The Art of Product Design: Changing How Things Get Made

Chapter 2

Since the Potter’s Wheel, the Most Important Tool in History

Is it possible to overstate the historic importance of 3D CAD?

That would be a stretch, because you have to go back to prehistory to find the advent of any tool that has given humans such a quantum leap in our ability to produce physical objects . . . maybe iron implements or the potter’s wheel. Certainly, this marvel should rank somewhere alongside Gutenberg’s printing press in the annals of technology.

If you have overlooked its significance until now, there is no shame in that. Since this still-new technology became widespread in the 1990s, it has largely been out of sight, hidden behind the locked doors of giant aerospace and automotive concerns and on the computers of individual engineers who don’t usually make headlines.

Why do I venture to make such bold claims? What magical powers does 3D CAD give us?

To understand, you must first grasp what we gained in the leap from two to three dimensions.

For centuries, engineers designed in two dimensions, drafting and redrafting blueprints by hand. We could make sense of what we were creating, but it was working in abstract—and it was extremely labor-intensive.

Once two-dimensional (2D) CAD proliferated in the 1980s, the process of drafting and modifying blueprints became much more efficient—but it was still working in a 2D abstraction.

Today, working in three dimensions means no more abstraction. What we design on our screens is virtually the actual object. We ...