The Art of Product Design: Changing How Things Get Made

Chapter 4

New Culture, New Tools Converge in the Cloud

For all the talk about The Cloud, so far you may have no earthly use for it. You don’t need to run your word processor on someone else’s server, and your hard disk likely has enough storage to hold all the family photos you will ever snap. But if you’re an engineer, the cloud opens up a new universe.

Today’s typical engineering workstation boasts compute power beyond the dreams of the team behind NASA’s space missions of the 1960s and 1970s. As the New York Times recently noted, Voyager 1, launched in 1977, “carries an 8-track tape recorder and computers with one-240,000th the memory of a early iPhone.”

And yet we can always use more. In fact, mechanical engineers will find creative ways to hog all the compute power you can throw at us. We need the cloud because it promises to provide a near-infinite amount of it.

Most of the stuff we do in three-dimensional computer-aided design (3D CAD) runs superbly with the resources that today’s engineers have to work with. But there are definitely moments when some of us wish we could set a supercomputer loose on the task at hand—as with simulated testing, for example.

Will the exterior of my spacecraft survive the intense heat of reentry into the Earth’s atmosphere? How will the exhaust gases flow in the combustion chamber of the rotary engine I’m working on? What will happen to the front end of my supercar design in a 30-mile-per-hour collision? Complex physical simulations such as ...