The ability to turn a design drawing into a visualization that mimics reality is an invaluable tool for troubleshooting a design, convincing a nervous client or helping to promote a design firm’s capabilities. This segment of the CAD software industry continues to grow and evolve, with rendered visualizations becoming more sophisticated.

While this trend is indeed a positive one, it is fundamentally constrained by an exclusively designer-centric perspective. This view understandably stems from the historical hardware constraints which made customer/end user access to the CAD data prohibitively expensive. However, as can be seen in the high end, proprietary CAD/PLM offerings of Dassault, this tradeoff is not an inherent requirement. In a rhythmeering environment integration is needed for manufacturing, maintenance, supply chain, marketing analysis - throughout the complete product lifecycle. In order to achieve this level of deep integration, the underlying information models for CAD have to become features of the operating system and eventually the hardware. Open source platforms like Croquet point the way.

When people think of scenarios, they often think of stories. Such stories have a specific sequence: this happens, which causes that, which triggers this other thing, which results in the world looking as follows. Most scenarios also tend to be monolithic. That is, singular. Typical scenario ‘architecture’ is all of a piece - difficult to deconstruct, much less reassemble in new ways.

… In the content industries such boundaries are clearly starting to break down, as things like digital editing tools and blogs enable creative improvisation, re-use, and jazz-like riffs on others’ thoughts and works. That topic and its intersection with copyright evolution is a big one unto itself. I use it here merely to point out how strategic thinking processes are long overdue for a similar process of modularization and opening-up.

… What is the antidote to all this? Modularity. Lego blocks. Tinker Toys. Mad Libs. The computer industry after the mid 1990’s. The automotive industry of today. Jazz.

Effective Scenarios Part IV: Modularity

This is a very insightful resource I’ll be spending more time with.