3D design magic

The dearth of home-grown manufacturing skills has long worried the industry, prompting the development of a new Diploma in Manufacturing and Product Design, to be made available in schools and colleges in two years’ time.

But what happens in the meantime?

Not everything can be sent offshore. Keen young workers from Eastern Europe are turning up all the time – and bending over backwards to learn and work hard. But is this the answer long term? What happens when these workers go home, or move on to better things?

The industry needs a makeover

The key must be to instil the same level of enthusiasm for manufacturing and design in our own young people, so that they will consider, perhaps for the first time, a career in industry rather than, say, professional services.

3D design fuels creativity

If there’s one thing that draws together students of all levels of aptitude, it’s technology.

"The growing and increasingly creative use of advanced 3D design tools such as Autodesk Inventor in schools and universities is already having a major impact, changing the way young people think about engineering."

Today’s sophisticated yet uncannily easy-to-use 3D tools enable highly realistic designs to be created. Products can be ‘built’ and ‘tested’ without any hard materials, firing designers’ imaginations in ways that weren’t possible before. Just as property developers and kitchen designers can allow prospective clients to design their own homes down to minute levels of detail, and ‘walk’ around them before committing themselves, so the creative designer can explore any number of ideas and product variations without wasting resources.

  Read the full article in Creator 9, p4