Autodesk's Andrew Anagnost Discusses Functional Design

SAN FRANCISCO (Autodesk Press Event) - I zeroed in on Dr. Andrew Anagnost, Sr. Director of Product Management at Autodesk, who earlier had praised Inventor's "functional design" as the shape of thing to come.

Q: What did you mean when you said, "We have Russian mathematicians to blame for making 3D difficult to use?"

A: Parameters and geometric constraints are not the way users should have to think. Autodesk hopes that one day parameters will be pushed into the background so a user would not have to interact with them.

Q: Is Autodesk in the forefront with "functional design?"

Absolutely. There was one company that made a foray into this but gave up.

Q: Inventor uses functional design for shafts, pulleys and belt systems. Why those choices and what's next?

A: It was non-threatening. Those things are common to all mechanical users, they'll get it. Though I can't say what will be in the next release, you can look for functional design to be applied to the creation of molded and cast parts.

Q: How is functional design of an assembly (such as in the creation of a belt/pulley system) different than simply creating the assembly parametrically?

A: Functional design uses a rules-based system -- so it is actually making decisions based upon rules that have been defined, thereby capturing engineering intent. In the future, we hope to make our software actually capture these rules automatically based on user actions. The technology comes to us from our recent acquisitions of Mechsoft and Engineering Intent.

Comments

[Tony Tanzillo]

Q: Is Autodesk in the forefront with "functional design?"

"Absolutely. There was one company that made a foray into this but gave up."

Apparently, Mr. Anagnost does not know how to count.

Autodesk, Inc. did not 'invent' functional design.

Mr. Anagnost's implied claim that Inventor is the only commercial application of functional design is completely untrue.

Can you please find some people who are not as ethcially challenged as this bloke, to intervew???