By Elizabeth Baron
I have had the distinct privilege in my career of being able to really think out of the box and look toward the future. I could innovate in ways that provide efficiencies by allowing intuitive, agile thought to get at solutions to complex, multidimensional problems.
SIGGRAPH was my inspiration, my foundation, my place where I could go to understand the art of the possible, or the impossible.
Being a Practitioner, I possibly see the benefits of SIGGRAPH through a different lens than the average SIGGRAPHer. Back in 2017, a Strategy Team was formed to determine what SIGGRAPH should look like in the future. The clear mission was defined as: Enabling everyone to tell their stories.
As a Practitioner, “everyone” includes artists, designers, ergonomists, engineers of many types [electrical, mechanical, structural, materials, thermodynamics, …], roboticists, analysts, AI/ML specialists, and more. Whew! There are a lot of players in the industrial space. They each have their own goals, and perspectives. It’s not the typical cast of characters you’ll find at an ACM SIGGRAPH conference, but an interesting mix, nonetheless.
What is so fantastic about SIGGRAPH is that many of the concepts are universal in application. Our tradition of innovations in media of movies, animations and games also applies to extended realities, photorealism, real-time interactions and sensory experiences and other forms to experience data and concepts. We as a community are creating new and exciting ways to understand and communicate. Our community enables us to use intuitive insight for problem solving. SIGGRAPH enables people with unlike minds (i.e. an artist and an engineer) to communicate effectively, each telling their story to the other in a way that makes sense to the person experiencing the content.
Problems are best solved when people can connect personally to facts and data through experience. Most people are visual thinkers and learn by doing. In industrial design and engineering, teams are collaborating in real-time in immersive environments, even though geographically the participants may be miles away. SIGGRAPH is the place where we (I) learned how to make this happen!
Think about the value of our conferences. Through our experiences have been mostly virtual recently, the conferences provide the opportunity to learn from the brightest minds in computer graphics & interactive techniques. SIGGRAPH 2021 Conference this year. (There is still time to enjoy on-demand content – until October 29, 2021. Register here!) And get ready for SIGGRAPH Asia 2021!
It is coming up in Tokyo from December 14-17.
Practitioners of CG&IT are realizing the results of successful collaborations, where design and engineering converge. The power of holistic product creation provides a deeper understanding of an enjoyable experience. Learning both emotive and scientific perspectives simultaneously provides impactful insights into form and function of product. It leads to high throughput discovery; which allows teams to find creative solutions to problems by considering multiple data points in an intuitive manner.
A Strategy Committee called “New Communities” has done great work in bringing in new disciplines from both emerging research and application of CG&IT platforms to the SIGGRAPH Community. There is a lot of thought being given regarding the needs of industry practitioners for Design, Engineering and Manufacturing to collaborate in what is becoming a hybrid society. We would appreciate your thoughts on how to move industry forward, so that they can realize the benefits of holistic communication. Please email me at ec-chair@siggraph.org.
Practitioners, please consider becoming a member of SIGGRAPH. The benefits are inspirational. The knowledge you acquire can set you on a path to become the benchmark in your industry for insight and efficiency in solving complex problems with high precision and speed. Check out the profound work in the ACM Digital Library. If you see something you like in a video, go to the DL to deep dive and really understand how to apply the concepts.
The real power of CG&IT is that it’s holistic. It brings everyone together and everyone can understand the final product (whether it’s a product or service) that makes people’s lives better. And that’s a beautiful thing. Please consider becoming a part of the SIGGRAPH community. You can register here to become a member of ACM SIGGRAPH and join in the conversation.
Elizabeth