Engineers over use PowerPoints to make technical presentations, and the results can be disastrous. So says Edward Tufte, professor emeritus at Yale University, who is an expert on statistical evidence and analytical design. Example: NASA executives had a fatal misunderstanding of the potential danger to the space shuttle Columbia because of overly simplistic PowerPoint presentations made by Boeing engineers. That may seem hard to believe, but Tufte made a convincing case when he spoke at a seminar in Boston yesterday. His viewpoint was validated by the Columbia Accident Investigation Board in a report issued in 2003. “The board views the endemic use of PowerPoint briefing slides instead of technical papers as an illustration of the problematic methods of technical communications at NASA,” the board wrote.
Why are PowerPoints a problem for technical communication? 1) They oversimplify complex technical data, 2) They tend to reflect the biases of the presenter, and 3) Information becomes even more filtered as PowerPoints are summarized and moved up a bureaucratic hierarchy. Tufte puts it simply: “Serious problems require a serious tool: written reports.”
A separate NASA task force investigating escalating communications problems in the agency made this damning statement: “It appears that many young engineers do not understand the need for, or know how to prepare, formal engineering documents such as reports, white papers, or analyses.”
A new process for laser-welding large-scale, steel-aluminum foam sandwich structures for lightweighting ships, which eliminates intermetallic phase, has been demonstrated.
A major advance in repairing composite structures combining robots and lasers bodes well for commercial aircraft such as the Boeing 787 Dreamliner and Airbus A350XWB, which contain composites in large proportions of their structures.
Against a backdrop of mounting product complexity and a need to keep a lid on development costs, companies are recognizing a need to make simulation a more integral part of the design process. In response, vendors in the CAD world are building out CAE functionality as part of their CAD suites while simulation vendors are building tighter integrations to leading CAD tools. Keith Meintjes, Ph.D., Practice Manager, Simulation and Analysis at CIMdata, Inc., joins Design News CAD Editor Beth Stackpole in this radio program to explore the new face of integrated CAD and CAE, how companies are benefitting from this tighter partnership between platforms, and how integrating CAE earlier in the development cycle pays off in optimized product designs.
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