From 10th to 15th Feb, Pune will play host to a host of design events across the city, organized as a part of the Pune Design Festival. To quote the website:
Design has become the epicentre of many business success stories in India. The value of design stretches across all industries and sectors – from manufacturing to services. Recognizing this integral role of Design for the competitiveness of your businesses and betterment of our society we organize such events annually. This year’s edition brings you rich and diversified events to help us learn from each other and contribute to the betterment of the Industry.
We are pleased to bring to you the 5th Pune Design Festival from 10-15th February 2011 at various locations across the city, being organised along with MCCIA.
There are a large number of events being held – see the website for the full list. Some of them are free events, some have nominal charges and some have substantial fees. Note: a number of these festivals are geared towards automobile design and industrial design, so don’t go there expecting software/graphic design…
Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s (MIT) Media Lab and College of Engineering Pune (CoEP) will host a five-day design and innovation workshop in the city from January 24 to 28.
This workshop aims to engage and inspire students across all disciplines in Indian universities in inventing the future. The week-long workshop will engage students in ideation, design, and implementation of prototypes together with Media Lab and local mentors.
The workshop will culminate in a plenary conference and exhibition that will be open to visitors from academia, industry leaders, and the media. The Media Lab culture of research involves working closely with industry and we believe this workshop will offer participants and attendees a flavor of how the Media Lab “invents the future.”
The workshop is free for COEP stduents, and students from partner institutions. Other students have to pay Rs. 2000, and industry applicants have to pay Rs. 10000. Normally, PuneTech does not feature paid events, but we are making an exception this case, since this event seems rather unique, and also it is free for at least some PuneTech readers.
The keynote speakers will be Prof Joseph Paradiso, Prof. Ramesh Raskar (remote), Pranav Mistry (remote), of sixth-sense fame. There will be tracks on living mobile, hacking pixels, media recrafted and living with machines. Detailed background information about the instructors can be found here.
The idea is that about 120 students will participate and four teams would be chalked out with 30 participants in each team. The teams will interact, brain storm and would present around five projects.
(This information is mostly taken from the website of Ozran Academy. Although we at PuneTech don’t really know anybody at Ozran personally, but the courses look interesting enough, and it appears that they could be useful to many freshers, and best of all it’s free. We’re publishing this information in the hope that students find it useful.)
Ozran Academy is a web development company that is offering five courses to freshers in IT/Arts/Maths for free. Click on the logo to see their website.
Ozran is a small Dutch company that has a development center in Pune. They are providing five free courses targeted towards freshers in IT, Arts or Maths, with the intention of developing skills that industry is interested in and identifying talented individuals. Each course consists of 6 evening classes (2-1/2 hours each) and one exam on a Saturday afternoon. The whole thing is free, and a certificate is given to each participant who attends all classes, and passes the exam. Talented participants who demonstrate the ability to quickly learn and apply the concepts taught in the Ozran Academy courses may be offered a paid traineeship or job.
The five courses being offered this year are:
For HTML coders – Advanced HTML/CSS techniques and concepts, includes a primer in HTML5
For Programmers – Adobe ColdFusion for rapid construction of dynamic web applications
For Artists and Graphic Designers – Web Design European style
For Number Crunchers and Marketing Geniuses – Optimizing website conversion with marketing and analytics
For Artistic Programmers and Programming Designers – Replacing Flash with the jQuery JavaScript library
There are different cut-off dates for applications, and for the start of the actual course, and unfortunately, we believe one of the courses is already over. But check the Ozran Academy Page for full details of the courses.
Design thinking is more than just the art of designing a usable interface. Think of it as a skill that can help mold technology in to an agent of change.
To help stimulate design thinking a mix of celebrated as well as young design entrepreneurs will share their award winning designs and thinking models with POCC.
POCC is an informal group of the Pune Startup ecosystem. It contains more than 2000 people who either have their own startups, or want to start one, or provide some service (or funding) to startups. Click on the logo to find all punetech articles about the POCC
Satish Gokhale, was recently in the Times of India for designing TATA Swach, a water purifier unveiled by Ratan Tata, that costs under Rs. 1000, does not use electricity or running water often not available in rural India. Satish has designed several award wining products, and won the BusinessWorld Design Brilliance Award several years in a row. He was invited to deliver the keynote address at the International Design Forum, Singapore, and invited by HP Innovation Labs to present on “Design for The Other Six Billion”, Palo Alto, California. Satish is an entrepreneur himself, and he has accepted our invitation to speak at POCC on how he designed the Swach for extreme affordability, something that MIT Review calls “Value for Many and for Money”.
Dipendra Baoni is the Founder and Managing Director of Lemon Design, a Pune based Strategy, Branding and Multi Disciplinary Design Studio. Some of Lemon’s clients include RBI, Airtel, TVS Lucas, Hindustan Times and TCS. An Industrial Designer from NID ( National Institute of Design), Dipendra has won awards in Transportation Design ( Audi International Design Competition – 1996, Nagoya Car Design Competition – 1997) and Web Design ( Macromedia). Dipendra is interested in the convergence of Design & Technology to create/identify unique marketplace opportunities that address real world problems and create compelling value propositions for users and stakeholders. Dipendra is also a Director at Bisquare Systems, an Industrial Design, UI/UX Design, Embedded Software and Electronics Design Firm and has also recently started ECCO Electronics, a company that makes environmentally friendly, affordable consumer products. Dipendra is also involved in academics at NID, MIT and SID.
Chinmay Kulkarni is a Business Design Consultant and heads Preference Architects, a Brand Strategy Consulting Firm. He focuses on identifying and harnessing strong motivators in the value flux to achieve the maximum revenue impact. He has been a consultant to companies like Skoda, Prudential, Gera Developments etc, and is the only SE Asian Consultant to global brand IKEA of which he will be sharing a case-study with us. The IKEA case demonstrates the role of creative thinking in business with a definite focus on innovation. His next focus is to help a Tier-I ITES company to build its global consulting practice in design. He is a graduate of National Institute of Design.
After the talks, we will have an hour for general networking as we celebrate the second anniversary of POCC.
Venue: SICSR,7th floor, (Model Colony, next to OM Super market). Map. When: Saturday, April 3, 4.30pm Organized by: Anjali Gupta, Santosh Dawara Registration and Fees: This event is free for all to attend. Register here.
Pune is a hotbed of activity for CAD Software – both, for users as well as developers. We asked Yogesh Kulkarni, who has more than a decade of experience in this industry to team up with Amit Paranjape to give PuneTech readers an overview of this area.
Nonlinear statistics analysis of a 3D structure subjected to plastic deformations. Image by Joël Cugnoni courtesy the Wikimedia Project
CAD is defined as the use of computer technology to aid in the design of a part, a sub-assembly, or an entire product. Design can include Technical Drawings with Symbol based Representations, Visualization, 3D Rendering, and Simulation. Note, the term ‘Product’ could range from a small Widget, to an iPOD, too a large Building. Components of CAD technologies have also found widespread use in somewhat unrelated fields such Animation & Gaming.
Consider a World-War II era vintage B-17 Flying Fortress bomber; probably the only bomber ever to manufactured on an assembly line. How was it designed? Each and every part was painstakingly drawn on a drafting board. The various components and sub-assemblies were represented through various engineering drawing conventions. Yet the true visualization of how all these complex pieces fit and worked together, was left to that of the top engineers’ minds. And what about the complex 3-D shapes such as the wings? How were they designed and tested? Actual wooden models had to be created for this to visualize their shapes and test out their air-flow characteristics in wind tunnels. You can think of an army of literally hundreds of Draftsmen working on various pieces of this complex machine. Cars were designed the same way. ‘Machine Designing’ had elements of ‘Art’ in it. This style of designing was with us until recently. It’s only in the past 2-3 decades (even more recent in many SMEs in India) that computers have started replacing these ubiquitous ‘A1’ sized drawing boards that ruled the designers shop for so many decades.
Fast forward to today, and now let’s look at how Boeing’s latest 787 Dreamliner is being designed. This truly 21st century aircraft is built with composites instead of the traditional aluminum structures, and a whole bunch of other interesting innovations. All put together, Boeing claims to improve fuel efficiency by over 20% compared to other modern day commercial airplanes. All the designs of the Dreamliner are done using CAD. From the smallest widget to the entire airframe, the drawing, designing, assembling, and visualization is done on computer monitors. These designs are also evaluated for their validity and performance via Computer Aided Engineering (CAE). CAE works in conjunction with CAD to simulate and analyze various mechanical and other aspects of the design. Similarly, Computer Aided Manufacturing (CAM) works closely with CAD to help manufacture the complex parts on Computer Numerically Controlled (CNC) machines.
History
CAD has evolved a great deal over the past few decades along with the rise in computing and graphics power. Earlier CAD solutions were simple 2-Dimensional solutions for drawing machines and structures. These still represented a big step forward over drawing boards in terms of ability to save, edit and reuse drawings. Initial 3-Dimensional solutions were based on ‘wireframe models’ and ‘surface modeling’. Loosely speaking, these represented the outer edges and the external surfaces of a solid object in mathematical terms. Real 3-D capability involves representing the real object as a solid model. Mathematically, this involves a series of complex equations and data points. This had to wait for computing power to catch-up. Only in the late 1980s did this power become available to a wider engineering community via desktop workstations.
At a high level, you can think of a CAD package to have 2 important pieces: 1) The backend mathematical engine and 2) The front-end graphical rendering service.
Earlier CAD programs were primarily written in FORTRAN. Present day, CAD packages are typically developed in C or C++. Rendering was not a strong point of the earlier solutions. However over the past 2 decades, life-like rendering and simulation (rotation, motion, etc.) have become a reality. This capability has also taken this technology into the Animation & Gaming fields.
Associated Areas
CAD works closely with other allied areas such as CAE (Computer Aided Engineering), CAM (Computer Aided Manufacturing), as well as PLM (Product Lifecycle Management). In fact, CAD/CAM or CAD/CAE are often used together to describe the entire workflow. In this section we will take a brief look at these allied areas. In future, PuneTech will feature more detailed and specific articles about each of these areas.
Computer Aided Engineering is the use of computer technology to support engineering tasks such as analysis, simulation and optimization. These tasks are often performed by the engineer in close synchronization of the actual CAD activities. An example of ‘Analysis’ could be leveraging mathematical techniques such as ‘FEA/FEM’ (Finite-Element-Analysis/Finite-Element-Method) for designing a safe Bridge. ‘Simulation’ can be used to study how a mechanical assembly with various moving parts work together, on a computer screen, before actually building it. ‘Optimization’ can build on top of Analysis and Simulation to come up with the ‘most optimal’ design that meets the designer’s requirements. ‘Most Optimal’ could mean least weight, smallest number of parts, least friction, highest reliability, etc. depending on the designer’s primary objective.
Computer Aided Manufacturing is the use of computer technology to manufacture complex parts on automated machine tools. These machine tools are commonly referred to as ‘CNC’ or ‘Computer Numerically Controlled’ machines. Here’s a simple example. Let’s say an engineer has created a complex 3-D shape consisting of various contours for a new car’s exterior. The exterior parts are made by die-stamping in huge presses. The ‘dies’ are essentially molds made of hard metal. Principally, they are similar to a clay mold that is used to create various artifacts out of Plaster-of-Paris. These metal dies themselves have to be created by machining a ‘die-block’ to create a solid mirror image of the final part. This complex 3-D shape needs a sophisticated machine tool that can machine (cut/drill/shape) metal across multiple (3 or more) dimensions.
Controlling the motion of these machine tools is similar to controlling a robotic arm. CAM packages convert the solid designs in CAD packages into a set of coordinates and path instructions, along with desired speeds & acceleration/deceleration profiles for the machine tools, and communicate these instructions to the CNC machines.
PLM or ‘Product Lifecycle Management’ is not directly related to CAD like CAE or CAM. Instead, PLM as the name suggests focuses on managing the entire lifecycle of designing activity across multiple groups and departments in a company. A complete design is not limited to the machine designer. Various other players come into the picture. These include Purchasing Managers who have to source design components and sub-assemblies from vendors; Cost Accountants who want to keep a tab on the overall material and manufacturing costs of a design, Compliance Experts who want to review the design for various agency compliance requirements, etc. Similarly there are requirements to maintain the design as it goes through various versions/upgrades through its life-cycle. PLM enables collaboration across different departments on the key aspects of the design. PLM also enables collaboration between designers in terms of sharing parts data, etc.
Major Players
AutoCAD® by Autodesk is one of the most popular CAD packages out there. It focuses more on 2-D drawings such as part drawings, architect plans, electronic circuit designs, etc.
Packages like Catia® by Dassault, NX® by Siemens-Unigraphics, Pro/E® by Parametric Corporation are popular 3-D Solid Modeling Solutions. These solutions find wide use in Automotive, Aerospace and Other Manufacturing Industry Segments.
CAD in Pune
Due to the strong industrial and manufacturing base, Pune not only contains some of the biggest users of CAD/CAM software, but it also hosts some of the biggest developers of CAD/CAM software in the world.
Leaving the sobriquets such as ‘Detroit of East’ aside, it is safe to say that Pune is indeed the primary automotive hub of India. Pioneering Indian automotive companies such as Tata Motors, Bajaj Auto, Bharat Forge and Kirloskar Oil Engines are headquartered here. Along with these, a number of top multi-nationals such as Mercedes-Benz, General Motors and Volkswagen are also based here.
These big auto-majors, along with other industrial powerhouses such as Cummins Diesel have created a strong industrial manufacturing ecosystem in Pune. These OEM (Original Equipment Manufacturers) in turn drive requirements for sub-assemblies and components to Tier-1 and Tier-2 vendors.
A large number of small and med-sized industrial automation companies have also sprung up in Pune. These companies design and develop various factory automation and material handling solutions for automotive as well as other industries.
Designing activity is important at all levels, in all these companies – big or small. As a result, Pune has become probably the biggest user of various 2-D and 3-D CAD applications and other associated CAE/CAM applications, in India.
However, the ecosystem for CAD doesn’t stop here! Given Pune’s dominance in Information Technology and the huge CAD users’ base, many CAD/CAM/CAE software companies worldwide have found Pune to be the natural choice for their R&D and Service Centers. All CAD majors described in the earlier section have some development presence in Pune. Pune also has software service companies focusing on this area, such as Geometric Systems.
Amit Paranjape is one of the driving forces behind PuneTech. He has been in the supply chain management area for over 12 years, most of it with i2 in Dallas, USA. For more details, see his PuneTech profile.
What: ‘Autodesk Live’, event for information about 2009 Autodesk Manufacturing Solutions When: 8th July 2008, 9:30am to 5:30pm Where: Le Meridien, Pune Registration: Free registration here.
‘Autodesk Live’ would give an idea on the kind of impact Autodesk 2009 will have on business. Focus will be on ‘Digital Prototyping‘ and how that can be used to:
Connect conceptual design, engineering and manufacturing teams through the use of a single digital model
Simulate complete product and better optimise and manage the design
Create accurate digital prototypes that enable to validate the design as one work, minimising the need for costly physical prototypes
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