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The Fruit Bowl Future of Design and Engineering in 2019

by Josh on March 4, 2009 · Comments

future-designAhhh, it’s that time where we sit with a pretend cup of hallucinogenic material and ponder the inescapable existence of highly advanced technology creeping it’s way into our future (as well as the need to still clean it all.)

A little over a week ago Microsoft presented, in fine video form, it’s vision of what the future computing and collaboration might be in 2019. Sound boring? Maybe typical?

Well, it’s anything but, and when you apply it to 3D CAD, PLM and all those amazing things you design, engineer and manufacture each day… the future is lookin’ pretty dang cool. Lets ponder…

The future of what?
When I first started putting this together, only to Montage video was out. (See first one below.) Some others have emerged looking at the future of specific industries. You’ll want to watch the second one below on the Future of Manufacturing. Does it capture your view of what it could actually be like?

Future Vision Montage

Video: Future Vision Montage

Manufacturing Future Vision

Video: Manufacturing Future Vision

Watch the Future Retail, Banking and Health Videos Here

Applying this to the process of Design and Engineering
So we’ll be moving things around with our hands on touchscreens? Is that the extent of tech in our little world of design and engineering that creates and produces everything we see? What more is there? Obvisously, thsese videos are answering the questions lf, “How will we interact with our surroundings?” and even “How will our surroundings interact with us?”

Honestly, that point of view, while valid and exciting, limits a lot of simple possibilities for back-end processes and interaction between programs.

If I had to apply some of the ideas in the video to help define and simplify the process of design engineering, some of them would be:

  • Collaborative screen with translation for foreign clients during design reviews
  • Handheld Inspection peripherals that render and confirm design
  • Seamless transitions from design to engineering to manufacturing
  • More automation (almost invisible) documentation/approval process
  • Notification of material availability during design/engineering
  • Automatic material and property settings base on industry and project semantics
  • Instant ‘wi-fi’ synchronizing all aspects of process with each other
  • Real-time sales to manufacturing ‘matrix’ that begins each stage simultaneously
  • Desktop augmented reality environments
  • ‘Flash-sintering’ that instantly creates (prints) and captures iterative design changes
  • Automatic Fit and Failure notification based on material and environmental properties
  • Design programs that train as they are used
  • ‘psych-suggest’ tech that contextually creates and adapts to input
  • Rendering slider (options) combined with design and engineering environment

I’ll stop there. What are your ideas? Right now I’m thinking two things 1) That most of this innovation is driven by what is possible with touch-enabled devices, which I find limiting (read some of the thoughts above that would expand this) and 2) who cares if Microsoft is the one who delivers on all of this. The more important point is that these are some inspiring ideas to take us beyond what even the geniuses at Microsoft can fathom.

I bet you’ve got some creative ideas about tech and design after watching these videos. What’s your fruit bowl vision of the future?

Source: IStartedSomething.com

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Comments

Tagged as: future interfaces, future of cad, manufacturing

  • yorbs
    the part i really had a problem with is the sheer lack of understanding of what life used to be like before computers and people sat in uncomfortable positions using machines.

    why were they showing so many instances of people taking information from a desk and putting it onto a smaller machine then using a stylus to navigate menus..

    unless ur getting up to go somewhere.. then leave it all on the desk. its a much more natural position for your neck to be in.. and you have lots of room to spread your work out..

    and why did the guy have to draw on a piece of paper, then scan it in? LOL

    draw on the damn desk!!

    and also.. all of your information should just follow you.. why do you have to be concious and remember to take things with you? Your whole day should be spread out all over the table.. then you walk into another room with a big screen and it magically appears when you need it to.

    then we can progress to more advanced stuff, like "remember that conversation I had with bill the other week, what did he say again?" and it comes up and u can track between it to find the right part.. grab those sections and throw into a report instantly..

    this is so logical-progressiony.. people at msoft are just grabbing current tech and integrating it without really thinking about it.

    thats why the only really innovative stuff with multi-touch came out from the guy who invented it.. but since then, NOTHING!! Sick of the resize photo thing.. it's lame and rarely used! Where is cut/copy/paste/crop/draw/save/rename/view front/view back/create reference/extrude/bevel/sweep... etc etc..

    oh and i haven't even gotten started!!

    Yorbs
  • Oh geez, I just can't help myself...

    Did you notice that paper STILL doesn't get totally eliminated in the future? Digital-smigital.

    That woman that scheduled downtime is getting $100,000/hr deducted automatically from her paycheck... unless she has a good reason... or works for Toyota... i guess it's demoing the whole Kanban thing.

    $52k for a coupe? That puppy better be turbo-charged.
  • I know it man, the vids were riddled with inconsistencies. Thanks for mentioning them. In one there was even a guy using XP... XP in 2019??! Please...no.

    In the retail one, seems the stockboy is the only that is notified of things out of stock. There's inventory management systems now that do a better job.

    I guess if you can't view it on a cool touch display then it's not really gonna be future video worthy. :) Thanks for the comments Bruce!
  • Sorry, but did ANYBODY else watch the "Banking" video? All I have to say is... HUH?

    $20 for a taxi cab ride, paid automatically, to go to a bank, to STILL have to wait for someone to meet you..

    Then another taxi-cab ride back. So... $40 to go to the bank, so that you can transfer some files to a banker, that could have been done "old-school" for FREE via email?

    Whaaa???

    3D thinga-ma-jig glasses on the assembly line, to figure out how a part fits? You'd think after some "old-school" thing called "training", and after doing the same thing over and over again, you'd stop needing the silly glasses after like... in a few hours?

    I could go on forever.

    Seriously, though, I think it's time I start putting my money on hand sanitizer wipee companies. Ewww.
  • Kevin Quigley
  • yorbs
    screw holodecks.. i wanna design products that way!!
  • awesome stuff. In the midst of posting about this video to and will shout out some cred to ya man, thanks!

    I'm not convince about the touch either. It's the latest craze, but I've written before about adaptive display environments that will not require the glassy interface everyone is currently familiar with. It's much more going to resemble what's in Bruce's WorldBuilder video. I'm glad there's some people out there with vision beyond flat touch screen devices.

    Thanks for your comments Kevin!!
  • Kevin Quigley
    Very slick videos, as you would expect. I much preferred these to the Dassault ones knocking around that were recently featured on Product Design Forums, but the essential hypothesis is that we will all be communicating all the time with touch technology at the core. I'm really not convinced. all these videos actually show is what Microsoft, Dassault and others are developing now for future release. You can be sure that when it arrives it will look nothing like that! These are concept cars.

    But there are some good ideas in there that I think will become the norm in 10 years. Small hand held devices incorporating contactless payment systems (which are here now), large scale display incorporating scanning (I liked that), the classroom with the large interactive touch display (I don't think it will be transparent in 10 years but certainly slicker than the current whiteboards are).

    But the whole point I think was missed in that there is still the big focus on corporate - as you have said. Well Microsoft makes its money selling to big enterprise so no surprises there, but have they missed the whole remote working thing?

    I can tell you that as a small design company our largest cost is office premises. If I could reduce that and rely on high speed internet access ALL the time I could work anywhere. With this kind of large screen facility I could see a network of rent by the hour network centres popping up everywhere to hold brainstorming or progress meetings. Large corporates are looking to reduce costs and one way is to have smaller offices - less overhead. Less pollution, happier employees, and with this kind of stuff having remote meetings is not the jerking video affair we have now.

    But then reliable ultra high speed communications is what we need to drive all this.If we don't have that then all this stuff is just a big fancy touchscreen display that offers little over what we use today. And Microsoft do infrastructure comms do they?
  • Thanks Josh. I love futuristic videos, they get you dreaming. It's true that in these everything seems a bit Leave it to Beaver. I'd love to see some robotic swarms mixed in and see how the people react to those! ;-) The swarm video Oleg pointed us to creeps me out, especially when they start slithering across desktops (around minute 1): http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SkvpEfAPXn4&feat...
  • Timothy
    I really liked these videos as well. I've seen the first one before, but I haven't seen the second one. If this is what the future is going to be like, it's going to be great...for both developers and engineers.

    Pretty Exciting. Thanks for sharing.

    Timothy
    Boston Engineering and Construction
  • Agree. There were some noticeably absent elements. But what struck me most in the second video was this sense that all these developments were occurring within large corporate organizational structures; very status quo. I think that perspective misses quite a lot.
  • man, no kidding! what was up with THAT. The grit and the grim of the industrialized majority is where it's at - they need a dose of apocalyptic possibilities added to those suits and tower dreams.
  • I really enjoyed watching these videos. Much like others, I love seeing what people think of what may come in the future.
    I agree that it shows what is possible in the near future with existing technology.

    What is my vision of the future? First, I see us moving away from keyboard/screen/controllers and going back to the drafting board, only it'd be an electronic board.
    Not really a new idea or technology, most likely doable with today's technology, or even already done?

    I'm sure the "CAD" system shown in Ironman has inspired some software programs and we could potentially see something like that in the future.
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