A Fundamental Shift in the Product Design Paradigm Continued ...
by Michael Davis

Enter the CAD Revolution and the Four Tiers of CAD Implementation

What happened over the past 35 years was an outright revolution in the tools used for designing and building products. In 1977 when I graduated from design school, there were no personal computers. However, over at Lockheed, engineers were designing aircraft using mainframe systems with wire and 3D. This was strictly an engineering function. I call this period the first tier in CAD development.

In those days, ID involved hand rendering, hand model building and a hand sketching process. It was all arts and crafts. But the computer existed and CAD was beginning to make a place for itself. Little did I know that it would be 25 years before I saw a product that could blend industrial design and engineering functionality.

Young people have no idea how powerful a concept this is. Software at last that can build what you think, the way you think? Amazing. In relative historical terms, this is such a very new concept.

The second tier in CAD development arrived with the advent of AutoCAD on the PC sometime around 1981. I clearly remember a demo disk of AutoCAD that worked on my IBM 8088 based PC. A few years later, (1983) Personal Designer (still in my opinion, the best wireframe 3D software made) was picked up by ComputerVision and marketed to compete against the rising strength of Autodesk, Cadkey and others.

Mainframe CAD continued a parallel improvement as it evolved into a reduced cost CAD station called a workstation. At the same time, the PC evolved into a level of capability until it too became a workstation level CAD tool. All of this was very far removed from the industrial design process, which, at the time, was still art based on hand rendering, drawing and sculpture. In fact, the 80s and 90s saw the transition of most ID education programs into the art schools of sponsoring universities, even though Computer Aided Industrial Design did exist, mostly with a very pricey package called Alias. The problem with CAID was its cost. In those days, the cost per seat was well above $100,000 and the installations were typically in a large corporate design environment.

During the mid-eighties, Parametric Technology created the first parametric software tool called Pro-Engineer, which was the advent of the third tier in CAD development. Industrial design as a thinking process did not blend well with the engineering tool (Pro-E) to allow full participation. A few industrial designers learned to use Pro-E for design; but most design firms elected to have a few Pro/E seats handled by Pro drivers who were either mechanical engineers or mechanically inclined industrial designers.

But everybody recognized the power of the software to implement design in a powerful way. The die was set and the lure of solid modeling was an inevitable solution. Now, today, we are in the room of the fourth tier of CAD implementation where both ID and ME are integrated and are using the same tools. SolidWorks proved that it is possible to build a dual-purpose parametric solid modeler in 1998. When their SolidWorks 98+ version was released, for the first time in history, industrial designers could perform industrial design tasks in an efficient and powerful way with the same tool being used by engineers. This was a revolution of the highest order. It is no coincidence that in 1998, PTC took its financial plunge and the era of isolated high cost engineering software ended. This was the power of a huge paradigm shift in the product development process both in platform costs and in design methodology.