Attire for COFES is weekend casual (no suits); shirts with collars; sandals or sneakers. Shorts are okay.  

The Design and Sustainability Symposium: Exploring the intersection of design, simulation, and sustainability for the built (AEC) and manufactured environment. Details here.

Optimizing Across Disciplines in AEC
   Because our current process of design is sequential, we rarely end up with a design that optimizes across the various systems of a building. In most cases, this is because we aren’t able to optimize the topology of a system and the sizing of the system's components concurrently across several disciplines. Multi-Disciplinary Optimization (MDO) methods and parallel computing can enable such multi-scale and multi-disciplinary optimization during conceptual design, enabling quick exploration of the design-space and convergence on more optimal solutions. How? What are the costs, benefits, and implications?

Millennials are Different
   Millennials, the people soon to be entering the workforce, are cloud natives. They view software as apps and portable tools. They pull bits and pieces of capabilities, from wherever they can find them, to solve whatever problem they have at hand. If the engineering community can get them the tools they need, they’ll use them. If not, they’ll find their own ways to do things. We can’t expect that their ways will meet our corporate needs for security, IP protection, management, or whatever. But they’re going to get things done. How do we cope?

Remote versus Cloud
   While everyone’s talking about the Cloud, there’s another very real transformation we’re starting to see: The move from MY computer and MY local data, to accessing data and programs hosted on centralized platforms. It doesn’t matter so much whether it’s virtualized or not, or whether the resources are hosted in a local server, a cluster, a company cloud, or at an external provider. The key transition results from finally being able to push pixels fast enough so that our data and programs never have to be run locally. Among other things, this solves data duplication, large data transfer between sites, and BYOD issues. We’re at the beginning of this transition. What are the large scale disruptions that may emerge? How will this change business process, workflow, and economics?

Rethinking Complexity
   We are being asked to solve ever larger and more complex problems. Often, the starting point is even larger and more complex solutions. However, the repeating record of failed projects reminds us that the best big solutions are composed of several best small solutions. Composed is the key idea. Systems thinking is the key to this composing. How can systems thinking change the way we address complexity? What’s the cost of not using this approach? Where can we drive complexity out of our solutions as we address complex problems?

Moving Manufacturing to the Home
   Remember Vac-U-Form? It was a lot of fun, but most of us never really made anything useful with it. 50 years later, we have 3D printing available to the home market. Like the iPhone, it’s the combination of technologies that is rapidly making 3D printing significant. Computer+Software+Camera+Output means that we have the ability to actually make things we can use. Will we? Why will 3D printing be different than our Vac-U-Form experience? What does the path from a toy to personal replicator look like? How will the technology evolve for the consumer? What technologies will be made obsolete in the process?

MBE: Model-Based Everything
   Model-Based Design and Model-Based Definition are not the future – they’re now. Model-Based Delivery is about to be a mandate for DoD systems. Then there’s Model-Based Enterprise, which is the transformation required to support the 3 MBDs. MBDs and MBE are great if you’re the OEM. But if you’re in the supply chain, managing the interactions with many different MBEs is a crippling challenge. What challenges and opportunities can we expect as support of MBE and MBDs becomes pervasive? What are the ramifications of MBE for non-DoD projects? What trends are likely to change the way we perceive MBE?

The Age of Governance
   Information Governance tracks sources, ownership, responsibilities, and accountabilities needed to meet requirements for legal, regulatory, and policy-driven compliance. PLM has been supporting compliance for years, but recently support for governance in PLM has had increased visibility. Governance for simulation is also a hot area of simulation management. What’s going on here? How will awareness of governance and software support for governance impact the process of design and engineering? How does it impact liability? Will governance help or hinder design improvement?

Rethinking Sustainability
   What can we do to help our customers act more responsibly? What can we envision that would support better decision-making? In addition to lifecycle assessment tools and economic impacts, what can we do to help our customers design desirable products that THEIR customers will want to keep and maintain? Can our software support design as a foundation for the rebirth of an heirloom mindset when the consumer goes to buy? Can availability of 3D printable replacement components jumpstart this move? And not just at the consumer level. How might design-for-maintenance change the equation? Where do embedded software and electronics fit into that equation?

Escaping AEC’s Adversarial Nature
   Stakeholders within AEC have powerful tools that address their specific needs within their silo. These deep silos of knowledge and tools, while necessary to get their part of the job done, fail to connect with the silos of the other sectors. Each has optimized its own domain, at the expense of the overall project. Design-Build, and later BIM, have started the process of connecting and optimizing the overall project. Integrated software, open protocols, and data standards alone are not enough -- the real challenge is the adversarial nature of the process for each stakeholder. Mandated BIM is part of the push that gives us hope that the move away from the adversarial process is actually happening. What needs to happen to accelerate this transition and to make the transformation mainstream?

Educating the Next Generation
   STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering, & Math) education is a part of the solution to the critical challenges facing the manufacturing industry, including a global aging workforce, increased product and process complexity, a skills/education gap, and battling STEM ignorance. There are three key parts to the big picture of STEM education: driving more students to enter STEM fields; building a better launching point for STEM students to enter the workforce; and finally, increasing STEM literacy for those NOT interested in joining the STEM workforce. All three parts are imperative.

Unique industry/academic partnerships for STEM education are key to a pipeline of new engineers, technologists, and skilled manufacturing workers. Averting this crisis in manufacturing through STEM education and workforce development is a global problem with local solutions. How can firms impact and benefit from these programs and brainstorm how your organization can get involved?

Impact of Cloud on Customer Spend
   The combination of Cloud, pay-as-you-go, increased interoperability (in support of heterogeneous environments), and plug-in apps has the potential to have a disruptive impact on vendor lock-in. We’re already at the point where some customers have the option to choose which tool to use on an object and no longer have the need to consider what tool was used to create the object. Today, you can view an analysis with any of many tools, regardless of the solver. What happens when a customer with a pay-as-you-go license can select from multiple tools to work on 3D product models and assemblies? How does a vendor maintain its relationship with the customer so that the customer spend doesn’t stray? What does this mean for VARs? What new business models may arise when it’s no longer necessary to have a dedicated tool to address a particular object?

They Obviously Never Asked an Engineer
   As engineers, we abhor the inefficiency of the healthcare system, particularly in the US. As a software industry designed to manage complexity, we build and use tools every day to address similarly complex challenges. What can the health care system learn from how we approach our own challenges? What tools can we bring to bear to the challenges of health care? What short- and longer-term improvements might be possible, without further breaking the system in the process?

Design-Space Exploration: Systems of Systems
   Design-Space Exploration is more than just the fuzzy front-end of design. It’s where many paths are explored, chosen, and taken. In complex projects, this requires conceptualization and manipulation of sets of components (systems) that interact with other systems in complex, seemingly unpredictable ways. As we explore the design of systems of systems, what tools do we have today to address this? What’s missing from our toolbox? Who’s doing what to change that situation?

EoL 4 Email
   The first email was sent in 1971 and email has dominated our working lives for at least the past two decades. By its nature, Email is a one-to-one communication and storage medium, with a metaphor similar to postal mail. Email is a transactional medium. Facebook is not. Less than 10 years old, Facebook is a state-based medium and has changed the way we think about communication and information. Facebook changes the responsibility of communication. Email communication is being banned by some firms, who instead now rely on Facebook-like interactions. How will firms manage a plethora of Facebook-like systems in place of email? What other things will change as email follows that path of other bypassed technologies like postal mail, fax, and landlines?

Manufacturing Renaissance
   3D printing is no longer just about Rapid Prototyping (RP) or Additive Manufacturing (AM). We’re entering a next generation of thinking about 3D printing, no longer bound by old metaphors. 3D printing now supports complexities that allow us to create unexpected composite materials that can influence our design strategies. We’ve added cells, electronics, paper, and concrete to the 3D printing repertoire. How will this transform design exploration, analysis, manufacturing, testing, etc.? Up until now, we’ve designed for RP and AM with the same tools we use to design castings and subtractive manufacturing. What tools might we think up that can accelerate the value of 3D printing for the next generation?

A Sea for Pearl Diving or an Ocean of Meaning?
   Big Data is what happens when the cost of the decision of which data to throw away is higher than the cost to keep it. Value from Big Data generally comes from being able to access what you are looking for: Search; uncovering a solution or response where you know the question but not the answer: Find. More interesting are observations that you were not looking for and did not expect: Discover. Search, Find, Discover. What are the implications for Big Data for design and engineering?