Hasta La Ideas

A controversial post by Sam Ladner, followed by a rich debate between the author, Paula Thornton, Peter Merholz, Raymond Pirouz, and others.

Design is attractive to management because it is a de-politicized version of the well known socio-cultural critique of managerial practices. Design thinking is so popular because it raises only questions of “creativity” or “innovation” without ever questioning the legitimacy of managerial practice. Instead, design thinking aspires only to “better” management technique by investigating “contextual problems” or the truly innocuous “pain points.”

The inconvenient truth is that the science of management fails because it treats people as either mere inputs into the production process or as faceless “consumers” who have no real stake in outcomes. Design thinking allows for these truths to remain unaddressed, thereby avoiding any discussion of power itself. Workers are cast as something to be organized or “incented.” Consumers are to have their “needs met.” And neither group is granted a meaningful stake in the creative process.

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Conveniently located near to Core’s Portland office, Autodesk’s Manufacturing Solutions Headquarters in Lake Oswego, OR opened its doors yesterday to a dozen or so CAD nerds and bloggers (including Core77’s), for a preview day slightly reminiscent of high school. Dubbed “Manufacturing Tech Day,” the schedule had us herding from room to room for a series of seven hour-long sessions in which the product leads for Alias, Inventor, AutoCAD Mechanical, and a few other packages sprinted us through the newest bits of each program for 2010. Here’s what we gleaned for the Industrial Design community.

ALIAS

Yes, it really runs on a Mac. We told you that already, but here it is in picture form. That’s the Mac. And that’s Alias. And it only crashed once.

Improved interoperability between Alias and Inventor. Also something we mentioned before, but it was nice to see another live demo. With the compressed timeline, we only got a few minutes of Alias + Inventor interchange, but it’s reasonably impressive stuff. The demo consisted of free-form modification of the vent shapes on the helmet model above, as a set of Alias surfaces, then switching over to Inventor and watching the thoroughly detailed solid model update with the new shapes, including fillets and draft. This is similar to the passing of information down the stack in solid modelers with surface functionality, such as Pro/E and SolidWorks, but with Alias’ surfacing capability. There are always limitations to how much you can stress a system like this, but it looks at first glance to be about as robust as a single parametric modeler approach.

Better integration of polygon surfaces. Scanned 3D data can now be imported as polygon mesh and used directly in model creation. The demo above shows a polygon surface at left, a native Alias NURBS surface at right, and a loft between them. Neat for exploring alternate takes on existing products, or reverse enginee…er…I mean “investigative analysis.”

more goodies after the jump…

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Core77 is very proud to have been selected as “Best Design Website” in their first-ever Best of Green: Design + Architecture awards. We are humbled to be in such great company, and honored to be on the list. Thank you Treehugger!

Oh: Most unexpected “best of” pick in the bunch?
Best Material: Dirt

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Once hailed as a panacea, it has been so diminished by hyperbole that it risks seeming irrelevant. (“Transformation” is the fashionable favorite to replace it.) Yet just like “design” and “contemporary,” “innovation” is losing credibility as a word at the very time when it is needed most urgently.

As the economic and environmental crises deepen, there is a growing recognition that many aspects of our lives need to be reinvented. Politicians routinely call for the “redesign” of society, and urge businesses to “innovate” their way out of recession. This readiness to embrace change — even radical change — coupled with advances in science and technology, is unleashing a stream of innovations. Here are some of the most exciting ones.

Read on.

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‘Chaos Scenario’ author Bob Garfield watches as his worst predictions wreak havoc on media and marketing worlds.

“This isn’t about the end of commerce or the end of marketing or news or entertainment. All of the above are finding new expressions online, and in time will flourish thanks to the very digital revolution that is now ravaging them. The future is bright. But the present is apocalyptic. Any hope for a seamless transition — or any transition at all — from mass media and marketing to micro media and marketing are absurd.

The sky is falling, the frog in the pot has come to a boil and, oh yeah, we are, most of us, exquisitely, irretrievably fucked.”

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via Bruce Sterling

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