Having decided that my first contribution to the design community would not be a sterile technical article but something that could reach beyond our all-knowing-decision-taking cortex all the way down to the limbic system, I decided to share what has been my first “industry experience” as a senior student within a product design company based [...]

There’s nothing quite like real world experience for engaging students.  And engineers, notorious for their passion to work hands-on, know this better than anyone.  That’s the motivation behind the Real World Design Challenge sponsored in part by PTC.  Every year RWDC presents high school students across the US with an actual design challenge being faced [...]

GrabCAD is a community founded by mechanical engineers. It is also a place for engineers to share their talent, expand knowledge, find a dream project and work with tools and features that make life better. Their HQ is located in Boston, MA with the development team in Estonia. Becoming a Member for FREE GrabCAD is [...]

Objects in zSpace appear “solid” in open space, allowing users to manipulate them directly as if they were real physical objects. “Talk about an unusual and cutting-edge way to interact with CAD and other design tools. Infinite Z, which bills itself as a startup although it’s been around in development mode since 2007, has launched [...]

A genetic algorithm is a search heuristic for optimization given a set of guidelines. The algorithm works with different kinds of strings of data that represent an object. The purpose of the algorithm is to select ideal output from a programmed environment.

Here’s a box of 100 SRAM high-performance bike components. Now make something of it. That’s the challenge SRAM laid down for a group of noted artists from across the country, handpicked by Milwaukee’s art Guru Terrence Coffman and SRAM’s very own Marketing Chief David Zimberoff. The participating artists more than met this challenge. The works [...]

The XC2V FLYPMode is one imposing looking vehicle. Also known as the Experimental Crowd-derived Combat Support Vehicle, DARPA has billed this mean machine as the “first crowd-sourced, militarily relevant vehicle design.” After being selected as the winning entry to DARPA’s design-the-next-Humvee competition, Local Motors tricked out the XC2V FLYPMode in just 14 weeks. For now, [...]

ATTENTION engineering students and grads! Design Engine will be having an Open House on Thursday, Dec. 15th at 7pm. There will be modeling demos (Pro/E, Solidworks, Maya, Rhino, Alias, etc.), discussions, networking, job hunting, and just getting nerdy cool. With the job market in the engineering and industrial design fields these days, being proficient in [...]

The 8 Worst Fonts In The World In “Just My Type”, Simon Garfield counts down his least favorite typefaces. And Comic Sans isn’t among them. “We’d need another book, of course, to do this justice. And where would one start?” Fonts are like cars on the street-we notice only the most beautiful or ugly, the [...]

Each Region or PTCUSER chapter has a meeting of the minds once or twice per year where Pro/Engineer users gather together to share their knowledge. This November 11th PTC User conference is no different. It is being held in Denver CO at the Colorado School of Mines and hosted by the Colorado PTC User Group [...]