If you think of engineering as the art of designing things that work, you’re only partly right. For more than 200 years, companies have focused on engineering great products: man-made devices and machines that do exactly what they are intended to do.

But today we expect more. Engineering competitive products means considering the people who will use, wear or, in the case of medical devices, host those products as well. Design perfect harmony between product and user.

The relationship between man and machine is changing rapidly and as engineers we have to embrace that in our work. This imperative is already being expressed in the marketplace: Just look around you:

Cars are now engineered for optimal driver experience or even a shared driving experience with the car itself.

Full time wearable devices that monitor your health 24-7.

Smart clothing that responds to your level of activity.

…even patient-specific medical devices that are designed and manufactured to fit a single, unique human being.

In the marketplace, many of these innovations are still in their infancy, but there’s no denying they are the future and the winners will be those who prepare now. If you are a product engineer you need to start thinking about how to factor the “human element” into your simulation-driven design process. It’s not only temperature, pressure, acceleration or other measurable quantities of physical phenomena that can affect product behavior: the user’s own interaction with the product can affect performance and durability as well and must be considered in the design phase.

Engineering competitive products means considering the people who will use, wear or, in the case of medical devices, host those products

And the corollary remains true, that the product design greatly affects the user experience. Designing in the right experience is essential in today’s competitive market and critical to building brand loyalty. Waiting until physical prototype or production phase is not the time to learn you don’t have this right. Never has the age-old adage of form following function been truer but the bar has been raised.

Factoring in the Human Experience

The complex interactions of the body with, for example, something as ubiquitous as a car seat, are a challenge to simulate. Bone, muscle, tissue, even blood supply—all these may need to be factored into the model when you are trying to define what a user can easily recognize as “comfort.” If you think the comfort of a car seat is not all that important, think again. Many purchasing decisions distill down to something as seemingly minor as how good the seat feels during a test drive, the first measure of perceived quality which influences the rest of the buying experience.

Can you design a good product for human use without factoring in the human? Of course—but should you? At our Science in the Age of Experience event we heard about an athletic-shoe company who can readily engineer the desired physical response of their shoes entirely on the computer, yet they include an accurate human foot model to simulate comfort—the user experience which is the #1 priority for the runner thinking of buying.

At Dassault Systèmes’ SIMULIA, through our close relationships with customers we were able to see this transformation some time ago. In response we have been investing in new technology and collaborating with industry leaders to make Virtual Human Modeling a reality. This special issue of SIMULIA Community News gives testimony to this fact and demonstrates some of the tremendous progress that has already been made.

At the Science conference, we described our bold technology strategy for delivering the comprehensive multiscale/multiphysics portfolio required to enable human-centric, simulation driven-design.

The genesis of this strategy was the challenge to help our customers move beyond PLM— remove current limitations of virtual product development that is void of user experience—and embrace a product development strategy for a sustainable world where those products are harmonized with nature and life.

Our most advanced activity, the widely acclaimed Living Heart Project was our first to see how far we could go if we united a worldwide community on this important mission. It has set a new standard for collaboration and defined a new direction for computer-aided engineering, but it’s no longer the only example. Inspired by this work, we are now setting our sights on a future software strategy with the entire human body in mind.

We believe that, across all industries, every customer that adopts this approach will produce better products and user experiences, delivered faster, more cost effectively and tuned to the precise demands of today’s diverse global markets. In this issue you’ll see examples of the kind of applications already possible today, including those from leaders in the research community, the industrial sector and even clinical applications in patients.

For example, in the retail clothing industry, MDAC is helping Toyobo create human simulation models to analyze the pressure of clothing on the body as it moves to design for maximum comfort. As you may recall from previous issues of SIMULIA Community News, Wolfel has made great strides in creating a full human model with which to measure the forces of a person’s body on the seat of a vehicle. At Stanford University they are truly getting personal by creating individual-specific anatomy models to study everything from bone regrowth in tennis and football players to the effects of high heel shoes on women’s feet, and even brain surgery—yielding invaluable insights into the behavior of the human body.

Of course one of the most exciting fields in which these tools have the potential to improve our lives is Life Sciences. We all like to think of ourselves as unique—and, as it turns out from the medical point of view, we are!

Convergence Has Begun

The convergence of science and engineering has begun to alter the landscape in Life Sciences, and we will all live better lives as a result. No strangers to advanced simulation, the academic, industry and clinical worlds already recognize the critical need to understand and model the human body. Using virtual human modeling to engineer safer and more effective device designs and procedures is just the tip of the iceberg. In the very near future, the shape, size and properties of almost anything— from arterial stents and aortic valves to replacement knees and hips, from plates and screws for repairing broken bones to bio-compatible plastic skull patches—will be custom-created for an individual.

Devices can be virtually “fitted” to identify which will perform best inside a patient’s body, or to determine if a custom device is needed. Patients will become better educated on their options, which will alter the relationship with their doctors and surgeons, and influence their choice of treatment and device. Such a change will disrupt the industry as we know it today, and the winners will be those who learn to flourish in such an environment.

The full power of personalized simulation can be realized through the use of SIMULIA’s simulation platform with complementary solutions from partners like Materialise and Synopsys, Inc. for translating 2D scan data into 3D meshes, or Intel and Hewlett-Packard Enterprise for high-performance computing. Adding our capabilities for optimization (Tosca, Isight) and fatigue-life evaluation (fe-safe) creates the ability to rapidly replicate the process used by nature for refining designs based on a “survival-of-the-fittest” methodology.

These are exciting times to be an engineer. Now that BIOVIA has joined the other DS brands, we are developing the digital continuity necessary to build models that go from atoms to parts, components to systems—or from cells to organs, or individuals to entire populations. This truly is unprecedented and I’m eager to see how you will use the tools to make the impossible, possible.

Imagine selecting, and even designing the performance qualities of, the specific materials that will deliver products with a precise user experience—right off the production line. Add in the benefits of collaboration with the 3DEXPERIENCE platform and imagination moves toward reality even faster.

I hope you see why I believe we are on the threshold of a true transformation in product design and engineering. Think about the products you help to develop, use yourself, or the medical care you or your family receive. Ask yourself if such a human-centric transformation would change the game. Now is the time to be part of this profound shift and we’re here to help you master—and enjoy—the experience.

This article was originally published in the September 2016 issue of SIMULIA Community News magazine.