Dreaming on Desing at a nice place

Cathedral San Francisco de Asis

Trying to find some inspiration for my new post, I find myself at the main Plaza in the beautiful and historic city of Querétaro, México. Lots of people enjoying a nice afternoon and hearing the Cathedral bells calling for the next mass... Some raindrops are starting to fall over my phone but nobody seems to care about that.

Its a melancholic afternoon for me since I´ve missed PlanetPTC 2012 at Orlando, and because I find myself away from home and family due to a training CAD class I'm delivering outside my home city. Now I think I've found my imspiration...

Sitting here at the main Plaza I just wonder how people use to design things some decades ago without the use of CAD tools. Nowadays I tell and teach my students some engineering technics to take advantage of design and analisis software and some keep strugling to do things faster... faster?, what does that mean? one year, one month, one week, one day, one hour, one mouse click. It all depends at which era do you happend to born.

Mechanical CAD design is now a must for any engineering student which pretend to make things happend or who will to bring any new product to life.

Besides of engineering basics and some master degree at any specific topic, there should alwas be a CAD training in mind. Regardles the sofware, designers must follow a learning path in order to succed in the product design field. And this training path should be necesary followed in a specific sequence: basic > intermediate > advance.

There is a big problem trying to teach students in an advance training class when they barely know basic commands or, even worse, when they are not mechanical or industrial engineers. Some companies, at least in my lovely country, still doing such bad habit of sending principiants (maybe technicians, or drafters) to advanced training hoping they get back to work with new pro abilities and ready to bring solutions to daily problems. 

Desing is definitely not for anyone. It requires certain abilities of great creativity and imagination to foresee new things where already are and new posibilities to improve others. Engineering designs are meant to improve or help humandkind while Industrial desings are meant to make things look better. They are not apart one from the other, in fact they complement each other. Computer Assisted Design tools facilitate designers to achieve their goals as easily as possible, by doing nice concepts, functional designs, validation, digital prototyping, tooling and manufacturing preprocesses. Even though CAD software seems easy to use, there should always be a good designer (mechanical or industrial) behind the wheel who should put his/hers experience on the table to get what the market asks for.

Old fashion design and brand new techniques are not against each other. Take al look at this example of a very nice design of a public lamp in the middle of an historic colonial plaza. Its fascinating to find such things around us and learn they can get along and look good.

Lamp at Centro Histórico, Querétaro.

Hope you enjoyed this post and hope to receive some comments. See you!

jaVieR