Walking into class this week, I didn’t really know what to expect. I had downloaded Fusion 360, been playing around in it a little bit and was able to create my very own conduit. While I struggled quite a lot my extremely mediocre results are below: Click Here

https://www.flickr.com/photos/151616386@N05/shares/cmR34k

Now with a little background and a lot of struggle in Fusion 360, Jeffrey Smith from Auto-Desk took the stage and gave us a comprehensive tutorial and knowledge transfer session of Fusion 360. From user interface to competitor analysis (i.e. Inventor, SolidWorks, Reflex Design, etc) to a comprehensive tutorial of how to sketch, create, modify, assemble, construct, inspect, insert, etc, Jeff Smith really provided us with all the technical basics to succeed in CAD software and design especially Fusion 360. Additionally, Jeff shared with us his entire career path from working with the IDSA to being a Design Director at Reflex Design, to currently serving as an Education Program Manager at AutoDesk. With all this being, said I haven’t even gotten to the best part! The best part of AutoDesk Fusion 360 is that there is a free 3-year student subscription!

However, my two biggest personal takeaways from Jeff’s Presentation were the following: the implications of Fusion 360 student subscriptions and AutoDesk’s Pier 9. As Jeff mentioned, the majority of Fusion 360’s revenue streams come from corporations, businesses, organizations that utilize Fusion 360 on a daily basis to consistently solve business and real-world ground breaking problems through rapid prototyping and CAD software problem solution-ing. With that being said, AutoDesk is providing free 3 year subscriptions to students not only because it wants to give accessible CAD resources to students but also because the business demand for Fusion 360 technical skills is astronomical. Businesses all across the United States are looking for young graduates with the CAD technical skills to work at their corporations. With that being said, Jeff really re-embedded how practical not only Fusion 360 and CAD design is but also how practical digital making seminar is in the business world.

Lastly, Jeff conveyed the unrelenting and limitless power of innovation with AutoDesk’s Pier 9 video. AutoDesk’s Pier 9 is a physical location in San Francisco where hundreds of innovators explore all stages in making things and take ideas and digital models and bring them to life. With creative partners and technical experts, the people at Pier 9 are catalyzing groundbreaking innovations and removing the limitations between software and hardware. Pier 9 demonstrates the sheer power of the CAD community and really drives me to get involved with the CAD community so I too can make a difference in the world or business through my very own idea generation and 3-D printing. If you want to take a look at Pier 9’s latest innovations look here!

Now with all that being said, let’s see what I made this week. Here is a heel that I was able to construct in class in just 15 minutes thanks to Fusion 360: Click Here

https://www.flickr.com/photos/151616386@N05/shares/9m3M35

Here is a water bottle I created to replicate my own water bottle at home: Click Here

https://www.flickr.com/photos/151616386@N05/shares/d4C70q

To conclude, this week has been amazing in the Digital Making Seminar. Not only have I gained extremely applicable skills in Fusion 360 but I’m so excited to continue learning more about the 3-D printing world this upcoming week!

Working at Grainger this past summer, I had the opportunity to operate and work in an agile methodology for innovation-development. And through my academic experiences and classes at the College of Business, I have been exposed to the innovation funnel and waterfall methodologies. However even with these different innovation methodologies, Design Thinking is not only a fascinating innovation methodology but also truly an innovation process that solidifies ideas and formulates on a daily basis!

So what is the Design Thinking Methodology? Well according, to Harvard Business Review in Tim Brown’s Design Thinking, Design Thinking is “a discipline [or methodology] that uses the designer’s sensibility and methods to match the people’s needs with what is technologically feasible and what a viable business strategy can convert into customer value and market opportunity.” Tradition innovation processes typically recognized design as a downstream activity that take place after an idea, product, or service had been created. Designers would add value to a product or service through “aesthetically attractive” designs and evocative or memorable advertising: embedding these designs into a consumers mind and driving point of sales transactions. However, the Design Thinking Methodology disrupts the conventional process of innovation. Instead of involving Designers at the tail-end of the innovation process, Designers effectively collaborate and provide solution ideation with marketers, engineers, and behavioral scientist from the dawn of the innovation process. Design Thinking allows businesses, enterprises, and organizations to “explore more ideas more quickly than they could otherwise” by providing generation of a highly diverse set of ideas and preventing problems such as Groupthink from occurring.

However, Design Thinking also requires the following crucial elements: Taking a human-centered approach, rapid experimentation and prototyping, and consistently seeking outside help.

Brown utilizes two excellent examples to illustrate the Design Thinking Process: Kasier Permanente and Shimano Bicycles. In both situations, Kasier Permanente and Shimano hired IDEO consultants to provide a unique and outside design perspective in their business solution-ing process, balanced technological feasibilities with consumer needs (to provide the highest value proposition), and performed numerous iterations of quick prototyping to reach their successful business solutions. In doing so, Kaiser was able to effectively streamline their nurse debriefing processes. By placing nurse shift-knowledge transfer in front of the patient and incorporating new software systems that accurately tracked data in a user-friendly way, prep time was reduced astronomically allowing patient care to exponentially rise with more nurse time spent on patients. Similarly, Shimano collaborated with IDEO to discover an untapped market of consumers that loved riding bikes in adolescent days but stopped riding bikes due to intimidation, high-complexity, and high cost. Shimano then introduced their “coasting bike” into this market driving revenues to highs never seen before.

Lastly, Brown argues that Design Thinking is not meant to undermine conventional downstream design processes. Designing to appeal to a consumer emotionally and functionally is still imperative in the deployment of a successful product or service. Because of this, aesthetics are still important. Aesthetics fuel consumers’ emotional appeal and allowed for the success of Bank of America’s “Keep the Change” savings account service. Additionally, I saw the importance of aesthetics design at my internship at Grainger this past summer. Working in an agile methodology, there were always User Interface and User Experience Analysts on all sprint teams to ensure user friendliness. For instance, on my agile team we were developing customer insights within a CRM platform so that our sales reps could better reach customers and drive revenue. User interface/experience analyst consistently redesigned the interface of the application to ensure that the sales team could easily access and utilize their custom reports.

Design Thinking has truly disrupted the traditional processes of innovation. With that being said, I end with this: I will be working at IBM after graduation and am really excited that they are an avid supporter for Design Thinking Methodology. IBM’s Design Thinking methodology centers around “focusing on user, relentless reinvention through rapid prototyping, and diverse empowered teams” that certainly contain designers.