, so I’ll let you know when it’s available online.

Anne also showed us a virtual simulation of real water pouring on a floor. Who knew our R&D department had been working on an algorithm for water? Anne explained, “This is about physical aspects of nature used within modelization.” Another wow.

Ayse Birsel of Bisel+Seck presented next. Her design studio is known for product design for companies such as Herman Miller and is also part of DS Design Studio’s ecosystem. Ayse spoke about how users are the new designers, and that now a designer’s role is to visualize the future. And in order to visualize the future, designers have to put the user in the center of their reflection process. She gave the example of designing a chair. You can design a chair without thinking about humans. You can design a chair for humans to sit on. You can design a chair for a tired human who’s been standing all day to sit on. Each chair will be very different. (I’m omitting the wow moment of Ayse’s presentation because I’d like to dig deeper and give you fuller details. More later.)

Next we heard from Andreas Riedmann, a design engineer in the R&D department of Otto Bock. In addition to bionic limbs, they make wow products like their hybrid wheelchair/paragolfer vehicle. What impressed me the most is that they’re developing thought-powered prostheses. Think connecting real human nerve endings directly to prosthetic hands, arms or other. No, think Will Smith in his film “i,robot”.

Ok, I give up. Wow.

And finally, well, who doesn’t say wow! when then learn about BMW’s GINA vehicle. Chris Bangle was “present” in the form on an optical theater special effect but managed to chat with Anne anyway while giving us a fascinating presentation on “The GINA Philosophy” and how the car came to be. We even got to see a video of GINA in all her behaviors. Check out GINA for yourself in this video I found on YouTube:

If you attended ECF, please jump in on the comments section. I’d love to hear your impressions about these speakers.

Best,

Kate

P.S. Andreas from Otto Bock told us he’s using CATIA Imagine & Shape on an exciting hand prosthesis project. ‘Said it’s a lot easier to communicate with the designer this way. Click here to see a neat CATIA Imagine & Shape video.

It’s alive! That’s the impression I had at this morning’s opening session. CATIA CEO Jacques Leveille Nizerolle told the crowd of +1,200 that this year CATIA wanted to emphasize the word ‘live’ because that’s where V6 shines. Live collaborative design. He told us he wanted people to “jump in and use V6, touch it.”

The events team also pulled off making the CATIA logo, Beijing National Stadium and the V6 logo seem alive. Through an optical theater technique they hovered and spun around, almost like ghosts in a Harry Potter scene.

One of the presentations I liked best was given by Arup Sport’s Associate Director of Structural Engineering, Martin Simpson. It was interesting to hear how the conception of the Bird’s Nest (designed with CATIA) began five years ago and the roles parametric and associative design played in conceiving, for example, the cascading stairs, twisted box sections, or eliminating the moving roof and quickly re-jigging the entire project.

Because the design was so complex (think twisted steel beams à la rung-out towel, wrapped delicately around the stadium bowl), Martin said it was crucial to be able to digitally assemble all the parts in a virtual prototype, test in detail each component within context, and adjust from there. In fact, the project was so complex that when it came time to building the scaled physical model, they couldn’t find anyone in the construction industry capable. Arup had to call upon a shipbuilder out of Shanghai to build it!

Martin ended his presentation comparing the lifecycle for buildings to that of manufacturing. The difference being that today there’s still an enormous amount of waste in construction whereas manufacturing has become lean. For this, and for where the lifecycle for buildings is really fractured, solutions like CATIA and PLM can come in and make a big difference.

But back to manufacturing. Martin pointed out that if you look to its history, starting with Henry Ford’s first assembly lines to today’s robotic technologies, you get a glimpse as to how his industry will evolve.

I was able to catch up with Martin in the lobby of the New York hotel to drill down on this. Martin told me that what he really expects to change is how you put together complex buildings like stadiums (which, BTW, will grow so complex as to become community complexes in themselves, including schools for children!). He started talking about assembling large chunks separately and bringing them together. And I of course thought of Boeing’s Dreamliner. We’re also seeing this starting to happen in the shipbuilding industry. I didn’t expect him to say it, but it makes sense when you consider how complex the stadiums being designed today are.

As an aside, I asked Martin if he was familiar with farm towers and if he thought people would start growing food in stadiums too. Martin then kinda looked at me funny and answered: “Now there’s an idea I haven’t thought of before! Maybe not in the stadiums themselves, but on the grounds.” Just think, one day our stadiums may grow the food that onsite restaurants will cook and serve to visitors. I’ll betcha we’ll see it one day . . .

Best,

Kate

P.S. If you’d like to dig deeper into lean construction, check out Sir John Egan’s “Rethinking Construction.” It was written in 1998 but remains pertinent. Some sample stats Martin covered from the paper: Ten percent of materials used in construction are wasted. Forty percent of construction projects are completed late/over budget.

P.P.S. If you’d like to read more about the future of stadium design, you may enjoy the article Pushing the Limits in Stadium Design.