Engineer's Office of the Future

Washington State University received a donation of $100,000 from the PACCAR Foundation to implement the conceptual “Engineer’s Design Office of the Future” and integrate it with undergraduate and graduate education in engineering. WSU has matched the donation with $100,000 for a total of $200,000 now available for this effort.

The Office of the Future is a concept that was proposed by Professors S. Jayaram, U. Jayaram, and B. R. Ramaprian of the School of Mechanical and Materials Engineering. The overall goals are to educate engineers in software and information technology tools and techniques and prepare the next generation of graduates for the changing engineering culture that involves globalized corporations with distributed product teams.

Check Presentation by Jim Reichman,

Paccar Corporation, to the Dean of Engineering and Architecture, Washington State University

Some of the details are provided below:

• Two “Design Studios” have been installed. Each design studio includes a large projection wall capable of stereoscopic 3D visualization, high quality projectors, video conferencing facilities, and high speed internet.
• The software in these offices range from traditional CAD systems (e.g. Pro/Engineer, Catia, etc.) to advanced visualization and simulation systems. Pro/Engineer, Catia V5, Eon Reality’s simulation software, WSU’s Virtual Assembly Design Environment (VADE), and WSU and PACCAR’s Virtual Reality System (VRS) and Virtual Design and Manufacturing System (VDM) have been installed in these offices along with several other engineering software systems (e.g. Jack, ANSYS, etc.)
• The junior level design course, ME 316 (Systems Design) has been targeted for initial implementation of this vision. Students in this class have used these design studios for their design projects and were introduced to true computer aided engineering including Product Life-cycle Management (PLM), collaborative design, use of integrated engineering software tools, and designing in a distributed team environment.
• Eon Reality, Inc. has donated software (estimated at $1 million) for use in these offices and to support research activities spurred by this initiative.