How CAD/PLM can capture design and engineering intent

It was a big Twitter day. Twitter IPO generated an overflow of news, articles, memorable stories. For me, twitter become a part of my working eco-system, the place I use to capture news, exchange information and communicate with people. If you are on twitter, try Vizify to visualize you twitter account. I did it here. The most insightful information for me was the fact I tweet 24 hours a day… (well, I don’t know how Vizify deal with my time zone changes). It made me think about what impact Twitter-like ecosystem can provide on engineers and designers. It came to me as a continues thoughts about failure of Social PLM – Why Social PLM 1.0 failed and What PLM can learn from public social data?

I’ve been reading an article and interview with Biz Stone, Twitter co-founder and entrepreneur – Be emotionally invested. It is a good story. Read it, especially if you are involved in startup activity. One of interesting pieces that caught my attention was a story about Google working environment. Here is the passage:

“I used to just walk around. I don’t know if I was supposed to, but I’d just open doors and see what people were doing.” One led to a guy surrounded by DVRs. Stone asked what he was doing. “I’m recording everything being transmitted on TV all over the world.” Another led to “a sea of people operating illuminated foot-pedal scanning devices. “We’re scanning every book ever published.”

Another interesting article that caught my attention was about an interesting behavior – deleted tweets. Navigate to read – Why do people delete their tweets?  University of Edinburgh researchers have been looking into the motives behind deleted Twitter missives. You can read more about this study here. The funny part of this mechanism is that it implements the old idiom – Word spoken is past recalling. Here is passage explained the research and how it works.

Right now there’s no way to tell whether you’ll be proud of your rousing 140 character defense of James Franco in a few years, or deeply, deeply ashamed. But hiding the evidence isn’t hard. Deleting a tweet is not a complicated process. If you don’t like what you wrote, you can trash it in a few clicks. And there are services like Tweet Delete that help you mass-delete older tweets.

These two examples – capturing of information streams from global and personal perspective made me think about how potentially we can capture engineering activities and discover design intent of decision making factors similar to techniques used to identify deleted tweets and other related twitter user behaviors. The challenge of CAD/PLM environment compared to Twitter is obviously security and open APIs. It is hard to capture information from design and engineering systems. In most of the cases, the information is secured and access is restricted.

What is my conclusion? There is a huge potential in analyzing of design and engineering activity from capturing information about people behavior. My hunch, it can become one of the places CAD/PLM companies and startups might crack to discover a future potential of design optimization and decision making. Just my thoughts…

Best, Oleg