Jim Heppelmann Interview — continued from TCT 18/5 page 38

...Continued from TCT 18/5 page 38. See the whole article online HERE.

"Solving these problems requires a fundamental breakthrough,” says Brian Shepherd, PTC’s executive VP of product development. “Mechanical CAD has been too focused on the needs of the few, the consumers of CAD information (engineers and designers). Other users are better served by a different approach. An analyst, for example, may just want to take a parametric model and make some quick, easy changes to it, without having to worry about the history that it was created with or the features it was modelled through. A product manager might be better served by a markup approach or a configuration planner, an application that doesn’t really resemble CAD today, a hybrid between CAD and PLM . It’s also important to note that these individuals' needs change throughout the lifecycle.”

PTC doesn’t believe the answer is, as Shepherd put it, “one massive, monster, monolithic application.” To explain PTC’s vision, he borrowed a line from Apple’s iPhone campaign, “Whether you need 2D sketching, 3D direct modelling, surfacing, parametric modelling, or something else pertaining to product development, we want to be able to say, there’s an app for that,” says Shepherd.

Project Lightening (to be launched at the end of October) from PTC is the start of this new approach. PTC contends that if the decision of which modelling paradigm to use (2D, 3D Direct or 3D Parametric) was left up to each user they would naturally select the modelling paradigm (and tool) that would make the most sense for them and their particular task. 

There are many ways to dig a hole in the ground, from a simple garden trowel to a powerful mechanical digger. People naturally make the 'right' choice for their personal situation and task. But, in the CAD world, it has always been different. Because of the lack of interoperability between modelling paradigms, and because there is a need for all of the participants in the design process to share data, many companies seek to standardise on a single system and paradigm. 

This is always a 'compromise' approach that often provides many users with more capabilities (and more complexity) than they really need. It would be like issuing everyone with a mechanical digger even if their job was just to plant flowers. Project Lightning will eliminate this need for a company to mandate a single paradigm, by offering a set of solutions on a common platform, giving each user the flexibility to invoke whichever modelling paradigm is best suited for them and the task at hand.

Similarly, another dilemma confronting product developers has been the approach to assembly modelling. For relatively simple products with few variants, a pure CAD based approach works fine. But for more complicated products that may have many hundreds of configurations, a CAD based assembly approach is not feasible. In these cases, a PLM approach is required. Project Lightning will solve this problem by rationalising these two methods with a simple, robust PLM backbone that will drive the CAD model.

PTC’s future software environment will be a lot less about geometry and more about the process and solving product issues such as form, feel and function. Will it do the job, will it work in water, does it look good in my kitchen, or will it be too noisy for my lounge. It will become more about design collaboration where multi-party interaction will be seamless, and the complexities of the software will be hidden from the user to be replaced with environments that play to the Game Boy generations’ preferences. 

Charles Clarke

charles@rapidnews.com