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.

While Dassault Systèmes has always been about design (see mission statement below), you probably know it best as a software R&D company, or perhaps when you think Dassault Systèmes, you think planes, trains and automobiles. Rightly so.

But look at our mission statement:

“Enable people to create innovative products and experience the whole lifecycle to build a better environment for the future.”

Doesn’t that scream design, i.e. designing the future?

Here enters the Dassault Systèmes Design Studio.

Our Design Studio story began one year ago when we announced Anne Asensio as vice president of design experience. You may be asking yourself, “what’s design experience supposed to mean?” It’s listed in Wikipedia as experience design, and basically about designing for the user experience, or as Anne likes to say, designing with “human at the core.”

Anne is a prolific creative and creator (20+ Design years at Renault, General Motors . . .). Since last year she’s been busy designing the designs of Dassault Systèmes from the inside out. (Ok, pun intended!) One deliverable is the creation of the Dassault Systèmes Design Studio, aka DS Design Studio.

Because PLM and, well, our lives (experiences, memories and futures) are intermingled with design, we’ll be talking about it through the coming months on 3D Perspectives. Call it a warm-up or introduction, 3D Perspectives’ Design Series 1 is dedicated to the Design Studio so that you can:

• Learn about DS Design Studio’s mission
• Explore its ‘four pillars’
• Get to know the people behind it
• . . . and get revved up for future Design posts

If you’d like to follow our series, the easiest way is to subscribe to 3D Perspectives via email, RSS or Twitter.

We’d like to hear from you, so don’t be shy about leaving comments. The blogosphere is a domain of discussions, so let’s get the Design talk rolling!

Meanwhile, stay tuned for my next post exploring the DS Design Studio mission . . .

Best,

Kate