On Filling in the Holes

By Jonathan Gourlay

I can’t stand holes. Of any kind. As an editor,  I’ve been trained to hate holes in magazine stories. Part of my job is to find the holes and plug them whenever possible. The only thing worse than a hole is a story that doesn’t give you the entire story.

  Do you know what I mean? Have you ever read a story in the local paper about some new business moving to town and by the time you get to the end you have more questions than answers? That’s a story with a lot of holes. I look for them, everywhere.

  I often find them in some of our stories in DE,  and we get to work making phone calls, searching the Web, bashing off e-mails,  to try and get the information that will plug the holes. We don’t have to do that for our more experienced frequent writers, but sometimes we’ll get a story on just one perspective from another contributor and have to get to work.

  In other words, if we have a story about how manufacturer A designed the slickest, coolest left-handed smoke shifter ever made using company Y’s solid modeling program, I want to read about the entire development process, not just the design part. The better story will explain who dreamt up the left-handed smoke shifter, how the concept was captured, then designed, then improved, then analyzed, then shared with suppliers from Tonapah to Timbuktu, then prototyped, and then finally manufactured.

  If our application stories accomplish all that,  if our technology roundups continue to pull in new information, if our industry analyses poke deeper, and if our hardware and software reviews continue to present unbiased evaluation, I know everyone will get something out of each of our articles. We’ve strived for this ever since I’ve worked at DE, and while we don’t always nail it, I like to think we get better and better at it as time marches on.

In any case, our aim is to provide well-written,  well-researched, and insightful articles to help engineers and designers do their jobs better. And we think the best way to accomplish this is by covering all aspects of the design engineering universe in every issue.

  We are calling this approach the four silos of our editorial mission. Here are the four silos as we’ve categorized them:

• MCAD — Design from concept to rendering and manufacturing;
• Engineering Analysis — Simulation from finite elements to mathematics;
• RP&M and Reverse Engineering — Prototyping and data capture of all types;
• Engineering IT and Computing — Tools that power the applications.

  By digging into these four silos in as complete a fashion as possible, we think we’ve been able to produce (and will continue to produce) useful and informative stories for our readership — a readership that has increasingly been asked to expand its own areas of expertise. Everyone from design engineers to information technology executives has been tasked with pushing the envelope from designing into simulation and from prototyping into manufacturing; and everyone is affected by the hardware platforms that run all this technology and make seamless collaboration possible.

  We hope we’ll continue to serve you, the reader,  in this manner, and hope that you’ll let us know how we can better fill the holes so that you don’t have to.

  Jonathan Gourlay is the features editor of DE. You can send comments about this subject to DE-  Editorsmailto:[email protected].