Hardi recently asked me to write a little something about what GrabCAD means to me, a task that is worth more than a few thousand words but had to be written in a few hundred. Simply put, I love GrabCAD because it is a truly revolutionary synthesis of a learning environment and a freelance crowdsourcing website.
School isn’t just about coming into class, learning a skill and walking out the door. It’s about being in a place with people who share a certain level of bliss learning and doing the same things as you. GrabCAD brings those people together. Design challenges, Private messaging, Dropbox, Tutorials, the Request page – they all exist for a reason. GrabCAD isn't around to teach you. It's around to help the world of engineers and designers teach each other. In other words, to facilitate professional development. If you wanted to describe GrabCAD as a school, I guess that means its the job of the GrabCAD team to keep the sandbox tidy and provide enough play-dough to go around (actually, it's AutoCAD and Solidwork's job to provide the modelling clay) All in the name of ensuring collaborative learning and getting the best ideas out of engineers from every corner of the planet Earth.
Major companies have taken notice of GrabCAD because they know what a passionate group of engineers can produce if given a task. It doesn’t matter that the community doesn’t speak a common language (English excepted) - GrabCAD speaks in the language of CAD. Users communicate by shape and form and not just words. As you read this, someone in the community has initiated a conversation by rendering another user's design, or finding the right design in response to a request. Right now, a US client just sent out a drawing – and a user in Thailand redesigned it. They don't have to wait long - there's always an engineer on GrabCAD that is wide-awake. This is what I like about GrabCAD – it gives engineers and companies the ability to design Globally yet manufacture Locally. The millions of engineers with good ideas and skills to provide better solutions are plugged into network of companies, and share their own experiences with other users. All in the name of producing good work and having fun doing what they love.
