What is seducing a designer to use 100% digital equipment to documenting and developing ideas?

Capturing creativity is a sensual act with decisions taken within micro seconds. Nothing must disturb the magic moment when the ideas flow from brain to the documentation support. For centuries or even back to the stone age designers have relayed on a pencil and a box of color crayons to serve the purpose of documenting their design intent.

I recall the mid ‘90s when I visited at the Opel/GM development center in Rüsselsheim, Germany, for a business project. Open space offices were hung with impressive hand-made sketches and drawings of vehicles on transparent paper, thus manifesting the team’s creative outbursts.

Now a new generation of designers has been raised who are drawing directly on computer screens. And they seem to prefer this approach as their natural way to go about their job. In addition, with a digital input there are some advantages on the down-stream processes: the possibility of applying changes, the effectiveness of re-use and transfer to other media, as well as the ease of enriching content, such as varying colors, further detailing  or adding background for presentations up until photo-realistic rendering.

At the Dassault Systèmes European Customer Conference which took place two weeks ago in Paris we were able to observe what seems to be a breakthrough in this path of development towards a comprehensive approach: Industrial Designers now can use CATIA with a pen and tablet device from WACOM to directly draw in 3D.

WACOM has been a partner in our Emerging Technologies Program since last year and has been working with the teams from CATIA and the Design Studio to develop this integrated solution.

With the availability of this functionality the door opens to a closed digital loop from documenting the first idea to developing a product design which is ready to be manufactured.

This sounds like science fiction to you? It still does it to me. But it’s nevertheless real. Have a look at the video:

Listen to the 3D drawing experience of Julien Fournier, who is using this technology to design Haute Couture:

Up to the creative people of the world to check this out.

Best,
Michael