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Getting Human Hands Back Into Digital Design
Hugh Pickens writes "Using computers to model the physical world has become increasingly common as products as diverse as cars and planes, pharmaceuticals and cellphones are almost entirely conceived, specified, and designed on a computer screen. Typically, only when these creations are nearly ready for mass manufacturing are prototypes made. But the NYTimes is running an interesting essay highlighting a little-noticed movement in the world of professional design and engineering: a renewed appreciation for manual labor, or innovating with the aid of human hands. 'A lot of people get lost in the world of computer simulation,' says Bill Burnett, executive director of the product design program at Stanford. 'You can't simulate everything.' Fifty years ago, tinkering with gadgets was routine for people drawn to engineering and invention, and making refinements with your own hands means 'you have to be extremely self-critical,' says Richard Sennett, whose book The Craftsman examines the importance of skilled manual labor. Even in highly abstract fields, like the design of next-generation electronic circuits, some people believe that hands-on experiences can enhance creativity. 'You need your hands to verify experimentally a technology that doesn't exist,' says Mario Paniccia, director of Intel's photonics technology lab."
Modeling doesn't actually model everything, and an unknown factor can easily arise. It's easy to design a product, but hard to actually design one that works the first time around flawlessly.
Craftsmen are still needed in meat-space.
It's true that in the world of building design as well that designing solely with computer allows you to overlook flaws with a design, and that a physical model is still the best way to test design. It's also true that you can't sketch an idea in AutoCad, and that the beginnings of a design in any field should be sketched/modelled. It's almost as if when something is conceived on computer it's automatically granted legitimacy.
I dreamed of Freud: What does this mean?
Americans can't afford to waste their time doing things with their hands. That's what low wage countries are for. Americans have to concentrate on the profitable things, like banking, hedge funds, and real estate speculation. You can't get rich with machine shop skills. Or even with the skills to set up an production line. You don't get any respect for that.
A few years ago, I ran a DARPA Grand Challenge team. We had some bright young people with an interest in robotics and the ability to make complex hardware work. Where are they now? One is running a hedge fund in Santa Fe. One went to Bermuda to work for an offshore financial operation. One went to a search engine company. One headed a group developing software inside the iPhone. They're all making lots of money, but they're not doing robotics. They can't afford to.
Yes, it's sad, Yes, it's leading to the decline of the United States. But if you're young and have college loans to pay off, what can you do?
Gene
Mission: To provide products that consume time and energy as entertainingly as permitted by the laws of thermodynamics.
Ever.
A simulation is only as good as its input data and ability to map output data to meatspace. A computer simulation of anything in the real world, even if the simulation itself is perfect, will always be limited by its ability to acquire data from to real world to model, and the ability to implement the model physically in the real world. Going from analog to digital and back to analog always loses something in the translation.
Correct, but let's not be so anal. It is possible that limited simulations can be developed that could completely destroy manual design in certain fields (since you don't need to know quantum mechanics or the gravitational pull of Pluto to design a bridge). I would say that it is reasonably likely that in the next 20 years we will see classical physics simulation engines become the primary design *and* testing ground for most engineering products, with the exception of testing critical projects like bridges and aircraft.
What you do, is build stuff and fuck the rest of them.
It's that simple.
Perhaps you can't do it on the job --that's the case with me. You can however, do what you want to on your time and the skills you build will provide value for you later on.
There is absolutely no place on this earth where the simple equation for wealth, which is innovation applied to labor over time, does not apply.
We are being told it does not apply here, that we are a consumer economy and that the world would crash if we quit consuming shit.
Don't believe one word of it.
We have the trade deficits today, the economic trouble we do today, for one reason and one only:
We don't carry our weight as Americans. Until we fix that, we will slowly be owned by the rest of the world perfectly willing to carry theirs.
Blogging because I can...
"Yes Daddy, it's something you know with your skin."
Do not mock my vision of impractical footwear
This topic has been in the back of my mind for a while now. Some musings.
If we continue to use expert systems to design things using coded models of behavior, we need to be cautious about interpreting the output of those models. Airplane wings are wind-tunnel tested to see that they conform to the model's predictions. This is well and good. But as more complex non linear chaotic objects are modeled, one needs to be crucially aware of the model as being just a "model" not the actual object (with all it's nuances and quirky behaviors). Look at the level of detail and redundancy in the space program for a lesson in exhaustive modeling, and still resulting in tragedy and gross error (Hubble comes to mind).
I remember when the Star Wars initiative was the talk of the Friday night grogs. Most engineers (at least the software designers) thought it impossible to design a bug-free mission critical system to support it, but were happy to give it the good ole college try in any case.
Rely on tools to design robots to design machines, didn't someone write a sci-fi story about that once?