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."

Easy!

Digitize your hands and use them in your digital environment.

What... no good?

Digital environments

A pedant could argue that if you're using your fingers it's already digital.

Re:

Perhaps, but then you're limited to eight bits.

Re:Digital environments

I count ten bits, personally. Are you Yakuza, by any chance?

Simple Reason

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.

Hand Generated Work is Necessary in All Fields

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.

Re:

An old prof of mine used to say "Never trust a digital meter, they lie with a straight face!"

Re:Hand Generated Work is Necessary in All Fields

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'm sorry but you remind me of some of the older teachers i had when studying architecture, they always repeated the same without having a clue of what they were talking about.

First of all: AutoCad equals a computer as much as a protractor equals hand drawing. Sure, you can't sketch a design using a protractor and a right angle ruler. This debate between computer/hand drawing, hand modeling is pretty useless. Fundamentally the limitations of a computer are 'input' and 'output' (since the computer per se can handle data much better than paper). With a keyboard, mouse, digital stylus and 3d controllers, you can not only emulate paper and hand modeling but surpass it by a long way and try different approaches to designing, like scripting or using parametric relationships between components.

  The fact is that there is a lot of software for designing and does a much better job that hand drawing/modeling. For example, try manually designing an environmentally friendly building. You've got software that displays real time the shadow range the building will cast, thermal analysis, lighting analysis, acoustic response, much more, and all in the initial stages of design, so you can try different layouts quickly, and see what works better.

The only advantage of a physical model is that if you don't have good spatial perception, you'll understand the space better than looking at a flat screen since you are looking at it in stereo, but you can always buy some stereo goggles, Boeing use them when designing.

Americans don't do that. Third world people do.

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?

Re:Americans don't do that. Third world people do.

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?

A very profitable area for young students to go into is "Intellectual Property" law, which field is also hastening the decline of the United States.

Re:

Are you lamenting that they can't make any money tinkering with complex hardware? I built parts of the TDRSS(Tracking and Data Relay Satellite System) for NASA while working for TRW. These Satellites have been in orbit for 25 years, just about the only thing I have ever built that is still in use. In 1983, I was paid $5.39/hour. I took a pay-cut from the Army to go to work for TRW. Now, I make 10 times that. Is someone going to pay me what I make now to build components for TRW? Probably not.

Just as

You are kidding right?

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.

Re:

Yeah but all of that crap is really boring in my opinion. I'd rather do something that is enjoyable that be drained by taking the path that leads to "easy money."

Re:

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.

Why is that a bad thing? It's not just about individuals chasing money, it's about companies *gasp* hiring intelligent people to do important things like manage large amounts of resources. Their choices aren't contributing to the decline of the

yep, thats great!

good luck with that!. (walks back to computer screen).

I work on embedded systems...

..that interact with and measure the "real" world. As far as I'm concerned, I never stopped working with my hands, even though I'm writing soft/firmware. There's an o'scope on my desk, and a soldering iron on my workbench. If I had to work exclusively within the bounds of a PC, I'd find another line of work.

Gene

The First boing 777 flew

The first Boing 777 flew and flew exactly as the model predicted.

There was a time when you would make a physical model to see how it will behave, but no longer. They sort of do it with cars but only for the sake of styling. Aerodynamic models are more accurate and styling is more important so there is no need for wind tunel testing.

Modern Cad pakages like SolidWorks, Catia, ProE are amazing and almost a comodity.

Skilled manual labour is a beautiful thing, but is becoming more distant

I am sure there is a SciFi script in this.

G

Re:The First boing 777 flew

Remember the 777 wing stress testing? When they loaded the wings till it was about to explode? We covered it on slashdot a while ago. I think that's physical modeling. They may have modeled it on computer first, but they still needed the physical test to confirm.

And I'm sure some designers ended up making small scale mocks, or partial mockups of maintenance bays to make sure everything was easily serviceable and stuff.

ProE etc

I once saw a very simple electronics box designed in ProE. Looked great. Everything fitted neatly. Only problem was that it was impossible to assemble because the positioning of a mounting boss made it impossible to slide a connector through a required hole.

Luckily the project manager was "old school" and had an SLA made which showed up the problem before the big-cost plastic injection molding dies were made.

I'm laying out boards right now

Rest assured, laying out a complex circuit board is still very much a "hands on" process, because interacting with the software is a real pain.

Isaac Asimov

If I'm not mistaken, Isaac Asimov wrote in Foundation's Edge that the reason why humans have developed a technological society is because we have hands. Dolphins and whales have sizeable brains but they lack hands. He even goes as far to say that humans 'thinks' with their hands, in that the hands are manifestations of intelligence.

Re:

Okay, but what about gorillas and ravens, which are intelligent and have hands, or elephants, which are intelligent and have a trunk with functionality equivalent to opposable thumbs?

Simulation gives us more

A computer model is far more useful than a piece of hardware on your desk. It does more and costs less.

One important aspect is measurements. There is no easy way to do any meaningful measurements in a microwave circuit unless it is specifically designed for that (and for nothing else.) However a CST or Ansoft model allows you to measure the field, or the current, or whatever else you want in any point of the model (and of the space around it, if you build an antenna, for example.) These measurements will be totally non-invasive, as opposed to a real-world probe that you would have to use. Some RF designs require hundreds of iterations before you achieve the desired compromise between all your design goals. Doing this in a computer will take a month. Doing this in metal will take 10 years.

Another advantage is in parametric design. Usually models are not hardcoded, but defined with a set of parameters (Excel for Autodesk Inventor, built-in spreadsheets for SolidWorks, etc.) You can manipulate these parameters and [almost] instantly see their effect. To do this in a real-world hardware you'd need weeks and thousands of dollars.

Per my current practice, the model is built only as a working prototype, when the design has been done and validated on the computer. This model can be also used as a sales demo, but the main purpose of building it is to verify the calculations, and the quality of the overall design (such as "can it be assembled?")

What is a skill?

I asked my then - 8 year old daughter "Do you know what a skill is, dear?"

"Yes Daddy, it's something you know with your skin."

analog integrated circuit designer

In the IC design market, we're certainly not going back to hand design. :) But that's probably expected. We have to integrate many, many devices (thousands in my case, but millions for the digital guys), and they are incredibly small. Gone are the days of predicting silicon behavior with equations on a napkin. These simpler models still provide good insight, but we need simulation software that can better predict how the circuit will behave to even have a chance of success. (Plus each spin on silicon costs millions of dollars. The bosses don't like it when we don't get it right.)

Having said that, we can get too dependent on the tools. Sometimes for certain circuits we learn that if this line cross that point, we're good. But it's too easy to forget why it would cross that point or even what the line measures. Today more than ever it's essential that good designer's understand what's physically going on. The tool can't truly model everything accurately, and even if it could it can't truly run all possible scenarios even with today's compute resources (my top level sims run for about a week). So the tools have limitations and we must be aware of them. A guy with a wrench can't assume everything is hexagonal, or that everything should be torqued in the first place.

Also, software tools can pidgin-hole us. They are written with a certain design paradigm in mind. That might represent good practice over a long period of time and over many different types of circuits, but eventually you'll hit limitations. You need to understand those limitations to build a better tool. We need to know when it's time to shift paradigms. Now new paradigms come along before the old ones even get broken in because we're working with tens of nanometers for features sizes.

Anyway, this is just the perspective from the integrated circuit industry (and specifically on the analog side). But I suspect that in this world of so much device integration that we'll really need computers to keep track of all the amazing richness of technology that these new widgets contain.