What are the remaining problems to solve in CAD?

I keep mourning the passing of CAD as a topic interesting enough on its own to keep producing interesting articles. It used to be that you didn’t have to look far to find a great technical topic, or a new way to apply the tools. But at least on the SolidWorks (desktop – do I really have to specify what that word means?) side of things, the development has been largely uninteresting.

Current design technology development still seems to be focused on 3D print materials, methods, support structure, machines to go bigger and smaller, and handle finer structure, finishes, and materials. The surge in robotics is related to the hardware side of 3D print, and is still also going gangbusters.

Let’s take a look at what general 3D CAD development has achieved in the last decade or so, and then look forward to what we hope for in the next decade. The big topics that CAD developers have tackled recently have been:

1. Universal file management
   1. Some CAD added file management and some made is less accessible…
   2. Is it possible that SW killed off PDMW as certain individuals were going out the door to create a new venture with built in data management?
2. Providing an alternative to history-based modeling
   1. Tsplines and related technology
   2. Direct/Synchronous
   3. Convergent CAD: Subd + Nurbs in the same model
      1. subd push-pull
      2. 3d scan data
      3. FEA mesh
      4. 3d print mesh
      5. generative (shape optimization) techniques
      6. medical, dental mesh (mri, etc)
3. Providing application delivery and data storage options
   1. First decentralizing off of mainframes on to personal computers
   2. Then centralizing back to cloud servers
4. CAD in a database
   1. So much data these days is kept in a database format. It makes sense. It builds in data management and turns the idea of file management on its head.
5. Various 3D Print integrations (most 3D printing advances have been in materials and robotics)
   1. support structures
   2. moving specialized functions from specialized software into CAD

Not all of these have been ubiquitous, and not all have affected all CAD users, but most CAD users have access to these solutions when they need them.

Mechanical CAD, 3D scan and print have been developed into medical and dental specialty areas with great success. If the many recent wars have had an upside, it has come in the form of next generation prosthetics, some strictly mechanical, some with newly developed neural interfaces. Scanning and printing have allowed us to customize attachments to individual injuries, replacing and repairing limbs and even joints quickly.

I think we’re in a lull period right now with strictly mechanical CAD. With all of these other interesting things to do, the base technology is being forgotten for a while. Some of the big ticket items that CAD developers have put on the table haven’t really caught on. I think there was an assumption that cloud computing was going to be embraced in the same way that PC CAD was embraced starting in the 1990s. But it hasn’t. Clearly it works for some people, but not for everyone.

The Synchronous push from a decade ago also has not really caught on the way I hoped. I still really believe in this technology and its application to general mechanical design. It’s far simpler and easier to control than history-based design. This tech will catch on eventually, but too many intransigent engineers have too much invested in the overly-complex history-based system and haven’t taken the time to understand the real advantages of synchronous.

Where do we go next? What would it take to make CAD cool again? I’ve made predictions about this before. I thought engineer-to-order was the next big thing, certainly synchronous, predicted cad-in-the-cloud was not going to be the next big thing… So far, the last one was the closest to a good guess. And where is AI going to show up, or do we not have the piles of unsorted data that it requires to make AI successful?

I really hope the idea of converging different types of data keeps developing, as well as mesh manipulation tools in mechanical CAD. There are so many subd tools out there that each of the big CAD developers should buy one up just for their understanding of the data type, the tools, the usage, and the applications. We don’t have to re-develop all of this knowledge.

Another thing I would hope would get some play would be more specialized tools. We have special tools for sheet metal, and frames, piping, and earlier I mentioned specialization in medical fields. I think something could be done with plastics. Plastic parts are so hard to design. The outside is all minute detail, and custom made, and the inside that you don’t even see can be even more difficult to create. We need a series of functional features that can be applied to a model. Maybe this requires a special file format just for plastic parts, like the other specialized techniques. Plastic design and manufacturing need to come closer together, and the design of the outside shape and mechanical details as well as the manufacturing expertise that have to come together to make individual plastic parts and plastic products all needs to be centralized so that a single person can make the decisions about design and manufacturing. Throwing designs over the Great Wall is not going to be a viable solution going forward.

And we have to do something about assembly design. Right now, it’s a custom approach every time. We need a tool that follows a process for assemblies, and can reuse information on how assemblies go together. Is it rules based? AI? Does it somehow learn different types of joints, closures, mechanisms? We need tools that know how to work with Horizontal Modeling, Resilient, Top Down, Layout, Master Model – these are all methods that design software should be able to replicate, and even guide you through. We’ve developed to a point where forcing dumb tools to do smart things is just inadequate. Best Practice rules exist to help people use tools that allow for poorly structured workflow. These are things I’d like to see.

Beyond the software, I’d like to see design and product development in general (especially in plastics and packaging) aim more to the durable and reusable and away from the single use. As engineers and designers (and yes even marketers) people need to have a conscience. Reject bad ideas. Throw away products have always been a bad idea, but someone other than the people for whom this is a religious cause needs to stand up and say so. Design stuff that endures, and when it doesn’t endure, it can be fixed, and when it can’t be fixed, it can be recycled. Not that long ago, certainly in my lifetime, people used to have less stuff, but the stuff they had was more valuable. It lasted longer because it was built and designed with use in mind, rather than crass consumption.

Maybe all of this heads back to more employee owned companies. I don’t think driving the economy from a bunch of disinterested investors is good for anyone, and obviously centrally managed economies have shown they don’t work. Certainly we need to learn to do things locally again. Globalism is a failure. The bigger an organization (including government) gets, the more corrupt it becomes, the more disconnected it is from the people who make it work, and should be benefiting. Stop sending product development and manufacturing to China. Manufacture molds here again, make microelectronic chips here again.