The last day of general sessions was dedicated to the hard work of our wonderful, passionate user community. The world’s coolest new products get their start in SOLIDWORKS and today we saw many of the innovative thinkers behind those products.
Suchit Jain, Vice President, Strategy, Community & Business Development for Dassault Systèmes SOLIDWORKS, kicked off the third general session titled, “Connections to Relationships.” Suchit confirmed what many already know: that SOLIDWORKS is still everywhere.
More than six million designers, engineers, students, entrepreneurs, makers and innovators are designing and creating many of the things we see around us every day, and many of those users rose to the occasion during the COVID-19 pandemic to retool factories to manufacture medical supplies or create better designs to rapidly 3D print personal protection equipment (PPE).
Matt Carney and Tej Matel are two customers who shared their stories. Matt leveraged the 3DEXPERIENCE platform to connect hundreds of engineers to iterate and develop open-source face mask designs that everyone can help improve. Tej addressed the need for better information sharing with all the various tests being used to diagnose COVID-19.
Marie Planchard, Director of Education and Early Engagement, was up next, speaking with two well-known SOLIDWORKS engineers who took very different paths on their engineering journeys and who are both paying it forward to the workforce of the future. Eric Beatty teaches other users as a SWUGN leader and through SLUGME, the world’s largest user group meeting. Paul Ventimiglia, when he’s not working in his day job, is a fixture on the BattleBots TV show and mentors one of the competing robotics teams.
One keynote was a panel consisting of Brent Bushnell, co-founder and chairman of Two Bit Circus, Nolan Bushnell, founder and CEO of Atari, Inc. and Chuck E. Cheese, and Grant Delgatty, Chair of Innovation, USC Iovine and Young Academy. Nolan shared the story behind the creation of Atari and Brent explained how he expanded on those lessons learned to develop Two Bit Circus. One thing they all agreed on is that failure is an essential part of the innovation process.
If you missed general sessions, or any of the meetups, you can catch up by going to agenda tab on the virtual event platform and watching the session replays. Also be sure to check out the session with Jim Capobianco, the Academy Award-nominated writer of Pixar hit Ratatouille, about his new stop-motion movie, The Inventor. Sharing your models of Leonardo Da Vinci’s designs can help the animators better understand how the mechanisms moved and help bring Leo’s ideas into reality.
With over 130 tech sessions, we hope that you all were able to find the classes you needed to take your skills to the next level. The best news? These tech sessions will be available for the next month or so through the 3DEXPERIENCE virtual event platform so be sure to take advantage of the replays—don’t miss out!
Miss the action? No worries. Click on the image below to watch the video to get an overview of the day and remember you can watch replays of any of the sessions on the virtual event portal.
