3D EXPERIENCE World Day 1 General Session
During Day 1 of Dassault Systemes’ 3D EXPERIENCE World conference, Senior VP Gian Paolo Bassi quoted designer and social scientist Leyla Acaroglu, “The things that we design, at the end design us.”
He was referring to the viewpoint that design is not simply meant to improve things, but…”the end game guys, is to improve life itself.”
This was the context he created before seque-ing to the question of environmental impact caused by products at the design phase, and the reason that technologies like Dassault’s can help.
“It is estimated that over 80-percent of product-related environmental impact is determined at design stage,” he said.
What Dassault proposes is a platform solution like SolidWorks that is able to tell businesses exactly, the environmental impact of the designs which they create before it goes through costly prototyping and even costlier production processes.
Why a platform? Because of its ability to connect people, data, solutions, and have this cohesive whole plug seamlessly into data which is a single source of truth.
“Data is the enabler of all this. It unearths knowledge and know-how that you never even knew you had,” he said.
Later, CEO Bernard Charles also added that design quality has been the core of what many companies have been doing.
“We can today select any of the (smaller) designs created on the planet created by anyone, and our AI engine (in SolidWorks) will regenerate automatically the specifications of it and re-create the best possible design.”
This is going to be available as a cloud service, Bernard also said.
The new AI feature within the platform basically means two outcomes: Designers can assess the quality of their design, and also have choice to elevate its quality with high-quality specs.
And there is also implication upon the use of AI to recreate specs of objects/products that are not yet digitalised – Bernard believes that very advanced AI can very quickly recreate their design specifications to be as close as possible to the physical product.
Although he did not call it ‘reverse engineering’ the general sentiment around the conference and exhibition is, yes… it is.
All of this capabilities, when coupled with Dassault’s plan to index, scan, sort, simplify, clean, provide characteristics to a gigantic dataset, and more, implies that this solution can enable predictability of material costs, estimate risks for a particular product, and more.
This is significant during a time of unpredictable supply chain disruption, because of the new challenges that emerge, for example how to pick new types of product materials that would work as well as materials that are not so readily available as before.
Bernard revealed that predictability to a certain extent, is what they had enabled for vehicle development for one Dassault Systemes customer.