This week in class, Jeff Smith, a speaker from Autodesk introduced and showed us how to use Fushon 360. Fusion 360 is one of the more powerful CAD programs out there that enables users to be innovative. To be totally honest, I had a hard time with Fusion 360, even now I still cannot fully understand and figure out how it works. However, I must admit that it becomes more user-friendly as one gets to understand the functions more and the program is quite effective. What I do admire about Fusion is its ability to help the user be more productive. It helps users create more complicated objects with different layers that would normally take hours on end to create in a normal CAD program at a faster pace with the same amount of quality. Finally, Autodesk, the company behind Fusion 360 offers this program, as well as many others, free to students for 3 years.

Personally, I still have so much to learn within Fusion 360, but as someone that has had previous background in design software such as Photoshop and InDesign, I must say that I am very surprised and have great respect for this program no matter how frustrated I get with it. Jeff really dove in and taught us the full potential of Fusion 360 and each function has a blurb that loosely summarizes each functions’ capabilities and actions. I think that applications like Fusion 360 really pave the way for people to understand that design is something that anybody can come up with and that anybody can make their own objects. For the students in this class, Fusion 360 will eventually assist us in designing our concept and plausible ideas for our projects.

Another speaker we had was Dot Silverman. Due to time, Dot could not really go into depth about her topic on biohacking, but we did learn about the basics of biohacking, a “do-it-yourself” type of biology. She introduced fungi product design in which products such as sturdy chairs were made out of fungi and were environmentally friendly.