Masters of Technology Happy Hour
Conversations with masters of technology, those who produce it or those who use it.
Masters of Technology Happy Hour
Caleb Vainikka is One Sketchy Engineer
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CAD is powerful, but it can also trick engineers into locking in a design before we even know what problem we are solving. I sit down with Caleb Vainikka, principal designer of Cove Design, to unpack a skill that quietly upgrades every part of product development: sketching. Not as art, not as idle doodling, but as a fast way to think, communicate, and explore manufacturing options you commit to a costly path with CAD.
We dig into what Caleb calls the fuzzy front end of engineering design: those early moments when the difference between sheet metal and injection molding is still up for debate, when assembly trade-offs are unclear, and when cost targets matter more than perfect geometry. He explains how quick 3D sketches, rough prototypes, and rapid iteration help burn down risk and keep a project moving. We also talk about his approach to teaching sketching for engineers, plus the practical resources he shares to help people get started.
From there, the conversation shifts into the business reality of design for manufacturing (DFM): why “just model this bracket” often hides a deeper systems issue, how asking “why” uncovers root causes, and how he prices consulting based on measurable ROI instead of hourly time and materials. We wrap with NDAs and IP ownership, why outside design agencies can accelerate development, and a fascinating look at drone delivery design through the Zipline example.
Welcome And Biking Icebreaker
RoopinderHello, everyone, and welcome to the Masters of Technology Happy Hour, where once a week I have a drink with someone I meet in the course of business, but someone I'd like to get to know better as a person. Welcome to the show.
unknownOkay.
SPEAKER_00No, I just bring my lunch to work in those bags. So that's why I threw them. Okay. Is that no? I've done a I've done a little bit of biking. Um I I don't do, I'm not really uh an avid cyclist, but I do bike to work. I try to bike to work when it's nice out. Um, I've done a little bit of bike packing, kind of uh camping and biking over a few three days, I guess, was my most recent one.
RoopinderOh yeah, two to three days in a row over overnight?
SPEAKER_00Yeah, three days, about 30 to 40 miles a day, so 120 miles-ish.
RoopinderUh huh.
SPEAKER_00It's kind of a fun uh exploration. Then we camp in campgrounds. That was out in the Wisconsin area.
RoopinderOh, okay. Wisconsin, okay. Yeah, we spent uh 10 years at Milwaukee. And I and I did a little bit of biking, so we have a lot of common ground.
SPEAKER_00Yeah, no, that we went all the way around, not all the way around. We went around the Schwammigan National Forest. So that's kind of started in in cable and looped all the way around by melon and then came back to cable. So it was a it was a fun little trip.
RoopinderYeah, 30, 40 miles a day. No, that's a good distance. That's a good distance to do in a day. Uh it leaves you with enough time and enough energy so you can still see where you're at rather than what I did. I'll tell you what I did. We went, we rode across America, a bunch of us in a group, right? And we went 110 miles a day average, right? Had zero energy, zero time to look at anything on the wall. It was like it's ridiculous, ridiculous. I don't, I don't, I've never recommended it. I people say, oh, it's a good way to see America. I think, no, no, it's not, it's not.
SPEAKER_00Have you ever been to the 110 miles a day? How how long did you go?
RoopinderLike all the way across or all the way across, yeah, 30 days. Oh wow, it's an ordeal for sure. But yeah, not not it's definitely not a good way to see America, unless unless you want to get like really depressed and really bored. But I'll tell you what, one guy got so bored. This was in Kansas, because you see miles and miles of cornfields, right? Yeah, and he was real tired. One of the guys on the trip, we had like 20, 20 some people in our group that started. He got so bored he fell asleep and he rode his bike into a cornfield. Oh yeah, you could get amazingly scratched up riding in the yeah, and uh yes, it's just uh no good. Any anyway, anyway, I want to talk about you more.
SPEAKER_00Yeah, well, no, that's fun.
RoopinderOkay, yeah. But tell me this. Okay, so you got a lot of three printing on you, Caleb. You are you gotta introduce yourself to the audience, and I'll tell you a little, I'll tell them a little bit. Caleb, I as I got first interested in you by your marvelous sketching ability, because like I'm into cat. My career is like in CAD, like whether learning it, teaching it, writing about it, right? And then I then I see you who's like saying, not saying I'm doing it all wrong, but kind of saying, like, you can sketch, you know, you you can sketch in 3D. And your sketches are amazing. I'm I'm reminded of the Internet Art of Da Vinci, you know, because that's all called, that's all they used to do is sketch things, right? You didn't have a CAD system.
SPEAKER_00Yeah, I think I think CAD can be a crutch. I mean, sometimes I I even get fall into the trap myself where I think of an idea and I I think that I need to jump into CAD immediately. And it it is a tool, I mean, like any other tools, and it can be very powerful. Some ideas simply can't be explored without jumping into CAD. For example, I'm working on a on a um product right now where the differences between idea A and idea B are so subtle that the only way we can evaluate them is by modeling and and actually showing the differences. But when we're early in a development project, I I like to say the exploratory fuzzy front end when ideas are not well formed and we're trying to decide whether we should you know make something out of sheet metal or injection mold it. The level of effort to get to a sheet metal model and an injection mold model are vastly, or they might be roughly the same, but now you've chosen a fork in the road, unless you have two draftsmen that are both doing the model. So you get to the end of this road and then you say, well, maybe we need it
Sketching As A Thinking Tool
SPEAKER_00injection molded, right? So now you have to kind of back up and start down the other path. So we can in concept exploration, we can really explore quickly and discuss, have valuable discussions about the manufacturing trade-offs, the assembly trade-offs, cost trade-offs with just a pencil sketch or a pen sketch on paper. And it's really it's really a quick, low barrier to entry method to just visualize things.
RoopinderYeah, I'd say it's like you make a good case for like being at least the intermediate step between like an idea in your head, a rough sketch on a napkin, 2D, and then like an isometric sketching on paper or notepad or iPad or something, and then and then go on to then go on to CAD if you really need that, if you really need to, right? But most of the time you can explain the design fairly well. I don't think I I know for a fact engineers, including myself, don't cultivate that ability to sketch, right? They do that jump right away into CAD. I gotta say, it's looking back on it, it bogs you down. CAD will bog you down most of the time, right?
SPEAKER_00It's like it can, especially when my desk right now is just cluttered with little half sheets of paper. And I I just print this out. It's um it's nothing special, it's just copy paper with a few dots on it and my logo on it. So I can document an idea. Like I just grab a sheet, scribble it on there, and it's sort of my way to just get it out of my brain and put it somewhere. And then, you know, every few days I'll sift through them and try to decide which ones have merit. Maybe I'm actually working on a different project, but I have an idea, I can visualize it, create a drawing, I could really hand that to anybody to turn it into a CAD model. But I'm I'm sort of taking an idea out of my head and putting it on somewhere. And if I had to jump into a CAD system and model it out, I mean that takes hours, minutes at least. And I can, you know, in a few seconds I can scribble something on a piece of paper and then just move on and forget about it because it's not documented. I think of sketching as like a thinking exercise. Some people think of it as an art exercise, like we're gonna create these beautiful sketches, and I don't I don't see it that way. The ones that I post actually tend to be the nicer looking ones because I don't know, I like looking at them, but like an idea like this, and nothing proprietary, it's just a scribble, but it's a scribble with an intention that I can then take and run with, you know, another day when I have more time to think about it. And so there's there's there's really just a way that I visualize and think through things with a pen. And it gives me like the superpower to to to consider ideas that maybe would be limiting if I had to stop and think, well, I've never designed a fill-in-the-blank. Generative, a generative model that uses sort of organic sculpted forms to solve this problem. That doesn't that shouldn't stop me. I don't need to need to go learn generative modeling and sort of organic surface modeling in order to do it. I can just draw a picture and say, you know, we can find somebody that knows how to do it, or we can use a tool to get us there. But let's just think of that as an option and then move to another option, you know, as quickly as we can. It's almost like a shotgun approach, right? I want to find as many ideas as I can and then evaluate, down select, pick a few for further exploration. And the the less less effort I can put into each idea, the better, in my opinion, at that stage.
RoopinderYeah. So most of the time engineers I've found have put their, I hate to see this happen, but this is what they do. They draw it in 2D. I've even seen engineers do like the front side, front, right, and side views of things. And I'm thinking, oh no, no, you're just you're just duplicating a mistake you made in the first place, right? Like that shouldn't even exist. Why don't you draw it like you would see it in 3D, right? The only reason we have orthographic projection is because we had to uh uh you know accurately depict a design on paper, right? Yeah, but in your hand, you're you're I mean it everybody sees in 3D. Why not draw it in isometric or trimetric or whatever, whatever view that is, right? Like why not draw 3D? Yeah. So is that now is that something you're formally teaching, or just through LinkedIn, you're providing examples and sketching?
SPEAKER_00I actually am formally teaching. I have a course on teachable for in I call it intro to sketching for engineers. I think engineers are sort of lacking this skill. They most engineers don't learn it in college. They may or may not come from some sort of an art background, but but a lot of engineers seem to be sort of hungry for this skill. And I think it's a really teachable skill. I think it just takes practice. But even though orthographic, you know, three-view project projection, sort of front, side, back, I actually teach part of that in a lesson simply to help people understand proportions and sort of aspect ratio of features. So if you're going to be doing something in isometric view or perspective view, well, we should at least understand, you know, if this thing's if this fillet or this round is a third of the length of the feature, let's show how that looks in a front view so that when I can count my little dots and and figure out how a third a fillet would look like in a front view, exactly how that transitions into an isometric view. And just thinking through that and seeing, seeing sort of the the behind the scenes, why why did I pick that line right there? Well, you can sort of see it better, I think, in a front view and then transition into ISO. From a side view, transition into an ISO. And eventually I get to the point where I just think in in 3D, right? I mean, I I'm visualizing things from the first pen stroke in 3D. I just I just can see kind of the the bounding box of how big this part's gonna take up and where the where the features will be. And that again just takes practice, and I think I think most engineers could learn it.
RoopinderI notice on your pad it wasn't uh it didn't have dots, it didn't have what do they call it, quadrille. They didn't, it wasn't uh it's just plain.
SPEAKER_00It does, but it's but it's really faint. Oh, I see it. Yes, I don't actually use the dots, that's the funny thing. I just like looking at it when I draw, I'm all over the map. I'm drawing stuff all over. I don't count dots, I don't try to use it for any sort of proportions or anything, but to me it just looks nicer to look at drawings on that paper than it does on plain copy paper. Oh, okay. That's just a personal preference.
RoopinderYeah, oh I could use it. I I think I'd be the opposite. I'd I'd count it because sometimes I find myself counting like inches and rough, rough measure. Yeah, and I wish I had like at least the at least a graph paper to do it on. So uh yeah, do you sell those pads?
SPEAKER_00I don't sell them, but I do have, I think I'm just gonna double check here. I think I have them posted on my website on the resources page.
RoopinderIs that the same site people would go to if they wanted to take your your class?
SPEAKER_00I'll I'll put a link to it on the yeah, I have I have two pages. So one is called uh one is one page is called learning or learn, and on the learn page is kind of my blog, and then a few other things, one of them being the course, and then on the next page called resources, I have an injection mode cost estimator, and then at the bottom I have yeah, I have the notepad, I have some other stuff, a 3D file, 2D file, CAD checklist, sample BOMs, just kind of some general resources that I've found helpful for other people that are in kind of getting into this space.
RoopinderUh-huh. Uh uh. Yeah. You run a design uh product design firm business consulting? Yeah, I do. Yep. Okay, all right. And that's called what what's the name of it?
SPEAKER_00It's called Cove Design, and it's been a changing agency. When I started the company, I had a uh vision that it was going to be a 10-person firm with a full full service prototyping in-house capability, and I got about halfway there in five years. I had seven people on hand or on staff, and we had almost a full-service prototyping service from CNC to laser cutting, 3D printing, SLA, FPM. We did urethane casting and silicone molding in-house. We also had manual mills and laser. We could basically build just about anything in-house back in 2022, and it was really fun. But I went through a number of changes in 2022. Some of them were some of my employees wanted to go back to school or try different companies, and so we did kind of a company reset. I scaled it back to just be me as a design or a uh sort of a design and manufacturing consultant, and I basically sold off all the equipment that was in my prototyping shop. So I can do still do a little printing in-house, but I partnered with a few local uh prototyping shops so I can still get things built, I could still do the assembly and test. I just don't do it all in-house anymore. Um, sort of that flexibility and scaling back has allowed me to focus my energy on my clients' projects in a more targeted way. And what I've become, I think, is more like a DFM consultant. So helping people rather than saying, I'm gonna take your napkin sketch and get you through to production. The discussions happen, they're a little bit more organic, but usually it's like, hey, I've been making this product for a few years. I don't know that I need a new generation product, but my costs are really high, or tariffs are eating my margins, right? There's
Teaching Engineers To Sketch
SPEAKER_00there's like functional business reasons why some redesign needs to happen. And design being part of the solution, you know, prototyping being part of the solution, but really what I've become is is sort of a cost consultant or a manufacturing consultant to help people understand where the opportunities are to save money on their design. And so some of that, yeah, involves me doing a little bit of design or or even bringing in contractors help with design. But a lot of the rationale that the the products that get funded are the ones that have a real business value, sort of a business case behind them.
RoopinderBusiness case. You're providing actually business consulting more than you are, because when you get right down to it, something like even design, let's say you sell yourself as a SOLIDWORKS designer or something, that can be anybody can do that, and probably people can do it cheaper than you can. It's a becomes a commodity real quick, right?
SPEAKER_03Exactly.
RoopinderYeah, yeah. So if you could sell something that's a little bit more beneficial, uh you know, as a business, then you made a name for it, made a good name for yourself. Did you it reminds me of our friend? I did you ever uh do a podcast with with him?
SPEAKER_00Is that Aaron Monker?
RoopinderAaron Monker. Aaron Monkar. He just had a uh he does a very similar uh well on the surface, very similar operation. He does a design firm, but he has much higher aspirations. He does a podcast, like I said. He also does uh he's like the world's busiest engineer, I think. He does he does everything. He has a class that he has for kids that do uh teach them how to use CAD. Uh he does what else does he do? Podcast. He has his own design firm, of course.
SPEAKER_00He's doing the PDX thing on Phoenix.
RoopinderHe did that, yeah, yeah, yeah. And I think he had several design firms even you call them his, you could call it his competition, but I think he had other firms there, design firms there, smaller, small and medium-sized, but yeah, interesting fellow. Yeah.
SPEAKER_00So yeah, I think at the end of the day, people hire people that they like. I don't really think it matters how big your company is or or whatever. And I just generally want to be a person that people like, and people like talking to them, people feel like I can be helpful.
RoopinderPeople you can work with, right? You want to be people you can work with. Because yeah, I mean, I try this called global economy manufacturing design business, and uh you know, I had I had people design in Rwanda, I had people design in India, and uh well, it has nothing like being able to explain to somebody that without having to translate, without having to wait for them to wake up or be on their time zone. It's like there's so much more to it, right? You can't really outsource design, I don't think.
SPEAKER_00I think it's tough to it's tough to outsource design, particularly to find designers that actually care about what it is they're building. So I've tried hiring contractors for a lot of different projects, and it's really unfortunate, but sort of the freelance economy or the freelance marketplace that's out there, many of the people are there because they believe they have the skills to do the work. And when you believe you have the skills to do the work, I think they're what ends up happening is we end up having these discussions about like, oh yeah, the work that you did is good, but it doesn't actually align with the project goals. Like you did a really good model, and that's cool, but like you didn't actually ask enough questions, you didn't really want to consider, so so yeah, you took our brief and literally realized that in a CAD model, but and and you're fast, great, but like that doesn't actually help the program. So what we needed maybe wasn't exactly what we said, and so when I can embed myself in with a client's project and really kind of understand what it is they need, sometimes
Cove Design Shifts Toward DFM
SPEAKER_00when they're asking me for a prototype, what they actually need is is nothing at all. What they need is like eliminate a component, but they don't know that, yeah.
RoopinderThey don't know that, right?
SPEAKER_00And so when we when they come to me and I can ask, like, why do you want me to model this bracket? And they're like, Well, because we need to um change our motor. It's like, why do you need to change the motor? Well, because um our previous motor supplier went out of business. Well, cool, but like, why does that matter? Well, because all the motors that we found are have different mounting pattern. It's like, cool, but like, why did you need to find a new motor? Well, you know, you just keep chasing the breadcrumbs and keep asking why and keep asking, trying to figure out why. Turns out they had some guy in the company who doesn't really understand manufacturing, doesn't understand design, got tasked with replacing a motor, and somehow that resulted in needing a new bracket. When we get to the bottom of it, they don't actually need the new motor at all because the motor was for a feature that does that they don't even use anymore. So it's like, why don't we just take the motor out and go to a gen 2 design where you simplify your PCB because this motor does something that literally isn't even necessary in 2025? We don't need that feature anymore. It's hard to speak in in generic or abstractions, but but when we can really dig to the bottom and figure out this the problem that people are having, which is usually something measurable, tangible, it's like a cost problem or it's a missing feature problem or something, right? They come talking about the tactical work that they need done, but when I can help and align on the strategy part of it, then I can actually do some of the tactical work, or I can bring on a team of contractors and kind of set up a little mini team to execute on the tactical work, but I'll be still be like the main point of contact, kind of the kind of the um the tip of the spear. I think we're gonna get the work done effectively and and help you reduce your cost. But realistically, if I can keep that cost target in mind, and we can say, hey, we're gonna cut 30% out of this cost, that's pretty important for some companies, like critical for some companies. They're going out of business because of tariffs, and that's really unfortunate.
RoopinderYeah, oh yeah, yeah. Oh, I promise I'll try to stay out of politics through my podcast.
SPEAKER_00So yeah, no, that's fine. We don't have to cover the the political reasons for why the why the tariffs, but even just even just uh, you know, this product was designed 20 years ago using many known manufacturing technologies that existed 20 years ago, and it hasn't been touched ever since. Because the company that invented it doesn't actually have engineers on staff, they just have sort of supply chain liaisons, and so they're constantly farming out these 20-year-old files to new companies, and everyone's quotes keep going up because they're using technology that doesn't really exist anymore.
RoopinderYeah. Have you so it seems like you're more of a design consultancy than a than a design provider? So you can work with a too, so somebody could come with you with a specific task, but you could reorient them to something else. So, in my mind, true a true consultancy, Christ really what they want is a is a they have a problem and they want a solution, but they may have the wrong problem.
SPEAKER_02Yeah, sometimes they do.
RoopinderYeah, interesting. Interesting. Do you find that user Like, well, what are the reasons why they wouldn't use this? Would they find that they just want one thing done and get it done and don't argue with me?
SPEAKER_00Or like that is the case sometimes, and I'll tell them like I can do that thing that you're asking me to do. Uh and that's you know, if that's all you want me for, then then we can make it work as long as my costs align with your expectations.
RoopinderNow, how do you this is a higher order level, higher level of thinking? What's your how do you charge for that? Because there's one price you might have for just like, okay, I'll do what you say, I'll make it CAD model. And yeah, otherwise it's like, no, no, I'm gonna have to rethink this and don't believe me, you'll love this in the end. Uh yeah, that's gonna be a different price structure, right? So that's yeah, yeah.
SPEAKER_00So if I can if a cuff if a company is open with their business reasons for why they need something done, yeah, generally I can price my services at like 10 to 20 percent of that, and it's just a it's an obvious ROI. So if a company is gonna save $100,000 a year, yeah, you know, in five years they're saving a half a million dollars and it costs them $10 or $20,000. Yeah, you know, that's a very effective ROI. We don't even need to talk about what's gonna happen. That that is like a no-brainer, right? Ideally, I can get my service costs to be a complete no-brainer, and until I understand what their business needs are, then it's hard to price it. If they come to me and say, you know, we don't actually know what this costs, we need your help building this waterproof, rugged military antenna enclosure. We don't know what it costs, we don't know what the business value is, we just need help with that. Well, then I'll try to position the service cost, which is the design cost, around a proportion of their expected inventory purchase. So let's say that a comp this particular company wants to buy, I don't know, a hundred antennas for outfitting this fleet of military vehicles, and each one, you know, just without doing any design, we can estimate the cost of being you know ten thousand dollars per unit.
SPEAKER_03Yeah.
SPEAKER_00I already forgot. Did I say a hundred units? So a million dollars in uh in uh equipment cost is about to get spent. And first we'll talk about that and say, you know what, are you ready to write a million dollar check for a hundred units at ten thousand dollars a unit? They're like, Yeah, we have the money, we have the money. We just need to get the design files, the NRE, the non-recurring engineering costs. We need to get that work done so that we can place this PO. I'm like, cool. So what if we place that PO today? Everyone would like to know that that's you know, the design work has been done well and it's validated and it's proved and it's tested, and we've built prototypes of them, and we have developed confidence that this check is going to be, you know, it's gonna it's going to be well spent because nobody wants to spend a million dollars on hardware and then have it show up with a bunch of mistakes. And a million dollars is a really big number, but a lot of times people will come to me and say, I need 10 prototypes, and they are they're going to a medical device conference, and we are we're budgeting $2,000 for each one. So that's $20,000, right? Well, if you're gonna spend $20,000 on hardware, we we need to design it. And sometimes that could be a $5,000 effort, sometimes it could be a $20,000 effort, but being able to position the NRE cost as supporting the purchase, the inventory by, and help helping them understand that really the design costs were gonna round to zero by the time that this project is done. When you start looking at all the NRE, the capital, the tooling, the uh logistics, the assembly costs, you know, setting up a supply chain, getting that all worked out, the design cost is going to be a very, very small part of it. And so if a company's fixated on minimizing the design cost, yeah, I think that they don't understand the true scope
Finding Root Causes Behind Requests
SPEAKER_00of the production activities that they're about to incur. And if they are fixated on the design, keeping them minimal, it's probably not a good fit for my company. Yeah, yeah, and so I can almost like filter them out early in the discussion just by helping them understand how big of an activity they're taking on. And when I can when the first, you know, when people say, Oh, well, I just need you to XYZ, even the word just tells me that they don't value the design activity, it's just something that they need done. It's a hurdle they have to clear because somebody told them go get this thing designed. And those people, I'll also filter them out. And so, as I guess I've been doing this now for almost eight years, and I can almost from a gut feel start to tell who's serious and who understands the process that they're about to undertake. And if we can align on the business values really early, then the design costs, I'll just price them. I generally don't I can say I don't do any time and materials type contracts anymore, like hourly or any of that. It's all fixed fee based on a project. And if that if we can define the project and define the deliverables, then I can price it out pretty cleanly. Okay.
RoopinderYeah.
SPEAKER_00Long, long rambling answer. Does that answer your question?
RoopinderI like it. No, I like it. I I think you could pull that off, or probably have pulled it off already. I'll tell you what, I was totally unsuccessful with this approach because I try to tell people how they should do things. They don't listen to an old journalist. I say I I don't I don't have a design service or anything. I'm just a I'm just a guy who's read about it all. Maybe I'll tell you one example. So you know, do you know about the I don't know if you know about do you know about Waymo's, the self-driving cars? Yep. All right, so they're in San Francisco. By the way, if you ever come out to San Francisco, I'll take you on a Waymo ride. You'll you'll love it. It's like the coolest thing. But Waymo had the misfortune of killing a cat in a neighborhood. And the cat was called Kit Cat, and it was a beloved cat of this little shop, right? So the cat ran thing ran uh the car ran over the cat. It didn't see the cat, right?
SPEAKER_03Yep.
RoopinderSo I I'm a CES. CES is the consumer, it used to be called a consumer electronic show. It's held in Las Vegas. So I go there and there's Waymo to show you know how great their cars are. And I said to them, you know what? If you just had like under vehicle sensors in your car under under your vehicle, you could have seen an obstruction or a cat or something. You don't even have to identify it. You could just see it's an obstruction, and the car would have could have jammed on the brakes, right? And cat over, which by the way, caused an enormous outcry among the population that their beloved cat was crushed, right? Run over. And I feel for them, but it stands in the way of your technology uh introduction, right? You is going to go against the up against the public. So basically I was saying, okay, you need to fix this design and just add a couple hundred dollars worth of sensors, right? You already have a hundred thousand plus technology stack sensor stack, but it's all above the car, around the car. Couple hundred bucks, add the sensors at the bottom. You know what they said, Caleb? Don't worry, we have engineers who are looking into that. They're like, don't dismiss it.
SPEAKER_00Yeah, yeah. Of course.
RoopinderYeah, yeah.
SPEAKER_00They wouldn't want to get told a better way to do something.
RoopinderNo, not when they have engineers on staff, right? Uh Apple's another company. They have, I think they do all of their design in-house because you know they have, I really like their designs. And same way I like I like uh Tesla's designs too, but I don't know if I necessarily like the people or the or the company, but it they're really good design. They're all in-house designers, right? They they positively don't want their designs to go out of house. So security is one reason, but I think they just I don't know, is design services is that a how common is it the companies that have go outside that yeah?
SPEAKER_00I think it's um what I've seen in the last eight years is the design agency uh business model works really well when venture capital funding is high. Because when venture capital money is flowing into businesses and they see a strong investment vehicle by giving companies money to start new products, launch new services, whatever there isn't enough designers to do all that work. There's not I mean they couldn't hire people fast enough to build the stuff in-house, and so that's that's one reason why design agencies exist. The other reason is to accelerate development. So some of my clients, you know, they think about well, should I use Caleb or should I hire a design agency, or should we hire somebody in-house? And there's a couple of interesting trade-offs that happen. So a comp a company that hires an engineer in-house takes on the burden of not only the engineer's salary and all their benefits, but also training and and um distracting that engineer from focusing on innovation or development. And so when a when an employee of a company is tasked with doing RD, sure, they'll probably do some RD in that industry, but they'll also do a lot of other things in the business that are not sort of innovative at all. Like they're they're attending company events, they're getting sucked into all the company political reasons for doing things, and that person is not, generally speaking, allowed to just think about what is best for this product. And so some companies hire an outside third-party sort of blue sky
Pricing Work Around ROI
SPEAKER_00thinking engineering firm strictly because we're not distracted by your internal politics, we're not distracted by your internal um inertia, sort of the design decisions that have been made in the past. We want somebody that's outside the company that can think about this problem cleanly and dedicate some time to it to develop a better solution than we could build inside. So that's kind of the trade-off. There are also reasons to hire an agency that is outside of your industry because the agencies have exposure to technology, manufacturing processes, and ideas from other industries that can carry into your industry. So if you hire, say, you're a medical device company making catheter-based delivery systems, and you hire a mechanical engineer whose experience is in catheter-based delivery systems, your ideas are going to follow the same path because that's the technology exists, the ideas are all sort of funneled around the same thing, and a lot of that innovation, a lot of that idea generation is pigeonholed in that industry. And that's not to say that people can't come up with new ideas, but when you work in an industry all day, every day, it's difficult to cross-pollinate, it's difficult to go look in the asphalt paving industry for how they apply coatings to a surface, right? And how could I put that into a that's a really probably bad example, but you can look in other industries and say, you know, if I'm if I'm washing off the outside of a PVC pipe that's been extruded in a mill, that's a similar process to how I might use an air knife blade to clean the outside of a catheter, but it's a significantly smaller scale.
RoopinderOr if I'm working on is there such a thing as an air knife? I gotta ask. You could cut you can cut with air.
SPEAKER_00It's yeah, it's uh uh Xair is a company that makes air knives. They make them linear and they make them circular for wiping and scraping. Actually, uh Dyson commercialized the air knife for the sort of drop-in hands dryer. I'm sure you've seen it at IKEA. Yeah, but the air knife, it's just a really thin blade of air. It uses a principle, which I'm forgetting right now, called like the uh it's like the Bernoulli effect, but it's not that, it's something else. Anyways, uh, what it does is it entrains the outside air with it, so it has a really thin blade of air, which then creates um it sort of pulls in the air around it and multiplies the air flow, so you get a really thin profile but really high volume without pushing all that air yourself.
RoopinderYou could cut things.
SPEAKER_00I'm familiar with the air, well, not not necessarily cut things, but it it acts like a knife. So in the cleaning industries, like for doing pipes and things, they're trying to separate that the water off the surface of a pipe after it's been washed and cleaned.
RoopinderOkay.
SPEAKER_00And if you just blow air at it, the air just kind of uh recirculates. Yeah, it's recirculates, it's really turbulent. It doesn't really clean the water off the pipe, but they need the pipe to be very dry. So they have this air circular air knife that they put right on the surface of the thing, and it'll actually strip the water off of the pipe.
RoopinderOh, okay. In a really clean way, just like those Dyson uh air blades or dryers in in uh the I just used one the other day. Okay, interesting. All right, but they there's just an industrial version of that, which can really force air higher speed, okay, and have has probably laminar flow rather than turbulence.
SPEAKER_00Okay, yeah, probably uh um a third reason why I think companies hire outside design agencies is, and maybe I mentioned this already, is just strictly for speed. So I've worked with companies who say, Yeah, it would take me two weeks to do an iteration on this design. And I'm doing an iteration every day or sometimes twice a day. Oh I can send pictures, photos, videos, updates to my clients, and they're getting real-time updates of a project happening completely outside of their building, and they can provide feedback. I can loop that feedback back into the design cycle, and I can just really aggressively drive down the risk on a on an idea by exploring a bunch of different ideas, picking a few to downs, you know, down selecting to a few ideas, um, you know, detailing those ones out further. And sometimes I'll then plug my idea, which is not a fully formed idea, not even totally designed for manufacturing, back into their system. Their engineers will take it, run with it, and they'll say, You got us far enough. We can see the vision from here, we'll take it and we'll detail it. We'll design it in our systems, using our engineers, using our templates, you know, you know, in our built within their system. The way I build it is pretty unstructured, probably the best way to say that.
RoopinderYeah. But okay, so I could see how this is a very creative process. How the heck do you turn it off? Like, how do you say I'm done thinking about this? Like in the middle of a design and you're iterating mentally, how do you say, Oh, it's five o'clock or six o'clock and not be losing sleep on it or thinking about it? Because you may not have found the optimum solution, right? So I could how do you it's like a nine to five job? You could just say, Okay, I'm gonna go home with the kids, right? But you've got a design percolating in there.
SPEAKER_00That's a great question. Um, the closest thing I can I can compare it to is I saw a a cartoon once, and it said, creative work is um similar to like how a lion hunts. So a lion sprints for a little while and then they rest for a long time. They sprint, they eat, and then they just rest for a long time. Then they sprint and they eat and they rest for a long time. Cows, on the other hand, just sit there and graze 24-7. I'm not a grazer type of person. So I try to plan enough time in a project so that I can sprint really hard, get to the bottom of the solution, then stop.
Timeboxing Creativity And Shipping
SPEAKER_00Get it out of my brain, you know, go for a bike ride, come back a week later, don't even touch it for a week, don't think about it, nothing. Open up the files after a week and look at them and say, would I have done this any different? You know, if I started today. And usually just the iterative nature of the process, I can I can sort of work through a lot of the problems and then and develop a pretty good solution that I'm proud of even weeks later or months later or years later. Uh, but it doesn't happen slowly, and I try not to let it take over my life. So I do walk out here at five every day, but that doesn't mean I stop thinking about it, which uh okay, which is a can be a curse sometimes.
RoopinderYeah. Oh yeah, yeah. I find myself trying to solve design problems and other business problems when I was riding my bike. I'd go for a long ride, I'd just be in the beginning, I'd think of start thinking of the problem. And if the ride wasn't too strenuous, I would arrive at the actual end of the ride with some sort of progress made towards that, right? So I'm not recommending that. Maybe it's probably healthier to just not think about it or think about the ride itself, but but that's it's like it was kind of like my yoga, right? I would yeah, I would be calmer while I was doing it, and uh it's getting a lot of oxygen to the brain, that helps too, right? Sure, yeah.
SPEAKER_00Yeah, I'll tell you this. I um I kind of subscribe to the 80-20 principle, and I think that you can get 80% of the way to a solution without expending a tremendous amount of energy, but just diligently looking through a number of options, down selecting, driving, burning down the risk by building prototypes, iterating through them quickly. So I'll get through that 20% effort, just sprint through it, right? And then we'll we'll stop, we'll check in, we'll decide which the right direction. And then that sort of usually unlocks the budget to do the 80%, what I call the development work. So the design work is very sporadic and varied. The development work is usually pretty linear and straightforward. And once we enter the development work, that's the work that grazing work, right? You're just gonna kind of chew through it. We're not thinking too hard, we're just building CAD files, clean manufactured CAD files, building drawings, working with manufacturers to identify final DFM issues and then handing those files off. So that's all it's all pretty fun. But I do say that uh companies can paralyze themselves by not ever closing a design phase. So they will they will think of an idea, then they'll start exploring it, and then they'll think of another idea, and then they'll pivot and they'll explore that one for a while, and then they'll think of another idea, and they'll pivot again. And pretty soon they've they've spent years on a project that never gets done. Yeah, but A, it's on their back burner and they don't really focus a lot of energy on it, and B, they just refuse to decide when it's going to be done. So I encourage my clients to you know time box the activity, pick a launch date, whatever it is, pick a launch date and say we are going to launch a product on this date, yeah, and it's going to be as good as it can be before that date, and then just step backwards. Say, well, we've got you know six to nine months of manufacturing transfer and building an initial inventory, and we've got three to six to nine months of design before that, and we're going to build a few iterations in between there. So we really can't give ourselves an infinite amount of time, and we'll explore using the exploring tools that are out there, define the direction early, and then stick with that, and then follow through the rest of the development activities and actually launch it. Along the way, we'll think of a lot of cool ideas, and I just say, write those down, draw pictures, sketch it out, put those in a folder for Gen 2 because as soon as we start Gen 2, you know, as soon as we launch Gen 1, Gen 2 is going to come out, let's say a year later, and we want to be able to capture and include all the user feedback, all the design ideas, all the clever ideas that we couldn't roll into Gen 1 without you know stalling the project out.
RoopinderNow, how does this work? I imagine you sign price on NDAs to keep the uh keep the work proprietary, right?
SPEAKER_00I do, yep.
RoopinderDo you and how about the ideas that you have, the original ideas that you you supply, are they yours or are they comp your the companies then? Do you have any? Are you able to patent anything that you make for another company, for example?
SPEAKER_00Uh I've always been a sort of work for hire agency. And so when I'm working on a project, any ideas we come up with, any IP that's generated is all owned by the company. I haven't tried to patent any of it or license any of it. I know there are companies out there that that do, and that's their bread and butter. Like they even say we don't charge anything for our design services, we just do the design for free, and then we license you the design. So you can make as many as you want. Yeah, but we own the design files, and you can make as many as you want, and then we get a whatever agreed upon royalty payment off of each one. And I think that that could be a good long-term solution for the company, but I haven't ever explored it.
RoopinderOkay, all right. You're okay with giving up your original idea. So you're best case and best case for them, worst case for you is they make a myth, they make the next iPhone, let's say, based on what you yeah.
SPEAKER_00I mean, if if it is that uh amazing of an idea, then I can say probably I'll get a good referral out of them.
SPEAKER_03Yeah, yeah.
RoopinderYou know, it it it could be you can always do what this what the stars, what the uh athletes do, right? Renegotiate the contract.
SPEAKER_03Yeah, yeah, exactly.
RoopinderYou made it you made a lot more money than you and I thought you would. So it's time to renegotiate that. I'm not I'm not working for working for the original contract anymore. So I bet you can get away with it. If it's a real money maker.
SPEAKER_00Yeah, I think there's ways that I could we could work around it. I don't I don't really know. I I enjoy doing the work that I'm doing. It doesn't feel like work. So if if the ideas come out of a out of a development effort, in my opinion, yeah, they've earned them. They they've paid me for those work for those ideas. It's not I don't even know that ideas are always so unique because usually they're they're pulled together from ideas from other industries. And is any idea really new anymore? I mean, the the sort of amalgamation of all the experiences that I have from med device to consumer electronics to industrial hardware, waterproofing, military hardware, like a lot of those things have already been done, but just maybe not in this particular industry, solved this particular way. And if my clients, if it gives them a bigger IP moat to develop these new technologies, or even to take the concept sketches and prototypes that we build and lock up a part of the market, good for them.
RoopinderI think that's are you uh it sounds like you have your your hands in the military and some what you also work at consumer consumer products too?
SPEAKER_00And most of my work is in consumer electronics and med device. Oh, okay. But I have done yeah, I have done some military devices, I have done some industrial equipment for industrial electronics for warehousing and inventory management and stuff like that. I've done some drone hardware, drone accessories, you know, drone-mounted cameras. Drones are interesting market to address because they are incredibly mass sensitive. And so when uh a company comes to me and says we would need this accessory built, it's not just can we design the parts, but can we design a part that weighs the appropriate amount that has the stiffness that we need out of a manufacturing process that works at the scale that you need. Most drone companies are not building at very high volume, they're building lower volume, which is a limitation on their on their manufacturing cost reduction efforts. You know, if you're only building a thousand units a year, it's not you might get a little bit of a price break, but if some drone companies are building 50,000 units a year or more.
RoopinderOh, like the Chinese drone company, I think there's one DGI, is it that's famous for drones? They're they're owned by 90% of the drone market. Yeah,
IP Ownership Drones And Career Advice
Roopinderyeah.
SPEAKER_00Yeah. And they can put 2,000 engineers on their drone design for the next generation and you know, really drive down costs and drive up the user experience and make it a beautiful, you know, well-designed product because they have those scale, the manufacturing scale to justify it.
RoopinderWhat kind of drones they beside is there anything besides military drones that that you're commercial drones that are being made for specific purpose?
SPEAKER_00Like I'm thinking of uh site monitoring or or site design for a GIS or yeah, yeah, that kind of so right now I'd say the biggest from what I can see, the biggest movement right now is is in military drones or in delivery drones.
RoopinderDelivery drones.
SPEAKER_00So delivery is a big growing opportunity. The biggest company I've worked with in the last five years is Zipline. They're doing here out of California, they're doing this. Is actually a Zipline drone right here. Ah, yes. This is their little droid, it hangs over my desk every day. But uh that drops down out of a fixed-wing airplane size drone, like five, six, seven-foot wingspan. And that thing flies at 70 miles an hour and then hovers over the drop site, and then this thing drops down and opens little bomb bay doors and drops your boat laboredo right on your picnic table, and then it zips back up and takes off. So they're um does it zip back up?
RoopinderIs it is it tethered or is it fly back on it's tethered.
SPEAKER_00It this is hanging on a string, but yeah, it's tethered on a piece of high tensile fishing line, basically.
RoopinderOh, okay, okay.
SPEAKER_00And that way they're able to get like pinpoint accuracy in high urban density settings, where their previous design, what they called platform one, was a more rural-based medication delivery for rural hospitals. And they would just drop it out of a plane with a parachute and it would land, you know, roughly the size of a couple parking spaces.
unknownUh-huh.
SPEAKER_00And now they're able to drop it down with I don't know, 50 centimeter accuracy, so like the size of a few dinner plates or something.
RoopinderYeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah, and then they can retrieve it too, so it's not an expensive delivery. They don't lose they don't lose the vehicle.
SPEAKER_00Okay, that's a drone delivery is interesting because are you allowed to talk about this, by the way? Yeah, their whole thing's public. You can go on Zip Line's website and you can watch exactly everything, how they do it. They're very open about everything they're doing. I can't talk about some of the specifics about what they're doing, but generally speaking, what they're doing is all public. They're they partnered with Chipotle to deliver burritos most recently, which is fine. Yeah, you can if you live in one of their test cities, you can actually order a uh drone delivery right now. Really? They're not in very many cities right now.
RoopinderOkay. Yeah, check them out.
SPEAKER_00It's a cool company. Zipline. Yeah.
RoopinderOkay. All right. That's a good name for it. Wow. Well, this has been very informative and useful. How would you would you how would you suggest this to uh younger engineers or engineers that are coming out of school? Would you suggest doing a design consultancy or at least participating in one? Or like I I to it looks like you're doing well. And uh but you had another real you were an engineer for another company for a while, correct?
SPEAKER_00Yeah, I came out of college and I went to work for an industrial testing and equipment company called MTS Systems.
SPEAKER_03Uh-huh.
SPEAKER_00And they built you know, room-sized robotic servo hydraulic test systems.
SPEAKER_03Uh-huh.
SPEAKER_00You know, big company, I don't know, three, five hundred engineers, 2,000 people worldwide, big delivering massive test equipment for airplanes and F1 race cars, and you know, really cool customers, really, really bleeding-edge servo hydraulic control technology and you know, electrodynamic hardware in the loop testing for really, really high-performing engineering teams. Yeah, but I didn't really fit in there because it was I was building machines, and for me, machines are just not that interesting. They're very complicated, very technically complicated, and they require a high level of engineering rigor. I don't have that, I'm not really an engineer at all. Like I got my way through engineering school, but I think I'm more of a designer, kind of trapped in the engineer's body. I I have the engineering degree and I do some engineering analysis, but I like to say I do more like design engineering. I'm doing more conceptual, and that's kind of why I position myself as a manufacturing consultant. I understand the manufacturing world well enough to know what's manufacturable and how we can rip cost out of a design.
SPEAKER_03Yeah.
SPEAKER_00But as for like optimizing the um hydraulic efficiency of a of a system, it's just not really what I'm good at. Simulation, calculation, optimization, like it's all really necessary and it's really cool and interesting, but I just couldn't stay engaged in it. So I went to a design firm, and that's where I kind of found out what I like to do and what I can what I can do well. And design firms are interesting because you get a lot of you get a really wide breadth of knowledge, but you're not really deep in any one area. Yeah, yeah. You can take a concept from a napkin sketch or a whiteboard sketch all the way through to handing out files to manufacturers, quoting, you know, working through design changes, and you get a really wide breadth. And you also, if you work at a good agency or an agency that has a um a wide focus, you can see a lot of different industries. So you might find out you really like working in automotive or in motorsports or in you know outdoor equipment or whatever, med device. Like there's a lot of different experience. I think that everyone, even before they if they have any interest in design or prototyping or exploration, they should find a design agency and work for them, even for six months or a year. Get some experience talking directly to clients, figuring out what people want. It's not always what they say that they want, building, exploring, testing, prototyping, iterating, building conceptual models, like everything from cardboard and hot glue, foam core through to 3D printed models, all the way through to you know injection molded prototypes. There's a wide variety of prototyping fidelity. And if you can see how and why these prototyping technologies can help accelerate learning, then say you go work for a big company, an OEM that builds walkie-talkies like Motorola or something, right? Right, you can then push their RD department to move faster. If we can develop faster, we can push an RD cycle from two years to one year, or one year to six months, we can get on the market six months faster or a year faster and recognize revenue. We can start to get user feedback faster. There's a lot of things that can happen when we can launch faster and build faster and learn. And traditionally, engineers are known for you know, kind of overanalyzing and making things, dragging things out and slowing down the process because there's not enough data, because there's not enough test conditions, whatever. But I'm kind of a I have a bias towards action. So I just like building things and testing to see what works, and then knowing that there are people out there that don't have that skill, they don't have the mindset to think outside the box, but they're very, very good at analysis, they're very good at simulation, and they can help me take it from most of the way there to you know polished final release product.
RoopinderYeah, no, they make a good argument for working for a design firm because you could almost you could uh be tempted to argue the other way, that uh you know, that you you can't work in a design firm unless you have specialized knowledge in what the firm designs. But but you I think I like this much better. You got a varied experience in design and manufacturing at a design firm, and then you could go to, or if you like a particular industry, then you could go towards that. But I don't think anybody's gonna want to do that, Caleb, after they see what you know how creative a design firm is and how um meaningful it is. I can't see like going from there to like, okay, now I'm gonna make valves or I'm gonna make you know forging for landing gear or something like that.
SPEAKER_00Yeah, no, I can say for myself, I would get bored if I was working at a company doing one thing every day. But but but I can say also from working with engineers who work in a consulting firm, some get exhausted by the lack of control and process. It's too open-ended, it's too flexible, there's too many moving parts. I need things to be more rigorous, I need things to be more process driven, we need to slow things down. Like so the different types of people I think succeed in this industry, and different types of people maybe maybe struggle. And I have worked with people who are yeah, they they really, really struggle with the open-ended sort of blue sky thinking. And if that's you know, you or you're feeling like I don't think I could handle that much uncertainty, I don't know what I'm gonna be doing next week or next month. Well, then maybe a design agency isn't the best thing for you. Maybe you do would be better off being a you know a fuel line specialist at caterpillar. You know, one of my friends, that's what he's done for 20 years or something. He's a fuel line specialist on all the caterpillar equipment. He knows fuel lines inside and out, and anybody that has any question about caterpillar will come to him and ask why this fuel line was selected and what materials have been used in the past and why they chose them. And you know, that's that's the extent of his ownership at the company, is like this particular fuel line. And that's cool. Like yeah, great. I I that's not me, unfortunately.
RoopinderYeah, you reminded me of uh of uh special specialization. Oh, in some cases, it can be really good and really valued. I sat next to a guy on an airplane, I got a first class upgrade one time, and seated next to me was a a guy from uh doctor from Harvard Medical School, right? And he said, uh, and I was like right away impressed. And I thought, wow, you're you're that's pretty cool. I said, but what do you what do you do? What's your field of research? And he said, I'm known for, now I've I won't be able to quote this. I'm known for, oh my god, I forgot, all sort of treatments on some kind of one type of body organ, right? He's like it says everybody at Harvard is an expert, but they have such narrow fields that they're expert in, that I just wonder what how oh my god, is that then I found myself thinking, well, it's cool to be at Harvard Medical School, I guess. But if that's what you're known for, lesions. It was for wound lesions. He was expert in wound lesions off a particular organ. I forgot what it was, even, but that was his specialty. That's all he did.
SPEAKER_03I think that's all he did.
RoopinderAnd I I guess he could, I don't know. How are you gonna impress anyone at a party with that? Except for the first part, which is hey, I'm at Harvard Bank, let's go, right? Just tell them, just don't tell them the second part.
SPEAKER_00Yeah. Well, there some of my clients are are exactly that, right? They have worked in one industry forever and they understand it better than anyone in the world. And I I won't ever claim to be an expert in any one technology, but what I think I am an expert in is sort of the art of iteration and being able to explore multiple ideas very, very quickly, taking them from a concept sketch to a physical parts in hand prototype so that we can evaluate and select what ideas work and what ideas don't work, and then taking those concepts through to what I say is like the first engineering model for manufacturability, and that that early front-end work is so critical because the strategy, the design strategy and the manufacturing strategy, and the product, sort of the usability of the product, is all defined at the front end. We can't sort of put lipstick on a pig and apply all that at the end. We need to understand it from the beginning and know how a strategy or how architecture decision is going to affect the product downstream and how a certain feature or orientation of a feature at the front end is going to affect the manufacturer at the back end, and being able to see that at the front end is very, very helpful. In fact, one of my clients, he's they're a med device company here in Minneapolis, and they told me, they said, My favorite thing about you is that you can walk into our executive board meetings and stand at the whiteboard and visualize what the people on our team are talking about. And I said, Well, that's interesting because to me that's that comes with the territory. But they said, Everyone on our team talks to each other, but nobody really understands what they're saying. Like this person has an idea, but they can't draw it, they can't build it. This other person has another idea, but they can't draw it and they can't build it. So they're talking to each other and they're just using words, and they're each misunderstanding what the other is saying. They might be pretending to understand each other, they might be pretending to understand, and they all have valuable experience, but they can't extract the experience and present it in a way that we could all evaluate. And so I can stand there at a whiteboard, draw seven different pictures of the seven different opinions, and we can say we can build these three right here and bring them to you in two weeks. And it's like eyes light up, the guard is is lowered, and people can say, Yes, let's do that, and then we'll put them in front of users, and we can start to understand the ideas rather than just talking, because talking will go on forever.
RoopinderI imagine, and including um I'll wrap this up because you're not making any money talking to me, but uh, but imagine it's not just sketches, but sometimes you even hand them a 3D print of something, right? And say, Well, is this is this what you had? And then they can get it in their hands. And engineers do this all the time, you know this, right? They'll there's nothing like a you know, even better than a sketch, 3D sketch, is like they feel it, they touch it, they spin it around, right? Get it in their hands, right? And I've never had a 3D printer or anything 3D printed, but just the fact that they got a physical device in their hands is priceless, wouldn't you say?
SPEAKER_00Yep, absolutely. Yep, and sometimes it doesn't even have to be 3D printed. So I've been known to buy stuff off Amazon or eBay or the go to the thrift store and buy stuff, right? And just cut it up, hot glue it together, band-aids and bubblegum, hold it all together and put it in front of somebody and say, What do you think about this?
RoopinderLike, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.
SPEAKER_00It's it's so I call it sketchy engineering on LinkedIn. It's it's like this early concept exploration with manufacturing and design intent, but not investing a tremendous amount of time into it. You know, trying to figure out where this idea falls down. Because if we can figure that out early, we can save everyone on the team a bunch of time.
RoopinderSketchy engineering. I'm gonna use that as a title for this podcast. That's fine. All right, thanks, thanks, Caleb. Caleb, great to catch up with you. Thanks so much for appearing to be on.
SPEAKER_00Yeah, absolutely. Thanks for an invite.
RoopinderYeah, most pleasure. Pleasure. Thanks for a new way of looking. I want engineers to look at their what they do day to day in a different way. And I think that this is gonna help them. All right. Great talking, yeah. Have a good rest of our day. Okay, bye-bye. And that concludes this episode of the Masters of Technology Happy Hour. I hope you enjoyed our chat and will join me as we talk to some of the most interesting people in the design and engineering software community.